Aristophanes penned Lysistrata during the Peloponnesian War, about Greek women who manage to stop the war by withholding sex from their soldier-husbands. In a way, this is what Western women have been doing in the second half of the 20th Century. By leaving the home to work, they have made their sexual favors more dear. By earning their own wages, they have unchained themselves from supplicating reliance on the menfolk. We in the West have had a long time to get used to this transformation, and for the most part we are better off for it. I don’t have the data, but I suspect that societies where women make up more than one third of wage earners have seldom if ever gone to war against each other.
Islam
Shariah by stealth
Immigrant Aydarus Yusuf, who has lived in Britain for 15 years says, in effect, that he does not feel bound by British law. “Us Somalis, wherever we are in the world, we have our own law.” According to the BBC, the 29-year old youth worker wants to ensure that other members of his community remain subject to the law of their ancestors, too. To this end, he helps convene an unofficial Somali court, or “gar”, in southeast London. This group tries both civil and criminal cases, without reference to the English police or England’s 1,000 year old legal infrastructure. This news simply confirmed what many in Britain already suspected. Muslim immigrants and their offspring, who constitute around 2.5% (according to Labour government figures) of the population, are running an underground parallel legal system operated along tribal lines by “elders”.
Episcopalian canon Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, himself a convert from Islam, whose own family immigrated from Guyana and who heads the Institute for The Study of Islam and Christianity, confirms that shariah courts now operate in most larger cities and operate according to their own traditions.
Dr Sookhdeo said, “The government has not been straight about this.”
Why this pinprick in the dyke must be plugged stat
Newly elected Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim, must not be allowed to take his oath of office on the Koran.
First, as Town Hall columnist Dennis Prager wrote, Mr Ellison does not get to decide how he takes his oath. America does. Second, it has not bothered America�s many Jewish Congresspeople down through the decades to take their oath on the Bible, although the New Testament has no religious significance to them. Similarly, atheists/securalists have voiced no objections. This is the way you get sworn into the Congress of The United States of America.
But most important of all, Mr Ellison�s stated intention is yet one more Islamic attempt to breach the dyke to allow Islamic habits, customs and laws to seep in slowly at first, and then gain in volume until the dyke is breached. The aggression of this religion cannot be overestimated and those who surrender one-quarter of an inch to people like Mr Ellison, thinking it really doesn�t matter and �we all worship the same God�, are mistaken.
But most critically, what most people are unaware of is, an oath taken on the Koran means absolutely nothing. Muslims are instructed from childhood that they may take such an oath and lie � if it is to advance the cause of Islam. In other words, they cannot swear in a court of law, on their Koran, �No. I swear I did not rob that bank� if they really did. That�s a sin. But if it is to advance the islamic cause, then it�s not only OK, but is to be desired.
That is why such reasonable sounding requests must be resisted. A Muslim can swear on the Koran that he does not know a suspected terrorist, has never even heard of him and has no idea if he is stockpiling chemical weapons in his basement. Because the lies are to advance the cause of Dar-es-Salam � the house of islam � they are seen as a righteous grabbing of an advantage in the 1500 year war with Christianity and Western civilization.
This new Congressman must not be indulged. Mr Ellison is not big enough to defy America, and neither is his belief system.
The future doesn’t belong to Islam, thank you very much
Mark Steyn is, as so often in the last years, claiming yet again that the future belongs to Islam.
Point is, demographics aren’t quite as decisive as they used to be, and large, uneducted masses are mostly a danger to themselves nowadays. Not to mention the fact that there only are 15 million Muslims in all of Europe and that their birthrates also aren’t all that high in several countries. German Muslims have a birthrate below replacement level, at about 1.8 babies per woman, and it is rapidly declining even further. The danger of substantial Muslim immigration also is very slim. Our expulsion policies towards Third World immigrants already are inhumane in their draconian harshness, and they are only going to get harsher over time. ‘Our’ Muslims also aren’t a monolithic mass. Especially in Germany we have a lot of Alevites, whom ‘mainstream’ Muslims consider heretics. There is no way that the Alevites make common cause with the more conventional Muslims whom they in return see as a threat to themselves.
As to age structure: The relative proportion of young people is higher than in the ‘native’ populations, but in absolute terms the ‘native’ still have hands down more young people of fighting age, as well as the weapons and all the other stuff that is needed to keep the barbarians at bay. And we will do that, and more, once we feel seriously threatened. Most Europeans so far simply don’t, and there is no concrete danger you could point to, except in some French and Belgian cities. And the Muslim ‘youths’ wouldn’t last more than 10 minutes if they ever tried that crap on French farmers, rather than the urban types, so those specific problems will stay localized.
Mark Steyn is a smart fellow, but when he goes on and on about demographics he is reminding me of the statisticians who claimed in the 1850s that by 1910 the streets of New York would be covered with four feet of horse manure. They couldn’t have foreseen the motorcar. Steyn’s arguments aren’t quite like that, more like that of one of those statisticians who’d refuse to change his opinion even after the invention of the motorcar. He simply isn’t thinking outside of the box. Demographics isn’t what it used to be, the more populous country or ethic group doesn’t win automatically anymore, not for decades in fact. Such a large population would have to invest a lot of time and money into the education and training of its young, and as it happens Islam does exactly the opposite. If there ever are serious conflicts betwen ‘native’ Europeans and Muslim immigrants, the Muslims won’t have a chance.
Symposium on the Pope’s Regensberg Speech at U of C on 11.01.06
I received the following today:
The Lumen Christi Institute presents a symposium at the University of Chicago on Benedict XVI on “Faith, Reason and the University”: The Regensburg Address in Context, with remarks by Hans Joas, University of Chicago, Michael Kremer, University of Chicago, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Northwestern University, Paul Griffiths, University of Illinois, Chicago. Wed., Nov. 1, 2006, 4:00-6:00 PM, Room 101, Hinds Lab. for Geophysical Sciences, 5734 South Ellis Avenue. For more information and the revised text of the Pope’s address (with footnotes), see the notice at www.lumenchristi.org.
We have had some discussion of this speech and its meaning and impact on the blog. If you are able to get to Hyde Park for this symposium, I am sure that it will be good, as all Lumen Christi events always are.
Incidentally, I think the best thing I have seen about the speech was this piece by Lee Harris.