Category Archives: Cultural

Nothing makes peace inevitable

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A Labour-voting Israeli explains “Why I’ve made my home at a kibbutz near Gaza“. The most striking image in the story comes near the start:

My visiting friend wanted to go and have a look at Gaza, so we went to a point at the edge of the kibbutz that offers a good look across the border. On the way we passed by the kibbutz’s pool, with its crystal clear, cool water. It was 8 p.m. and the sun was making its way into the Mediterranean, but while on our side of the border, street lamps were beginning to light up, in Shejaiya everything remained dark. Not just the streets; also the visible homes and apartments, which house hundreds if not thousands of people. Had we returned to that spot two hours later, we would hardly see anything across the border. I’ve been living in Nahal Oz for almost a year and have gone to the observation point dozens of times, but only once at night. It’s too depressing to look at the complete darkness on the other side and realize that many people actually live in it.

I get feeling sorry for the people who live in Gaza. What I don’t get is not recognising that it is only a hard line that will ever bring peace. Only if the other side comes to believe that they can never win through war will war come to an end. It is not going to come from weakness on the Israeli side or a change of heart on theirs.

Europe’s “catastrophic error”

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The headline writer chose this, Europe must follow our lead on turnbacks: Tony Abbott but the first sentence says what he was really trying to say:

Europe is heading towards a “catastrophic error” that could change it forever and must instead study and adopt Australia’s policy to turn back the tide of asylum-seekers, Tony Abbott said today.

Delivering the second ­Thatcher Lecture at London’s Guildhall, the former prime minister also called for more to be done to strike Islamic State terrorism “at its source” and said it was a pity a recent summit by world leaders looked only at countering violent extremism and not the ­inspiration for it.

In his first significant speech since he was toppled by Malcolm Turnbull six weeks ago, Mr Abbott said his invitation to give the lecture “suggests there was at least a hint of Thatcherism about my government in Australia”.

For some, a hint of Thatcherism is the kiss of death. For others, who have some idea of the stakes involved, there cannot be enough of Mrs Thatcher and what she stood for. What he and she understood is the difference between right and wrong. Now it is the difference between good and evil, and even so the left is blind to it all. And here’s the advice:

Europe should study how Australia had stopped the boats and restored border security as “the only compassionate thing to do”.

“This means turning boats around, for people coming by sea. It means denying entry at the border, for people with no legal right to come; and it means establishing camps for people who currently have nowhere to go,” he said.

“It requires some force; it will ­require massive logistics and ­expense; it will gnaw at our consciences — yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever.

“The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in.”

In the meantime, it can only be hoped that Malcolm gets the message before we end up in the same boat as Europe. Abbott is world class, one of the deepest thinkers ever to rise to high office in this country. It’s only a shame that what he saw and understood was too difficult, not just for the media and the left in general, which is to be expected, but for the people who he had to deal with in cabinet and in his own party room.

AND CONTINUING: This has been cross-posted at Catallaxy and the comments thread is quite interesting. Hard for me to imagine people who would disagree with Abbott on these issues but, I guess, with much of the right self-identified as “libertarian”, and therefore open-borders, perhaps it’s not that surprising after all. I have added two comments of my own. First this:

Abbott was all Thatcher but where was his Keith Joseph? And Margaret didn’t have to put up with a creep like Turnbull who relentlessly stalked his own PM to the extent that nothing debated in cabinet was not the next day being aired on the news. But Margaret was famous for her foreign policy even more than the economics. She with Ronald Reagan and the Pope stared down the Evil Empire, not to mention Argentina and the Falklands. I only wish we had a Margaret Thatcher somewhere in one of the major countries of the West. Instead we have Obama, Merkel and Malcolm. There is some potential in Cameron but he, too, is no Margaret Thatcher.

And then this:

Dealing with migration and the Islamic State is the issue of our time in the same way that dealing with the Soviet Union was the issue of her time. Who besides Tony gets it? As for economics, this is from her first budget in 1979:
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The 8 and 12.5 per cent VAT rates were unified at 15 per cent, putting around 3.75 per cent on the RPI. There was also a 7p increase in petrol duty, adding 10p to a gallon when VAT was added in. (For RPI reasons, alcohol and tobacco duties were left untouched.) The oil companies were tapped: Petroleum Revenue Tax (PRT) was increased from 45 to 60p and BNOC lost its exemption from the tax.

Let us compare with Joe defending his first budget in 2013:
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An emotional Mr Hockey described his first budget, which included the now-dumped GP co-payment, plans to uncap university fees and increased fuel and income taxes, as too courageous for the Parliament.

We will see as time goes by who will be as courageous as Joe and Tony were then. I suspect there is no one around who will take these issues on, least of all the current incumbent, who was probably leaking as furiously as he could to all his mates at the ABC.

This Abbott Derangement Syndrome truly is a form of insanity. People who think politics is no more difficult than agreeing with your friends while sitting around your dining room ought to get out once in a while. Abbott had a right to expect some slack from those who understand what the other side represents but political sophistication is as rare as a modern economist’s understanding of the operation of a market economy.

Fantasy v Reality

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Fantasy world

Let them in and let them earn from the idiots at The Economist:

By moving to Europe, with its predictable laws and efficient companies, they can become several times more productive, and their wages rise accordingly.

Sceptics may retort that the cultural impact of migration is profoundly unsettling, and that Europe is neither willing nor able to absorb big inflows. Europeans recoil when they see crowds of unassimilated, jobless immigrants, as in parts of Paris or Malmo. And they fear Islamist terrorism, especially after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the disarming of a gun-wielding Moroccan on a French train last week.

Not all who express such fears are bigots. And it is clear that monitoring of jihadist groups needs to be stepped up. But the answer to the broader question—how can Europe assimilate migrants better?—can be summarised in three words: let them work. This formula does well in London, New York and Vancouver. Jobs keep young men out of trouble. In the workplace, migrants have to rub along with locals and learn their customs, and vice versa. Which is why policies that keep newcomers idle are so destructive, from Britain’s restrictions on asylum-seekers working to Sweden’s rigid labour laws that make it uneconomic to hire the unskilled. A more open Europe with more flexible labour markets could turn the refugee crisis into an opportunity, just as America did with successive waves of refugees in the 20th century, including plenty from Europe. Let them in, and let them earn.

And what’s the plan if they don’t work and don’t earn? Send them home? Let them starve? Live on welfare? Your addresses at The Economist should all be taken down and refugee centres opened across the road from where each and every one of you live.

Real World

migrants to europe

Aside from not knowing any European language, remind me what skills these people have that can be put to work.

From A Lurker on this thread

If the shoe fits, wear it

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This is why I love free speech and an open society. The article from The Oz is written by Uthman Badar, the media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Australia. You may judge for yourself whether he makes his case. The title is Finger points at Islam every time and this was his central point:

It is the establishment, then, and mainstream media that shamelessly milk attacks such as the Parramatta shooting, creating political and social hysteria to justify foreign and domestic interventions that only further besiege an entire community, feed the anger of its youth and perpetuate the cycle of violence.

But do read it all. And then when you’ve read that, read the one that sits on the page next to it by Jennifer Oriel: Known wolves pose huge threat.

Australia’s new security measures must move beyond the comforting lone-wolf myth to address the discomfiting reality that jihadism is an organised crime arising from networks of Islamist terrorists.

That was the opening sentence. You can go on from there for yourself.

The secret of eloquence lies in a care for detail

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A tip off from Tim Blair, there is an exquisite article at Quadrant by Clive James: Les Murray and the Purpose of Poetry. Read it all, but marvel at this first:

After Gough Whitlam personally instituted the idea of educating the working class—here I borrow the dearest historical belief of the unintelligent intelligentsia—there were suddenly more intellectuals than you could shake a stick at. Unfortunately, far from their inheriting the country’s traditional scepticism, there was almost no fad that they wouldn’t fall for. The result has been the near-ruination of Australian prose. There are always a few hold-outs, but when you look at the collected writings of the late Christopher Pearson, for example, the most startling impression is not of how he shines, but of how he shines almost alone, like a single candle in one of his beloved cathedrals.

Perhaps the tip-off lies in the fact that his posthumous collection of writings, A Better Class of Sunset, is not very carefully edited. It seems to have had several editors all working at once, and none of them to sufficient purpose: in which, perhaps, lies the trouble. The literary world works best when some of the editors could have been writers too, but preferred to guard a publication, giving it the care and energy that might have put their own name in a public light.

Just as the basis of ethics lies in manners, the secret of eloquence lies in a care for detail. The alternative is the ever-spreading swamp of the blog-trolls, in which the opinions of a frothing dolt are so important that no paragraph can last longer than a sentence. Or else he raves on forever without a break: either way, he has no sense whatever of nuanced argument. Nor can he pause to put in the capital letters, the commas and the apostrophes, not to mention the good humour, the sense of proportion and the common courtesy. Cram all that negligence into the frame of Facebook and you have mental cyanide in pellet form. I hate to say it, but of all the countries in the Anglosphere, it seems to me that Australia is the most likely to be the first victim of a web-world and social media coalition that annihilates the hard-won virtues of English prose. If you dread a culture in which every twit’s tweet counts, here it comes.

All this might sound like the carping of an old man on his way out, but I did find it remarkable, as I came back to Australia more and more often in the middle of my life, that the books of expository prose tailed off in quality from year to year. Not every woman writer will ever be able to write like Helen Garner, just as not every male politician will be able to write like Diamond Jim McClelland. But you would have expected the supply of stylists to go up, not down. Born and brought up at a time when such a poet-journalist as Elizabeth Riddell was still active in the Australian media, I never imagined that the female journalists of Australia could have listened to Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech and not laughed her from the stage.

And was there even a single red-blooded Aussie media man to greet President Obama’s remarks about Australia’s alleged neglect of the climate change threat to the Barrier Reef by telling him, in a single well-shaped paragraph, that the Reef was well looked after and that if he really thought he knew anything about it he was always welcome to take a paddle around a piece of it, barefoot and without a guide, or else, failing that, to bugger off? But no: scarcely a peep. The days when the Australian newspapers and periodicals had plenty of hard-nosed jobbing writers to deal not only with the bullshit manufactured at home, but with the incoming bullshit from abroad, seem long gone. By now, the next wave of literary journalists is looking pretty understaffed, half a dozen surfboard riders sitting out there on a gentle swell.

Permissible lying

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From Diana West. The media has obviously taken up the same rules for itself.

Dear Glenn Kessler,

First of all, how come your “Fact Checker” column of 9/22 awarding Dr. Ben Carson “Four Pinnochios” for his statement regarding “taqiyya” is running for a second time? It first appeared last week, but there it is again in today’s paper, 9/27, on p. A5.

Oh well, I missed it the first time. It’s definitely worth revisiting.

Dr. Carson said the following: “`Taqiyya’ is a component of sharia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals.”

You then write: “In other words, he appeared to be saying that this tenet of Islam offered some kind of loophole that would allow the Muslim to lie about his or her religious beliefs to pursue other objectives. Is this the case?” (Emphasis added.)

For the record, your paraphrase is not what Carson said. He invoked “taqiyya” to describe a concept in sharia, or Islamic law, that, as he put it, “allows and even encourages [a Muslim] to lie to achieve [his] goals.”

I note that you have chosen to frame Dr. Carson’s very broad claim about sharia-approved lying by focusing on a literal definition of “taqiyya,” as if Carson were discussing only whether Muslims were specifically permitted to lie about “religious beliefs.”

You then go on to “fact-check” this concept of lying about religion in Islam.

Note that I put “fact-check” in quotation marks. This is because you did not, in fact, check the facts. You just contacted sharia-apologists and “taqiyya”-artists for comment.

As a reporter, you really ought to check the authoritative Islamic sources yourself, even if just for “balance.”

Such sources include Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. It is available on Amazon, which should please the boss. Even at $29.95, it is a bargain, and I cannot recommend it highly enough as a means of quick access to “sharia,” or Islamic law, as authorized by Sunni Islamic authorities, including certification by Al Azhar.

Turn to the detailed subject index of Reliance of the Traveller where you will find a section on “Lying.”

This “Lying” section includes, relevantly, a subsection called “reasons that permit.”

Before I tell you what it says under the heading “Permissable Lying” on p. r8.0, I will quote three men you selected to referee this crucial discussion about lying in Islam, which, thankfully, Dr. Carson has brought to mainstream-media-attention for the first time, incredibly, since 9/11.

I am calling them (A), (B) and (C).

(A) actually addresses Dr. Carson’s general statement about the permissibility of lying in Islam, declaring: “There is no concept that would encourage a Muslim to lie to pursue a goal. That is a complete invention.”

“Complete invention”? As we will see below, “Fact Checker” does not have enough PInnochios to reflect the mendacity of (A)’s statement.

Now, to the other “experts,” who discuss lying in Islam in terms of protecting a religious minority:

B) “It is a dispensation within some aspects of Shia law, which was developed out of the experience of a persecuted minority. … If a Shia is being persecuted, and someone holds a gun to your head asking, `Are you a Shia?’ you are allowed to say `no’ in order to save your life.”

C) “Taqiyya is dissimulation when one is being oppressed or tortured or having one’s views banned, a bit like Jesuit dispensation to lie under oath when your life is in danger.”

To recap, you, and, by extension, the Washington Post, are reporting that Islamically-legal lying to achieve goals is “a complete invention,” or narrowly approved in cases of religious persecution.

Now, to the authoritative Sunni Islamic law book, Reliance of the Traveller.

The sharia discourse on “Permissable Lying” opens by citing canonical “hadiths” (or traditions of Islam’s prophet, Mohammed) by Bukhari and Muslim that quote Mohammed as having said: “He who settles disagreements between people to bring about good or says something commendable is not a liar.”

The text continues, quoting Umm Kalthum, a daughter of Mohammed, who appears in Muslim, where she says:

“I did not hear him permit untruth in anything people say, except for three things: war, settling disagreements and a man talking with his wife or she with him….”

War, settling disagreements, and talk between man and wife: That’s a whole lot of “permissable lying” right there.

“This,” Reliance of the Traveller continues, “is an explicit statement that lying is sometimes permissable for a given interest, scholars having established criteria defining what types of it are lawful.

“The best analysis,” the text continues, “is by Imam Abu Hamid Ghazali,” a famed theologian (d. 1111).

And Ghazali said:

“If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissable to lie if attaining the goal is permissable…and obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory.”

Now, back to your Source A. He claimed “there is no concept that would encourage a Muslim to lie to pursue a goal.”

No concept?

Really?

I just found exactly such a concept in the Al-Azhar-approved sharia law book, as derived from the “hadiths” of Bukhari and Muslim and explicated by Ghazali. And, more important, you can, too. Have a look for yourself. It will help in your preparations for the Washington Post correction that Dr. Carson greatly deserves.

The section on “Permissable Lying” in Reliance of the Traveller continues, offering additional detail. It underscores the fact-checkable fact that there exist within Islamic law different circumstances in which lying is permissable if not “obligatory.” ”

Meanwhile, I haven’t even mentioned the Islamic conception of “slander,” (completely, divergently at odds with our own), which serves as the Islamically legal means of outlawing free speech about Islam that is true but not complimentary.

So, to one side of the West-Islam divide, we have Thou Shalt Not Lie. Neat. Simple.

On the other side we have a body of Islamic law stipulating when exactly Thou Shalt Lie.

Dr. Carson was right again. I trust that Fact Checker is already preparing the necessary correction.

The lost continent of Europe

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When it finally happens, they are not going to know what hit them. We are possibly the stupidest generation in history, with our affluence making the wealth generating machinery of our societies look effortless but also apparently dulling our minds. The Europeans are about to find out how different reality is from appearance when everything is running well. How it works is entirely invisible. The article, written by a Swede, comes with the explicit title, Sweden Close to Collapse. These are the dot-points of the introduction but read the whole article which will scare you, or at least it should. If we have the wit to understand what is going on we can learn from their mistakes and not make the same ones ourselves. And while this is about Sweden in particular, it applies to the whole of Western Europe. There is no reason this could not be us because there are plenty here just as “imprudent” as the Swedes.

. If the wave of migrants keeps coming, in 10-15 years, Swedes will be a minority in their own country. That there is, in fact, an exchange of populations going on, should be clear in any sober assessment.

. “The final consequence of… Sweden’s immigration policy is that the economy will collapse — because who is going to pay for it all?* And economic breakdowns, once they happen, always happen very fast.” — Lars Hedegaard.

. In the last two weeks, more than 1,000 “unaccompanied refugee children” have arrived from Germany via ferry; more than half of them have now vanished and are listed as missing.

. For the last few weeks, the central train station in Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, has been overrun with migrants; the volunteers that for the first few days showed up with food, water and clothes now seem to have lost interest.

. It will not be long until the Swedes realize that the state will not look after them. The country that just 20 years ago was considered one of the safest and most affluent in the world, is now in danger of becoming a failed state.

* This notion of “who will pay for it all” is part of the failure of economic theory and our superficial way of understanding the underlying economic reality in terms of money. Of money, there is never a shortage. Of food, housing, services there is only enough if the saving of the past has allowed us to lay down the right amounts to meet the requirements of the present. It’s not paying for it that matters, but having the goods and services in existence that are there to be bought. The shortages that the rush of migrants have caused are already becoming manifest and now the fight will begin in earnest.