You Don't Need to Be Racist to Be Racist

This article in FrontPage Magazine, headlined "Oprah: Just Because You’re Not Racist Doesn’t Mean You’re Not a Racist" , reminds me of what happened in Britain when the Macpherson's Inquiry into the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993 enshrined that racism does not need to exist in reality for someone to be guilty of it, opening the door to the abuses we witness today, with these words: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

So what if racism in America is at an all-time low? So what if the vast majority of Americans are not only not racist, but actively anti-racist? That’s not enough for Oprah. “A lot of people think if they think they’re not using the n-word themselves, they physically aren’t using the n-word themselves, and do not harbor ill will towards black people that it’s not racist,” she said in a comment that is as challenged syntactically as it is intellectually.

This is paranoia of the highest sort. And it is absolutely crippling to America’s future. If a huge number of Americans believe that racism that is not present in action nonetheless lurks beneath the surface of our life, waiting to burst forth in a conflagration of hate such as that which allegedly claimed Trayvon, there can be no shared future.

But many on the left, including Oprah, apparently don’t want a shared future. They want emotional blackmail. The corollary to the belief that racism hides in the nooks and crannies of the white personality is the belief that the only way to expunge such racism by embracing the philosophy of people like Oprah. If you see The Butler, you’re buying a racial indulgence; if you vote Obama, you’re buying a racial indulgence...

That seems to be the perspective not just of many black Americans like Oprah and Daniels, but the perspective of many in various minority communities. For example, in California, Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a law declaring that transgender children must be allowed to enter bathrooms of their choice and join sports teams of their choice. The idea here is that this will minimize bullying, as though most Americans bear children with gender identity issues some sort of ill will. The truth is far simpler: Americans have a right to worry that their children will feel uncomfortable in a bathroom next to someone of the opposite sex, no matter what that person believes him or herself to be. That’s not wrong. That’s normal. But the onus has now been placed on children without gender identity issues to explain why they feel uncomfortable at the urinal next to a girl, even if they’ve never bullied a transgender child.

That’s nasty. More than that, it’s an attempt to shape values by implying that everyone is in need of having their fundamental racism, sexism, homophobia overcome by government action. Americans have nothing left to discuss. America is now a country where whites are often perceived as racist until proven innocent. And the only way to prove yourself innocent is to perform acts approved by the leftist establishment.

None of this helps black Americans. All it does is perpetuate power for those who divide us in pursuit of political gain. Hillary Clinton, who has begun touring the country invoking the supposed racism of voter ID supporters, is merely the latest race hustler to attempt this pernicious trick. Unfortunately, it seems to work. And that means that Oprah’s racial narrative is far more influential than The Butler’s.

Immigration or Invasion?

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


What we insist on calling “immigration” from the Third World to Western European countries like Britain is a historically new phenomenon, for which a case can be made that other, more appropriate terms should be used — like “colonization” and “invasion.”

The definition of “colony,” from which the word “colonization” is derived, is: a) a body of people living in a new territory but maintaining ties with their homeland or b) a number of people coming from the same country, sharing the same ethnic origin or speaking the same language, who reside in a foreign country or city, or a particular section of it.

Either could apply to the people coming to live in Europe from Asia and Africa.

In reference to colonization, dictionaries add “relating to the developing world,” but this is only because colonization primarily occurred there in the past. Word meanings have to change to adapt to the new historic realities.

Similarly, the expressions “native” and “indigenous” previously referred to the original inhabitants of non-European continents, whereas now they are used to describe Germans, French, British, Swedes, Dutch and so on.

“Invasion” has three main meanings: a) the act of invading, especially the entrance of an armed force into a territory to conquer; b) a large-scale onset of something injurious or harmful, such as a disease; c) an intrusion or encroachment, an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity.

The latter is a perfectly apt description of what is happening in Western Europe.

Even “ethnic cleansing” could be used, since local populations are being replaced by different ethnic groups. London, for instance, is no longer a white-British-majority city, although mainstream media like the BBC and London’s own paper, the Evening Standard, barely mention it, to say nothing of the city mayor Boris Johnson.

From Wikipedia:

The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group.”

[...]

Terry Martin has defined ethnic cleansing as “the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory” and as “occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end.”

European native populations are being replaced because many locals, tired of being colonized, flee their countries, cities or neighborhoods.

The proportion of white British Londoners fell drastically from 60 percent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011, partly due to the arrival of so many foreign nationals and partly to a mass exodus of white Britons. David Goodhart, director of Demos, writes in The Financial Times:

Over the decade between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of white British Londoners fell by more than 600,000 (17 per cent). That is about three times the fall over the previous census period, 1991 to 2001.

“Most of the leading academic geographers did not expect London to become a majority minority city for another 20 or 30 years – they underestimated the extent to which white British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London,” says Eric Kaufmann, an academic at Birkbeck College who is leading a project on “white flight” at Demos, the think-tank I lead.

Six hundred thousand is a big city disappearing in just 10 years.

Are we sure that Londoners have abandoned their city because of this “cultural enrichment”? Looking at the areas where white flight mostly occurs provides reasonable evidence that they do: the most multi-racial districts tend to experience high levels of it.

What the large-scale influx of foreigners to Europe can no longer be called is “immigration.” Immigration is what you have when, for example, small groups of French go to live in Britain or the British in Spain.

What distinguishes invasion from immigration are three things: the volume of people involved in the movement, the span of time and frequency of these movements — the same number of people moving to live in a country over 4 years as opposed to 400 years — and the kind of people, in particular how similar or alien to the natives they are, and how easily or improbably they’ll integrate.

The sheer numbers of people who have come to live in the UK in the last few decades have negatively affected the indigenous population’s quality of life in a serious, profound way, even assuming that those people were all law-abiding, upright citizens, which they are not.

There are many areas where this is occurring, including jobs, social services, education and public health – with tuberculosis constantly rising largely due to immigration.

A classic example is the current housing shortage. The UK is suffering its worst housing crisis in modern history. Two or more household units cram into one dwelling, and young people, not being able to afford to move out, live with their parents.

It would be trivializing the issue to say that all housing problems are created by immigration, but it’s impossible to deny the obvious fact they are exacerbating it.

There are other factors contributing to the housing crisis, including the very low interest rates, which result in fewer forced sellers, and the welfare system that, by underwriting sometimes exorbitant rent bills for people who’ve never worked, indirectly encourage landlords to charge more, thus driving up both rental and purchase prices for those who do work.

But one of the main causes is the high number of immigrants increasing the demand for dwellings, while the supply remains low, therefore pushing up house buying and renting prices.

Liberal commentators say that there is no evidence for that, but the evidence is in the most self-explanatory statistics: the more people are in the country, the more properties are needed.

Most immigrants rent, rather than buy, a property in the first 5-10 years since their arrival, which inevitably increases rental prices for everyone, including the indigenous people.

Social housing is also in limited supply. Therefore, the immigrant population that takes a share of it deprives the natives. The percentages are roughly the same: 17 percent of British live in council-rented accommodations, 18 percent of foreigners do.

Leftists and charities would want the government to “build more affordable housing” and “enough homes to meet demand” rather than limit immigration, although it’s difficult to see why the government should act like a construction company in preference to a body that protects and defends the country’s borders.

Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment

Via Facebook.com



This is something I like very much. We should do more things like it:

The New Fad Taking The Country By Storm: "Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment"

The group “Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment” held rallies around the country this weekend calling for Obama’s impeachment. The group lists 12 reasons for Obama’s impeachment on their website and has quite the following on Facebook. It’s the next big thing.

They have a Facebook page, Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment, with currently 35,108 likes (including mine) and 37,700 talking about this.

Their website is Impeach Obama.

Christianity Is a Crime Punishable by Death under Sharia Law

I'm in the process of transferring here the articles I had on another, older blog which I'm closing down. They are still relevant, showing how things haven't changed at all in the Islamic world but maybe - just maybe - have developed a little bit chez nous.

The Guardian article that I quoted from in here might have still made today the same unfounded, false claims that death for apostasy is not part of Islam that it made then. But, while it's becoming more and more obvious every day that the Muslim persecution of Christians throughout the world is the greatest humanitarian disaster of our times, and while we are in the middle of a proper, probably irreversible, ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East and the media, while pretending to ignore it, cannot possibly be totally unaware of it, the justifications given by this Grauniad hack for the horror being commited against the story's poor innocent man by reference to colonialism ("The age of classical colonialism may have passed but where once the blunderbuss came as an adjunct to the bible, today it has been replaced by the rice bowl.") - even accusing missionaries of only pretending to give aid -, or by reference to "well-intentioned desire to protect cherished beliefs", would today be considered beyond the pale even by Leftist standards. I hope.

------------------------------------------------

The news

Sunday, March 19, 2006.
KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan man who allegedly converted from Islam to Christianity is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death, a judge said Sunday.

The hypocrisy of the Muslims

"We are not against any particular religion in the world. But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law," the judge said. "It is an attack on Islam. ... The prosecutor is asking for the death penalty."

No, they “are not against any particular religion in the world”.
Except that they consider being Christian a crime punishable by death.
That’s not being against a religion, is it?

The response of Western media

I watched a Channel 4 report on this, that made it sound as if Abdul Rahman (this is the name of the Christian man) was mad (it reported that he was mentally ill), and as if the Afghan government wasn’t all that bad.

Or, look at the Guardian Online. “Don't make a martyr” is the headline, and the article by a Faisal Bodi (isn’t it a name that says it all?) says:

Sending Abdul Rahman to the gallows would indict Islam on a charge of which it is wholly innocent.

Nobody likes a turncoat. Whether it's a scab crossing a picket line, or a footballer joining his club's arch rivals, the consequences of defection will usually haunt them for life.

It's a cross that Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert to Christianity, is currently having to bear.

By the way, the explanation for his madness could be this one, from two comments posted on Jihad Watch by the same person. One is:

As I noted here, the idea that Abdul Rahman is insane is a more or less clever attempt to please both the irresistable force of Afghanistan's allegiance to Sharia and the immoveable object of American presence and pressure.

Officials say the man, Abdul Rahman, will be released from custody soon.

Who will protect him from raging Sharia-minded mobs when he is freed?

And the second comment is:

Sarinwal Zamari may be floating this idea to extricate the Karzai government from the tight place this case has put it in. It is a common view among Muslims that only someone who is insane, corrupt or under immense pressure would convert from Islam to Christianity, so this angle will make sense to those in Afghanistan who want Abdul Rahman's blood. Likewise it will get them out of holding the trial without their having to say or do anything contrary to traditional Muslim apostasy law. This could be the perfect pirouette to allow Karzai to save face with both camps.

Why Muslims Are Necessarily Fundamentalists

There is an incompatibility between Islam and the ideas which are fundamental to Western civilization.

There are logical contradictions between the principles at the basis of Islam and the West. One cannot resolve logical contradictions, they cannot be solved in the way that problems can. You simply cannot square a circle.

It’s got nothing to do with terrorists, or fundamentalists, fanatics, or Islamic radicals of various sorts.

I’m here talking about mainstream Islam and the fact that it is in serious, direct and open contradiction with principles which are at the core of Western civilization and form the very basis on which all our Western world is erected.

I am not talking about issues like the treatment of women. Islam’s treatment of women is only one aspect, one application of the much more general problem of Islam’s incompatibility with Western principles which I am about to discuss.

There are several elements in Islam which conflict with and contradict Western core principles. Here I'm outlining one of them.

All Muslims believe (and they must believe, I mean it’s not open to interpretation or dispute) that the Koran is the actual word of God. They think God himself dictated it word by word to Mohammed.

Christians think that the Bible was written by human beings: that leaves a lot open to different interpretations and variations in opinion, and it leaves a lot of room for mistakes.

But for Muslims, none of this tolerance and flexibility is possible. Every true Muslim must believe in the complete, literal truth of every word of the Koran.

So, basically, every Muslim is a fundamentalist. That old, tiresome, repeated ad nauseam distinction between Islamic fundamentalists and the “benign” majority of mainstream Muslims is much less important than it is constantly portrayed to be.

This fact in itself, that all Muslims believe in the literal truth of the Koran (no word of the book can actually be disputed) “invites trouble”, opens the gate to all the flood of problems that we have continuously witnessed in the history of Islam. It is a veritable Pandora’s box.

The funny thing is that Muslims themselves have used this argument in order to justify their own intransigence and intolerance, for instance when they try to justify the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

And I want to remind that, when in Muslim communities living in Britain there were episodes of public burnings of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the streets, it wasn’t a minority of fundamentalists who were doing and justifying the burnings. On the contrary, it was the Muslims’ majority.

Whenever I watch a TV debate or interview involving Muslims, hardly ever I see the interviewer or participant in the debate ask a Muslim person (supposedly a member of the tolerant Muslim majority who has no problems with Western values) what s/he thinks of the fatwa against Rushdie. That question, and especially its answer, obviously would immediately show an unbridgeable gulf between the supposed “tolerant Muslim” and the rest of us, and would expose this construct of the “tolerant Muslim” for what it is: a myth.

To clarify a possible misunderstanding, I am not here talking about personality traits: I don’t mean “tolerant” in the sense of nice, decent, pleasant, likeable person. I’m sure that there will be many Muslim individuals who fit the latter description. But their “tolerance”, or rather lack of it, is nothing to do with their personal characteristics: it’s not a matter of personal choice. They have no choice. If they are Muslim, they must think that the Koran was indeed written by God through Mohammed’s hand, and therefore it necessarily follows that they cannot tolerate a work like The Satanic Verses: to them it will be tantamount to blasphemy, an insult to God himself.

Photo by George Daley

We Cannot Protect British Culture without Christianity

If we want to protect and preserve British traditional culture and values, we cannot do it without Christianity. Not only has Christianity been part of them since time immemorial but also they couldn't continue their existence without it.

An anecdote. I was in Steyning, in Sussex, in the Downs, not far from the sea. Our car had broken down. It's a beautiful village (or perhaps a small town now) in the South-East of England, the constituency that my party Liberty GB has chosen for the 2014 Euro Elections. Without enrichers in sight - except for one very kind black bloke who offered to help -, it looked like England may have been pre-enrichment. Very well preserved, with lovely Tudor houses, quaint, there was a building covered in Union Jacks and portraits of the Queen, you've got the idea. Every time we asked the locals for directions to the centre of the village, they directed us to the church.

The question about atheism and religion is simple. Individuals can be atheist, societies cannot. Atheists can be upright, moral individuals. But most people who follow the idea of a Godless world end up behaving in unethical ways, like irresponsibly having children out of wedlock they cannot provide for; treating their sexual life as a drug or alcohol (which they may also be addicted to); repeatedly having late-term abortions which more and more resemble infanticides; becoming addicted to consumerism and material things - kindly called "shopaholics" - to fill their empty lives and ending up with debts they cannot repay; neglecting their elderly parents; putting other people's and their own health at risk with promiscuous heterosexual or homosexual sex; and committing crimes. These people may not necessarily call themselves "atheist", but they have abandoned a moral system which for them would in the past have been dependent on the idea of God.

Think of this. If prisons, punishments and the penal system were abolished tomorrow, there are people who would continue to act more or less in the same way as before. But do you really believe that all members of society would?

There are many who, either because of limited intelligence or other factors - emotional, for example - don't live an ethical life without something guiding them from the outside (a condition that the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant called "heteronomy").

You may ask: what about those atheists who are behaving morally?

There is a risk in that too. A risk of erosion. The majority of atheists or agnostics among us have parents who believed in God, or grandparents, and so on. We have been educated in a Christian or Jewish way which has influenced our outlook, even if this can go back a few generations. But over time those values will become more and more diluted in people and therefore in the education they impart to their children. Gradually, maybe slowly, they will weaken or even disappear.

British culture has its roots in Christianity. It is its breeding ground.

Christianity has a solid rational basis. It has been studied and systematised by philosophers, first in the Middle Ages with the Patristic and Scholastic movements. It has incorporated Aristotelian logic. People like Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens who tell you otherwise are zoologists or journalists, not philosophers of religion, not even philosophers of science. They have no in-depth knowledge or understanding of this subject. If we lose Christianity, we end up believing in all sorts of superstitions, as it's already happening with the increase in the number of people who believe in astrology, spiritualism, all sorts of cults, New Age doctrines, "alternative" medicine, and so on.

And also, let's not forget that reason has its limits. It is rational to understand that reason is not everything.

No society has ever been without religion. If we lose Christianity, we will fall prey to other, much worse, religions or pseudo-religions, like, um, let me think, Islam for instance.

The State of UK Immigration Debate in 2005

I've just found something I had written in February 2005, at a time when questioning government's immigration policies in the UK was no longer considered downright racist like in, say, the 1990s, but not yet mainstream political discourse at it has become now. I publish it here because it shows the road we've travelled.

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In January 2005, the UK television channel ITV showed a program, called Vote For Me!, described as a political reality show, in which some so-called members of the general public, all with passionate political views, contested to get a public phone vote. The winner of Vote For Me! moved forward to the opportunity of standing for parliament.

There was also a panel of 3 judges and a studio audience, but they didn't actually affect the vote in the end.

At the time the ITV website said: “But that was what Vote For Me! was about: giving real people with real issues a voice. But more than that, Vote For Me! gave you, the people, the chance to choose a representative. A person who could honestly claim to be: 'The People's Choice'.”

That was the blurb: the reality was quite different, in that the program tried in every way to influence the result, and in the end it was rumoured that ITV was not happy at all with it, to the point of regretting having made the show.

The winner was a Rodney Hylton-Potts (pictured above), somebody whose views you can easily call politically incorrect.

Listen to what he said in interviews after his victory:

“All three judges urged viewers to vote me off. The show started as being light-hearted. But as it progressed it changed. In fact, it changed following my mention of a policy of nil immigration. At that point, it turned into a different animal.”

In fact, after having watched that, in the face of escalating insults from the panel "judges" and continuous booing and jeering from the TV studio audience, Rodney Hylton-Potts obtained such an astounding victory from the public at home, which almost looked like an opinion poll result, I decided to look for myself at what the British public actually thought of current immigration policies.

What I found supports, confirms and vindicates Hylton-Potts ideas.

For example, this article in The Guardian of January 19, 2004, with the headline “Four out of 10 whites do not want black neighbour, poll shows”. The article says:

Four out of 10 white people do not want an Asian or black Briton as their neighbour, according to a survey published this week. The opinion poll found rocketing concern about immigration and asylum.

The Mori survey for Prospect magazine found that 39% of those asked would prefer to live in an area only with people from the same ethnic background. Forty-one per cent of whites and 26% of ethnic minority people surveyed wanted the races to live separately. Over half of all ethnic groups wanted to live in diverse areas.

Bobby Duffy, research director at Mori, said: "We have overestimated the progress we have made in race and immigration issues. I'm surprised about such a high finding as people are usually reticent because they worry about being judged by the interviewer, so this finding is worrying."

The poll shows that the issue of race and immigration has risen up the list of people's concerns, and is now the third most important, ahead of crime, defence and the economy. The issue is ranked the most important by 29%, behind education on 33% and the NHS on 41%. Ten years ago the figure was below 10%.

If the Mori research director mentioned in the article is worried about those results, what about the next?

A YouGov/Economist survey in December 2004 gave the following results.

Of the people polled, 74% agree with the statement "Too many immigrants are coming to Britain."

Asked about the problems caused by immigration - and remember, this is important, that it was a one-answer question, so people could only choose one among some possible answers - 53% think that immigrants are putting too much pressure on public services, and as many as 25% (one quarter) think that immigration is upsetting the racial balance in the country.

To the question "Do you think people in your neighbourhood would approve or disapprove if more people from each of the following groups moved to your area?", the majority of people answered "Disapprove" when the group in question was Black Africans (43%), Iraqis (64%), Pakistanis (56%), West Indians (41%). The majority answered "Not mind" when the group in question was Australians (63%) and Polish (50%).

Some people might rush to say: racist.

But this is a too hasty and harsh judgement of public opinion.

Look at this interesting result: the only other group was Romanians and, although last time I checked these are white, the majority said: "Disapprove" (48%).

So, something else is at work here.

Could it be that common people have a better instinct than politicians, the media, and the intellectual elite?

And it's the same all over Western Europe.

From The Scotsman of 27 May 2004:

A new opinion poll which sampled opinion across ten countries found the majority of people in Britain are supportive of religious tolerance - but still believe that immigration has damaged the country.

The research triggered a mixture of disbelief and concern from mainstream political parties yesterday, amid fears that asylum is becoming a growing issue ahead of the 10 June European Parliament elections.

Ipsos, a Paris-based polling firm, found 60 per cent believing that immigrants were a bad influence on Britain - the highest proportion of all countries surveyed.

France, where the far-right National Front came second in the presidential election two years ago, emerged as one of the more moderate countries in the study with only 53 per cent arguing that migrants made the country worse.

But seven out of ten in France said that religious diversity within a country is to be welcomed, and three-quarters said that immigrants arrive to take the jobs which native Frenchmen refuse to do.

The same split reaction - welcoming religious pluralism but fearing that immigration has been harmful overall - also characterised Spain, Germany and Italy.

Ipsos, which conducted the poll with the Associated Press, admitted that its findings contradict widespread feeling that Britain - with its long history of migration and colonisation - is more relaxed about multiculturalism.

For that last statement, read: we thought that we had done a much better job at brainwashing the British public than we actually, demonstrably have.

And, finally, consider this: pollsters, namely the professionals in the field, think that polls, particularly online polls, are likely to produce more liberal responses than in the electorate as a whole.