We don't need this cringing defense of a free society

Weasels who want to play the courageous defender of freedom while keeping their dhimmi qualifications intact often use a standard ploy. It works like this: claim that a flap over something said to be offensive to the Muslim population is just down to over-sensitive non-Muslims. Like this:

What I would not do was make a police spokesman go down on his knees and grovel for supposedly causing offence by putting a picture of a dog sitting in a policeman's hat on a poster for a new non-emergency number. …

The idea that Muslims are offended by the very sight of a dog seems to derive entirely from one Dundee councillor, and even he didn't try to make out that he was upset, only that others “could” be. By rolling over and apologising, the police have made themselves look weak and inadvertently given the impression that Dundee's Muslims are an intolerant bunch intent on Islamifying the British way of life.

Do writers for what was once, in its pre-Murdoch days, England's most respected and literate newspaper no longer have to know syntax? You do not mix a conditional tense ("would not do") with a past tense ("was"). But that's a side issue.

Clark, the columnist, obviously feels he dares not step out into the clear without first strapping on his flak vest and singing the multicultural company song: "If I were diversity officer at Tayside Police I would go to great lengths to avoid offending Muslims. I would make sure that they were not stopped and searched just for looking a bit shifty, and, nothwithstanding the Government's victory in the Commons, I would want to make sure that young Muslims were not driven into the hands of radicals by being incarcerated for 42 days without charge."

Take that, you racist Islamophobes! As though someone had suggested that a police "diversity officer" — Lord, how I hate that expression — should offend Muslims by not going to great lengths. As though he were bravely standing in the way of a howling mob demanding Muslims be stopped and searched "just for looking a bit shifty." This is what is known in slightly more rational circles than those our pundit inhabits as a straw man argument.

Next, he presents a one-off incident and generalizes as if it applies to every situation in which Britain's multi-culti commissars bow to the ground to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities. Maybe no one did complain about the advertisement. But there certainly are cases on record (see here and here) in which Muslims have been so offended by "the very sight of a dog" that they refused to perform the public service jobs they were licensed to do. The police diversity officer was hardly excessive in imagining that Muslims would wax indignant yet again.

And why would the police hire a diversity cop and all of Britain's officialdom go tippy-toe around anything to do with Muslim beliefs if they weren't afraid of trouble — complaints, political pressure, maybe even calls for the heads of infidels? Yet the clear implication of the article is that the problem is in the minds of non-Muslims. They're making the mountain Mohammed went to out of a molehill.

But the main reason why arguments like Clark's are despicable is that, under the cloak of sweet reason and criticism of the deepest fathoms of political correctness, they actually reinforce dhimmitude. He implies that his society should trim its discourse to please its most fanatical colonists. To him and people like him, it's axiomatic that Muslims must never be offended. The only thing that can legitimately be discussed is whether any speech or act really offends them.

Every day Muslims in a Western country are wound up about something the "Crusaders" do. A great many Muslims are "an intolerant bunch intent on Islamifying the British way of life," as Clark says with lofty irony.

So he reassures his Muslim readers that here's one good dhimmi who'll be their sword and shield, while assuring everybody else that all this carry-on would stop if only they'd quit expecting Muslims to run true to form. What a guy.

Don't say you weren't warned

Here is the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. If you look carefully, you will notice some differences from the standard picture postcard view.

According to the Daily Mail, "This is the apocalyptic scene terrorists hope to create if they ever get their hands on a nuclear bomb. The computer-generated image below was posted on an Islamic extremists' website yesterday."

There are of course reasons not to take it seriously, if you don't want to.

It's journalistic sensationalism, intended to stoke readership. True. It would be very hard to transport, assemble, and detonate a nuke that could do this. True again. It's a madman's fantasy. Yes, the Muslim jihadist's version of a skin-magazine centerfold. And so on.

The FBI was quick to point out that it had not issued any warning and that the video was not an official Al Qaeda release through its media arm, Al Sahab, but simply an ' amateur' collection of old footage spliced together and posted on the Internet. U.S. analysts said a lot of effort had been put into the video - entitled Nuclear Jihad, The Ultimate Terror - with graphics, music, and clips of different leaders and groups.

The same expertise seems to have gone into creating this image of a devastated Washington.

Al Sahab puts out more than 80 'officially sanctioned' videos a year to keep up the propaganda on the West. And the Internet shows how easy it is to stir up militancy. One message with the Washington picture said: 'The next strike's in the heart of America. When? When? When? And How?'

Despite the relative ease of computer graphics, someone spent considerable time and effort to create this imaginary scene of a devastated Washington. (To see the picture in all its loving detail, click to enlarge it on the Daily Mail site.) Without a doubt, there are people (very likely in the United States) who relish the idea. And who would love to make it happen.

So what's the point? We've known this for seven years, come September.

The point is this. I've made it before, but I think it bears repeating.

The United States government says, "Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in the United States today. According to one recent survey, there are 1,209 mosques in America, well over half founded in the last 20 years." The New York Times reports, "In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent U.S. residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades. More than 40,000 of them were admitted last year, the highest annual number since the terrorist attacks, according to data on 22 countries provided by the Department of Homeland Security."

Right, so we're bringing in 100,000 Muslims a year, in round figures. The great majority of them would have nothing to do with nuking Washington or anything similar. They are perfectly willing to wait 30 or 40 years for their high birth rate and demographics to bring the Caliphate and shari'a law in peacefully. Let's be generous and say that no more than 1 percent of Muslims admitted permanently to the United States are violent jihadists. Only 1,000 a year, ready to use all their ingenuity and fanaticism to produce something like the scene pictured above.

So we have basically two choices. We can trust to luck — yes, luck — and hope that those 1,000 a year all get frustrated and give up, or are all detected in time and prevented from carrying out their mission, or fail at it.

The other option is to allow no Muslim immigration. Zero. Not even allow Muslims to visit the United States except for a handful who have been vetted six ways from Sunday.

That's unfair to the other 99 percent of Muslim would-be immigrants? Yes, if you don't mind the country eventually being under shari'a law, like Britain in a few more years. Yes, if you believe that anyone on earth has a "right" to colonize the United States.

If that is what you believe, then damn you, and I hope you are standing at Ground Zero if the kind of people who created the vision of a skeletal Washington pull it off.

UPDATE 5/31

According to another report, the image of a blasted Washington was taken from a computer game (which strikes me as a rather sick production). If true, you can strike from the above posting the picture of a jihadweasel toiling away in a dark room to paint with pixels his dream of the Great Satan humbled. The Daily Mail has not changed its story about the webcasting of the image on a militant Muslim site.

Fitna

No punning headline, no wisecracks for this post. The subject is dead serious.

Geert Wilders's anti-Muslim video, Fitna, which provoked no end of denunciation, worry and hand-wringing before its release yesterday, and caused Network Solutions to shut down the Web site on which it was apparently planned to be shown, nevertheless is out there. It can be accessed through the link to the right, at least for now. Even if that site is kneecapped, it won't keep Fitna from being seen, because it's undoubtedly been copied many times by now. The genie is out of the bottle.

As to its content, there isn't much, if anything, factually new in it. Wilders has compiled clips of atrocities and threats by Muslim firebrands, interspersed with verses from the Qur'an that he believes inspired them or are consistent with them. There is no doubt that he's made a whole that has a stronger emotional punch than the sum of its parts, and it's far more gripping to watch than to read about what it shows. Still, if you've been paying attention for the past seven years or longer, it won't tell you anything you don't know.

Fitna is very disturbing to watch; I don't want to see it a second time. Even so, Wilders has had the sense and judgment not to go too far: the people falling from the World Trade Center are seen at a considerable distance; the beheading of Jack Hensley to the tune of "Allahu Akbar" is faded just before the sword starts cutting, although his terrified screams are heard on the soundtrack. There is no voice-over, but music by Grieg and Tchaikovsky, of all things, is used as background. Maybe it's intended ironically to contrast products of Western civilization with Muslim barbarism, and it's effective, but I hope never again to hear that lovely music in such a context.

Should you watch it? That's your choice, and there's no reason to be ashamed if you think it will be too much to bear. Anyone with a normal human sensibility is bound to be revolted. This entry in Wikipedia gives, at the moment, a pretty fair description (although goodness knows it may be much re-edited by the time you read it).

What about the substantive issues Fitna raises? It is unlikely to change the debate over the West's position toward Islam. First, because most of the people who need to see it will go out of their way not to. Second, it will be dismissed as blaming the great majority of Muslims for the actions of a few.

I'm quite willing to acknowledge that most Muslims would not themselves commit acts such as Fitna shows. That doesn't mean that Islam is no threat to our way of life. Terrorism is only the most extreme expression of this politico-religious totalitarian system, but Islam is not compatible with a free society. And it doesn't need overt terrorism to succeed. Just immigration condoned by Western governing elites for their own agendas and stratospheric Muslim birth rates. As things stand, in a couple of generations there will be Muslim majorities or critical masses in most of Europe, Britain, Canada, and possibly the United States. That's far scarier than suicide bombings.

The liberal media, particularly in Europe, will also portray Wilders in as negative light as possible. (If you want to get a taste of typically biased reporting, check out this page from Der Spiegel Online.) They'll pay ritual lip service to freedom of expression, while claiming he is abusing it. Freedom of expression can be abused and is every day, by shock jocks and trashy gossip publications. Is it abuse, though, to comment on a subject of great — overwhelming — worldwide importance, however provocative?

And the ad hominems will flow freely. I've already read critics of Geert Wilders claiming that he is only trying to gain political advantage by appealing to anti-Muslim sentiment. Yep, getting hundreds of death threats, having to be guarded 24/7, changing locations and travel routes constantly — that's sure a great career move for a politician.

Could it be that Wilders is actually what he appears to some of us, and what the modern world of government is severely understocked with, a man of principle and immense physical courage?

Made for each other: Bobby and Sharia

Jack 'Imam' Doyle on his way to sharia class. 'I know this secret plan to combat terror will Mecca difference,' he says.

This could well go under Photon Courier's running head "Just Unbelievable":

Bobbies will be taught sharia law and the Koran in 'secret' plan to counter terror at local level

Police will be trained on the importance of sharia law and the Koran to Muslim communities, under new plans to fight extremism.

The lessons in Islamic faith and culture will become part of the formal training of constables working in towns and cities across the country. Chief constables say that, by understanding the community they are policing, officers will build better relationships.

Okay, but does this go far enough? Why not demand that all U.K. coppers convert to Islam? Or at least pay a jizya tax to the Muslim community if they fail to convert? That would help them understand those they are enabling, sorry, I mean policing, right enough.

The Chief Constable in charge of the strategy, West Yorkshire's Norman Bettison, said: "We work closely with communities and the majority of police training at the moment in this area is done in partnership with Muslim organisations.

"We are building on this basis of training and emphasising that a basic principle of policing is that officers work with and should understand the communities they are policing."

Excuse me, Chief Constable Bettison, but may I put to you the suggestion that a bobby's job is to protect lives and property and catch criminals? For that he or she needs an understanding of British law — you recall that term from your days as a young recruit? — not of a Middle Eastern tribal cult. Sociologists may wish to comprehend the traditions of forcing women to undergo mutilation and wearing a black tent, and the rationale for honor killings. Police only need to understand one thing: these practices are not on.

What this "secret" plan — what's secret about it? — is actually about is normalizing sharia, giving it status as an acceptable alternative system.

And thus it goes on, the creeping Islamification of Britain.

Affirmative action for Saudi millionaires' sons

The United States government is trying very hard to turn me into a conspiracy theorist. I'm not there yet, but one of these days ...

Are you ready for this?

More students from Islamic nations allowed in U.S.

The State Department has been steadily increasing the number of visas granted to students and visitors from three Islamic nations -nations with connections to the Sept. 11 attacks and to al-Qaida, according to an NBC News survey of U.S. visa data. ... NBC examined temporary and student visas granted to citizens of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan from 2000 through 2007. Saudi Arabia is Osama Bin Laden’s home country, while Egypt is the home country of his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri. Both men are now believed to be hiding inside Pakistan. Saudis also made up 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11.

Overall, the three countries received 134,015 visas in 2000, before dipping to 34,781 in 2003, the lowest year in recent memory. Since then, the numbers have risen dramatically, to 109,878 last year, the first year of 100,000 or more visas since 2001. Those numbers represent an 18 percent drop from the peak year of 2000, but a near tripling since 2003.

The rationale -- or maybe excuse is the better word, since our lords and masters inside the Beltway seem determined to inject as much of the world as possible into the U.S. -- is that "it’s better we take the calculated risk to encourage the elite in these countries to come here,” said Bob Grenier, former head of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center. “There is a ripple effect in reaching those people we want to reach in those countries.”

And who are these people we want to reach?

Officials in the three countries are particularly sensitive about the educational visas. The reason: The elite in each of those countries-usually the most pro-American segment of society-want their children educated in U.S. colleges and universities. “The elite in Pakistan all want their children to go to Harvard or Stanford,” said a Pakistani official. “And if they don’t get into Harvard or Stanford, they get upset with America.”

Let Abdul who is the son of Labib who is the son of Muhammed who is the son of Mansur into Harvard or they'll get bothered with us. And elite families like the bin Ladens really know how to get bothered.

Obviously, most of these students and "visitors" are not security risks. How many are can't be known until they act so as to remove any doubt, but let's be charitable and say that no more than 5 percent might be people we need to worry about. That's a mere 5,494 out of 109,878 admitted. Last year.

There are other issues, however, suggested Grenier, that have to be dealt with if the U.S. is going to win friends and influence people in those nations.

Yes, let's convert terrorists with the Dale Carnegie method. Ask their advice. Help them feel good about themselves. Invite them to join the Rotary and the Toastmasters. Put them up for membership in your country club.

You would think, would you not, that the CIA and the State Department, in their zeal to protect the American people, might just err on the side of caution when it comes to recruiting the sons (probably not daughters) of privileged and well-connected Muslim families in states rife with terrorism? In your dreams. Or nightmares.

Equivocational training

Mark Steyn is one of two prominent journalists in hot water with some of Canada's Muslims, who have filed a complaint against him with the British Columbian Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission for published excerpts from his book America Alone. Steyn has linked to an odd article by Lee Harris about the flap.

Harris begins with some historical notes intended to show that the idea of nearly unlimited freedom of speech is actually fairly new in British and American law, and was possible only after religious factions finally got polite enough not to rip one another's insides out. He then goes on to suggest that we are again back in a situation where the government may need to recognize limits on free speech for the original reason: because if it inflames a portion of the population, it puts the rest of the population at risk.

Today, because of Islam, the furor theologicus that we in the West thought we had put behind us is reemerging and can flare up in any part of the world. A cartoon or a film documentary that Muslims find offensive can set off a chain of reactions that lead to riots, bloodshed, the murder of innocents, and international crises. To continue to maintain, in the light of these troubling facts, that the state has no business watching what its citizens say is to indulge in a wistful anachronism. Even the most dedicated libertarian must surely realize that at some point the other members of his society may not be willing to pay the social costs of his freedom of expression. One may of course wish for a society to stand firmly behind those who have the courage to speak their minds; but it is simply naive to expect the general population to support them beyond a certain point.

Does Harris actually believe this — that one group should have the power, through threat of violence, to set certain kinds of criticism out of bounds? He says, "If speaking of Islam runs genuine risks of inciting violence, we cannot just pretend that it isn't so. We can be indignant about this and declaim loudly against it--but what good does such an approach really do? If criticizing Islam promotes bloodshed, then criticizing even more hardly seems like an attractive solution."

What to do? His answer, while superficially clever, is ultimately evasive.

Let offended Muslims file complaints to their heart's content. Make outraged imams fill out tedious forms. Require self-appointed mullahs, representing imaginary counsels and committees, to provide documentation of their grievances. Encourage them to vent through the intrinsically stifling bureaucratic channels provided by panels like the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Show them, nanny-like, that you care about their injured feelings. Patiently and silently listen to their indignant complaints, and let them, ideally, get it all out of their systems. Humoring, let us remember, is not appeasement, but often a clever way to coax troublesome children of all ages into behaving like civilized human beings.

If he isn't just showing off his sense of humor, then he is hoist by his own what-do-you-call-it. People can sometimes smile and shrug off criticism or even outright insults, but will never forgive being patronized.

Harris actually seems to realize how shallow his prescription is, and that the stakes are too high to be swept off the board with a little good natured clowning. He acknowledges that

it is the nature of the nanny state to bring up citizens who have been trained not to rock the boat. Under a nanny regime, the good citizen is one who is reluctant to speak his mind merely out of fear of what other people might think. For people already this cowed, even the threat of a minor bureaucratic hassle would be a powerful argument for keeping one's mouth shut, and for standing by while our hard-won liberty of discussion is steadily eroded.

Just as he seems to be about to take a stand for free speech and letting the chips fall where they may, he decides to go for the equivocation discreet.

Either we must clamp down on critics of Islam, mandating a uniform code of political correctness, or else we must let the critics say what they wish, regardless of the consequences, and in full knowledge that these consequences may include the death of innocents. This is not a choice that the West has had to face since the end of our own furor theologicus several centuries ago, but, like it or not, it is the choice that we are facing again today.

Well, Lee mon vieux, which is it to be? He comfortably dodges answering and leaves it up to us.

You will notice, if you read his whole essay, that he assumes it is impossible for a society to return, if that is what it takes, to the condition in which there is enough common ground that no one has to live in fear of violence or legal sanctions for speaking his mind. The diversity hook is in his gill. Harris can't imagine that Muslims could be separated from the rest of the world, so the rest of the world could get on with its business without endlessly worrying about being "sensitive" and inoffensive.

Since Harris won't make his own choice, I guess I have to. We should face reality and acknowledge that Muslims and the West have completely different assumptions about the purpose of society and how life is to be lived, and that it's futile and dangerous to keep trying to pretend otherwise. Only stopping and reversing Muslim incursion into the West can preserve both freedom and safety.

Harris must have put a lot of time and work into writing that article. Too bad he had to leave it to me to finish it for him.

Save the Parthenon sculptures: get them out of Britain

I have changed my mind.

No kidding: I have changed my mind.

My rethink is about the heatedly debated question of whether the sculptures that once covered the pediments and frieze of the Parthenon, which are now housed in the British Museum in London, should be repatriated to Greece. I have said no before. Now I say yes.

The sculptures were formerly known as the Elgin Marbles, after Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman empire — which then ruled Greece — who collected and shipped them home in 1801. The Parthenon had been severely damaged in an earlier war, and the site was unprotected, so it is quite possible that Lord Elgin saved them from destruction. But in today's climate of ethnocentrism and political correctness, he is reviled.

The sculptures now reside in a grand room built specially for the purpose, well displayed (except they necessarily face inward rather than outward as they would have on the Parthenon). I've been fortunate enough to visit them twice. Despite being considerably damaged, with portions missing — especially on the pediment carvings — they are still powerful and offer a fascinating glimpse into the civic and religious atmosphere of Attica's golden age.

While I can sympathize with the Greeks' (and many others') desire to return the artwork to its original site, especially now that a large modern museum has opened at the Parthenon, I can't buy it in principle. The argument from ethnicity is irrelevant: few of today's Greeks are descended from those who lived in fifth century B.C. Athens. That aside, to cater to the view that every work of art "belongs" to the country on whose territory it was made would wreck every major museum collection in the world. To take the land-of-origin idea to its logical conclusion, the Cincinnati Art Museum would contain only works created in Cincinnati. Or in the museum's own ZIP Code.

So why have I come around to the view that it's time to send the Parthenon sculptures back? Because that will help assure that they are preserved when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim-dominated country, as it seems determined to do.

During the Blitz in World War II, the National Gallery in London wisely packed up its treasures and stored them for safekeeping far from the city (I believe they were sent to a cave in Wales). The Parthenon sculptures could be equally vulnerable in another 10 or 20 years — or today, for all I know.

Muslim fanatics haven't a drop of tolerance for religious art, or even art depicting human figures, from other cultures. Whether the Parthenon sculptures are religious art depends on definition; worship of the gods and the celebration of the polis were entwined in the age of Pericles. Regardless, Muslim iconoclasts don't make fine distinctions. Buddhism is not a theistic religion either, which didn't save the 1,50-year-old statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan from the Taliban.

Before Taliban


After Taliban

The Parthenon sculptures belong to the world, not to Greece. But they will be safer in Athens. The Greeks lived under the Turkish-based Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, and if resistance to an Islamic takeover succeeds anywhere in Europe, I think Greece will be one of those places.

The Devil sends his compliments

England expects every person to do her duty!
Welcome your friends and neighbours!

I read this yesterday but quickly dismissed it as a subject for a blog posting:

Fanatic 'hoped to spread fear with beheading'

A terrorist planned to kidnap a British Muslim soldier, cut his head off “like a pig” and release a video of the beheading to cause panic and fear across the country, a court has heard. Parviz Khan, 37, was said to be a “fanatic” at the centre of a terrorist network shipping bomb-making equipment to kill British soldiers in Afghanistan.

But he was also hatching a plot at his home in Birmingham, to “kidnap and butcher” a member of the British armed forces, Leicester Crown Court heard. Khan was “enraged by the idea of Muslim soldiers in the British army,” said Nigel Rumfitt QC, prosecuting.

He said Khan planned to enlist the help of drug dealers to approach a soldier in Broad Street, the nightclub centre of Birmingham.

“They were going to take him to a lock-up garage and there he would be murdered by having his head cut off 'like a pig,’” Mr Rumfitt said.

A practiced self-nagger, I later confronted myself: why had I thought this bit of news not worth comment? Have we — me included — become so blasé about planned or actual terrorist outrages that they barely register on the Jihad Seismic Scale? There have been thousands before, will be thousands henceforth. Yawn.

Assuming Parviz Khan and his associates are found guilty as charged, it won't change the big picture. Plotters after plotters may be arrested — and, credit where due, the counterterrorism agencies of the Western countries seem to have done a brilliant job — but long term, the normalization of murderous deviancy becomes a fact through sheer repetition of atrocities and would-be atrocities. They become like car accidents and natural disasters, distressing to read about but without the power to shock, and without giving rise to questions about why such things continue to happen.

Further analyzing why I didn't think this item worth a blog post, I had to admit that in Britain such things no longer make a difference; would have made no difference even if the wicked plan had been carried out. Sure, many British people would have been sickened and outraged, with calls to stop the insanity of Muslim immigration. But they might as well save their breath to cool their porridge with.

The country's Boneless Wonder rulers have long since made the decision for ethnic replacement of the native stock. It's what their globalist masters want and what they expect will keep them in office now and eventually land them cushy sinecures at EU headquarters in Brussels.

So the politicians will shake their heads. How unfortunate. They will appoint a high-level committee (let's see, this is number 347, is that right?) to study the root causes. Presently they will issue a gravely worded report, expressing in the strongest possible terms the need for greater efforts to integrate Muslims into British society. The U.K. is still full of prejudice. The future majority must be welcomed. Not only by government programs, important as those are, but by individuals, reaching out to the newcomers to show how valued they are, lest they have brain space for Bad Thoughts.

"Parviz? Come in please. So glad you could make it by this evening! Sit you down and get right comfy. Can I offer you something to drink? No, of course not alcoholic, I know that's forbidden by your Prophet (p-be-uh), booze just a decadent custom of us infidels, how about a nice traditional cuppa tea? Great!

"So … understand you're in the export business. Some sort of equipment for rebuilding Afghanistan, right? Good line, that, plenty of customers I reckon. Do you go in for football, Par? Thought you might be an Arsenal supporter, hope we can go to a match one of these days. Bring your wives."

The British Establishment has made its deal with the Devil. The Devil always keeps his part of the bargain. And sees to it that he gets what's owed him.

Eurabia by the slice

I've got to hand it to European Muslims, I really do. They are running rings around the governments of countries like Britain and Holland. Muslims clever; non-Muslims stupid.

What are they doing that's so smart? Well, either by a planned strategy or just an instinct for gnawing at the infidel's soft bits, they have figured how to advance Islamization in slices. Instead of one big confrontation, a thousand small ones.

Here's a story it's unlikely that you've read if you get your news from American sources.

A politician has warned that a "fear of Islam" is governing Holland after he delayed the release of a short film attacking the Koran.

Geert Wilders, 44, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, who compares the Muslim holy book to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, sparked government panic after saying the anti-Islam film would be released tomorrow.

As Dutch police prepared for a weekend of riots and Mr Wilders was told by the authorities that he would have to leave country, he launched a new attack on "intolerant" Islam while announcing that his 10-minute film attacking the Muslim faith would be postponed for two weeks.

After a few years of giving Europe shock therapy, Muslim mobs don't even have to riot; just threatening is enough, because cowardly politicians buckle at the knees. Violence would make headlines and perhaps unmake careers; giving in is quiet, undramatic, mostly unreported. And anyhow, they're not giving the store away … not all at once. It's just tiny increments.

In an attempt to defuse tensions, the Dutch government will tomorrow announce that it will not implement a ban on the Islamic burqa dress.

No big deal, so the thinking goes among Western government dupes. Not worth getting all hot and bothered about. Just give a little, and hot zowie, "tensions" are "defused." Until tomorrow or next week, when aggressive Muslims cut the next thin slice from the native culture. Until there is so little left that the only way to save it is civil war, or people decide that it's not worth fighting over.

Inte-Great Britain?

Would you favor people with an urge to beat you up becoming more integrated into your community?

Apparently lots of Brits do.

The Telegraph reports the results of a poll that "comes at the end of a week in which Muslim integration has been pushed to the top of the political agenda following an article in The Sunday Telegraph by the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, who claimed that Islamic extremism in Britain had created no-go areas."

The poll found that "Britons are divided on the issue, with 35 per cent agreeing with the bishop, 38 per cent disagreeing, and the rest unsure. More than half - 56 per cent - were critical of the failure of Islamic communities to integrate into society. Only one in four felt that they had been successful."

Also according to The Telegraph's account:

Church leaders in communities with large concentrations of Muslims said that Christians were being targeted. An east London vicar who had delivered Christmas leaflets in his parish said he was told to stay away from "Muslim areas". He said: "Despite this being a mixed area, where Muslims make up only about 15 per cent of the population, I was told that the leaflets were offensive and could make people angry."

Another churchman said his path had been blocked by Muslim youths as he drove through a district of Oldham, Lancashire, last year. "They wanted to know why I was coming into 'their' area," he said.

A priest ministering in the Manchester district of Rusholme said he knew of "dozens of cases" in which Muslim converts to Christianity had been attacked.

Another church leader said that Asian Christians in Leicester feared being identified when leaving churches. "They are scared of being stopped and beaten up if they are found carrying Bibles," he said.

None of the church leaders we spoke to wished to be identified for fear of retaliation, but Don Horrocks, of the Evangelical Alliance, said: "It's increasingly difficult for non-Muslims to live in areas of high Muslim density, especially if they are practising Christians."

Yet, The Telegraph still asks in its headine for a series of graphs showing the poll results, "Are We Integrated Enough?" What a fatuous question. It implies that all the troubles reported in the story would go away if the people who are causing the trouble would just be more integrated.

Can't British people, or their out-of-touch politicians, get a clue from the history of American race relations that integration is no automatic solvent of civil strife — even when the group to be integrated is blacks with a long history, a language, and for the most part a religion shared with the rest of the society?

How much longer can the British go on refusing to face the obvious, that Islamic values do not fit with those of a free society, and the only way that "integration" can take place is to accommodate Muslims by restricting freedom of speech and expression of ideas? Which is, in fact, exactly what the country is doing in a doomed effort to mix oil and water, or as the British say, chalk and cheese.

Sure, Muslims will be happy to integrate — under shar'ia law, in a Muslim state, with non-Muslims as dhimmis. Until that time, which is maybe not far off, they will keep themselves to themselves as much as possible, thank you, and try to intimidate the infidels they must temporarily share power with.

The hardest thing for any politician to do is admit, "I made a mistake" — even if it was a mistake so many others made. "Ladies and gentlemen, I was wrong, just like most of you lot. I know what I must do: fall on my sword, like a noble Roman of old. Then you can throw my body to the dogs. I'll still be better off than you, because you're going to have to live with what you've done, you stupid sods."

Nobody wants to openly acknowledge the obvious, which is that it was a catastrophic mistake (unless you believe it was deliberate) to open the country to virtually unlimited Muslim immigration and try, with bottomless futility, to integrate a culture that is everything traditional British values would reject.

Incidentally, as far as I can tell from The Telegraph, the percentages of answers to the poll questions were derived from a combination of non-Muslims and Muslims. How would the results have differed if they'd been broken down along those lines? I guess neither The Telegraph nor the government wants to know, or wants the British people to know.

"Mohammed teddy bear" teacher gets the lash — from me

Crowd thanks Gillian Gibbons
for teaching their children.

My sympathy for Gillian Gibbons, the teacher from England sentenced in Sudan to jail for naming her class teddy bear "Mohammed," has suffered a power outage. I have no time for dhimmitude and not much for gross stupidity.

"Thousands of people wielding clubs and knives marched through Khartoum after Friday prayers denouncing what they termed the lenient sentencing of a British teacher for insulting Islam and calling for her to be shot," the Telegraph reported. "'Those who insult the Prophet of Islam should be punished with bullets,' the crowd shouted after Gibbons, 54, was jailed for 15 days on charges stemming from naming a teddy bear Mohammed. Authorities in Britain and Sudan refused to reveal where Mrs Gibbons … was serving her sentence for fear of rioting there. "

Think Mrs. Gibbons and her kin took offense? No, no. Just a little misunderstanding. Her own doing, really, for not being sensitive enough.

In another story, the Telegraph says:

The British teacher jailed in Sudan for naming a teddy bear Mohammed has said that she wished she could stay in the country. … Despite street protests against her by hundreds of angry demonstrators, some waving swords, Mrs Gibbons expressed gratitude for her treatment.

"I've been given so many apples that I feel I could set up my own stall. The guards are constantly asking if I have everything I need," she said.

Mrs. Gibbons, I am glad to hear they have comforted you with apples. But you do not have everything you need, including one of the most important: self-respect and dignity. And a carload of righteous anger. I can understand that, although you are under house arrest and supposedly being treated well, this may not be the time to fully express outrage. But you do not have to fawn over your captors and go out of your way to assure the world that the threat to your very life that has arisen over the name of a toy bear has no connection with Islamic fanaticism.

In a telephone call to her son John in Liverpool, Mrs Gibbons said: "I don't want any resentment towards Muslim people."

Count yourself lucky, madam, that the British Foreign Secretary, the British ambassador, and two members of Parliament are trying to get you off the hook. How do you think it would have gone for you otherwise — if, say, you were from some obscure African country, or Sudan itself?

More dhimmitude from another British teacher in Khartoum:

Colleagues I chatted to this week agreed that the whole affair has more to do with Sudan than it does with Islam. “I have a lot of friends who are Muslim, and I did understand the Islamic culture before coming here, but I was not prepared for this,” one woman teacher told me.

She thought many Sudanese just have no idea about the rest of the world. “They tell you what to do, and they don’t listen to the views of anyone else,” she said.

For me, the past few days have really driven home that just having a general appreciation of Islam is not always enough to avoid causing offence.

Well, colleagues, if you weren't so busy abasing yourselves to your Muslim overlords, you might have noticed something not too long ago about crowds in London — you've heard of it? — calling for infidels to be beheaded for publishing cartoons of Big Mo. Nothing to do with Islam, of course; says more about London. Let this teddy bear flap be a learning experience for you. Don't fail to dial up your general appreciation of Islam to the "Full Servitude" mark.

What would a person in the British diplomatic service a hundred years ago, dealing with international treaties and other state enterprises of great pith and moment, have thought if he could have looked forward in time to see future diplomats in a frenzy trying (while facing an "uphill struggle") to rescue an Englishwoman from imprisonment caused by a row over a teddy bear?

These newspaper articles also demonstrate that the English have given up their own spelling gaol in favor of the American jail. If you needed one more sign of weakness, there it is.

Zoned out in France

Bordeaux. Aix-en-Provence. Arles. Nice. Paris, City of Light and all that. How they capture the imagination. History, architecture, wonderful food and wine, civilization and its refinements.

Only, they and more than 700 other cities and towns in France include what are called Zones Urbaines Sensibles (ZUS). No, not "sensible urban areas." Sensible translates more accurately as "sensitive." That is, n0-go areas for police and non-North African, non-West African, or non-Muslim French people.

ZUS at Chambéry outlined in red.

According to Daniel Pipes, they are "places in France that the French state does not control. They range from two zones in the medieval town of Carcassone to twelve in the heavily Muslim town of Marseilles, with hardly a town in France lacking in its ZUS. The ZUS came into existence in late 1996 and according to a 2004 estimate, nearly 5 million people live in them."

This information was published late last year, but in case you missed it (as I did), it's worth taking a look. I had no idea how extensive these enclaves are.

These ZUS aren't just a journalistic or popular name. They're officially recognized by the French government. Here is a link to an interactive list. They are ordered by départements, jurisdictions more or less equivalent to English counties or Canadian provinces. To see any of the maps, click on carte to the right of the location name. You can then zoom in to a fairly detailed resolution. The red-bordered area in each map is the ZUS.

I looked at the map for Arles, famous for Van Gogh. I was surprised during my visit to see so many North Africans there, but that was before I knew much about France's demographics. They were in the greatest numbers, so far as I could tell, in the run-down area by the port that was bombed heavily in World War II and never recovered economically. According to the map, Arles's ZUS isn't in that section, though, but just across the railroad tracks from Les Alyscamps, the atmospheric ancient Roman cemetery where Van Gogh liked to sketch and which he painted.

All these ZUS represent sociological land mines throughout France. Their residents are almost completely alienated from traditional France — because of French prejudice, or because they are incapable of assimilating, or both. We saw several of the zones in the suburbs of Paris explode a couple of years ago, and I have no doubt that under not-unimaginable circumstances, they could all blow up.

The French government is pursuing various schemes to win the allegiance of those who live in these outlaw areas. Theodore Dalrymple seems to believe they are beyond the reach of government, however well intentioned (although the intentions probably stem from fear as much as benevolence).

French officialdom is trying to fix the problem with the usual social amelioration programs, job creation, affirmative action, and so on. It's probably useless to expect anything else from a European government — it's the only language they know. But North and West African Muslims are unlikely to integrate into the French system, other than in the most superficial ways. Maybe even that will be enough to keep a damper on violence, and the country will be reconciled to having two permanently separate cultures. But if the standard liberal remedies don't work out, France needs an alternate plan, and had best be prepared to carry it out.

Down with multi-culturalism, may it please our Muslims

Minette Marrin, in a column headlined "Fear of offence is killing our culture" for the Times of London, wants us to know how brave she is:

‘So, Minette Marrin – all cultures are equal, yes or no?” This was the challenge put to me live and rather scarily by a BBC World Service presenter a few years ago. ... “No,” I said firmly, but nervously, since I don’t like inviting contempt and anger any more than anyone else.

Sorry, Ms. Marrin, but you just have, on the part of this reader. The rest of her column explains why.

"Many prominent multiculturalists, including the Commission for Racial Equality itself, have recently performed swift U-turns and the bien-pensant orthodoxy now is that multiculturalism has been a divisive failure. Integration is the new big thing," she writes. But,

There are still signs that many people are in the grip of the old orthodoxy; its hold on public institutions and the public mind seems to be remarkably persistent. A week ago The Sunday Times reported that some Muslim workers in Sainsbury’s [a U.K. grocery chain] are refusing to check out purchases of alcohol on the debatable ground that it’s against their religion. Whenever the sinful stuff is presented by a customer at the till, the Muslim expects an infidel colleague to hurry over and sully his or her hands with the transaction instead.

So, it's another sign that Britain has systematically imported an incompatible culture? Oh, no. Perish the thought. "The point about this story is not the absurd demand, but that Sainsbury’s gave into it, quite unnecessarily, of its own free will. It wasn’t even being pressed to do so by any prominent Muslim figures."

And so on, in the same vein. The problem isn't with an intolerant religio-political group that demands the majority culture adjust itself to conform to Muslim ways; it's those companies, suffering from dhimmitudia nervosa. Sainsbury's hadn't received any demands from "prominent Muslim figures."

But that Commission for Racial Equality, which has supposedly hung a U-turn just before being reincarnated as the even more all-inclusive Commission for Equality and Human Rights, headed by -- who'd have guessed? -- the same witchfinder-in-chief, Trevor Phillips, departs (as The Spectator notes)

... with a threat that 15 government departments may be taken to court — at our expense, presumably — because they haven’t checked the precise ethnic origin of everyone who works for them. There is no suggestion that the departments have discriminated against British Caribbeans, or British Bangladeshis, or British Static Travellers (yes, there really is that wonderful category); merely that they haven’t yet asked everyone if they’re properly and nicely white or not. The crime is one of ‘non-compliance’. And along with that, the report churns out the usual stuff about how Britain is ever more segregated, socially and in the workplace, and that extremism ‘both political and religious’ is on the rise.

The Commission recently turned its awe-inspiring moral force to urging that a book of 75-year-old comic strips be banned. The "equality watchdog" (a frightening term) accused one of the books of "making black people 'look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles'." That privilege, apparently, is reserved for the Commission.

But to get back to Marrin: she carefully avoids taking a position about what Sainsbury's should have done if those "prominent Muslim figures" had insisted that no Muslim clerk's fingers should touch a bottle of plonk. She continues the theme:

Surely the fault lies with Sainsbury’s, for cultural funk. And it lies with all those others who out of some strange abandonment of common sense – such as the government’s laissez-faire guidelines on wearing Muslim veils in schools last week – bottle out.

Think of the headmistress in Yorkshire who removed stories about pigs, including the Three Little Pigs, from her school in case they might offend her tiny Muslim pupils. Think of the councils that have banned Christmas, or hot cross buns, or the council worker who banned a flyer about a Christmas service from a council notice board but held a party to celebrate Eid. ...

In many cases Muslims (or Jews or Hindus – or Cypriots no doubt) who are asked to comment say publicly that it was all quite unnecessary. They would not have been offended at all and nobody had bothered to ask them.

It does not seem to occur to her that British institutions have bent backward so far to avoid offending that Muslims or their "prominent figures" don't need to say they're bothered. The dog has been conditioned to cringe at the mere sight of the man with the whip. If Sainsbury's, for instance, found its spine and told its Muslim clerks that the company believed in equality, even for infidel customers, who is to say that the imams wouldn't have kicked up a fuss, and the Commission on Racial Equality wouldn't have stepped in with its confession-encouraging instruments?

We can't know, but the important point is that Marrin, with her air of straight-ahead, good old English common sense, implies that it's all a storm in a teacup. No prominent Muslims have complained (only an unspecified number of unprominent ones), so no problem. She wants to have her Ramadan and eat during it too.

In her own "sophisticated" way, she is still pandering to Muslims. The problem is with institutions (presumably) still run largely by white British people, wicked types who flee when no man pursueth.

"No well mannered person wants to go about pronouncing that western civilisation, particularly the British variety, is better than others," Marrin writes. "But sometimes it is necessary to risk giving offence, to defend what matters. It may not cause offence; it might even command respect." Well, Ms. Marrin, my mother tried hard to raise me with good manners, but I guess she didn't entirely succeed, since I have been known to say (thankfully, out of range of the British Equality Police) that Western civilization is better than some others. Her false self-recommendation for bravery in the line of fire causes offense here on my patch, and commands no respect.

"Fear of offence is killing our culture"? Minette Marrin is part of the fear, and part of the killing.