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Bawer

Vilified by the Government of Norway

15.06.2010. Excerpts from Bruce Bawer's article I’ve Become an Enemy of the People for Speaking the Truth About Islam:

When it comes to the right to speak one’s mind about Islam, the record of the last few years makes it clear which direction the West is moving in. In France and Italy, Oriana Fallaci is put on trial for disparaging Islam. In Canada, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are hauled before “human rights commission” tribunals for criticizing Islam in print. In Australia, an Islamic organization sues two pastors for “vilification of Muslims.” In Britain, a Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested on charges of hate speech for having written negatively about Islam, and the Archbishop of Canterbury proposes that Parliament pass stronger laws against such speech acts. And in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, the head of the Freedom Party, which performed so well in the June 9 general elections that Wilders may end up in the governing coalition, still faces trial for having made a film about the Koranic foundations of terrorism.

Then there’s Norway, where I live, and where the last few days have seen yet another dark development. By way of background, permit me to begin by quoting myself. On pages 230-31 of my book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom I sum up the more alarming aspects of Norway’s Discrimination Law, passed in 2005:

It forbids “harassment on the grounds of ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, skin color, language, religion, or beliefs,” and, in turn, defines harassment as “actions, omissions, or utterances [my emphasis] that have the effect or are intended to have the effect of being insulting, intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating.”

In other words, it’s illegal just to say certain things.

Defendants may be accused not only by the individuals whom they’ve supposedly offended but also by semiofficial organs such as the Anti-Racist Center and the Center against Ethnic Discrimination (both of which helped formulate the law, and both of which exist less to oppose real racism and discrimination than to oppose political incorrectness generally) or by the government’s Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud.

Which means that a handful of far-left organizations have been given enormous power to silence those they disagree with.

Violations of the law by individuals are punishable by fine; violations by individuals in concert with at least two other persons (such as a writer conspiring with an editor and publisher, perhaps?) can be punished by up to three years’ imprisonment — this in a country where murderers often get off with less. Moreover, the burden of proof is on the accused: you’re guilty until proven innocent.

And this in a supposedly free country.

[...]

Anyway, back to the “shadow report.” The last of its three items about me returns to the subject of Geert Wilders, and quotes a single sentence I wrote at the HRS website about the court case against Wilders: “In fact, Wilders has only done one thing: he has made visible important truths about a very dangerous ideology.”

And that’s it. To sum up, two members of the NBCC think I’m a racist; I hold certain views about Islam; and I’ve deplored the fact that Geert Wilders is on trial for holding essentially the same views. These offenses on my part are sufficient, apparently, to qualify me officially as (to borrow the title of a play by Norway’s greatest playwright) an Enemy of the People.

Controversy is one thing. I’ve been a professional writer for three decades, and have long since become accustomed to controversy — accustomed to being criticized severely, to seeing my words misquoted and my views misrepresented, to being attacked in print and to answering back. But this is something entirely different. We’re talking about the government of a supposedly free country stepping in, tapping me on the shoulder, and telling me: You’re not supposed to say that. It’s a chilling development, and the more I think of it the more chilling it feels.

The question is: what comes next? I’ve now been singled out, in a report commissioned and funded by the government of the country in which I live, as a perpetrator of Islamophobia. The items about me appear under the heading “Prohibit and Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination and To Ensure All Equality before the Law.” Exactly how does the Ministry of Children, Equality, and Social Inclusion propose to “eliminate” the supposed “racial discrimination” on my part? Will I be arrested and prosecuted under the Discrimination Law of 2005? Am I about to join the company of those who have been hauled into court for daring to speak the truth about Islam, Muhammed, and the Koran? What say you, Herr Lysbakken?

Read the entire article at Pajamas Media.

Wilders

A Dutch revolution

15.06.2010. Excerpts from an article by Arthur Legger:

Wrongfully or rightfully accused of nearly every evil imaginable Geert Wilders solely, in person and single handedly caused a fundamental alteration in Dutch politics and society, which fits the definition of a revolution. What did he do?

a) He stayed alive. Against all predictions, including mine, he didn’t crack over the past 5 years and remained undeterred even though all institutional and social forces did and do weigh down on him. Moreover, he refused to die and managed to outwit his assassins. He exhausted his opponents and by nearly winning the national elections he survived them spiritually and socially, showing the validity of a his alternate route.

b) Not the content of his critique is radically different or an extreme challenge to Dutch society, but his rhetoric technique and tone. His rhetoric perfections the technique of ‘framing’: the repetition of a word and a notion and the linking of ideas in such way that they become an inescapable logic; so much so that opponents, when debating the topic, are subconsciously and automatically using and applying Wilders’ logic and wording. An example is, for instance, that when Job Cohen was confronted with Moroccan juvenile delinquency he spontaneously named and shamed them in the same way as Wilders used to do – to Cohen’s utter embarrassment. Wilders’ tone is purely functional and doesn’t show any doubt, hesitation or mercy. In his voluminous indictment the public prosecutor of the Amsterdam Court recognizes and underlines these facts: mostly because of Wilders’ way of expression, his ‘framing’ and his tone, he has to face charges of hate speech and racism. Frits Bolkestein, a grand old aristocrat with a funny voice, said the same things in an even more political correct era and never had to face Court.

Wilders’ tone of voice, his rhetoric, infuriates his adversaries, it’s also the quintessence of his revolution: his way of expression has broken down the accepted hierarchy and forced politicians and public to step away from the status quo. Mostly in Parliament but also in interviews and columns he showed a complete absence of respect to accepted notions of how to communicate and to debate. His radically new tone, light-years removed from the pleasing and teasing Pim Fortuyn, caused impregnable bulwarks such as the Central Bureau of Statistics to brake down and to acknowledge that their calculations are Social Democratic biased. Wilders managed to crack the taboo of the financial costs of mass immigration. Finally the Dutch know it’s very costly: a net loss of between 7 and 15 billion Euro per year since 1975. Wilders rhetoric technique of ‘framing’ also succeeded in naming, blaming and shaming the Moroccans and their Islamic context as being most costly to Dutch society. But most crucially Wilders’ ridiculing and denigrating tone destroyed the notion of the necessity of a ruling by regents; the way the Dutch have been governed for nearly 400 years. Modern parliamentary democracy never fundamentally altered the perception that when appointed, by Crown and Cabinet, one enters the class of regents who in an almost lordly manner govern city and country. In the final television debate between the 4 most prominent politicians on the 8th of June (2,8 million viewers), Wilders showed his revolutionary rhetoric by bullying and humiliating prime-minister Balkenende in the same annihilating tone he had used for 5 years in Parliament, leaving Balkenende shattered and stammering –a naked emperor. If the definition of power is: “power perceived is power achieved” then Wilders tone alone has caused the complete crack down and fragmentation of hierarchy and power.

c) Wilders in person and expression embodies the third notion: he’s not nice, he doesn’t care whether he’s liked or not; he doesn’t care about the unsettling effect of his critique. Clearly, like every politician in every nation and time he spins his facts, but unlike a great many Dutch politicians his facts are correct. The facts Wilders lists are perceived by most Dutch as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’, but like all facts they are, of course, a-moral. The facts Wilders unearthed and extorted are abhorred but also acknowledged by most political and institutional groupings. Hence, Wilders changed the Netherlands fundamentally.

[...]

In October the trial against Wilders continues. He might then be a member of Cabinet. If not, he’s heading the most powerful party in opposition. A conviction of Wilders because of his tone of expression might prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for his opponents. The initiators of the process, mostly Dutch-Moroccan Muslims and converted Dutch, ought to reconsider. They better check the core of Wilders’ critique which states the worrying fact that by Dutch law the confessors of a religion are completely free in their expressions, how insulting, stupid, discriminating, hateful and racist they might be. And that those who speak their mind without the pretext of a religion are constrained, censored and punishable before the law. It’s my educated guess that during this election many secular and integrated Dutch Muslims still abhorred Wilders’ tone and person, but finally got this fact. And if in years from now Wilders merely will be acknowledged for having successfully fought this rot in the Dutch system, and scorned for everything else, it will prove that his revolution was loud and limited, but vital.

Read the entire article at Document.no.

UK immigration

The shameless hypocrisy of Labour's leadership contenders

13.06.2010. Excerpts from Harriet Seargant's recent article in The Daily Mail (emphasis added):

Who is he trying to kid? This was no brushing under the carpet. This was a systematic policy over many years to mislead the public. Last year, former Downing Street adviser Andrew Neather, who wrote speeches for Tony Blair, admitted that Labour ministers deliberately encouraged mass immigration to diversify Britain.

‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if it wasn’t its main purpose - to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,’ he said.

So the Labour government deliberately opened our borders, deliberately encouraged unprecedent levels of immigration and deliberately emasculated anyone with the authority to protect our society - in order to create a multi-cultural society and increase Labour voters (first-generation immigrants are known to vote Labour).

Of course, migrants through history have benefited Britain immensely and are still doing so, bringing much-needed expertise and broadening our country’s culture. But the sheer scale of uncontrolled immigration under Labour has been a disaster.

Continue reading in The Daily Mail.

The Neanderthals

And the Evolution of High IQ

08.06.2010. Fjordman's article The Neanderthals and the Evolution of High IQ begins as follows:

I am personally convinced that Michael H. Hart’s book Understanding Human History will be remembered as an important work in the emerging field of biohistory. As I have argued before, I agree with its basic premise that genetic intelligence measured in average IQ tends to rise the further north you get. However, it is strange that the Neanderthals were displaced by more recent African immigrants, even though it has now been proven that the newcomers interbred with them. This seemingly contradicts the cold climate theory for the evolution of high intelligence. We don’t yet know why Homo sapiens sapiens displaced the Neanderthals in northwest Eurasia, where the latter had managed to survive in a challenging climate for tens of thousands of years and had evolved brains that rivaled our own in size.

Read the entire article here at HT.

National suicide

How stupid can you get?

08.06.2010. Here are some excerpts from Takuan Seiyo's latest essay, Reality for radicals:

The collective insanity is too big to grasp in its totality, but Mayor Bloomberg is a compact case study. At a net worth of $18 billion, Bloomberg is the 8th richest person in the United States. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA from Harvard. No idiot can amass such a fortune and such degrees. So why would Bloomberg rant about the recent Arizona law aimed at controlling illegal immigration? That law (here and here), is after all consistent with federal laws that are already on the books, except the federal government refuses to enforce them.

'We are committing national suicide,” Bloomberg said, "People are developing new drugs in India, rather than here. They're going to win the next Nobel Prize in China or in Europe not here. If we want to have a future, we need to have more immigrants here." 

There is one tiny flaw with His Honor’s empathic assertion. 80% of the 12 – 20 million illegal immigrants who have flooded Arizona and most of America are Western hemisphere nonwhites semi literate not just in English but in Spanish. Their mean IQ is 82 -83 (4). An IQ of 100 is the necessary minimum to absorb the curriculum of a real high school teaching real subjects like math, chemistry, Cervantes in Spanish and Shakespeare in English rather than Chicano pride, Afro-American studies, safe sex and basketball. And that 100 IQ, which happens to be the White mean, would still be short at least three Standard Deviations (i.e. 45 IQ points) from the level at which Nobel-quality science work is possible.

Only 0.135% of Whites have an IQ at that level, and the relevant percentage among the vast majority of (non-East Asian) immigrants is much smaller. But Bloomberg’s mental chip is plugged into a lie so fixed and guarded by dragon words like ‘racism’ and ‘discrimination’ that he could not possibly assimilate the foregoing without having to erase his internal Operating System. It’s like seeing the sun rise in the East and set in the West, and then being told that the Earth revolves around the sun. “Burn the heretic!”

Consider Lenin’s advice applied by the Snatchers faithfully to sell their multiculti falsehoods: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” After 45 years of an accelerated Long March through every Western institution, society is now not only controlled and manipulated at will by Gnostic Loons fired up by fanatical religious zeal, but largely populated by pitiable Pod creatures “snatched” by the Loons in a multi-generational campaign. All gyre in some Inverse Reality vortex that bears no resemblance to actual life on Earth.

[...]

Take a happiness–giving item like pizza. What could possibly be controversial about pizza. Yet, in Snatcher State -- the land of inverted reality -- pizza becomes an instrument of mass murder. Hardly a week goes by in the United States when a pizza delivery person is not robbed, shot and murdered. Just a quick sample of recent cases would comprise this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this , this and this. This pizza delivery man escaped death by shooting his assailant first.

The race of the persons involved in this syndrome is unmentionable in Snatcher society. For the sake of clarity, with few exceptions the murderers are Afro-Americans and the delivery men are equally poor Whites and Asians. The difference is that the Afro-Americans relieve their poverty by robbery and murder, and the Whites and Asians, by hard work.

It is legally risky for pizza shops to refuse delivery to high crime areas -- what’s known as redlining -- because those are invariably Black areas. Again, the “disparate impact” legal doctrine from hell that we have visited before.

Pizza shops that desire to save their employees’ lives by refusing to deliver to risky areas are set upon through Snatcher “racial discrimination” lawfare. They must stop “discriminating” and continue to subject their employees to probable slaughter, face ruinous lawsuits by Leviathan’s prosecutors, or just close down outright. As a result, pizza delivery ranks as the fifth most dangerous job in the United States.

The murderous lawfare engages the enormous edifice of federal, state and local governments’ “Civil Rights” laws and prosecutorial mechanism. Snatcher Journals thrive with titles like “SERVICE REDLINING: The New Jim Crow?”, and Snatcher cities like San Francisco pass ordinances making it illegal to "single out” parts of service areas. In other words, better for many innocent people to die than for Reality to be acknowledged.

This is not simply “liberal ideology.” It’s institutionalized, 2nd degree mass murder. And all Western institutions operate based on the same principle.

Read the entire essay at The Brussels Journal.

Affirmative action

A guaranteed failure - also in the UK

08.06.2010. A council today defended a decision to exclude white people from applying to join a management training scheme. Bristol City Council is facing criticism after the two-year graduate placement, worth £18,000, was offered only to ethnic minorities. The council - the city's largest employer - said the process was legal and is addressing an imbalance in the ethnic mix of its workforce. Continue reading in The Independent.

HonestThinking comments: This kind of anti-white discrimination is based on a tacit assumption, viz that there are no inherent differences in IQ and mental abilities between races. Alas, this assumption is, as anyone who cares about the truth can easily find out, false.

Arizona

Arizona is under assault - and so is the idea of American sovereignty

02.06.2010. From David Horowitz Freedom Center:

I'm certain you know that Arizona's decision to protect its citizens and secure its borders has sent shockwaves through the Obama administration (many of whose members have criticized the new law without bothering to read it), the ultra-liberal press, and the movement that wants to make America a nation of victim groups.

Arizona has become the "evil, racist" whipping boy of the radical Left. And make no mistake; the Left is taking this attack on Arizona very seriously because it knows that it is the first battle in a larger war about the kind of nation we will be. Despite the fact that *73% of Americans support Arizona's actions*, President Obama just last week gave the President of Mexico the platform to slam America's laws and customs in an appearance in our nation's capitol. Hearing members of Congress cheer as the Mexican President chastised Arizona for trying to solve problems Mexico has created and Washington D.C. has ignored should be enough to get any patriotic American's blood to boil.

Arizona is taking a stand where the Federal Government has been derelict for over 20 years as *the states of our great Southwest have been overwhelmed with a tidal wave of illegal immigrants and now of narco terror gangs*. There is nothing new or "racist" in this law; it merely restates federal law which Washington has ignored in the interests of expediency. Arizona had to act for itself because the Obama administration, trying to get support from the illegal immigrant lobby, stood by idly while the state was overrun.

But the radical Left's in full battle mode. So-called "activists" are calling the proud citizens of Arizona everything from racists, to Klansman and Nazis. And, in fact, the entire "open borders" campaign can easily trace its roots back to the strategies of Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama's mentor, of overwhelming the American system in the hope of radically transforming it into the Left's socialist vision. *This law and the action of Arizona are not only necessary, they are critical to our nation's survival.* This involves issues well beyond illegal immigration, the law and the costs to society. It involves greater issues of sovereignty and National Security. Already threats of boycotts are being launched, striking at the economic heart of our fellow Americans. This cannot stand.

As part of our effort to stop Obama and the Left's radical transformation of America, the Center is launching "Fight for Arizona" - a project which is really a Fight for America. We ask that you help us today by following this link and making a tax-deductible contribution of $25, $50, $100 $250 or more to the Freedom Center.

IDF

Fired at by flotilla passengers

02.06.2010. See e.g. material at YouTube and JPost. See also interesting material in The Telegraph.

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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.