What's Happiness to Do with Catholicism?

Yesterday, the 20th of March, was the International Day of Happiness, proclaimed in July 2012 by the United Nations General Assembly, "recognizing the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in people's lives and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives."

Being happy is in fact what everybody wants, but people hugely differ in their definition of happiness and views of how to achieve it.

Contrary to public perceptions due to prejudices and intentional distortions, Catholicism also wants people to be happy. A person couldn't be declared saint, for instance, if he hadn't been happy in his life.

Professor of philosophy Christopher Kaczor, in the book The Seven Big Myths about the Catholic Church: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction about Catholicism (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , writes:

[E]very saint experiences and exhibits joy - no saint is canonized without it.

The Catholic idea of and route to happiness are surprisingly similar to what current scientific psychology thinks, on the basis of empirical studies.

Here are some results of psychological research.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, is the author of the book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , in which she examines hundreds of empirical studies and concludes that about 50% of individual differences in happiness are caused by genes, 10% by life circumstances and 40% by our intentional choices of goals and activities.

That 40% is in our hands, and is going to have an important effect on our happiness.

Drawing on the work of psychologists and philosophers, the book Healing the Culture (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) by Robert J Spitzer distinguishes four kinds of intentional goals and activities corresponding to four different levels of happiness. Here they are:

1. Physical, bodily pleasure through food, drink, drugs, sex and so on.
2. Attainment of money, power, success, popularity, fame and other material goods.
3. Loving and serving other people, and therefore avoiding hurting others.
4. Loving and serving God.

The amount, length and depth of happiness increases at each of these levels.

This is what the Catholic Church says. And this is also what evidence-based psychological research says.

This subject requires more than an article, but let's make some reflections.

The paradox of hedonism

The first level is the easiest and the quickest to attain, but it's also the quickest to end. Not only it's short-lived, it's also short term. Only an addict or someone with serious problems would base his life on the search for this kind of pleasure, often followed by much greater pain (physical and psychological), ill health and other serious consequences.

There is nothing wrong with bodily pleasure, but in moderation and not as final goal. Catholicism says the same.

The first level is related to what is called the "paradox of hedonism", something already known to ancient Greek philosophers. It's very simple: you don't find happiness by directly pursuing it. Happiness is only the indirect consequence of something else, the result perhaps of something we produced or created and we are satisfied with. We find happiness when we aim at something else.

We all have experienced this type of failure. If you desperately try to have fun at a party, you're more likely to end up with the opposite effect. A deliberate effort to enjoy oneself, to find happiness or pleasure with alcohol or drugs can be one extreme case of this paradox. Another extreme case, at the other end of the scale, can be psychotherapy: continuously looking for possible internal obstacles to one's happiness.

Happiness and money: dispelling a myth

At the second level we find the goals that probably most people, in today's materialistic society, associate with happiness, so it needs more analysis.

It may seem obvious, and yet not many people take notice of this thing, that philosophers have always said, from Epicurus onwards: finding happiness in wealth is an illusion.

American affluence research shows that. In the early '80s, Americans had 5 times as many air-conditioners per head, 4 times as many clothes dryers and 7 times as many dishwashers as in 1958; 93% of American homes owned colour TVs, as opposed to 1% in 1960. Yet, despite this dramatic increase, people didn't feel happier. The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center found that the proportion of Americans describing themselves as "very happy" had remained the same (one third).

For most people, once they've satisfied their basic needs, the pursuit of material wealth does not achieve happiness. That explains why the huge gulf in affluence between, say, the Germans and the Indians, or the Japanese and the Kenyans doesn't translate into a different degree of how happy the people of these countries judge themselves.

R. A. Easterlin, of the University of Pennsylvania, has performed a comparative international survey of the link between affluence and happiness. His conclusion is that there is little relation between the two: "Economic growth does not rise a society to some ultimate state of plenty. Rather, the growth process itself engenders ever-growing wants that lead it ever onward".

Lottery winners and paraplegics

Suppose you win the National Lottery. Now suppose you have been paralysed in a major car crash. You probably think that, if the first were true, six months after the event you'd be much happier than if the second were true.

Well, empirical evidence shows that it is not so. Studies of the way people react to major happenings show that big money lottery winners, statistically, are no happier than those paralysed in a car accident, six months after each event.

Six months is the keyword, here. There is an element of habituation, a mechanism by which our minds get used to almost anything.

Basically, the maintenance of an emotional state (whether good or bad doesn't matter) and the repetition of a stimulus result in a neutral state, in which the stimulus has no more or little effect.

Here is the abstract of "Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?", a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Adaptation level theory suggests that both contrast and habituation will operate to prevent the winning of a fortune from elevating happiness as much as might be expected. Contrast with the peak experience of winning should lessen the impact of ordinary pleasures, while habituation should eventually reduce the value of new pleasures made possible by winning. Study 1 compared a sample of 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and also with a group of 29 paralyzed accident victims who had been interviewed previously. As predicted, lottery winners were not happier than controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events. Study 2 indicated that these effects were not due to preexisting differences between people who buy or do not buy lottery tickets or between interviews that made or did not make the lottery salient. Paraplegics also demonstrated a contrast effect, not by enhancing minor pleasures but by idealizing their past, which did not help their present happiness. [Emphasis added]

Happiness is relative, and depends just on the contrast with a previous state. A way in which this habituation occurs is through a series of rationalizations, a sort of "lying" to ourselves which is not necessarily lying, but giving a different interpretation to things.

Maybe, we can think, lottery winners are not so happy because they didn't earn that money and therefore they didn't appreciate it. Maybe they felt guilty about it.

Well, wrong again. Studies of Fortune 500 executives found they had only average levels of happiness, and 37% of these ultra-wealthy business leaders are less happy than the average person.

Christopher Kaczor says in an interview:

As St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out more than seven centuries ago, we want many things that no amount of money can buy. We cannot find true happiness in more fame, power or “winning” of any kind...

Scientists have studied this question extensively. It turns out that more money can make you much happier — if you live in abject poverty. If you do not have clothes to keep you warm, if you have no food for your children, and no roof over your head, money for these basic provisions greatly improves reported happiness.

Once you have enough money for food, clothing and shelter (what St. Thomas Aquinas called "natural wealth"), increases in money are unrelated to stable increases in happiness. In other words, once a person has the necessities, more money — money spent in shopping as well as money in the bank — does not lead to more happiness.

Social psychologist David Myers, the author of The Pursuit of Happiness (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) in which he reviews thousands of scientific studies, observes that the happiness attained by a purchase or achieving a particular level of wealth soon wears off and people adapt to whatever level of wealth they have achieved. Soon after having achieved a certain level of wealth or having purchased the desired product, the happiness recently enjoyed will fade and disappear.

This perhaps explains why, if you compare a person making $30,000 a year, another making $100,000 and a third making $500,000, there is very little difference in their self-reported happiness or levels of depression.

Not only that. However much money they make, they will all say that, if they had about 10% more, they would feel happier. When they do get that 10% more, however, which does happen over a few years of salary increases, they want another 10% and so on, ad infinitum.

Looking at other level-2 goals like power, success, popularity and fame, it's impossible not to notice how many so-called celebrities, people who have achieved all that - as well as money -, lead very miserable lives and often end up alcoholic, drug-addict, depraved, promiscuous, paedophile, HIV-positive and depressed even to the point of committing suicide.

Yet again, as in the case of physical pleasure, there is nothing wrong in any of those things per se: it's elevating them to supreme goals - or, as Catholicism puts it, loving them more than other people and than God - that turns a positive into a negative.

Think of the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.

They all correspond to some lack of self-discipline, by which we give more importance to something else than to others and God. If we had faith and followed His commendments, we wouldn't need any self-help book.

It turns out that psychologists, even those who don't believe in God, recognise - simply on the basis of empirical evidence - that the people who are happiest, mentally healthiest and most fullfilled are those who attain both the third and the fourth levels: serving and loving other people and God.

Robin Skynner, just as an example, in the book he co-wrote with John Cleese, Life And How To Survive It (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , says, like so many other psychologists, that the healthiest individuals are those who manage to feel part of something greater and higher than themselves. And, considering the secular nature of this book, he gives a surprising emphasis to Jesus' words.

It's because God and the Church want us to be happy that they guide us towards certain goals and behaviours.

Israel's Democratic Pluralism In a Photo

The above image shows Israeli Member of Parliament Michael Ben Ari while he publicly ripped up a copy of the New Testament in the country's Parliament, the Knesset. He then threw it into a rubbish bin after denouncing it as an "abhorrent" book.

A second legislator called for Bibles to be burnt.

Although Mr Ben Ari was criticised by the Knesset's speaker, he faced no official sanction.

If Israel were the pluralist, democratic, Western country that it claims to be, this MP would be forced to apologise or resign. But he's not.

This should tell you something about Israel where, incidentally, Christian Palestinians are treated just as badly as Muslim Palestinians.

So, the excuse of being tough in order to combat terrorism doesn't hold water. There are no Christian terrorists.

The First Crusade Came Very Late

The image above gives the numbers of years intervened between various Islamic attacks on Europe and the moment when Christendom finally responded with The First Crusade, called by Pope Urban II in 1095.

It is a graphic illustration of the lie uttered - recently by Obama as well - whenever Crusades are called aggressive - rather than defensive - wars and whenever a moral equality is postulated between Christianity and Islam.

Thanks Jews - Video

The Dresden Holocaust - Video

I have always found the conventional historiography of the Second World War a lot similar to Hollywood plots: absolute good versus evil, heroes against villains. The good guys have no faults, the bad guys have nothing but faults.

It's winners who write history. Maybe in this case they got the help of movie screenwriters, with their storytelling abilities and imagination. And it's a bonus that Hollywood studios are largely, as nobody disputes, owned and managed by members of the Jewish communitity.

The introduction to the above video on YouTube says:

More people died in the fire bombing of Dresden on February 13th to 14th, 1945 than in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Holocaust (noun) - "Great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire."

Orbán: Christian Culture Is Europe's Only Natural Foundation

It looks like some of our newest and possibly best hopes come from the European East, rather than West.

Putin is not a saint, but he is one of the few world leaders today who doesn't toe the line and is capable of standing up to the masters of political correctness and destroyers of Christendom. What Western European mainstream politician would dare say what he says about homosexuality, as a glaring example?

Another such man who does not accept the diktats of the New World Order is Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary and the president of the country's national conservative ruling party Fidesz.

This blog covered him in the article "Hungary: How to Overthrow a Government Voted by the People" , in which the Hungarian writer explained how last autumn's street protests against the Orban administration - reported by the Western media - were financed by George Soros, who also funds various opposition organisations and leaders, like Gyurcsány Ferenc and Bajnai Gordon. The well-known Jewish socialist Soros, the article said, has financial interests to protect in his native country, and they are threatened by the government headed by Orbán, which enjoys a great popular support.

In the April 2014 election, the government was re-elected to office. Orbán's centre-right party Fidesz received most of the votes, 45%.

A centre-left opposition alliance got 25% of the votes, and the far-right Jobbik party 21%.

The Hungarian left has never fully recovered from its heavy defeat in the 2010 ballot, in which Mr Orban swept to power with a two-thirds majority.

Viktor Orbán has given his State of the Nation Address in Budapest on 27 February 2015. These are some of the most illuminating and impressive excerpts:

Everyone can see that we are a people’s party community, based on Christian-democratic foundations – the ideal, guiding star of which is a civic Hungary. I do not think that this would change in the next hundred years...

We could, of course, always observe by way of introduction, that we are human, too. We are no saints, though we should aim for nothing less; this is something that members of the Reformed Church should also consider. We have our own interests, our affections, and of course, our biases. The work we do is far from perfect, even if that is what we should strive for. But notwithstanding our frailties and imperfections, there is one regard in which we cannot go wrong: neither individual ambitions, nor individual or group values may take precedence over the interests and service of the nation...

I should mention here a piece of political advice that should be important for all Christian-democratic politicians. “Do not concern yourselves with whether God is on our side, but concern yourselves with whether you are on God’s side.”...

Terrorist organizations recruit fighters to join their ranks from among immigrants living in the continent’s western part, while the southern borders of the EU – including our own state’s borders – are besieged by waves of modern-day migration, in the face of which increasingly frustrated states and governments are at a loss. And this is happening in an economic environment in which millions of Western European citizens feel that they have to work ever more for less money, just to keep their jobs. Europe is facing questions which can no longer be answered within the framework of liberal multiculturalism. Can we shelter people, many of whom are unwilling to accept European culture, or who come here with the intent of destroying European culture?...

Europe today continues to huddle behind the moats of political correctness, and has built a wall of taboos and dogmas around itself. In contrast, we took the view that the old pre-crisis world will not return...

Those who do not make choices find that instead circumstances will make the choices for them. Those who do not actively decide will find that their lives will be decided for them. We therefore let go of neo-liberal economic policy, and perhaps we did so as late as we possibly could have; we let go of the policy of austerity, just before we were about to share the fate of Greece; we let go of the delusion of the multicultural society before it turned Hungary into a refugee camp, and we let go of liberal social policy which does not acknowledge the common good and denies Christian culture as the natural foundation – and perhaps the only natural foundation – for the organization of European societies. We decided to face the barrage of unfair attacks and accusations, and also let go of the dogma of political correctness.

And as far as I see it, Hungarian people are by nature politically incorrect – in other words, they have not yet lost their common sense. They are not interested in talk, but want facts and results; they are not interested in theories, but want jobs and affordable utility bills; and they do not swallow the nonsense that unemployment is a natural concomitant of modern economies. They want to free themselves from the modern-day debt slavery that they were driven into by foreign currency loans. They do not want to see their country thronging with people from different cultures, with different customs, who are unable to integrate; people who would pose a threat to public order, their jobs and livelihoods...

We learnt from György Bencze something which we now experience personally on a daily basis. He told us that liberals are extremely tolerant – they are only intolerant of fascists. But it is surely not their fault that everyone else – everyone except for them – is a fascist. Yes, we must understand that liberal politics only ever recognizes two kinds of opinion: its own and the wrong one...

The modern world sees economic facts as the ones that truly count. It may be right, but I would attach higher priority to facts related to life. Above all, the facts which determine our biological survival and continuance.

Dear Friends,

Life in Hungary presents us with facts that surprise even the most pessimistic of people. More children were born last year than at any time in the last five years. The so-called total fertility rate – that is, the number of children born into a family – was 1.41 in 2014; this is its highest value since 1997, though still not high enough. The number of marriages has increased continuously since 2010; it rose by 9% in 2014 alone. Let me remind you that between 2002 and 2010 the number of marriages in Hungary fell by 23%.

Dear Friends,

The number of divorces decreased by 15% between 2010 and 2013. The number of abortions is in continuous decline, and has fallen by 20% since 2010. While the truth is that the number is still high, it has not been this low since 1954...

I could also say that the hundreds of thousands of hardworking Hungarians must be admitted to the ranks of civic society; we must make room for them and their children in the world of successful Hungarians.

And, Ladies and Gentlemen, we must not do this with the methods the socialists used: taking out huge loans, distributing them in the form of benefits or one-off pay rises as they did in 2003, and thereby crippling the national economy. We should only attempt to assist those who have fallen behind together with increased economic growth, and in parallel with improvement in our competitiveness...[Emphasis added]

Guillaume Durocher makes this interesting comment on The Occidental Observer, in relation to the Hungarians' lack of appetite for political correcctness:

The same could be said of most other Central-Eastern Europeans as well. Having lived under the hard political Marxism of Communist Party dictatorship, they have been for now inoculated against the soft cultural Marxism of Franz Boas, the Frankfurt School, Stephen J. Gould, and all the other pseudoscientific and anti-European theories peddled by the Left. Unfortunately, the Anglo-American world and Western members of the European Union (led by France and Germany) are seeking to impose these ethnomasochist principles and falsehoods upon Central-Eastern Europeans through cultural encroachment and European law.

PHOTO CREDIT
Wikipedia Commons

Essential Introduction to Kevin MacDonald

I want to introduce to you Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State University.

He received a B. A. in Philosophy, a Masters degree in Evolutionary Biology and a Ph. D. in Biobehavioral Sciences.

Since assuming his position at California State University, his research has focused on developing evolutionary perspectives on culture, developmental psychology and personality theory, the origins and maintenance of monogamous marriage in Western Europe, and ethnic relations (group evolutionary strategies). He is the author of more than 100 scholarly papers and reviews.

His most important book is considered The Culture of Critique (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , whose subtitle is "An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements".

In this book, and indeed in the trilogy of which it is part (The Culture of Critique series), he applies evolutionary theory to Judaism, arriving at the conclusion that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy, namely it helps the interests of the ingroup against the interests of rivals - the outgroups.

Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is the outgroups' response to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy that favours only Jewish interests at the expense of all others.

All three books are the fruit of extremely diligent and painstaking scholarly work.

Here's how MacDonald sums up The Culture of Critique (CofC) in the Preface to the First Paperback Edition of the book:

CofC describes how Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. Several of these Jewish movements (e.g., the shift in immigration policy favoring non-European peoples) have attempted to weaken the power of their perceived competitors — the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues. Ultimately, these movements are viewed as the expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political and cultural dominance with non-Jews.

The "culture of critique" of the title can be described as the constant pattern of theoretical and intellectual attacks to which predominantly Jewish movements and elites have subjected the mainstream White, Gentile and Christian societies in which they've been living, attacks which have considerably weakened these societies' resistance to external and internal threats. Mass immigration, multiculturalism and Islamisation are contemporary examples of these threats, and they have been overwhelmingly not just supported but also promoted by Jewish communities in the West.

The Jewish movements analysed are

Freud, the New York Intellectuals, the Boasians, and the Frankfurt School, in which 'scientific' theories were fashioned and deployed to advance ethnic group interests. This ideological purpose becomes clear when the unscientific nature of these movements is understood. Much of the discussion in CofC documented the intellectual dishonesty, the lack of empirical rigor, the obvious political and ethnic motivation, the expulsion of dissenters, the collusion among co-ethnics to dominate intellectual discourse, and the general lack of scientific spirit that pervaded them. In my view, the scientific weakness of these movements is evidence of their group-strategic function.

Boasians are the followers of Franz Boas, who established a highly influential school of thought in anthropology categorically denying the existence of human races and claiming that genetic differences between peoples are trivial and irrelevant.

It is thanks to this movement, that came to dominate the field of anthropology, that even believing in the existence of races and, more importantly, in differences among them is these days considered as racist.

I will return to MacDonald and his work in future articles but now I wish to introduce an autobiographical element.

During all the time I was in the counterjihad movement, I always felt that something wasn't quite right.

True, Islam is a serious problem, an inherently homicidal and supremacist doctrine disguised as a religion that threatens the whole world. I thought this then and I think this now.

But the question was: Islam is a foreign doctrine to the West, it's never been part of it and therefore it is - or at least it was - an external enemy to us.

The Western world is much stronger militarily, economically, politically, culturally than the Islamic world. How could the Occident be menaced by Islam, then?

If Muslim populations had been kept out of Western lands, they would have still represented a mortal threat to the unfortunate Christians living in Muslim-majority countries, but not to us. At one point someone opened the gates to Mohammedans, so that the invasion has not been by military conquest, as it happened sometimes in the past and was repelled by Christian armies, but by inordinate numbers of economic immigrants and true or false "refugees".

This is well-known recent history. But why not many people, even in the counterjihad, ask themselves and seek plausible answers to the question: who opened the gates and why?

The answers commonly given are not satisfactory: the Left, the politicians, and so on.

I was also giving myself these answers. Cultural Marxism was my best bet.

Now, I didn't then pause to reflect that Cultural Marxism is a typically Jewish movement.

Cultural Marxism's origins are traced back to Jewish intellectual György Lukács and Italian politician Antonio Gramsci, who married a Jewish woman, Julia Schucht; it was then developed by the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxists whose main inspirations and thinkers were overwhelmingly Jewish. Strange coincidences, when you think that Jews are a tiny fraction of the Western population.

Indeed, communism in its modern form is a Jewish creation. Its greatest, most influential authors are Marx for the theory, Lenin for the practice: both of Jewish background.

Bolshevism was disproportionately Jewish, and so has been radical Leftism in Western countries.

Not to mention another force that has been powerfully destructive of Western morality: psychoanalysis, another Jewish creation.

Add to that the strong anti-Christian feelings that Jews have always harboured, and you realise that there's far more than circumstantial evidence to establish a connection between the cultural destruction that has been practised for at least the last seven decades in the countries once collectively known as Christendom (a term Jews might have resented) and Jewish influence.

Let's hear some witnesses, then, only a few of the many from MacDonald's The Culture of Critique. These relate to both the questions of unrestricted immigration and secularisation in the USA:

The well-known author and prominent Zionist Maurice Samuel (1924, p. 215) writing partly as a negative reaction to the [restrictionist, EF] immigration law of 1924, wrote that 'If, then, the struggle between us [i.e., Jews and gentiles] is ever to be lifted beyond the physical, your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual and cultural homogeneity with the State. But it would be foolish to regard this as a possibility, for the tendency of this civilization is in the opposite direction. There is a steady approach toward the identification of government with race, instead of with the political State.'

Samuel deplored the 1924 legislation and in the following quote he develops the view that the American state has no ethnic implications.

We have just witnessed, in America, the repetition, in the peculiar form adapted to this country, of the evil farce to which the experience of many centuries has not yet accustomed us. If America had any meaning at all, it lay in the peculiar attempt to rise above the trend of our present civilization - the identification of race with State.... America was therefore the New World in this vital respect - that the State was purely an ideal, and nationality was identical only with acceptance of the ideal. But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken one, that America was incapable of rising above her origins, and the semblance of an ideal-nationalism was only a stage in the proper development of the universal gentile spirit.... To-day, with race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its fangs, and to the heartless refusal of the most elementary human right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly insult. We are not only excluded, but we are told, in the unmistakable language of the immigration laws, that we are an 'inferior' people...

A congruent opinion is expressed by prominent Jewish social scientist and political activist Earl Raab, who remarks very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States since 1965. Raab notes that the Jewish community has taken a leadership role in changing the Northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (1993a, p. 17), and he has also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that '(a)n increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop' (1995, p. 91). Or more colorfully:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.
We [i.e., Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible - and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever. (Raab 1993b, p. 23).

Positive attitudes toward cultural diversity have also appeared in other statements on immigration by Jewish authors and leaders. Charles Silberman (1985, 350) notes that "American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief - one firmly rooted in history - that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called 'social' issues."

Similarly, in listing the positive benefits of immigration, Diana Aviv, director of the Washington Action Office of the Council of Jewish Federations states that immigration 'is about diversity, cultural enrichment and economic opportunity for the immigrants' (quoted in Forward, March 8, 1996, p. 5). And in summarizing Jewish involvement in the 1996 legislative battles a newspaper account stated that 'Jewish groups failed to kill a number of provisions that reflect the kind of political expediency that they regard as a direct attack on American pluralism' (Detroit Jewish News; May 10, 1996).

It is noteworthy also that there has been a conflict between predominantly Jewish neo-Conservatives and predominantly gentile paleo-conservatives over the issue of Third World immigration into the United States. Many of these neo-conservative intellectuals had previously been radical leftists,4 and the split between the neo-conservatives and their previous allies resulted in an intense internecine feud (Gottfried 1993; Rothman & Lichter 1982, p. 105). Neo-conservatives Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus reacted very negatively to an article by a paleo-conservative concerned that such immigration would eventually lead to the United States being dominated by such immigrants (see Judis 1990, p. 33). Other examples are neo-Conservatives Julian Simon (1990) and Ben Wattenberg (1991), both of whom advocate very high levels of immigration from all parts of the world, so that the United States will become what Wattenberg describes as the world's first 'Universal Nation.' Based on recent data, Fetzer (1996) reports that Jews remain far more favorable to immigration to the United States than any other ethnic group or religion.

It should be noted as a general point that the effectiveness of Jewish organizations in influencing American immigration policy has been facilitated by certain characteristics of American Jewry. As Neuringer (1971, p. 87) notes, Jewish influence on immigration policy was facilitated by Jewish wealth, education, and social status. Reflecting its general disproportionate representation in markers of economic success and political influence, Jewish organizations have been able to have a vastly disproportionate effect on United States immigration policy because Jews as a group are highly organized, highly intelligent, and politically astute, and they were able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their political aims...

In this regard, the Jewish success in influencing immigration policy is entirely analogous to their success in influencing the secularization of American culture. As in the case of immigration policy, the secularization of American culture is a Jewish interest because Jews have a perceived interest that America not be a homogeneous Christian culture. 'Jewish civil rights organizations have had an historic role in the postwar development of American church-state law and policy' (Ivers 1995, p. 2). Unlike the effort to influence immigration, the opposition to a homogeneous Christian culture was mainly carried out in the courts. The Jewish effort in this case was well funded and was the focus of well-organized, highly dedicated Jewish civil service organizations, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It involved keen legal expertise both in the actual litigation but also in influencing legal opinion via articles in law journals and other forums of intellectual debate, including the popular media. It also involved a highly charismatic and effective leadership, particularly Leo Pfeffer of the AJCongress:

No other lawyer exercised such complete intellectual dominance over a chosen area of law for so extensive a period - as an author, scholar, public citizen, and above all, legal advocate who harnessed his multiple and formidable talents into a single force capable of satisfying all that an institution needs for a successful constitutional reform movement.... That Pfeffer, through an enviable combination of skill, determination, and persistence, was able in such a short period of time to make church-state reform the foremost cause with which rival organizations associated the AJCongress illustrates well the impact that individual lawyers endowed with exceptional skills can have on the character and life of the organizations for which they work.... As if to confirm the extent to which Pfeffer is associated with post-Everson [i.e., post-1946] constitutional development, even the major critics of the Court's church-state jurisprudence during this period and the modern doctrine of separationism rarely fail to make reference to Pfeffer as the central force responsible for what they lament as the lost meaning of the establishment clause. (Ivers 1995, pp. 222-224)

Similarly, Hollinger (1996, p. 4) notes 'the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jews' in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as the Jewish influence on trends toward the secularization of American society and in advancing an ideal of cosmopolitanism (p. 11). The pace of this influence was very likely influenced by immigration battles of the 1920s. Hollinger notes that the 'the old Protestant establishment's influence persisted until the 1960s in large measure because of the Immigration Act of 1924: had the massive immigration of Catholics and Jews continued at pre-1924 levels, the course of American history would have been different in many ways, including, one may reasonably speculate, a more rapid diminution of Protestant cultural hegemony. Immigration restriction gave that hegemony a new lease of life' (p. 22). It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the immigration battles from 1881 to 1965 have been of momentous historical importance in shaping the contours of American culture in the late twentieth century.

The ultimate success of Jewish attitudes on immigration was also influenced by intellectual movements that collectively resulted in a decline of evolutionary and biological thinking in the academic world. [All emphases mine]

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Wikimedia Commons

What Is Zionism?

The chap of the blog quoted below, Robert Lindsay, claims to be a Leftist, but, if he is, he's a very unusual and unusually insightful one.

I don't think, as I've always said, that we can solve the Islam problem in the West if we don't first understand why we've opened the doors to it.

And I now start realising that we must understand the role that Jews have played in this process.

Jewish leaders and organisations have been incessantly promoting mass immigration and multiculturalism in the Diaspora countries of the West, where they are a minority and where they have been trying to attack the majority culture of White Christians. They perceive it is in their interest as an ethnic and religious group to destroy the White and Christian characteristics of the Western societies where they happen to live but for which they don't feel loyalty.

In diametrical opposition to the "liberal" values they espouse when predicating tolerance of diversity and welcoming of immigrants in the West, in their state, Israel, these same Jewish elites support a racist immigration policy based on genetic Jewishness and want to impose an ethnonationalist society.

The American citizens who, through their taxes, have paid enormous amounts of money to support Israel wouldn't be able to emigrate there, unless they were pedigree Jews.

Some excerpts from Robert Lindsay's "What Is Zionism?":

What is Zionism anyway? I see Zionism every day on the net. In a nutshell, most Zionists, but not all, argue that both the formation of the state of Israel and the settler-colonial project that created it were right, just and proper.

A principal Zionist argument (though not shared by all Zionists) is this:

1.Jewish land, not Arab land – All of Israel is Jewish land. The Arabs have no right to any of this land.

Several arguments are used to defend this view:

1.Historical- Jews had a continuing presence in the land for 3,000 years, so therefore it is their land. The Arab presence is illegitimate. When the Zionist project began, there were only a few Arabs in Palestine anyway, and they were the ancestors of Arabs who invaded Jewish land in 640 and have been occupying Jewish land ever since.Arabs never controlled Palestine anyway, and all Palestinians are Arab invading colonists who have no right to be there and need to go back to Arabia where they came from. Jews were completely in their right to reclaim their homeland after so many years in exile.This is one of the most vicious and wicked Zionist arguments, and it is extremely popular amongst the hardest of the hardline, blood-and-soil, organic nationalist types.One can argue that this is the philosophy that it is at the core of the mindset of the leaders of the Zionist movement from 1897 to the present. It is this argument, that, like most primordialist ethnic nationalist projects that rose out of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1800’s, is most similar to Nazism.On the other hand, all modern ethnic nationalisms (in particular Arab nationalism, Indian Hindu nationalism, Lebanese Phalangist nationalism and all of the ethnic nationalist projects that swept Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s) came from the same 19th Century core as Nazism, so it is somewhat unfair to single out Zionism in that regard.

2.Religious – God gave the land to the Jews. It is Jewish land and will always be so. God watches over the Jews and Israel, and no one can mess with them. Anyone who messes with the Jews or Israel gets punished by God. This is obviously a favorite of conservative Zionists, though some secular liberal Zionists use it too, usually cynically in an effort to get Gentile Christians to go along with the project.

3. Holocaust – Jews needed a safe haven in Israel due to the Holocaust, and it was ok to throw out the Arabs to get this haven. A favorite of liberal Zionists, many of whom are ignorant of the specifics of the project. When questioned, many of this type will insist that no Arabs were thrown out to make the Jewish state. Apparently the land was just empty or something.

4.Freedom From Persecution – Related to the above. Jews have been persecuted everywhere they have been, so it is reasonable for them to have their own state where they can be safe. A favorite of more liberal Zionists. One of their favorite lines is that Zionism is “affirmative action for Jews”. Micheal Lerner of Tikkun is fond of that phrase.

5.UN and League of Nations – These two organizations agreed to give away Arab land to Jews for a homeland at different times. Therefore, Israel is legitimate. Once again, a favorite of more liberal Zionists and folks who are fond of the UN and international law.

6.Self-determination and National Liberation – All other ethnic groups have a right to self-determination on their homeland, and many have developed national liberation movements to obtain their nation-state. Zionism is the Jewish equivalent. This argument is a favorite of Zionist liberals and Leftists.

7.British Donation – Britain gave the land – British land – to the Jews. Therefore, it is the Jews’ land. This one is also a favorite of more liberal Zionists, because it avoids the question of whether or not Israel is Jewish land.

A number of the National-Religious types (see arguments A and B above – they are typically combined into a highly toxic form called National-Religious Zionism) claim that the land of Israel extends from the Nile to the Euphrates. It encompasses most of Lebanon and Syria, all of Jordan, part of Iraq, all of the Sinai, part of Arabia and all of Kuwait.

There are actually a fair number of Zionists who feel that all (or some) of this should be reconquered.

When an aide to President Truman visited the Holy Land around 1947 to try to understand the Zionist-Arab conflict, he said that all of the Jews he met there held the Nile to Euphrates view. He also noted that they did not like to talk about it too much, and they seemed to want to keep it a sort of secret, as if they were afraid of the reaction of outsiders if they learned of the Zionist plans.

Despite super-liar and modern-day Crusader Daniel Pipes’ articulate lie, The Nile to Euphrates Calumny, Nile to Euphrates Zionists are not mythological, and I have run across them fairly regularly on the Net, especially lately.

Does Mr. Pipes feel that I have hallucinated all of these Greater Israel types? Were they all just Arab agents out to make the Zionists look bad? Inquiring minds want to know. Mr. Pipes or his supporters are encouraged to email me here to explain how it is that I keep running into these nonexistent phantasms.

A lesser view holds that “Eretz Israel” at least covers all of Green Line Israel, all of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. Some also include the Sinai Peninsula (or at least a small part of it up to the Wadi Arish) and southern Lebanon to the Litani River.

A map demonstrating Zionist armed settler-colonialism in action. Note the progressive loss of Arab land to Zionist colonization. This was deliberate and planned from the very start. It all stems from the Zionist principle that all of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights is Jewish land and that the local Arabs are “squatting” on Jewish land and live there only at the whim of the Zionist owners.

Presently, the project is to make the remaining Arab enclaves so miserable that the Arabs will leave and then the Zionists can colonize their land.

This is a Minimal Greater Israel view and is very common. It was the “minimal view” adopted by the “progressives” of Left Socialist Zionism under David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel. It could logically be called Minimal Greater Israel.

Ben-Gurion’s ideological opponents, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists, held similar views, except that they typically claimed all of Jordan for the Jewish state also.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement. He authored The Iron Wall in 1923, in which he openly advocated a Zionist settler-colonial movement, to be implemented by armed force backed by an imperial power. The reason armed force was needed, he said, was because of inevitable Arab resistance. Before that, Zionism had been largely focused on buying out the Arabs’ land, then throwing them off the land and settling it with Zionists.

A poster for the Irgun Zionist armed guerrilla group. This was one of the three major armed Zionist guerrilla factions in Palestine. It focused on attacks against both the British and the local Arabs. Note that Irgun claimed that not only all of Palestine, but also all of Jordan, was Jewish land, to be cleansed of Arab “squatters”, and to be conquered by force (note the rifle).

Irgun dissolved after the founding of Israel, and since then Mainstream Revisionist Zionism has gone pretty quiet about claims to Jordan. Look carefully at the map to see that Irgun also claimed the Golan Heights for the Zionists.

I have recently met Zionist Jews on the Net who are still upset at the British and the League of Nations for “promising” all of Jordan to the Zionists in the early 1920’s, and then “going back on their word”. Actually neither party did any such thing, and such thinking is based on a misreading of the League of Nations Mandate.

In a recent interview, a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, a very powerful, very militant Jewish Zionist group in the US, noted with a twinkle in his eye that all of Jordan was actually part of Israel and implied that Israel should conquer it at some future time. The attitudes of ZOA fanatics are rampant amongst the neoconservatives who were associated with the Bush Administration.

The notion of Greater Israel, not some phony notions about buffer zones or security zones, is and was the real reason for the occupation and colonies in the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and the Sinai, and for the occupation of Southern Lebanon.

As you can imagine, this political project, Zionism, terrifies the Arabs and sends them into conniptions. My opinion is that Zionism is poisonous and that no people should have to put up with such a dangerous project, least of all the backwards Arabs.

There is a lot of nonsense about Greater Israel on the Internet, with devious Zionist sophists like Pipes holding that it is just a deranged, paranoid Arab fantasy. On the other hand, many anti-Zionists, especially Islamists, insist that all Zionists hold the radical Nile-to-Euphrates view.

As you can see above, that is not the case. The truth is that some Zionists do hold the Nile-to-Euphrates view, but the Israeli government does not, and most major Israeli political parties and political figures do not either.

The Minimal Greater Israel project described above is much more common and relevant. Anti-Zionists should focus on the minimal project for now and forget about the Nile To Euphrates project until we get some evidence that it amounts to more than the ravings of some Zionist radicals...

Many anti-Zionists (especially progressives and Leftists) believe that all of the Jews can stay in Israel, but that they must share the state and land with the Arabs and dismantle the Jewish state.

This view has been espoused by the leadership of the DFLP and PFLP leftwing Palestinian armed fronts, some members of the PLO, the Hamas Charter, an Islamic Jihad leader in an interview 13 years ago, and Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, who proposed a state called Izratine.

This view has been quite popular with Palestinian Christians and secularists like Edward Said, Mazin Qumsiyeh and Ghada Karmi.

In general, the vast majority of anti-Zionists do not advocate killing all the Jews in Israel, though I have heard some Arab hotheads say that on the Internet. No Arab or Muslim armed group (including Al Qaeda) takes that position, to my knowledge.

Yet this is a staple of Zionist propaganda – that all anti-Zionists and armed anti-Israel groups are all intent on “carrying out a second Holocaust”. If it were true, it would be an excellent reason to support Israel, but there is little evidence for this...

Getting back to Greater Israel, the Internet is full of statements by Zionist fanatics fantasizing about Greater Israel. They are not made-up lies but instead are well-documented statements. Here is one by David Ben-Gurion (formerly David Green):

David Ben Gurion, Report to the World Council of Poale Zion (the forerunner of the Labor Party), Tel Aviv, 1938. Cited by Israel Shahak, Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1981.

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria, and Sinai.”

Keep in mind that this frighteningly fanatical statement was uttered by the founder of the state of Israel, a socialist, a liberal and a moderate. Note that his rightwing opponents were even more extreme. Note also that his rightwing Revisionist opponents were the forerunners of the modern-day Likud and Kadima Parties, not to mention the many smaller rightwing parties.

Counterjihad and Anti-Semitism

It never ceases to surprise me how people in the counterjihad movement are so well versed in recognising the epithet "Islamophobe" as the censoring, insurmountable obstacle to open criticism of Islam that it undoubtedly is, but are incapable of seeing "anti-Semite" as, mutatis mutandis, having exactly the same function.

Or maybe there is another possibility: have they been trained only too well by the real movers and shakers of the counterjihad movement?

Genuine Refugees Will Be Helped but It’s Dangerous Not to Keep Out Bogus Ones

We keep hearing about tragedies involving immigrants, often hundreds of them, dying in the attempt to reach Europe and the UK.

Only a few hours ago came the news that the Italian Coast Guard has just rescued from the Mediterranean in only 24 hours nearly 1,000 Libyan migrants heading for Europe. At least 10 people died when their vessel capsized in freezing waters.

The rescue occurred off Porto Empedocle, in the Sicilian Channel, the stretch of water between Sicily and the North coast of Africa. You can see the video of the rescue operation above.

Less than a month ago, we heard about the 300 migrants who presumably “drowned in the Mediterranean Sea after three rubber boats carrying refugees from North Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa were reported missing, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.”

In reporting that news, the Leftist newspaper The Independent implies that not enough is being done to save lives, and some people, shocked by such headlines, may also think that more efforts should be made to help these immigrants.

Many of these criticisms come from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as can be seen in this video:

But the UN is not always right in its approach to European and UK’s immigration policies. For example, Francois Crépeau, the Canadian who is the UN’s special rapporteur on migrants’ rights, claims that Britain and other EU countries should provide free access to health care, education and housing to not just legal but also illegal immigrants and find homes for a million asylum seekers.

Add to this that the UN has a former Marxist as a special rapporteur on housing, the Brazilian Raquel Rolnik, and a radical feminist as special rapporteur on violence against women, South African Rashida Manjoo - who claimed that “sexism in Britain was the worst she had seen in the world despite her visits to dangerously repressive countries such as Bangladesh, Somalia and Algeria” -, and you get the impression that the UN is not always to be trusted and that many UN tsars “are promoting their own bizarre Leftist agendas”, as The Express put it.

Crépeau (mind you, not “Crapeau”) told The Independent: “The fantasy is that there is a core British culture that was created probably 2,000 years ago and carried on, and now it’s being threatened by all those barbarians that are coming to our gate.”

UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage was quick to respond: "More people came to Britain in 2013 than came between 1066 and 1950. That gives you a sense of perspective of where we are with this, so he is talking utter baloney.”

UKIP MEP David Coburn added: "It is the usual tosh. He has no understanding of the economic problems that this is causing the United Kingdom. And as for the cultural aspect, quite frankly he knows nothing of our country and it's not for him to decide what we feel."

And UKIP’s migration spokesman Steven Woolfe reiterated: “Mr Crepeau epitomises why so many people in Britain dislike interfering international bureaucrats. He is an unknown and unrecognisable bureaucrat.”

The UK, as revealed by the latest official figures earlier this month, remains Europe’s biggest ”magnet for migrants”.

Just to get an idea of the astonishing demands placed on Britain by its massive immigration, consider that at the UK's biggest primary school, Gascoigne Primary School in Barking, East London, only one in 10 pupils speaks English as first language - down from nine out of 10 in 1999. Now they speak no fewer than – wait for it - 60 different languages.

The UN’s various commissars obviously don’t care if British culture is going to be totally buried under this avalanche of foreign influx. But we do.

The genuine asylum claimants among the immigrants are only a minority and there is already a legal procedure for refugees and asylum-seekers to apply for entry to the UK:

Asylum applicants or 'asylum seekers' are individuals who come to the UK and apply for protection as refugees. A refugee is someone who has fled his or her own country, and cannot return for well-founded fear of persecution there. The UK adheres to UN and European agreements on refugees and human rights and therefore must not return asylum applicants to a place where they are likely to face torture or persecution.

Asylum adds to the UK resident population in several ways. First, it adds to the legal, permanent ('settled'), population. A minority of applicants gain permission to stay in the UK ('leave to remain'), and may remain long enough to settle in the UK. Leave to remain might mean official recognition as a refugee or permission to stay for 'humanitarian protection' (HP) or through 'discretionary leave to remain' (DL). In each case, the protected individual can stay in the UK for five years and then has the opportunity to apply for indefinite leave to remain.

Second, asylum adds to the temporary population. Applicants who are unsuccessful and eventually leave the UK nonetheless will live in the UK for some time as they await a decision. Any such applicant who lives in the UK for at least 12 months is classified as a 'long-term international migrant'.

A third group is more difficult to count – individuals whose applications for asylum have been rejected, but who have not departed the country. Some of this group applies for 'hard case support' (aka Section 4) while awaiting departure, and are tracked in Home Office data. Others may have departed outside of official removal or voluntary departure schemes; still others may remain illegally in the UK out of contact with immigration control, and thus uncounted.

The Home Office counts applications, decisions (initially and on appeal), and grants of leave to remain for asylum applicants. This includes dependents that arrived with the main applicant as part of the initial application. These data provide good estimates of the first two routes into the population for asylum seekers: 1) those who gain leave to remain in the UK, and 2) those that live in the UK temporarily while their cases are in process. The challenges in understanding the make-up of the third group, those whose application have been rejected but still remain here without legal permission, are discussed in the Evidence gaps and limitations section.

So the UK is not barring asylum seekers, but needs to deal firmly with those queue jumpers who prefer to use "refugee" status to justify their illegal immigration into their destinations of choice.

We are not selfish and inhumane in our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, but at the same time we must protect our borders and our culture if we want to survive as a race and a civilisation from these invasions.

Recent news shows that now more than ever Britain needs to be careful about whom it lets in.

ISIS is now controlling Libya's coasts and decides who is going to Italy by the immigrant boats. ISIS wants to send its own operative cells and jihadists to the island of Lampedusa, off Sicily - and then on to the rest of Europe, including the UK.

White Britons Oppose Jews and Muslims over Animal Slaughter

Published on The Occidental Observer

By Enza Ferreri


Thanks to the British brilliant organisation Animal Aid (AA) which has secretly made the above film, the assertion that animals are pre-stunned in many halal abattoirs is exposed as a deception in graphically traumatising images.

The scene is Bowood Yorkshire Lamb halal slaughterhouse in Thirsk, in the north of England, the tenth abattoir in which Animal Aid’s hidden cameras have filmed undercover since the charity’s ongoing investigation into UK slaughter practices started in January 2009.

What is significant is that Bowood is also the first halal slaughterhouse filmed by AA, which – as always – didn’t know what it would find. It didn’t know, for example, that it was halal. And so, the first halal abattoir investigated happens by sheer chance to be one of the few – so it is claimed – that don’t stun animals before the killing.

The UK’s law, like many other Western countries’, requires slaughterhouses to stun animals before they are killed to minimise suffering, but it allows exemptions for Muslim and Jewish producers due to their religious prescriptions. For meat to be considered permissible, namely kosher under Jewish law or halal under Islamic law, the animal must be fully conscious when slaughtered.

Barbaric ritual slaughter is regrettably something else on the long list of what Judaism and Islam have in common.

So Muslims and Jews once again are united in cruelty, to defend their ancient (“primitive” would be better) practices against the Western civilising influence, which owes a lot to Christianity.

Modern ritual slaughter in Judaism and Islam is closely related to animal sacrifice.

Many religions practice animal sacrifice even today, including Hinduism. Christianity exceptionally doesn’t.

This is because, while in ancient times, as well as in many contemporary non-Western cultures, people believed that the death of a sacrificial (in some cases human) animal was necessary in order to approach God or the gods, Christians think differently. They believe that, since Jesus had shed his own blood and offered a perfect sacrifice, there is no more need of animal sacrifice, because the door is now open to access God. After Jesus' sacrifice, Christians rejected animal sacrifices, and this has created in the Christian West a culture averse to them.

If we don't associate the ending of animal sacrifices with Christianity, in the other parts of the globe they do.

On the subject of offerings of animals, Judaism and Christianity are so entirely different that we cannot even talk of a Judaeo-Christian tradition. There are two distinct traditions, going in opposite directions. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then it is highly significant that on animal sacrifices the Old Testament and the New have led to antithetical practices.

Today Jews and Muslims want to force advanced White countries to accept practices that our animal welfare laws, reflecting a more humane culture, forbid. And so far, with some exceptions (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark), they have generally succeeded.

A case of such capitulation has been the Netherlands in 2012, when the country’s Lower House of Parliament passed with 116 votes to 30 a bill banning all ritual slaughter, introduced by the Animal Rights Party. The bill had the support of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party.

Guess what happened next. Haaretz reported at the time:

Israel's leading rabbi has warned Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders that his party's support for a ban of ritual slaughter of animals in the Netherlands is "anti-Semitic" and could drive away the country's Jewish community.

The Upper House of Parliament, the Senate, then rejected the bill. "Anti-Semitic" is the magic word to end all arguments.

What is particularly harrowing is that Western non-Muslims and non-Jews unknowingly eat meat and consume other products of such cruel methods of slaughter.

Going back to the video recently released by Animal Aid (which comes with the warning that it contains images some viewers may find distressing), among other things it shows slaughtermen hacking away and sawing at the throats of still-conscious sheep, belying the claims often made by ritual slaughter supporters, both Jewish and Muslim, that the animal doesn't suffer because death is inflicted through "a single cut made with a surgically sharp knife".

AA says:

With fly-on-the-wall cameras, it [Animal Aid] captured the horrifying yet routine abuse and taunting of thousands of sheep, and the shambolic set-up that guarantees animals will suffer...

Additionally, many of the sheep in our film are not dispatched with a single clean cut but have their throats hacked at repeatedly with a knife that is either blunt or being used ineptly…

In one instance it took five attempts to sever blood vessels.

During the course of our investigation, we discovered a remarkable weakness in the application of the law that requires all animals to be stunned prior to being killed unless the meat is intended for Muslim or Jewish consumers. The regulatory body, the Food Standards Agency, acknowledged to Animal Aid that any slaughterhouse can practise non-stun slaughter without demonstrating that the meat is destined for religious communities. [Emphasis added]

Translation: if you eat meat in Britain or in any other country with a Muslim and/or Jewish community, you will very likely eat meat from animals slaughtered in the same way as in the video above, too horrific even to watch.

The British halal market may be worth as much as £2billion a year, with more than 100 million animals killed in this way annually. It is calculated that the halal share of the meat market in the UK is about 5 times the percentage of Muslims in the country’s population, which means that kafirs are bound to buy halal or have it served on their plate.

Jewish and Muslim religious authorities assert that death by the shechita or halal methods, without pre-stunning, is instantaneous and painless. A body of evidence demonstrates that this is not a credible position, and our new footage removes any remaining doubt.

Rather than animals being treated with compassion and being uninjured prior to the fatal cut, we see them routinely treated with gratuitous violence and contempt.

Halal is probably one of the most, if not the most, sensitive issue in many European countries, including Britain, which is capable of mobilising native Whites against Islamic invasion.

Due to the antagonistic pressure from a large and growing number of people, Muslim associations have started claiming that many halal abattoirs pre-stun animals. Whether this is true or not is difficult to say. A sure problem is that, even when stunning is applied, the stunning is light and ineffective, so as not to compromise the Islamic requirements of keeping the animal alive: for example, the voltage used in electric stunning may be too low.

In the UK, there has been a sharp 60% rise last year in the number of sheep and goats killed without stunning, due to stronger campaigning by Muslims who believe that stunning killed animals.

A revealing incident showed how little importance Muslim lobbies give to animal welfare when compared to protection of Islamic practices. Last summer, research was published indicating that many chickens are still conscious and suffer pain when they are slaughtered, but that higher levels of shock would guarantee they were insensible.

As a result, European Union laws were introduced forcing many abattoirs to use a more powerful electric shock.

In the UK, the implementation of such new rules was put on hold due to Muslim leaders’ complaints that the new levels could kill birds before they could be slaughtered, meaning they would no longer be halal.

British Veterinary Association president Robin Hargreaves said: “Failure to implement the new regulations risks a percentage of chickens being ineffectively stunned, thus compromising animal welfare.”

The video footage released by Animal Aid in early February and given wide publicity in the British press has increased pressure and intensified demands for a complete ban on ritual slaughter.

A petition championed by the British Veterinary Association demanding that slaughter without pre-stunning be outlawed has crossed the threshold of 100,000 signatures, which means that it had to be debated by the House of Commons. A debate took place on the 23 February, eagerly followed in the Israeli and Jewish media with the predictable accusations of anti-Semitism.

The British Veterinary Association (BVA), along with the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, are UK scientific bodies which have always maintained that ritual slaughter causes great unnecessary suffering to animals and must be banned.

The BVA has now warned ministers that they “simply cannot ignore the strength of public feeling” over this issue.

A concurrent petition organised by Animal Aid to make CCTV mandatory for all slaughterhouses has also passed the 100,000 mark.

No slaughter is cruelty free, and earlier films by AA at slaughterhouses that did use stunning had nevertheless shown animals being punched in the head, burnt with cigarettes, beaten with sticks, given electric shocks with stunning tongs, thrown and kicked.

Kate Fowler, AA’s head of campaigns, said:

All four conveyor operators we filmed over three days [at Bowood] abused animals to varying degrees, while the slaughterers looked on unmoved.

This is the 10th slaughterhouse in which we have filmed undercover, and it is the ninth to be caught breaking animal welfare laws.

None of the abuses we uncovered would have come to light without our cameras being in place, even though there is a Government-appointed vet at each slaughterhouse.

There is now in the UK a wide mobilisation against Muslim and Jewish methods of slaughter, with the British Veterinary Association (part of the Establishment, certainly not a fringe group) heading it.

Even the moderate Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – the world’s oldest animal welfare organisation, founded in the 19th century with the blessing of Queen Victoria – calls for an end to Muslim and Jewish slaughter methods.

The British Government repeatedly said it has no intention of banning religious slaughter as it wants to respect the rights of Jewish and Muslim communities to eat meat in accordance with their beliefs, a line that Prime Minister David Cameron maintained during a recent visit to Israel.

It's not surprising that the Government doesn't want to change the law, given the strength of the Jewish lobby in Britain. Indeed, a documentary made by the TV network Channel 4 a few years ago provided evidence of the extent of power over politicians and media held by this interest group, called in the film "the most effective lobby" in the country. You can see it here:

Extreme Centre: People Doing Nothing when Action Is Necessary

I have read the novel expression "the extreme centre".

The context (it was the title of the book The Extreme Centre: A Warning by horrid UK-Pakistani neo-Marxist Islamophile, anti-Western, anti-White Tariq Ali) doesn't matter. These words struck me because we are in a situation in which not to take sides is - paradoxically - extreme.

If your civilisation and race and the religion of your forefathers are on the brink of extinction and you prefer to stand aside and do nothing, you are extreme, no matter how many more people are doing the same.

"Extreme" here is used not in the statistical sense of far-from-average but in the sense of describing an action or omission whose consequences are going to be momentous.

Israel Is for Jew-Friendly Free Speech Only

And I thought that Israel was all for free speech!

Didn't Netanyahu attend the Paris demonstration of the world leaders in support of freedom of expression, even to the point of physically pushing his way to the front?

From "Israel Demands UN Condemn Iran's Holocaust-Themed Cartoon Contest":

Israel’s top representative to the United Nations is demanding that the world body condemn the Iranian government for hosting a contest featuring Holocaust-themed cartoons.

Ron Prosor wrote a letter over the weekend to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and global delegates urging them to publicly censure the contest, which is scheduled to take place this coming April.

The contest organizers said the event is a response to the massacre of journalists at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo last month. The magazine was targeted due to controversial cartoons it had published depicting Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, in humorous situations.

The organizers argued that the event is in line with Western values that preserve humans’ right to freedom of expression.

The contest winners will receive awards, while one cartoon will be chosen for exhibition at a museum featuring Palestinian works of art in Tehran.

Israel: Modesty Patrols, Orthodox Power

Did you know that in certain neighbourhoods in Israeli cities women are welcomed by signs inviting them not to enter the area unless they are dressed "modestly"?

How much do Gentiles in the West know regarding Israel - beyond the headline news about bombings of Gaza - and Judaism generally?

So-called "modesty signs", like the one pictured above, for years have been a common sight in ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.

They usually say: “Please do not pass through our neighborhood in immodest clothes” followed by a rather detailed description of the permissible clothing, for example "closed blouse, with long sleeves, long skirt, no trousers, no tight-fitting clothes."

Women are asked to obey the imposed dress code in wordings such as this: “Please do not disturb [or offend or violate] the sanctity of our neighborhood and our way of life as Jews committed to G-d and His Torah."

I wonder how many women dress according to the above description but, apart from Muslim women, my guess is that they are not numerous. To see what Jewish Orthodox women look like, see the photo above the post.

That's probably why Judge David Gideoni, who ruled in favour of a group of women who started a legal battle to have the signs removed, wrote: "The signs were meant to limit the use of the public domain by all women. This could create an expectation or understanding that the area in which the sign was posted belongs in practice to a certain population."

But what aggravates the problem is that Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods are not in remote areas: they are central parts of a big city. Many of these districts contain or are next to public buildings, offices or institutions, like health clinics and government departments. Jerusalem women need to travel to such places and, when they do, they shouldn’t be left with the choice of changing their clothes or being verbally or even physically harassed.

NBC News reports:

In Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where the rule of law sometimes takes a back seat to the rule of God, zealots are on a campaign to stamp out behavior they consider unchaste. They hurl stones at women for such "sins" as wearing a red blouse and attack stores selling devices that can access the Internet.

In recent weeks, self-styled "modesty patrols" have been accused of breaking into the apartment of a Jerusalem woman and beating her for allegedly consorting with men. They have torched a store that sells MP4 players, fearing devout Jews would use them to download pornography.

"These breaches of purity and modesty endanger our community," said 38-year-old Elchanan Blau, defending the bearded, black-robed zealots. "If it takes fire to get them to stop, then so be it."

Many ultra-Orthodox Jews are dismayed by the violence, but the enforcers often enjoy quiet approval from rabbis eager to protect their own reputations as guardians of the faith, community members say. And while some welcome anything that keeps secular culture out of their cloistered world, others feel terrorized, knowing that the mere perception of impropriety could ruin their lives.

"There are eyes and ears all over the place, very similar to what you hear about in countries like Iran," says Israeli-American novelist Naomi Ragen, an observant Jew who has chronicled the troubles that confront some women living in the ultra-Orthodox world.

The violence has already deepened the antagonism between the 600,000 haredim, or God-fearing, and the secular majority, which resents having religious rules dictated to them.

Religious vigilantes operate in a society that has granted their community influence well beyond its numbers — partly out of a commitment to revive the great centers of Jewish scholarship destroyed in the Holocaust, but also because the Orthodox are perennial king-makers in Israeli coalition politics.

Thus public transport is grounded for the Jewish Sabbath each Saturday, and the rabbis control all Jewish marriage and divorce in Israel.

In recent years, however, the haredim have eased up on their long campaign to impose their rules on secular areas, and nowadays many restaurants and suburban shopping centers are open on the Sabbath.

These days, most vigilante attacks take place in the zealots' own neighborhoods.

...The unidentified, 31-year-old woman had left the ultra-Orthodox fold after getting divorced, according to the indictment filed by the Jerusalem district attorney's office. The indictment said her assailant tried to get her to leave her apartment in a haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem by gagging, beating and threatening to kill her. He was paid $2,000 for the attack, it said.

A 17-year-old who moved to Israel from New York five years ago said she was hospitalized after being attacked with pepper spray by a crowd of men outraged that she was walking down a Jerusalem street with boys.

"They can burn in hell," said the girl, who would identify herself only as Rivka.

She lives in Beit Shemesh, a town outside Jerusalem where the vigilantism has been particularly violent. Zealots there have thrown rocks and spat at women, and set fire to trash bins to protest impiety. Walls of the neighborhood are plastered with signs exhorting women to dress modestly — spelled out as closed-necked, long-sleeved blouses and long skirts.

'Stupid troublemakers'
The state, catering to religious sensitivities, subsidizes gender-segregated bus routes that service religious neighborhoods. Ragen and several other women challenged the practice in Israel's Supreme Court after an Orthodox Canadian woman in her 50s told police she was kicked, slapped, pushed to the floor and spat upon by men for refusing to move to the back of the bus.

Another Beit Shemesh girl, who asked to be identified only as Esther, said zealots threw rocks, cursed and spat at a friend for wearing a red blouse — taboo because the color attracts attention.

...But the rabbis are afraid to condemn them, says Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, another community member.

"They can't come out against zealots who champion modesty. Here and there they write against violence, but the militants ultimately set the tone," he said.

Stores are targeted too.

'This store burns souls'
In August, a Jerusalem man was placed under house arrest on suspicion he set fire to a store in a haredi district of the city that sold MP4 players.

"It started about six months ago. They would come into the store, about 15 of them at a time, screaming, 'This store burns souls!' and they would throw merchandise on the floor and threaten customers," said 31-year-old Aaron Gold, a haredi worker at the Space electronic store.

One Friday night, just before the Sabbath was about to begin, "they smashed a window, doused the place with gasoline and lit a match," Gold said.

Now, a big sign behind the counter says, "All products sold in this store are under rabbinical supervision. By order of the rabbis, no MP4s are sold here."

Clothing stores that sell clothes regarded as provocative have been vandalized, and bleach thrown at merchandise.

Suspicion sparks attack
Girls have been expelled from school after being seen talking to boys, a punishment that ruins their marriage prospects.

"It could be very innocent; she could be talking to her brother," Ragen said. But once thrown out of school, "no one — NO ONE — will take you in," she added.

In one case, the violence reached the highest levels of haredi society.

Three years ago, a son of Israel's Sephardi chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, was accused of kidnapping a 17-year-old boy, beating him at knifepoint and terrorizing him with snarling dogs because he had sought the attentions of the accused's unchaperoned sister.

The son was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail.

His sister married a different suitor the following year. [All emphases added]

Reading all this, I can't help being reminded of the Islamic world in so many ways.

The Muslim Invasion of England

I know it's not new but I've just heard it.

A British Naval Destroyer stops four Muslims in a row boat, rowing towards Brighton. The captain gets on the loud hailer and shouts:

"Ahoy, small craft, where are you heading?"

One of the Muslims stands up and shouts:

"We are invading England!"

The crew of the Destroyer all start laughing and, when the captain finally stops laughing, he gets back on the loud hailer and says:

"Just the four of you?"

The Muslim stands up again and shouts:

"No, we're the last four. The rest are already there!"

Harf: ISIS Is All about Lack of Jobs

We have all seen the video of ISIS's recent horrific beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya.

Mr Obama, how many Christian terrorists have beheaded Muslims? How can you compare violence in Islam with violence in Christianity?

US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf was interviewed by Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball about the atrocity.

She mantained that “we cannot win this war by killing them [ISIS], we cannot kill our way out of this war”.

I don't know if it's possible to respond to an enemy that kills, beheads and burns people alive without the spilling of blood.

Harf went on to argue:

[The video of ISIS] underscores to people that it isn’t just a fight in Iraq and in Syria and that it’s not just a fight about dropping bombs on terrorists. It’s really how we stop the causes that lead to extremism in a place like Libya, the fact that there’s no governance, and there’s no opportunity for young people, it lets groups like ISIL grow there and flourish there, which is what you saw with this awful situation with these Egyptians that you just mentioned, but this is a longer fight, it’s fighting them on social media…they’re using social media to get converts to their cause and to spread their hatred all over the world. This week, we’re going to have over 60 countries here in Washington to talk about how do we combat this violent extremism together in the long-term, not just in the short-term fight.

Right now, what we’re doing is trying to take their leaders and their fighters off the battlefield in Iraq and in Syria, that’s really where they flourish…we’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them, so are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians they’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them, we cannot kill our way out of this war. We need, in the longer term, medium and longer term, to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs…

[W]e can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance, we can help them build their economies, so they can have job opportunities for these people. You’re right, there is no easy solution in the long-term to preventing and combating violent extremism, but if we can help countries work at the root causes of this, what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47, instead of try to start a business? Maybe we can try– try to chip away at this problem, while at the same time going after the threat, taking on ISIL in Iraq, in Syria, and helping our partners around the world.”

This is a particularly absurd version of the old socialist position: it's the economy, stupid!

From Karl Marx to Bill Clinton, socio-communists believe that everything in human society is governed by the economy and every problem can be solved by trowing money at it.

"What makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47, instead of try to start a business?" is an especially ridiculous way of putting the question, in the context of Muslim jihadists. Materialists don't attach any importance to what people believe in, what doctrines and ideals inspire and motivate their behaviour.

That's why they're so badly equipped to deal with the Islamic threat, deriving as it does from a faith and frame of mind.

Harf's half-baked theory about how to address the big problem posed by ISIS echoes the "liberal" proposed elimination of crime in Western societies by getting rid of poverty and unemployment as its "root causes".

I'm not so sure that the US really wants to defeat ISIS. But this is not the first time that Ms Harf is out of her depth when trying to defend the indefensible: American strategy in the Middle East.

Videos: Muslim Children Learning to Kill

The Facebook page Australia says NO to Islam Sharia Law has the graphic above.

While Western kids learn how to avoid offending even the slightest sensibilities of all ethnic groups - except Whites - and religions - except Christianity -, Muslim children are taught different lessons: how to slaughter conscious animals and next how to slaughter humans, as the next video illustrates.

At a Muslim school for children, stuffed animals were used to accustom the youngsters to blood and violence, as the horrid (visually and acoustically) video below shows. The little ones are trained to slaughter sheep and other animals, including men.

They'll be ready for animal sacrifice, halal slaughter, beheadings and, if the worst comes to the worst, burning people alive.

H/t to Alessandra Nucci and ‎Pål Dugstad

Why Muslims Win and We Lose

Muslims fight for something. We fight against that something.

This is the big difference. We are fighting purely in defence. We don't have the same passion.

They are fighting for Islam. We don't like it, but we must admit that it is a whole system of living one's life, guiding a state and establishing its laws.

What are we fighting for? The ability to believe in nothing, pursue as many material possessions as we can, dissipate our lives and use as many swear words as is humanly possible. Big deal! That is really going to put fire in our belly, certainly.

People can be prepared to die only for something they believe in with all of themselves.

That's why Christian martyrs are legions while it's difficult to come up with many secular martyrs.

And people can fight with courage and ardour only for something that excites their imagination.

That's why Christian Europe was capable of repeatedly defeating Islamic enemies and remain free, while post-Christian Europe is doomed.

Here's how the great Pat Buchanan puts it:

T.S. Eliot said, to defeat a religion, you need a religion.

We have no religion; we have an ideology—secular democracy. But the Muslim world rejects secularism and will use democracy to free itself of us and establish regimes that please Allah.

In the struggle between democracy and Allah, we are children of a lesser God. “The term ‘democracy,’” wrote Eliot, “does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike — it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God … you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

Germany used democracy to bring Hitler to power. Given free elections from Morocco to Mindanao, what kind of regimes would rise to power? Would not the Quran become the basis of law?

If Charlie Hebdo were a man, not a magazine, he would be torn to pieces in any Middle East nation into which he ventured. And what does a mindless West offer as the apotheosis of democracy?

Four million French marching under the banner “Je Suis Charlie.”

Whom the gods would destroy …

The first comment on Buchanan's article shows the shallowness of the materialistic view:

Napoleon once said “God is on the side of he who has the strongest battalion.” Not: “The strongest ideology”. History is littered with the corpses of intense oddball gangs that tried to hit way above their league and were crushed. Bullets and bombs are ruled by mere physics, not fervor.

There are indeed many more cases in history of armies or armed groups who defeated stronger forces. If combatants are not motivated, they will flee or surrender.

It's people who fight, with whatever is in their minds egging them on. Weapons - even the most sophisticated - don't fight. The laws of "mere physics" can do nothing in war without a desire to utilise them.

In the case of our decadent Western societies, in which living a comfortable and easy life is a primary goal, fighting whatever or whoever threatens this cosiness defeats the object. So, given a choice between losing comforts and security in the future for not having defended them or losing them now in order to defend them, people prefer to wait and see if any possible danger will disappear as if by magic. When they are convinced that it won't, it will probably be too late to put up a resistance.

But hey!, at least we have protected - by doing nothing - our desire to believe in nothing.

Global Warming Protest Nixed Due to Cold

It's not a joke.

Yesterday a global warming protest set for this weekend at Yale University was cancelled because of the frigid weather and snow.

Fossil Free Yale, a pressure group that wants the Ivy League university to divest itself from fossil fuels, said the protest will be indefinitely postponed.

The Daily Caller says:

As this reporter writes this article, the weather in New Haven, Connecticut where Yale is located stands at -9 degrees Fahrenheit with wind chill. Saturday is expected to have weather in the low 30s with snow and Sunday will be 20 degrees with snow and rain, according to the Weather Channel.

This is not the first time that the weather doesn't play ball with the climate change brigade.

Many global warming events in the past have been held at sub-zero temperatures.

It's unlikely, though, that even the worst weather will make believers in Anthropogenic Global Warming theory reconsider their views: when in 2013 the UK suffered its coldest March in 50 years, they saw that as a sign of global warming.

This is what philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper calls "ad hoc hypotheses": in plain language, excuses to keep afloat a debunked theory.