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Ethnic War in Brussels

Moroccans Attack "Whites"

25.05.2008. On Friday evening, riots broke out in the streets of Brussels between Moroccan youths and supporters of football club RSC Anderlecht. On Thursday evening, a blog had called for attacks on the "white" supporters of the club, and "to burn pubs, houses and cars." Thus begins a report in The Brussels Journal.

Al-Dura: The atrocity that never was

French court ruling in disfavor of France 2

23.05.2008. The French Court of Appeals on Wednesday found in favor of Jewish activist Philippe Karsenty, overturning a lower court decision that he had libeled France 2 and its Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin when he accused them of knowingly misleading the watching world about the death of the Palestinian child Muhammad al-Dura in the Gaza Strip in 2000. See The Brussels Journal as well as The Jerusalem Post.

Class and IQ

The two are causally connected, claims academic

23.05.2008. Working-class youngsters have lower IQs than their middle-class counterparts, an academic claimed last night. Dr Bruce Charlton said the domination of middle-class students at elite universities is a "natural outcome" of IQ differences between social groups. The evolutionary psychiatrist defended leading institutions from accusations by ministers of bias in admissions. Dr Charlton, of Newcastle University, said: "The Government has spent a great deal of time and effort in asserting that universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, are unfairly excluding people from low social-class backgrounds and privileging those from higher social classes." See article in The Daily Mail.

Violence spreads in Johannesburg

Necklacing is back in South Africa

19.05.2008. At least 12 people have been killed in the South African city of Johannesburg since Friday in a wave of violence directed at immigrants, police say. Police have used tear gas and rubber bullets to try to stop gangs of armed youths from attacking foreigners and looting and burning their property. Five people were killed overnight in the area of Cleveland. Two of them were burned and the others beaten to death. Thus begins a recent report from BBC.

According to reports at document.no, this necklacing victim did not survive either.

Sweden headed for trouble

Immigration out of control; violent antiracism; depletion of police force

18.05.2008. Leaders of the far-right Sweden Democrats live under constant threat of violence, according to new report from the Swedish security service Säpo, according to The Local.

Criminologist Leif G W Persson has resigned his post with the National Police Board. After 25 years he says he is tired of the continual depletion of the national police force, according to The Local.

Unfaithful American wives

34% of moms have cheated

18.05.2008. A shocking 34 percent of mothers reported having had an extramarital affair after the birth of their children, according to a study released yesterday. More than half, 53 percent, of women polled in the "Sex and the American Mom" survey also said they had entertained the idea of straying on their spouses. Read more in The New York Post.

HonestThinking comments: If these figures are anywhere near the truth, the USA is in serious trouble. It is hard to see how a nation could survive in the long run if people behave like this (keep in mind that all (or at least most) of those unfaithful moms are cheating their husbands with other men). The following is worth contemplating for secularists: If, without religious means, we are unable to 'persuade' men and women to behave properly, religion is bound to make a comeback in our societies in general, and in politics as well as laws and regulations in particular. With a vengeance.

Renewal

Organizing European conservatives

18.05.2008. From The Brussels Journal: There are many Europeans who are concerned about the future of our continent and its culture. Many of them work tirelessly in their chosen fields to strengthen European civilisation. But European conservatives do not know one another well. Conservatives respect local traditions and national cultures. But European conservatives likewise recognise that they are part of a common civilisation and it is important for European leaders to meet. Building and strengthening a network of like-minded Europeans is among our key priorities. […]

European education is in crisis. Our common Western heritage is insufficiently taught and intellectually vacuous philosophies dominate our schools and universities. It is critical that the upcoming generation of European leaders be introduced to the sound principles of the Western tradition on which the health of our civilisation depends. […]

European conservatives need to organise themselves. There are too few local and national think tanks, educational institutions and other organisations. The Center for European Renewal will develop an active program to help, support and sustain local and national organisations with the same goals of renewing the Western ideal of a civilised, human and free society.

All people are good, except you

Hypocrisy of a higher order

18.05.2008. From The Brussels Journal: The key to the [Ontario Human Rights] Commission's thinking is in its labeling, as wrongful "Islamophobia," the view that Islam is a threat to the West. The assumption underlying such a judgment, whether about Islamophobia or bigotry generally, is that all people are good (except for people who don't believe that all people are good), and that no people can be a threat (except for those people who believe that some people can be a threat). Since all people (that is, all people who don't hate nothing except hatred) are good, and since no people are enemies (except for the people who believe that there are enemies), any negative statement about a group (except for negative statements about the society's own majority group) is by definition a false, vicious, dehumanizing attack on that group.

The core error of this liberal view is that it never considers the possibility that some people and groups (other than the majority peoples of the West) may indeed be enemies. Specifically, it never entertains the possibility that Islam is in fact a threat to the West. If Islam is a threat to the West, then saying that Islam is a threat to the West is not an act of bigotry but a statement of truth and part of a legitimate effort to protect the West from a real enemy. By condemning and punishing such defense as illegal bigotry, modern liberalism prohibits the West from defending itself.

In short, liberalism has taken group conflict, a normal feature of human history, and turned it into an immoral act, with the further twist that only the West is capable of exhibiting such immorality against other groups, while other groups are incapable of exhibiting the same immorality against the West.

How does liberalism get away with seeing only Westerners' negative statements about Islam as wrongful, but not Muslims' threatening statements about the West? Very simple. Under liberalism, there is no society "here" to be attacked. Under liberalism, Canada is not a substantive entity--not a nation, not a culture, not a people, not a "group." Canada is, instead, a system for the promotion of human rights. Not being a concrete group or culture, Canada cannot be an object of bigotry. But Muslims and other immigrants, who are concrete entities, can be objects of bigotry. Muslims are a group and therefore deserve to be protected from discrimination. Canadians are not a group and therefore do not require protection from discrimination.

In short, Western peoples do not need protection under the modern liberal order because modern liberalism, in its very premises, has already defined the Western peoples out of existence. This is why it's a waste of time looking for liberals and mainstream conservatives (who accept the premises of liberalism as much as the liberals do) to protect us. Under modern liberalism, the Western peoples have already in principle ceased to exist, and all that's left is the mopping up operation.

To see the above quote in context, please visit Lawrence Auster's blog.

Steven Rose vs. HalOnsgard

Giving race deniers a hard time

18.05.2008. The wikipedia page for Steven Rose informs us that this man has a reputation of giving "ideology priority over truth". See review of one of Rose's books by Richard Dawkins in "Sociobiology: the debate continues", New Scientist 24 January 1985, for an example of the substance of this criticism.

But some people never learn, and more than 20 years later Rose is still utterly unrepentant. In the wake of The James Watson affair he wrote a comment for The Guardian, the first paragraph of which read as follows (emphasis added):

For a clever man, James Watson is remarkably loose-tongued. He always was, and age does not wither him, nor custom stale his less than infinite variety. In the UK to publicise his new book, he has been in characteristic form. In the Sunday Times, it was that long-exploded racist claim that "Africans" are inherently less intelligent than "us".

He quickly got a reply from a reader with the nickname HalOnsgard (emphasis added):

"Long-exploded" in your marxoid-Boasian dreams, Rose. You are a dinosaur from Stephen Jay Gould's corner of Jurassic Park.

Continue reading: Permalink to this article about Steven Rose vs. HalOnsgard.

Not black and white

Rethinking race and genes

17.05.2008. Thus begins William Saletan an article in Slate a couple of weeks ago (hyperlinks in original): Five months ago, I wrote a series on race, genes, and intelligence. Everything about it hurt: the research, the writing, the reactions, the regrets. Not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about it. I've been struggling to reconcile two feelings that won't go away: that what I wrote was socially harmful and that I can't honestly renounce the evidence I presented. That evidence, which involved the proposed role of heredity in trait differences by race, is by no means complete or conclusive. But it's not dismissible, either. My colleague Stephen Metcalf summarized the debate better than I did: "It's a conflict between science and science."

When you find yourself in a dilemma this difficult, sometimes the best thing to do is let it sit in your head until you find a way to make sense of it within your value system. I think I'm beginning to find the answer that works for me: I was asking the wrong question.

In last fall's series, I asked myself why I was writing about such an ugly topic. "Because the truth isn't as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it," I concluded. "And because you can't solve a problem till you understand it." I wrote my commitment on a piece of paper and leaned it against my computer monitor: The truth doesn't care what you want.

Sometimes, with time and perspective, it's the small, overlooked things that turn out to be big. In retrospect, I was consumed by the wrong word. The flaw in my approach wasn't truth. It was the. Even if hereditary inequality among racial averages is a truth, it's less true, more unjust, and more pernicious than framing the same difference in nonracial terms. "The truth," as I accepted and framed it, was itself half-formed. It was, in that sense, a half-truth. And it flunked the practical test I had assigned it: To the extent that a social problem is genetic, you can't ultimately solve it by understanding it in racial terms.

Read the entire article in Slate.

HonestThinking comments: Saletan strikes me as a nice guy as well as a man who is genuinely interested in the truth. I do suspect, however, that he has been under quite a bit of pressure sine writing his original article series last year, and that now he is too quickly jumping to conclusions that will help him regain some of his lost respectability in politically correct circles. Even though his new article has a lot of fine qualities to it, it looks more like the testimony of a man that, to some degree at least, has caved in, than that of a man who has come to important realizations. This makes me sad. He should have listened to professor Linda S. Gottfredson, editor of a widely referenced paper on what mainstream scientists say about race and IQ and a sociologist at the University of Delaware, who told New York Times that "Mr. Saletan has nothing to apologize for".

I am, by the way, not impressed by Saletan's colleague Stephen Metcalf and his article Dissecting the IQ Debate - A response to William Saletan's series on race and IQ.

Finnquisition

European countries moving in totalitarian direction

17.05.2008. Thus begins an article in The Brussels Journal: There's a free speech trial going on in Finland, […] Here's what's happened: Mikko Ellilä is a blogger, who posted a rant on his blog about Africans and African immigration in Finland and elsewhere. (Excuse me for using the word rant – if you're a conservative you always hear that everything you've written is either a rant or a screed, but in this case it's more or less appropriate.)

The awful majesty of the Finnish legal machine is coming after him for a blog post.

State Prosecutor Mika Illman: The text under discussion, "Society Consists of People", has been published on the Internet. In the text, Africans are slandered and insulted. It includes material that is prohibited in section 11 of the penal code and that should therefore not be disseminated. I demand that the text be removed from the Internet. It is indisputable that the text has been disseminated as described in the penal code. What is in dispute is whether the statements included in the text are illegal. This case is not about freedom of opinion. Mr Ellilä is free to hold any opinions that he wishes. However, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits abusing these rights. Freedom of speech may not be misused.

Note that the business about the "International Covenant"(a UN document which the United States has signed but not ratified) is usually a censor's way of saying that even if his country had free speech, international law would force him to crush dissidents with whatever local legal machinery is available. A cease-and-desist order, for example, could prevent a journalist from writing at all. (Mark Steyn actually expects this: "My career in Canada will be formally ended next month.")

The questioning at Mikko Ellilä’s trial contains exchanges like this:

Illman: You write, "For the Africans, looting, rape, nepotism, corruption, clan warfare, superstition and impulsive homicide are business as usual". What is this claim based on?

Ellilä: On well-known facts. There are a lot of dictators and wars in Africa. There was a genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s due to intertribal conflicts between the Hutus and the Tutsis. Apart from the Darfur crisis in Sudan, there was also a civil war in Sudan between the Arab Muslim government in the north and the black Christians and other non-Muslims in the south. In Congo, the dictators Mobutu Sese Seko and Laurent Kabila killed millions of people. In Zimbabwe, the dictator Robert Mugabe has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda, killed hundreds of thousands of people. I could go on and on about this. Don't you ever read the newspapers or watch the news on TV?

Good question. Worth asking in any discussion of immigration – are the newcomers fleeing the problems of their home country, or are they bringing them with them? Read the entire article in The Brussels Journal.

HonestThinking comments: The following statement strikes me as unwise: "For the Africans, looting, rape, nepotism, corruption, clan warfare, superstition and impulsive homicide are business as usual". Writers who are critical of the multicultural project, and/or concerned about the challenges involved in trying to create multiracial societies, should, in my opinion, be very careful to avoid 'over-generalizations' like this, or unnecessarily hurtful language in general.

Even so, this report from Finland is very troubling. It seems to confirm a pattern of ever more draconian measures being employed to prevent inconvenient truths from being freely disseminated in society, and it is yet another sign that Europe in particular, and the entire West in general, is moving in a totalitarian direction. As I have said many times before, when the truth can no longer be tolerated (because we are pursuing utopian dreams) we will necessarily be headed for major problems.

The above is probably just an early sign of what is to come. Today they take those who use inappropriate language, tomorrow they will take those who simply tell the truth, no matter how moderate and appropriate their language.

Crime on the increase in Oslo, Norway

Observations from Bruce Bawer

16.05.2008. The following is quoted from Bruce Bawer (hyperlinks in original): During the nine years and two weeks that I've lived in Oslo, I've seen the city change significantly -- for the worse. I don't remember exactly when it started reminding me of New York in the 1970s and 80s, but by now the resemblance is undeniable. Burglary, rape, gay-bashing, mugging, graffiti, vandalism: you name it, we've got it in spades, and it's still on the rise. Public stabbings and gang fights have become routine. Forget for a moment the Muslim youth gangs that are responsible for a wildly disproportionate number of the crimes here: it's now impossible to walk in broad daylight down Karl Johans Gate, the grand ceremonial thoroughfare that was once the kingdom's pride, without being accosted by aggressive gypsy beggars who want your money (they've been bussed in from Rumania specifically for this purpose) and by equally aggressive drug addicts (some of who are asking for handouts, others of whom are dealing). At night, this unsavory crew is replaced by an even pushier brigade of Nigerian prostitutes, some of whom will follow you for a block or more, repeatedly (and often belligerently) demanding that you avail yourself of their services. So insistent are they that it doesn't even help to scream: "I'm gay!" Even the pre-Giuliani Times Square area was safer and more congenial.

The statistics are dire. Last month came news that the rate of reported crimes in Oslo is now four times that of New York; last week it emerged that Oslo's rape figures reached an all-time high in 2007; today it was reported that over 99 percent of street robberies in the city go unsolved. To any unblinkered individual who lives here, these statistics are no surprise. Yet civic authorities, faced with the steady erosion of law and order, exude indifference and ineffectuality. Alas, as illustrated by the vile comments made last October to a Muslim audience in Oslo by the head of Norway's security police -- who, as recounted by Rita Karlsen, bent over backwards to praise Muslims and decouple Islam from terrorism while maligning America and depicting ordinary Norwegians as ignorant, potentially violent anti-Muslim bigots -- Norwegian cops are hobbled by the same mindless multiculturalism that infects their counterparts elsewhere in the West.

HonestThinking comments: Bawer made the these comments on 29 April. Less than two weeks later at least nine (!) Norwegian women were, during a single weekend, in public and 'safe' places in a popular part of central Oslo, in broad daylight (at least in some cases), attacked and bullied by a group of some ten to twelve Somali boys of around 13 - 14 years of age. The boys tore most of the clothes off of the women, grasped their breasts and genitalia, and in some cases forced them to the ground. The following reports were published by Dagbladet: De dro opp kjolen og tok meg i skrittet ("They pulled up my skirt and grasped my vulva") and Det var guttehender overalt på kroppen min ("There were boys' hands all over my body")

At least some of the boys were later captured by the police who, in responce to the boys' actions, are apparently willing to take drastic measures such as talking to their parents and teachers.

Note added on 18.05.2008: The boys and their parents will, a few days from now, have to meet the women in question, in the presence of the police.

Political correctness ruining society

Modern life is bedevilled by political correctness, says author

02.05.2008. "Mutual respect and understanding and recognition of our common humanity cannot be nurtured in isolation. And in our relationships we are bedevilled by the cult of political correctness."

She added: "If in speaking to minorities we have to weigh every word in advance in case inadvertently we give offence, how can we be at ease with each other, how celebrate our common humanity, our shared anxieties and aspirations, both for ourselves and for those whom we love?" It would be "unfortunate" if the police became "enamoured" of political correctness, which she described as "a pernicious if risible authoritarian attempt at linguistic and social control". Read the full story in The Telegraph.

Israel 60 years

The Western disease has reached Israel as well

02.05.2008 (updated 03.05.2008). Excerpts from an article by Melanie Phillips in The Spectator: Ben-Gurion would today be surprised to find, for example, that Israel is regarded as illegally occupying the West Bank (and until 2005, Gaza). Along with modern Israel, this was part of the territory of Palestine within which in 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain the task of re-establishing the Jewish national home because of the unique claim by the Jews — the only people for whom it had ever been their nation state, hundreds of years before the Arabs invaded it. In other words, far from being ‘Palestinian land’, the Jews are entitled to claim it under international law, which also gives it the right to hold on to it in self-defence. Yet ‘progressive’ opinion not only denies both law and history but demands (as do the Palestinians) the ethnic cleansing of every last Jewish settler from a putative Palestinian state (just as half Israel’s population was created by Jews driven out of their ancient homes in Arab lands). So much for anti-racism.

The denial and inversion of such facts has singled out Israel for vilification applied to no other country. Scapegoated for crimes of which it is in fact the victim, Israel has become the Jew of the Western world. This is a victory for the Arabs in the new type of war in which they are engaged. Asymmetric warfare, whose principal battlefield is the mind, uses ostensibly powerless people (the Palestinians) who are in fact backed by powerful state actors (Iran). Such an inversion of strong and weak and the systematic use of deception are vital to the principal strategic goal of asymmetric warfare: to confuse and demoralise its victims and suborn world opinion to its cause. Even Israel itself has weakened under this. For it has an intelligentsia which is no longer confident of the nation’s right to its own Jewish identity. This has created a dangerous vacuum. In Israeli universities, revisionist historians have told corrosive lies about their country’s history, portraying it as having been born in sin. In the schools, children have not been taught Jewish history and parrot Arab disinformation instead.

The country’s sense of national purpose has been further weakened by the 2006 Lebanon war, which punctured public belief in Israel’s military invincibility, and by the ongoing crisis of political leadership caused by a political system which is endemically corrupt and excludes the brightest and the best from public office.

The result of all this is that at present, both the Israeli Left and Right are consumed by a morbid despair. The Left thinks Israel is doomed to war in perpetuity because there is no prospect of a Palestinian state — which it remains convinced is the prerequisite for peace, despite this being contrary to all history, evidence and logic. The Right, on the other hand, thinks that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is Israel’s Chamberlain, about to declare peace in our time by giving away half of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and thus delivering Israel to the wolves of Arab annihilation. But both are surely missing the bigger picture.

[...]

Indeed, much of the responsibility for these six decades of conflict lie with a Western world which, from 1921 onwards, has chosen to appease Arab violence while shedding crocodile tears over its Jewish victims. But the future of Israel is the future of the West. If the front line in Israel were to go down, the West would be next. Given its current internal appeasement of Islamism, however, the West may go down anyway. At least Israel knows it has to fight to survive. As a result, in 60 years’ time it will still be there. Can the same be said for Britain or Europe?

See full article in The Spectator.

HonestThinking comments: Britain and Europe are in serious trouble, and will, unless they change their ways, probably cease to exist as Western political entities some time in this century. Dramatic or even chaotic changes could very well take place less than 60 years from now, if we continue along a path of non-sustainable demographic development. Given the unfortunate fact that Israel is seriously stricken by the Western disease, too, I am less confident than Phillips that it will survive the next 60 years. Dishonest thinking is a suicide pill.

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HonestThinking is dedicated and committed to the art of thinking honestly. Yet honest thinking is not the same as true thinking, for it is possible to think honestly, but be mistaken. For the same reason, honest thinking is not identical with objective thinking either. Honest thinking is striving to get things right. This involves being truthful about whatever one publishes, but just as importantly, it involves an uncompromising dedication never to suppress relevant data, even when data collides with dearly held prejudices. Such an approach may sometimes cause hurtful revisions in one’s belief system. That’s what HonestThinking is all about! Read the entire manifesto.

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Please send e-mail to postmaster at honestThinking.org (replacing ' at ' with '@') if you would like to tip us about a web resource that we should link to, or if you wish to submit an article for publication here. Quality contributions are welcome from anyone.

The current European immigration and integration policy is profoundly disrespectful of both Muslims and Islam, because it is built on the tacit assumption that the Muslims will become like us. One claims to have respect for Islam and for Muslims, but one also expects Muslims to give up their orthodox faith when they come here. At the same time one is assuming that Islam will be reformed and modernized as soon as the Muslims become integrated and understand and appreciate how superior our Western culture is compared to their own. This is cultural shauvinism and arrogance indeed! The unspoken premise for this scenario is that Western socities are superior to Islam. Read more.

Human rights and democracy are under pressure. One threat comes from the Western world, in the form of lack of or dishonest thinking. There exists a peculiar Western "tolerance" which is so "tolerant" that it even tolerates totalitarian or anti-democratic ideologies. A tacit assumption underlying such an attitude is that all cultures, world views, and religions are really equally good. As a consequence of this assumption one is cut off from the possibility of critically examining the above mentioned ideologies. Read more.