Some old and new stories I have in my spooling tray worth noting somewhere…
Telegraph
A profile of the Scourge of Political Islam: Bernard Lewis
Lewis’s political message is as simple as it is uncompromising. “If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path,” he warned in December 2001, “the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression.” His prescription to America was stark: “Get tough or get out.” The Wall Street Journal defines what it calls The Lewis Doctrine as “seeding democracy in failed Mid-east states to defang terrorism”. Of course, it is slightly more sophisticated than that. Lewis is actually calling for the use of the minimum amount of Western force for the minimum amount of time in order to return consensual political institutions to the Middle East, starting with the most fertile place for them: Iraq. With its oil wealth, large middle class, stable past and secular society, democracy has a better chance of taking root in Iraq, Lewis argues, than virtually anywhere else in the Islamic world.
Ethnic targets for staffing ‘will backfire on the BBC’
The BBC has been criticised by a former member of the Commission for Racial Equality for trumpeting the fact that one in 10 of its staff is from an ethnic minority.The corporation announced last week that it had reached its target of having 10 per cent of staff who are black and Asian. The e-mail sent to employees went on to say that the BBC was aiming to raise the figure to 12.5 per cent by 2008.
Dr Raj Chandran, a Sri Lankan who served on the Commission for Racial Equality for eight years, criticised the BBC’s approach, however, and suggested that it could backfire by causing resentment among other segments of the population.
The 10 per cent figure, he said, meant that ethnic minorities, who account for 7.9 per cent of the overall population, were already over-represented. Recruitment should be based on merit, not colour, he added.
“I am totally against targets like this because people should be employed on the basis of their talent and skills,” said Dr Chandran. “It is my view that these targets can be counterproductive as far as people from the ethnic minorities are concerned.
“If you go to a medical school in Britain you will find a large number of people from Asian backgrounds. Sometimes it is as high as 30 or 40 per cent, but if those schools had imposed lower targets we would have fewer people in those professions.”
Observer
Lord of the Rings star speaks out on the demographic crisis
‘Are we willing to be part of a Muslim-controlled Europe?…There is a demographic catastrophe happening in Europe that nobody wants to talk about, that we daren’t bring up because we are so cagey about not offending people racially…‘By 2020, 50 percent of the children in Holland under the age of 18 will be of Muslim descent. Western Europeans are not having any babies. The population of Germany at the end of the century is going to be 56 per cent of what it is now. The population of France, 52 per cent of what it is now. There is a change happening in the very complexion of Western civilisation in Europe that we should think about at least and argue about.
‘If it just means the replacement of one genetic stock with another genetic stock, that does not matter too much. But if it involves the replacement of Western civilisation by a different civilisation with different cultural values, then it is something we really ought to discuss - because, goddammit, I am for dead white male culture.’
…’I do not want to see a society where, should I ever have any, my granddaughters have their fingernails pulled out because they are wearing nail varnish. Do not brand me a racist because I am certainly not. But I will stand by this: Western Christianised Europe has values and experiences worth defending.’ - John Rhys-Davies (played Gimli in Lord of the Rings)
Sunday Times
Friends, Muslims countrymen, lend us your ears - Roger Scruton
Our freedoms, built on loyalty to a shared nationality, are under threat from incomers who don’t want to join inCitizenship consists of a web of reciprocal rights and duties, upheld by a rule of law which stands higher than either party. Although the state enforces the law, it enforces it equally against itself and the citizen. The citizen has rights which the state is duty-bound to uphold, and also duties which the state has a right to enforce. Because these rights and duties are defined and limited by the law, citizens have a clear conception of where their freedoms end.
Only where people define their social membership in terms of sovereign territory, shared customs and a common history — in other words, the nation — are they able to live in a democratic, law-abiding order. In a nation state people can agree to differ; they can accept being governed by those for whom they did not vote; they can agree equal rights for all religions; they can allow their opponents to speak their minds and influence the political process. But where religion, tribe or family is the dominant form of social membership, despotism is also the political norm.
That is why 70% of the world’s refugees are Muslims, fleeing from states where their religion is the official creed. And it is why all of them are fleeing to the West.
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