From Jihad Watch :
Three clips at YouTube from the British series Dispatches:
January 17, 2007
January 14, 2007
MANWHILE IN UK
London, Jan 07: An undercover investigation by a leading daily has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain’s leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organization praised by Prime Minister Tony Blair.
According to the ‘Observer’, secret video footage revealed Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the Hijab, and to create a “state within a state.”
Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain’s leading Islamic institutions.
A forthcoming channel 4 dispatches programme paints an alarming picture of how preachers in some of Britain’s most moderate mosques are urging followers to reject British laws in favour of those of Islam.
Leaders of the mosques have expressed concern at the preachers activities, saying they were unaware such views were being disseminated.
At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by UK Islamic Mission (Ukim), an organization that maintains 45 mosques in Britain and which Tony Blair has said “is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities,” a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban.
In response to the news that a British Muslim soldier was killed fighting the Taliban, the Speaker declares: “the hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.”
Another Speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. “You cannot accept the rule of non-Muslim,” a preacher, Dr Ijaz Mian, tells a meeting held within the mosque. “We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.”
The 12-month investigation also recorded a deputy headmaster of an Islamic high school in Birmingham telling a conference at the Sparkbrook mosque that he disagrees with using the word democracy.
“They should call it… Kuffrocracy, that’s their plan. It’s the hidden cancerous aim of these people.” The Darul Uloom School said it no longer employed the teacher and that one of the reasons he resigned “was the incompatibility of many of his opinions with the policies of the school.”
Inside the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, a preacher is recorded saying, “Allah has created the woman deficient.” A satellite broadcast from the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, beamed into the green lane mosque suggests that Muslim children should be hit if they don’t pray: “when he is seven, tell him to go and pray, and start hitting them when they are 10.”
Another preacher is heard saying that if a girl ‘doesn’t wear Hijab, we hit her.’
In a statement to channel 4, Lord Ahmed, the convener of the government’s preventing extremism taskforce, said he was worried about the programme’s consequences. “While I appreciate that exaggerated opinions make good TV, they do not make for good community relations.”
http://www.zeenews.com/articles.asp?aid=346499&sid=WOR&ssid=
Meanwhile in la Franwce: The 11th Arrondissement
FROM: http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/
This Figaro article describes the violence in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. It begins with a description by Didier of his ordeal:
“I met a couple in a tony bar in the Oberkampf neighborhood. The girl was a pretty brunette, his head was shaved. We got on well, had a vodka, then they invited me to take a ride in their car to have another drink somewhere else. From there on it’s a black hole, until I realized that several guys were pulling me out of the trunk (“habitacle”) and punching and kicking me…”
His face swollen, his eyes black and blue, a broken knee…his memory vanished: he had been drugged with opiates. “A typically brutal assault” was the resigned judgment of the judiciary police.
Note: Didier may have asked for it, but that is not true of all victims. In a situation of rampant crime, there are always some fools who seem unaware of the dangers. I’m not saying he deserved it, I’m saying he let himself open to it.
Since January 2006…no fewer than 1100 persons have filed a complaint of physical violence merely in the 11th arrondissement. Almost 450 victims have been attacked for no reason, or 17% more than last year. The other 650 were attacked, then robbed of their belongings by gangs.
“The 11th arrondissement, the most densely populated in Paris, contains almost 1500 “License IV” establishments. (This refers to the level of liquor license)…Alcohol starts its ravages on Thursday night. Many of those arrested spend time in a detoxification cell before being sent before the judge. Here, almost a third of the crimes reported are of a violent nature,” says Commissioner Jean-Loup Chaluleau…
At the beginning of the summer, the local neighborhood police forces dismantled a gang of young thugs who had accumulated 17 extremely violent assaults in an area of one square kilometer, approximatively… Since October, a new wave of 35 barbaric acts, committed in the lobbies of apartment buildings, have been reported.
The police data speak volumes. According to the circumstances the perpetrators, from 3 to 7 in number, concealed by hoods, from the ranks of the immigrants (“issus de l’immigration”), aged 14 to 16, about 6 feet tall, “seize the victim’s head and deliver knee-kicks,” “grab him by the hair, then punch him,” “seize him by the throat and strangle him with their arm.” The victims, of both sexes, are between 15 and 75 years old. “If they obey without a word, they may receive just a slap…Sometimes, the gang continues to deliver volleys of punches even when the theft has been completed…”
The assailants work barehanded, sometimes brandishing a knife or a paper cutter. Their booty, often trivial, comes down to a cell phone, and iPod or a credit card. Lieutenant Olivier Barge of the crime squad admits, “Muggings are among the most difficult crimes to clarify…By definition, the victims robbed of their cell phone cannot call us. Furthermore, attacks committed behind an entry door make it difficult to catch them in the act.”
Finally, the victims are so shocked that they give confused descriptions of their attackers who act swiftly in the space of 30 seconds and disappear into a subway station. “It’s like hunting for a gust of wind” laments one officer…Recently a mother was knocked to the ground by two unidentified persons. Her head struck the curb. She began to vomit, and developed a hematoma of the brain. She underwent emergency brain surgery at Saint-Antoine hospital. At 27, she almost lost her life for 30 euros.
Note: my map reminds me that the 11th arrondissement lies between Place de la République, Place de la Bastille, la Nation, and the Père Lachaise cemetery. I only remember it as being working-class, a bit depressing, but nothing like what is described above. Père Lachaise (actually in the 20th arrondissement) was one of my favorite spots in Paris.
The photo is from the anti-CPE riots last year. I cannot provide a link.
Meanwhile in la Franwce: The 11th Arrondissement
FROM: http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/
This Figaro article describes the violence in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. It begins with a description by Didier of his ordeal:
“I met a couple in a tony bar in the Oberkampf neighborhood. The girl was a pretty brunette, his head was shaved. We got on well, had a vodka, then they invited me to take a ride in their car to have another drink somewhere else. From there on it’s a black hole, until I realized that several guys were pulling me out of the trunk (“habitacle”) and punching and kicking me…”
His face swollen, his eyes black and blue, a broken knee…his memory vanished: he had been drugged with opiates. “A typically brutal assault” was the resigned judgment of the judiciary police.
Note: Didier may have asked for it, but that is not true of all victims. In a situation of rampant crime, there are always some fools who seem unaware of the dangers. I’m not saying he deserved it, I’m saying he let himself open to it.
Since January 2006…no fewer than 1100 persons have filed a complaint of physical violence merely in the 11th arrondissement. Almost 450 victims have been attacked for no reason, or 17% more than last year. The other 650 were attacked, then robbed of their belongings by gangs.
“The 11th arrondissement, the most densely populated in Paris, contains almost 1500 “License IV” establishments. (This refers to the level of liquor license)…Alcohol starts its ravages on Thursday night. Many of those arrested spend time in a detoxification cell before being sent before the judge. Here, almost a third of the crimes reported are of a violent nature,” says Commissioner Jean-Loup Chaluleau…
At the beginning of the summer, the local neighborhood police forces dismantled a gang of young thugs who had accumulated 17 extremely violent assaults in an area of one square kilometer, approximatively… Since October, a new wave of 35 barbaric acts, committed in the lobbies of apartment buildings, have been reported.
The police data speak volumes. According to the circumstances the perpetrators, from 3 to 7 in number, concealed by hoods, from the ranks of the immigrants (“issus de l’immigration”), aged 14 to 16, about 6 feet tall, “seize the victim’s head and deliver knee-kicks,” “grab him by the hair, then punch him,” “seize him by the throat and strangle him with their arm.” The victims, of both sexes, are between 15 and 75 years old. “If they obey without a word, they may receive just a slap…Sometimes, the gang continues to deliver volleys of punches even when the theft has been completed…”
The assailants work barehanded, sometimes brandishing a knife or a paper cutter. Their booty, often trivial, comes down to a cell phone, and iPod or a credit card. Lieutenant Olivier Barge of the crime squad admits, “Muggings are among the most difficult crimes to clarify…By definition, the victims robbed of their cell phone cannot call us. Furthermore, attacks committed behind an entry door make it difficult to catch them in the act.”
Finally, the victims are so shocked that they give confused descriptions of their attackers who act swiftly in the space of 30 seconds and disappear into a subway station. “It’s like hunting for a gust of wind” laments one officer…Recently a mother was knocked to the ground by two unidentified persons. Her head struck the curb. She began to vomit, and developed a hematoma of the brain. She underwent emergency brain surgery at Saint-Antoine hospital. At 27, she almost lost her life for 30 euros.
Note: my map reminds me that the 11th arrondissement lies between Place de la République, Place de la Bastille, la Nation, and the Père Lachaise cemetery. I only remember it as being working-class, a bit depressing, but nothing like what is described above. Père Lachaise (actually in the 20th arrondissement) was one of my favorite spots in Paris.
The photo is from the anti-CPE riots last year. I cannot provide a link.
Why Are Arabs Upset by Saddam’s Execution? – Efraim Karsh (New Republic)
- While Saddam Hussein’s execution was greeted with delight by many of his victims – Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Iraqi Shia – it also generated widespread criticism among many Arabs and Muslims. This evokes one of the more confounding paradoxes relating to Saddam – the wide discrepancy between his actual track record and the adulation in which he was held by non-Iraqi Arabs.
- Saddam transformed Iraq into the most repressive police state in the world, where a joke or a reported thought could cost a person his life, where tens of thousands of civilians were brutally murdered by their government, and where millions starved while their unelected ruler spent incredible sums of money on monuments and palaces for himself.
- Saddam embroiled his country in a string of catastrophic foreign adventures that claimed more than one million lives and wrought untold physical and economic wreckage. Upon his ascendance in 1979, Iraq was a regional economic superpower, boasting some $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves. Twenty-three years later, it had been reduced to dire poverty and underdevelopment, with tens of billions in foreign debt.
- Why has such an abysmal record been widely applauded by Arabs and Muslims?
- It is the Middle East’s violent political culture that has created and perpetuated the monstrosity of Saddam (and his ilk). Only when this culture is fully eradicated will the region’s inhabitants be able to look forward to a better future. Saddam’s execution, at long last, sets a precedent of holding a local tyrant accountable for his crimes.The writer is head of the Mediterranean Studies Program at King’s College, University of London.
January 10, 2007
Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones.
by Steve Sailer
In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.
—Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam
It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard’s Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery—that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities—was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn’t dared announce it “until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it ‘would have been irresponsible to publish without that.’”
In a column headlined “Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity,” Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of “civic engagement,” a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:
When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. ‘They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,’ said Prof Putnam. ‘The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.’
Lloyd noted, “Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’”
As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust, Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay left him feeling betrayed, calling it “by two degrees of magnitude, the worst experience I have ever had with the media.” To Putnam’s horror, hundreds of “racists and anti-immigrant activists” sent him e-mails congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.
Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn’t cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was “almost criminal,” Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnam’s talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself. For example, Putnam’s line—“What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us”—sounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brecht’s parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet regime: “Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001 in a Los Angeles Times article entitled “Love Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.” Reporter Peter Y. Hong recounted, “Those who live in more homogeneous places, such as New Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with friends and are more involved in community affairs or politics than residents of more cosmopolitan areas, the study said.”
Putnam’s discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a civic betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. My wife and I lived for 12 years in Chicago’s Uptown district, which claims to be the most diverse two square miles in America, with about 100 different languages being spoken. She helped launch a neighborhood drive to repair the dilapidated playlot across the street. To get Mayor Daley’s administration to chip in, we needed to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer laborers.
This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The most obvious stumbling block was that it’s hard to talk neighbors into donating money or time if they don’t speak the same language as you. Then there’s the fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism work—namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental picture of what a park should look like. For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But most of the immigrant ladies from more southerly countries stick to the shade, since their cultures discriminate in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?
The high crime rate didn’t help either. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the local public-housing project.
Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their compatriots in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war.
Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasn’t related to, much less count on the government for an even break. If the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75, they wouldn’t be so proficient at running family-owned restaurants on Argyle Street today. But they might still have their own country.
In the end, boring old middle-class, English-speaking, native-born Americans (mostly white, but with some black-white couples) did the bulk of the work. When the ordeal of organizing was over, everybody seemed to give up on trying to bring Uptown together for civic improvement for the rest of the decade.
The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in history’s cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.
Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun’s analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussia’s border with the Balts and Slavs and Austria’s border with the Slavs and Magyars.
Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the “long civic generation” that reached its peak in the 1940s and ’50s.
Half a millennium after Ibn Khaldun, Alexis de Tocqueville famously attributed much of America’s success to its “forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”
The transformation of economics into a technical rather than empirical field discouraged hard thinking about co-operation. It was much simpler to create mathematical models based on the assumption that rational individual self-interest drove human behavior, even though that perspective could hardly explain such vast events as the First World War, that abattoir of asabiya.
In the 1990s, the importance of civil society was widely talked up as crucial in transitioning post-Soviet states away from totalitarianism, but the free-market economists’ prescription of “shock therapy” prevailed disastrously in Russia, as gangsters looted the nations’ assets.
An important contribution to the scholarly revival came in Francis Fukuyama’s 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity. Fukuyama raised the hot-potato issue that Americans, Northwestern Europeans, and Japanese tend to work together well to create huge corporations, while the companies of other advanced countries, such as Italy and Taiwan, can seldom grow beyond family firms. (As Luigi Barzini remarked in The Italians, only a fool would be a minority shareholder in Sicily, so nobody is one.) Fukuyama prudently ignored, though, the large swaths of the world that are low both in trust and technology, such as Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the lines were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maricón lanes altogether and drove wherever they wanted.
The next year, I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends, trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his credit-card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s. That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans’ beach instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering us were at least as hardworking and ambitious as we were. Mexico’s economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans didn’t seem to team up well beyond family-scale.
In America, you don’t need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, “Public life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power.” Anyone outside the extended family is assumed to have predatory intentions, which explains the famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican families. “Mexicans need few friends,” Riding observed, “because they have many relatives.”
Mexico is a notoriously low-trust culture and a notoriously unequal one. The great traveler Alexander von Humboldt observed two centuries ago, in words that are arguably still true, “Mexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps nowhere in the world is there a more horrendous distribution of wealth, civilization, cultivation of land, and population.” Jorge G. Castañeda, Vicente Fox’s first foreign minister, noted the ethnic substratum of Mexico’s disparities in 1995:
The business or intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are still exceptions, but they are becoming more scarce with the years). By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations: the criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle class, living in style and affluence; the huge, poor, mestizo majority; and the utterly destitute minority of what in colonial times was called the Republic of Indians…
Castañeda pointed out, “These divisions partly explain why Mexico is as violent and unruly, as surprising and unfathomable as it has always prided itself on being. The pervasiveness of the violence was obfuscated for years by the fact that much of it was generally directed by the state and the elites against society and the masses, not the other way around. The current rash of violence by society against the state and elites is simply a retargeting.”
These deep-rooted Mexican attitudes largely account for why, in Putnam’s “Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey,” Los Angeles ended up looking a lot like it did in the Oscar-winning movie “Crash.” I once asked a Hollywood agent why there are so many brother acts among filmmakers these days, such as the Coens, Wachowskis, Farrellys, and Wayans. “Who else can you trust?” he shrugged.
But what primarily drove down L.A.’s rating in Putnam’s 130-question survey were the high levels of distrust displayed by Hispanics. While no more than 12 percent of L.A.’s whites said they trusted other races “only a little or not at all,” 37 percent of L.A.’s Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks.
Some of this white-Hispanic difference stems merely from Latinos’ failure to tell politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust other races. Yet the L.A. survey results also reflect a very real and deleterious lack of co-operativeness and social capital among Latinos. As columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the L.A. Times: “In Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity.”
Since they seldom self-organize beyond the extended family, Los Angeles’s millions of Mexican-Americans make strangely little contribution to local civic and artistic life. L.A. is awash in underemployed creative talent who occupy their abundant spare time putting on plays, constructing spectacular haunted houses each Halloween, and otherwise trying to attract Jerry Bruckheimer’s attention. Yet there is little overlap between the enormous entertainment industry and the huge Mexican-American community.
In late October, I pored over the 64-page Sunday Calendar section of the L.A. Times, which listed a thousand or more upcoming cultural events. I found just seven that were clearly organized by Latinos. While it’s a journalistic cliché to describe Mexican-American neighborhoods as “vibrant,” they aren’t.
Some of this lack of social capital is class-related—Miami indeed has a vibrant Hispanic culture, but it’s anomalous because it attracts Latin America’s affluent and educated. In contrast, Los Angeles is a representative harbinger of America’s future because it imports peasants and laborers.
It’s often assumed that low-trust societies can be fixed just by everyone deciding to trust each other more. But that can only work if people become not just more trusting but more trustworthy.
Although most Asian-Americans originate in low-trust cultures centered around the family, they typically adapt well to middle-class American life because their high degree of honesty makes them dependable neighbors and co-workers. Hispanics in America, in contrast, have a relatively high crime rate—while their imprisonment rate is less than half that of blacks, it is 2.9 times worse than that of whites and 13 times that of Asians. Alarmingly, the Latino crime rate goes up after the immigrant generation, suggesting a troubling future. While many American-born Hispanics assimilate into the middle class, others descend into the gang-ridden underclass. Further, the illegitimacy rate has reached 48 percent among Hispanics (versus 25 percent among whites), and it’s higher among Mexican-Americans born here than among newcomers from Mexico.
The problems caused by diversity can be partly ameliorated, but the handful of techniques that actually work generally appall liberal intellectuals, so we hear about them only when they come under attack.
Putnam points out one success story but draws an unsophisticated lesson: “I think we can do a lot to push change along more rapidly. There was a lot of racial tension around the time of the Vietnam War. Now, polls show that US military personnel have many more friendships across ethnic lines than civilians. If officers were told they wouldn’t make colonel if they were seen to discriminate, they changed.”
Imposing martial law on the rest of America might prove impractical, however. And negative sanctions can hardly account fully for the growth of positive relationships within the military.
One important aspect that Putnam ignores is the military’s relentless use of IQ tests. From 1992-2004, the military accepted almost no applicants for enlistment who scored below the 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. This eliminated within the ranks the majority of the IQ gap that causes so much discord in civilian America. Contra John Kerry, enlistees of all races averaged above the national mean in IQ: white recruits scored 107, Hispanics 103, and blacks 102.
Another untold story is the beneficial effect on race relations of the growth of Christian fundamentalism. Among soldiers and college football players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians. According to military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic, “The rise of Christian evangelicalism had helped stop the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army.” And that has helped build bridges among the races. Military sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote in All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way, “Perhaps the most vivid example of the ‘blackening’ of enlisted culture is seen in religion. Black Pentecostal congregations have also begun to influence the style of worship in mainstream Protestant services in post chapels. Sunday worship in the Army finds both the congregation and the spirit of the service racially integrated.”
Similarly, it’s now common to see college football coaches leading their teams in prayer. Fisher DeBerry, the outstanding coach of the Air Force Academy, who has led players with no hope of making the NFL to a record of 169-108-1, hung a banner in the locker room bearing the Fellowship of Christian Athletes’ Competitor’s Creed, which begins, “I am a Christian first and last.” When the administration found out, he was asked to take it down.
Because policymakers almost certainly won’t do what it would take to alleviate the harms caused by diversity—indeed, they won’t even talk honestly about what would have to be done—it’s crazy to exacerbate the problem through more mass immigration. As the issue of co-operation becomes ever more pressing, the quality of intellectual discourse on the topic declines—as Putnam’s self-censorship revealed—precisely because of a lack of trust due to the mounting political power of “the diverse” to punish frank discussion. 
________________________________________
Youth and war, a deadly duo
Gangland slayings in the Palestinian territories this week have pitted the Islamist gunmen of Hamas against the secular forces of Fatah. The killings defy civilised norms: in December even children were targeted for murder. But the killings also defy political common sense. Ariel Sharon’s wall cuts terrorists off from Israeli targets and what happens? The violence – previously justified with the cause of a Palestinian homeland – continues as if nothing had changed, merely finding its outlet in a new set of targets. This makes it appear that Palestinian violence has never really been about a “cause” at all. The violence is, in a strange way, about itself.
Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist and genocide researcher at the University of Bremen, has an explanation for why this might be so. Since its publication in 2003, his eccentric and eye-opening Sons and World Power* (not available in English) has become something of a cult book. In Mr Heinsohn’s view, when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The “causes” in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such “youth bulges” now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.
Between 1988 and 2002, 900m sons were born to mothers in the developing world and a careful demographer could almost predict the trouble spots. In the decade leading up to 1993, on the eve of the Taliban takeover, the population of Afghanistan grew from 14m to 22m. By the end of this generation, Afghanistan will have as many people under 20 as France and Germany combined. Iraq had 5m people in 1950 but has 25m now, in spite of a quarter-century of wars. Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 450,000 to 3.3m, 47 per cent of which is under 15. If
Mr Heinsohn is right, then Palestinian violence of recent months and years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, existed 30 years ago) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the poorest) or humiliation. It is just violence.
More:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/652fa2f6-9d2a-11db-8ec6-0000779e2340.html
December 27, 2006
December 26, 2006
Iran aid the Jihate agains Jews
TEL AVIV [MENL] — Iran has accelerated military training of Hamas.
Israeli officials said up to several hundred Hamas operatives have recently
left the Gaza Strip for Iran. They said the operatives were undergoing
several weeks of military training by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps.
“The Hamas terrorists enter [Egypt’s] Sinai Peninsula and then make their
way to Syria and then Iran,” an official said. “We have been detecting an
increase in the flow of Hamas operatives leaving for Iran over the last two
months.”
Hamas leaders have discussed expanding cooperation with Iran. In November,
Palestinian Authority Interior Minister Said Siyam said Iran agreed to
bolster training and funding to security forces aligned with Hamas.
MEN
Jihate in Bethlehem
Reports that Israel is considering allowing a group of gunmen who were
deported in 2002 after hiding inside the Church of the Nativity to return
home have left some Christian residents here seriously concerned for their
safety.
Thirteen of the gunmen were deported to different European countries, while
another 26 were expelled to the Gaza Strip.
The gunmen, belonging to both Fatah and Hamas, were holed up in the church
for 39 days before European mediators reached a deal with Israel according
to which the fugitives would be permitted to walk out unharmed.
On Saturday, Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat announced that the
deportees would soon be allowed to return to Bethlehem. The announcement was
made following the summit between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and PA Chairman
Mahmoud Abbas in Jerusalem.
While most Muslim residents here welcomed the news about the impending
return of the gunmen, some Christian families expressed fear that the
deportees would once again impose a reign of intimidation and terror in the
city.
“What a wonderful Christmas gift from Father Christmas, Ehud Olmert,”
commented a local businessman. “These men were responsible for a spate of
attacks on Christians, including extortion and confiscation of property.”
He said the biggest threat came from those gunmen belonging to Fatah’s armed
wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, whose members often targeted “peaceful”
Christians.
“I’m aware that most Christians living here are afraid to speak publicly
about the issue, but the overwhelming majority was not unhappy when these
thugs were deported from the city,” he added. “Now some people here are once
again worried because of the reports that they will return. They remember
all the bad things that happened to the Christians when these gunmen were
roaming the streets. People also remember how the gunmen mistreated the
monks and nuns who were held hostage during the raid.”
The families of the Bethlehem deportees have been campaigning for the past
four years to allow their sons to return home. The issue has been raised
several times during meetings between Israeli and PA officials, but no
solution was ever found.
Former prime minister Ariel Sharon agreed at the 2005 Sharm e-Sheikh summit
with Abbas to the formation of a joint committee that would discuss and
solve the problem of the deportees.
Mary, who works in a local tourist agency, said not all the deportees were
involved in anti-Christian actions.
“Some of them were good boys, but there were a few who used their guns and
rifles for criminal purposes,” said the 44-year-old woman. “Some residents
are now worried that these guys will return to the streets of Bethlehem. We
heard that one of them, who is now in Europe, was involved in the murder of
two Christian sisters in Beit Jala.”
Tony [not his real name], who owns a small souvenir shop near Manger Square,
said he and many of his fellow Christians used to live in fear when the
gunmen were around.
“They used to take cigarettes and other goods for free from my neighbors,”
he recalled. “When they were deported from the city, there was a sigh of
relief not only among Christians, but some Muslims as well. Let’s hope that
when they come back, they will return to normal life.”
The few Christians who agreed to go on the record had only words of praise
for the gunmen.
“They are heroes,” said Bishara Hazboun, a 22-year-old university student.
“There’s no difference between Christians and Muslims and we are all one
people. Some people have been trying to defame the fighters by spreading all
kinds of lies against them. I never saw them do any harm.”
Jerusalem Post
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