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That’s how many European Jews have fled to Israel in 2015, almost 80 per cent of them from France.

It’s one thing when Jews emigrate to Israel because they want to. It’s quite another when they run for their lives because they feel they have to.

The Holocaust made the previously unthinkable possible. The current, overwhelmingly Muslim, anti-Semitic attacks make it likely.

Having lost half their population to the previous outburst of racial hatred, the Jews are understandably alert to the slightest signs of a brewing repeat performance. They aren’t being oversensitive, for assaults on Jews have become a daily event in Europe.

Synagogues vandalised, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, Jews abused – it’s not quite Kristallnacht yet, but the signs are worrying for those who can read them.

The other day, after a Muslim fanatic attacked a Jewish teacher with a machete, the Marseille Jewish authority told the Jews not to provoke assaults by wearing skullcaps in public.

Now France has the highest Muslim population in Europe, and the link between such demographics and anti-Semitic incidents is causative.

Except that saying so out loud isn’t the done thing, just as covering up Muslim rapes all over Europe is. A modern tongue, twisted out of shape by the PC dicta, can’t utter the simple words: more Muslims, more crime – including anti-Semitic attacks.

That most Frenchmen aren’t anti-Semitic is as true as it’s irrelevant. Most Germans weren’t anti-Semitic either, but that arithmetic wasn’t much consolation to the six million victims.

It wasn’t just they who died during the war; the total count was closer to 50 million. The difference between the two numerals ought to suffice to make an observation that holds true irrespective of time or place:

A society that fails to nip anti-Semitic escapades in the bud doesn’t just acquiesce in the suffering of Jews. It signs its own death warrant.

It’s true that most outrages are perpetrated not by the indigenous population but by Muslims – most of whom aren’t part of the indigenous population even if native-born.

But that doesn’t exculpate anyone else personally or society collectively. Millions of Muslims should never have been allowed to settle in the West, for they’re viscerally and doctrinally hostile to everything the West stands for.

True, the Holocaust was perpetrated without much Muslim participation. But anti-Semitic violence on that scale was an aberration both to Western morality and religion. Since, unlike the Koran, the founding documents of our civilisation don’t prescribe violence towards Jews, the West was able to lick its moral wounds after the war.

The wounds have now reopened because the West has proved too weak to protect itself against an influx of aliens first, and their propensity for criminal behaviour second. We’ve failed to inform the newcomers that our civilisation isn’t just different but also better than theirs. More important, it’s indeed ours, we like it and intend to keep it by any means at our disposal.

These could include deportation of undesirable elements, stiff sentences for any crimes, especially Islam-inspired ones, ending any Muslim immigration, summary closure of any mosque in which a single anti-Western or anti-Jewish word is uttered.

Alas, a civilisation needs to have self-confidence to act with such resolve, and in the West today that commodity is lacking. That’s why anti-Semitic violence shames us all, not just the Muslims in our midst.

That’s why also we must brace ourselves to face the consequences of our frailty. For it’s not just the Jews who find themselves at the receiving end of Muslim violence.

If Marseille Jews are told not to wear skullcaps today, tomorrow all women will be told to cover themselves head to toe in shapeless black garments (ideally masking the face too) not to provoke rape.

And then people will start taking the law in their own hands. Street battles, like those between the fascists and the communists in pre-war London or Berlin, are far from impossible today.

This could well create troubled waters in which assorted extremists will then fish, and we’re already witnessing the strengthening of the extremists’ electoral muscle all over Europe.

An economic crisis, something certain to happen in the next few years, can provide an ideal backdrop for violent anarchy to descend on Europe.

Though history teaches everything but complacency, complacency seems to be the only lesson we’ve learned. That’s a mistake, for a society unprepared to defend its civilisation doesn’t deserve to keep it.

 

Daniel Finkelstein, The Times Associate Editor, doesn’t think so. In another fulsome encomium to the late David Bowie, he writes: “…pop, with Bowie at its head, saw that consumerism isn’t base and philistine. It can be the ally of artistic endeavour. Commerce, liberty and art, arm-in-arm. That was the great David Bowie.”

Earlier in the piece, Finkelstein opines that Bowie was “undoubtedly one of the artistic geniuses of the past 50 years”. Chaps like Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Glenn Gould or James MacMillan don’t get a look in. The genius slot is occupied.

That Finkelstein knows about art as little as he does about football (about which he writes a regular column), and understands even less, is evident. That he doesn’t even understand the words he uses, equally so.

For consumerism is indeed base and philistine when it’s applied to the higher reaches of the human spirit. For example, when love equates consumerism, it’s reduced to the base level of a Soho whorehouse.

However, Finkelstein’s meaningless waffle wouldn’t merit a comment if it didn’t reflect a wider problem, a malaise that has both afflicted and defined the modern world: a catastrophic loss of mind and soul.

Finkelstein kindly provides an exhaustive illustration of this tragedy, which he however doesn’t see as such: “The most revealing… was his [Bowie’s] response to the question ‘Who are your heroes in real life?’… Bowie replied, truthfully and insightfully: ‘The consumer’.”

If Bowie’s ‘insights’ had been meant to mock Bach, he could have inscribed his CDs with ‘The glory is the consumer’s’, just as Bach inscribed his scores with ‘The glory is God’s’. The difference in motivation is obvious, as is the difference between real art and its modern, philistine perversion.

Anyone needing further persuasion of the difference between art and non-art could do worse than compare a recording of anything at all by Bowie (or any other purveyor of pop) with anything at all by Bach, say his aria Mache dich, mein Herze, rein from St Matthew Passion.

The former is a lewd, primitive caricature of art; the latter, art produced by a genuine creative impulse emulating the outburst of divine energy that brought the world into existence. It’s not for nothing that both Judaism and early Christianity frowned on non-verbal artistic creativity.

A man assuming the role of a creator seemed to them a hair’s breadth away from usurping the role of the Creator – an unspeakable heresy. For example, Clement of Alexandria (d. circa 215) wrote that art contravened not so much the second commandment as the eighth: by displaying creativity, man was stealing God’s prerogative.

Even in pre-Christian times music was seen as something more than just a product to be consumed. Thus Plato: “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

This isn’t the right medium to ponder the philosophical, theological and moral implications of music, or art in general. Suffice it to say that referring to pop effluvia by the misnomer ‘music’ testifies to nothing but the paucity of language.

We often use the same words to describe phenomena that have nothing in common. One man loves God, another loves a woman, a third loves fish and chips – language lags behind the notion it designates or else races far ahead of it.

Hence the likes of Lord Finkelstein see no contradiction between describing Bowie as ‘an artistic genius’ and quoting his cynically crass comment on the identity of his heroes.

Do you think Bach would have answered the same question with ‘Duke Johan Ernst’, Mozart with ‘Prince Lichnowsky’ or Beethoven with ‘Archduke Rudolph’? Yet those were the ‘consumers’ of the most sublime music ever written, the greatest testimony to the divine origin of man.

Pop, on the other hand, supports Darwin’s slapdash theory by only testifying to the simian origin of man, or rather some men. Bach proves the ape isn’t our past; pop proves it’s our future: by severing all links with divinity, man is rapidly forgoing his humanity as well.

Believing, as Finkelstein does, that art can be mass-produced exclusively for commercial purposes betokens woeful ignorance and semantic confusion. Both conditions are lamentable, but not nearly as much as the disease of which they are merely symptoms.

 

P.S. In the spirit of crass commercialism that so fascinates Lord Finkelstein, may I remind you that such issues are pondered at depth in my book How the West Was Lost, now available as a paperback from Amazon or directly from the publisher, I.B. Tauris, London.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Church of England hasn’t been into canonisations for a while but, judging by the front-page eulogies in the press, an exception may be made in David Bowie’s case.

Allow me first to declare a personal interest in David Bowie: there is none. When he was alive I knew he had something to do either with pop music or the drug trade, not that there’s much difference between the two.

Now he’s dead, I’ve found out he was actually some kind of singer of, putting it kindly, ambivalent sexuality and a strong propensity to snort cocaine. In short, he possessed perfect credentials to be eulogised as ‘a legend’ and ‘a great musician’.

Obeying the dictum of speaking no evil of the dead, I shan’t say much else about his personality, especially since even the panegyrics fail to portray it as anything other than trivial. I’m interested in Bowie not for what he was but for what he represents.

Judging by the scraps of his songs one can’t help hearing on every broadcast channel, he wasn’t a great musician. He wasn’t a musician at all. His ilk are merely both the totems and the shamans of a pernicious, toxic cult.

The purveyors of this cult overtly or implicitly favour satanic paraphernalia to dress up their rites, a cross between a Nuremberg rally and an orgy. Typically they perform in clouds of billowing smoke, hinting at hell with little subtlety.

Their puny musical content is drowned in the clinically deafening din of electric and electronic instruments, belting out the same three chords on which the whole structure of pop ‘music’ rests.

The accompanying roar coming from thousands of throats doesn’t reflect fine musical sensibilities. It’s a hateful chant of cult worshippers, the battle cry of victorious barbaric modernity.

Pop music expresses the true nature of modernity, which is more or less circumscribed by its hatred of Western tradition. Both the shamans and the worshippers of the cult seek, wittingly or unwittingly,  to destroy our civilisation, even though they don’t mind availing themselves of the riches it can deliver.

In fact, pop has become big business, perhaps the biggest of all. Illiterate, tone-deaf adolescents can become billionaires overnight, provided they can tickle the naughty bits of culturally inept audiences in a particularly effective way. They belch their anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank, oblivious to the paradox, perhaps even unfamiliar with this three-syllable word.

At the beginning pop remotely resembled music, but that was quickly lost. More and more, it began to acquire overtly satanic characteristics. More and more, it began to appeal not just to the darker side of human nature but to the sulphuric swamp concealed underneath it. Pop went the weasel of our civilisation.

Pop’s appeal is quasi-religious, in the same sense in which the antichrist is the negative image of Christ. While Jesus died on the cross to redeem our sins, the apostles of the new cult would commit suicide or else die of alcoholism, drug overdose or in due course of AIDS. At a pinch even cancer, of the kind that killed Bowie, can qualify as a trampoline to redemptive immortality. 

Improbably, the dead shamans are portrayed as a kind of innocent victims of some unidentified enemy who contextually can only be ‘the establishment’. Worshippers of the new cult pretend not to realise that they themselves are the establishment now. Iconoclasm always lives on even after the icons have been smashed.

Hence all those Jimmy Hendrixes, Freddie Mercuries, Amy Winehouses and David Bowies gave their lives for a good cause. They are martyrs at the altar of anomie and hatred.

Amazingly, even our formerly reputable newspapers not only praise the cultish martyrs but claim they set a great example for Christian churches to follow. Hence Hugo Rifkind, whose idiocy stands out even against the generally abysmal level of The Times, says the late Bowie could teach the Anglican Church the meaning of tolerance towards LGBTI people:

“LGBTI stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex’. Bowie, at times, appeared to be at least three of those things, and arguably four. Still… those whom the church left ‘abandoned and alone’, he championed and made his own.”

Tolerance means accepting with equanimity something one dislikes. You and I may be tolerant of cannibals, but a cannibal wouldn’t be. He’d be one of them.

Thus those who practise sexual perversions find it easier to be tolerant of such practices than would those who find them distasteful. Obviously, Mr Rifkind is so carried away by his own anomie that he’s unable to notice that he’s talking in logical solecisms. He’s just dying to state his credentials as someone who belongs.

That the Bowies of this world find mass adulation indicts not so much them as all of us. A society that can see them as anything other than an unpleasant sideshow fails aesthetically, culturally and philosophically. Above all it fails morally, and that is a truly serious matter.

Still, those of us who know how must pray for David Bowie’s soul – which will be a true test of tolerance.  

 

 

 

     

 

 

This morning I rang my friend Dave to ask him a few things, but found him unable to talk. He’s in deep mourning for David Bowie, whose death, mumbled Dave, courageously fighting tears, is “a great loss”.

Dave also referred to his deceased namesake as “a music legend”, which humbled me deeply. I thought no name of a music legend, from Bach to Offenbach, would fail to ring a bell with me but now, thanks to Dave, I know I was wrong.

Hence, even though I wasn’t entirely sure who David Bowie was, I readily agreed he was a legend and offered my condolences. My probing questions could wait, I said to Dave.

Now Dave is a lovely chap, but he has this little idiosyncrasy: an aversion to giving straight answers to straight questions. I don’t hold this against him – he’s a politician after all.

Since exercises in futility aren’t part of my fitness regimen, I hardly every ask him yes or no questions face to face. However, there’s no harm in doing so in writing – this medium gives Dave time to ponder the queries and respond to them as evasively as only he can.

Actually I’m maligning the poor chap. Sometimes he does give straight answers to questions, as he did yesterday when asked if his government had made any provisions for leaving the EU should the referendum go that way.

Dave’s reply was long and couched in political cant, but anyone fluent in that language could discern a firm ‘no’ underneath. This has led some commentators to accuse Dave of irresponsibility, which only goes to show how little they understand my good friend.

Dave isn’t irresponsible; he’s confident. He knows he can make sure the right people will never cast wrong votes. And even if they do, he’ll always be able to count on his Brussels ringmasters to invalidate the referendum and tell us to vote again until we get it right.

In fact, the first three questions I’m about to pose to my grieving friend deal with that very issue. After that, it’s free-for-all, in no particular order: 

1. Do you really think ‘Brexit isn’t the right answer’?

2. Is there one rational reason for Britain to stay in the EU (your desire to be EU president one day doesn’t count as one such reason)?

3. Are you going to use bogus concessions from the EU to trick the electorate into voting to stay?

4. Does reducing our armed forces to the pre-Napoleonic level compromise our security?

5. Are various crimes committed by Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in any way motivated by Islam?

6. Is Britain really enriched by an uncontrolled influx of migrants from hostile cultures?

7. In the light of current events, do you have any second thoughts about the Schengen Agreement?

8. Is regaining control of our borders more important than being on good terms with Angie and Rumpy-Pumpy?

9. Does comprehensive education work, in the sense in which education is supposed to work?

10. Is the £140 million you’ve committed to replacing vile council estates adequate to the task? (It’s only enough for 1,400 flats – on average, one flat costs £100,000 to build.)

11. Does the NHS really benefit from the systematic growth of the administrative staff at the expense of frontline doctors and nurses?

12. Is waiting a fortnight for a GP appointment a good medical practice?

13. Considering that no other European country has a wholly nationalised medicine, do we really know something they don’t?

14. Is there any value to an economic recovery almost entirely driven by borrowing and the inflation in the paper values of properties?

15. Is homosexual marriage consonant with our history, tradition and morality?

16. Is the fact that over 200,000 abortions are performed in Britain every year consonant with those things?

17. Is the welfare state, which effectively replaces the father, good for the family?

18. Is it good for society that half of our children are born out of wedlock?

19. Is it possible to run the country without such ministries as those for communities, sports, culture, diversity, women and so forth?

20. Is Islam really a religion of peace?

No sooner had I finished putting these down on paper that I e-mailed the list to Dave, asking him facetiously if he’s capable of giving unequivocal yes or no answers. He proved that he is, by instantly replying ‘No!’.

 

 

The way German Muslims chose to celebrate New Year’s Eve rather diminishes one’s confidence in their acceptance of sexual equality.

Nor can one be entirely sure that Muslims in general are imbued with the Western ethos governing matters of the flesh. Our Muslim friends don’t seem to get their heads around the fact that here in the West men ask for permission before having sex with women.

Whether the permission is conveyed semantically or semiotically doesn’t really matter – the woman must be a willing and therefore equal partner.

Men imposing themselves on unwilling women can’t possibly regard them as equals or indeed as humans. Women to them have to be chattels or inanimate objects. A man doesn’t ask a cup whether it wants to have tea poured into it, does he?

My friends Barack Hussein, Dave and Angela explained to me that it’s sheer coincidence that the men raping women en masse all over Europe happen to be Muslims.

That tendency has nothing to do with Islam. Gangs of young Muslim men coordinate group attacks on women across Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland not because they are Muslims but because they’re young men. Young men do that sort of thing, don’t they?

Yes, well, they may, sometimes. Similarly young men steal, fight in bars and kill. But – how can I put this without the God of Political Correctness smiting me with his vengeance – such behaviour isn’t regarded as normal, partly because it has no scriptural support in Western religions.

However, and I do realise we’re still firmly lodged in the realm of sheer coincidence, scanning the Koran and the hadith one gets the impression that these scriptural documents, while not explicitly condoning rape, may be interpreted as implicitly not discouraging it either.

“Your women,” says the Koran 2:223, “are your fields, so go into your fields whichever way you like.” Islamic scholars maintain, and I’m sure they’re right, that the verse has to do with the creative variety of ballistic possibilities open to enterprising Muslim men.

But one can also see how some men may see this verse as an endorsement to going into the field with the help of several friends holding the field down while awaiting their turn.

The Koran, 2:228, explains that “Of course, men are a degree above them [women] in status.” Speaking, you understand, purely hypothetically, isn’t it possible that as a result a young man would form in his mind a simple syllogism: I am above both women and china cups in status. I don’t ask a cup whether I may pour tea into it. Ergo…

In any case, one shouldn’t mollycoddle women because, according to the hadith, they are evil to the point of being diabolical: “Evil omen is three things: the horse, the woman and the house.” If so, why not rape a woman? Or for that matter a horse? (One doesn’t see any immediate way of raping a house, except perhaps having it furnished by a modern interior designer.)

And further: “The Prophet said, ‘I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women.’” Hence raping them is a kind of witch hunt, striking a blow for the Prophet – an easy inference, don’t you think?

The Koran 4:24 puts an interesting spin on the Seventh Commandment: “And forbidden to you are wedded wives of other people [so far so good] except those who have fallen in your hands [as prisoners of war].”

This verse was interpreted in the Middle Ages as a direct encouragement to raping women in front of their POW husbands. Now one has to say out of fairness that this practice wasn’t limited to the Islamic world. It also affected adjacent areas influenced by it, such as Russia.

Hence the Kievan prince Vladimir, before he baptised Russia in 988 and subsequently was canonised, had indulged in a spot of public rape too.

For example, in 978 he asked for the hand of the Polotsk Princess Rogneda, which to him didn’t necessarily imply an exclusive relationship (the libidinous prince had 800 wives and concubines). When the proposal was rejected by the girl’s parents, Vladimir captured Polotsk, killed the recalcitrant parents and raped Rogneda in front of his cheering troops.

However, after his baptism Vladimir became more restrained, realising that his new religion frowned on raping women even if they happen to be captured in battle. Islam doesn’t seem to have a similar injunction.

So yes, keeping my finger on the pulse of our PC modernity as I always do, I’m willing to accept that the spate of rapes being perpetrated by Muslims across Europe has nothing to do with Islam. But are you?

Do you also believe it’s purely coincidental that the Swedish city of Malmö, which is home to 100,000 Muslims, has more violent crime in general and rape in particular than the rest of Scandinavia combined?

No, I didn’t think so. This means you aren’t fit to live in a modern world shaped by my friends Barack Hussein, Dave, Angela et al. Abandoning all subterfuge, neither am I.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s distressing to see a boy cry when he’s old enough to be a man. Yet my friend Barack Hussein’s tears were so convincing that even old cynical me couldn’t stop laughing.

What caused Obama’s lachrymose display was the 2012 shooting at a primary school in which 20 children and six adults were killed.

Of course the sole reason for that tragedy was the wide availability of guns, explained the president. And the real culprit wasn’t the chap who pulled the trigger but the pernicious gun lobby that had osmotically communicated the message that open season on children had started.

Hence there was only one thing left for old Barack Hussein to do: bypass Congress and introduce gun control measures through the back door, by executive order.

As a clinching argument, he volunteered the information that he had never owned a gun. Well, even though I’ve never owned a dog, I don’t think they ought to be banned, but then idiotic non sequiturs are the stock in trade of today’s politics.  

The Republicans in Congress screamed bloody murder, as it were. They said the proposed measure was unconstitutional and I’d agree on general principle, what with a gaping deficit on my part of any detailed knowledge about US constitutional subtleties.

What I do know, having perused John Lott’s comprehensive study under the self-explanatory title of More Guns, Less Crime, is that the relationship between the availability of guns and crime rate is inverse.

Hence, unless someone disputed and refuted the reams of in-depth statistical evidence gathered by Dr Lott, ascribing the tragedy that so moved my friend Barack Hussein simply to the availability of firearms is frivolous and manipulative.

But then ‘frivolous and manipulative’ are words that these days adequately describe any public display by any public official anywhere in the West. Nothing new there, though Barack Hussein’s tears get top prize in the histrionics stakes.

Anyone who believes that anything short of applying thespian techniques à la Stanislavsky or else chopping a mound of onions can make a modern politician cry hasn’t studied modern politics closely.

Thus what caught my eye was precisely the cloying, tasteless sentimentality of Barack Hussein’s act, not its puny intellectual content. But then the truth dawned on me.

The moisture streaming down Barack Hussein’s cheeks wasn’t tears of grief. It was tears of joy, satisfaction of a job well done and well rewarded.

It’s just an unsubstantiated thought of mine, but Mr Obama must be an off-the-books employee of the gun-maker Smith & Wesson, or else a secret holder of a large block of shares in the company. Why else would the contents of his speech have been leaked beforehand if not to boost gun sales in anticipation?

If that was the real purpose of Barack Hussein’s action, then it has succeeded spectacularly. Shares in Smith & Wesson have jumped up to their highest mark since 1999, and the Obama family fortune must have moved in the same direction.

If my hypothesis is correct, then this is, and will remain, the only tangible effect of Obama’s announcement. I mean, you don’t really think gun crime will go down as a result, do you?

If you do, I can only quote one of Mr Obama’s predecessors in office by suggesting you read my lips. Murder, by firearms, knives, fists, feet, axes, bottles or what have you, will always be with us not because criminals have access to the aforementioned expedients but because we have criminals.

Therefore the way to reduce the number of murders is to reduce the number of criminals, not the number of guns. And the way to reduce the number of criminals is to destroy or at least mitigate the social conditions that breed them, the welfare state springing to mind first, the laxity of the punitive system second, the stranglehold on effective policing third and so forth.

Of course, just like the poor, criminals will always be with us, for such is the imperfection of human nature. However, human nature is equally imperfect in Switzerland, where there are practically no murders even though every man has a gun, and in Britain, where guns are outlawed and yet the crime rate is going through the roof.

It’s the task of just government to create conditions that discourage the bad part of human nature and encourage the good. This isn’t a goal that can be achieved by legislating against firearms, knives, fists, feet, axes or bottles. And it can be severely jeopardised by governments acting on institutionalised ignorance, dishonesty and self-serving demagoguery.

However, it would be fitting if my friend Barack Hussein, having started his presidency with an ill-deserved Nobel Peace Prize, were to end it with a well-deserved Oscar.

There’s something fatuous and dishonest about arguing for or against Brexit simply on the basis of economics.

The EU is a political, not, as its champions claim, an economic construct. Economic tools are used there only as auxiliary means of either bribery or blackmail.

Hence logically any argument about Brexit should proceed from constitutional and sovereignty premises first, second and tenth.

There can be no valid argument in favour of reversing two millennia of constitutional history for whatever economic gain – even assuming the impossibility of EU membership offering any economic benefits to one of the world’s largest economies.

One doesn’t recall too many Englishmen back in 1940 weighing the economic advantages of being incorporated into Germany and thereby saving the ruinous cost of fighting a war.

The benefits of such submission could have been argued plausibly, and Hitler doubtless would have agreed to much tougher terms than those Cameron allegedly asks from the EU today. Nevertheless, those Spitfires were still providing an expression of incipient euroscepticism.

Britain has nothing to learn about politics from the EU’s main drivers Germany and France, what with their, generously speaking, patchy past. Therefore we must leave that wicked political contrivance just because it’s indeed wicked, political and a contrivance.

This argument is too simple for our fatuous and dishonest elites to understand. Its simple and unvarnished truth is such that it precludes any troubled intellectual waters for them to fish in.

That’s why they insist on putting forth economic arguments, correctly trusting that the British public is ignorant enough to accept bogus calculations as real. After all, the elite’s 60 years’ investment into nurturing such ignorance must pay off.

Somehow The Times has positioned itself at the vanguard of this relentless assault on integrity. There’s hardly a hack there who hasn’t delivered himself of ponderous analysis pro and con Brexit, with the con argument rigged to carry the day. However, Oliver Kamm’s excretions on this subject stand out even against this backdrop.

Mr Kamm’s stock in trade is linguistic permissiveness touching on promiscuity: he attacks anyone daring to suggest that some English usage just may be incorrect. Whatever people say is right because they say it seems to be the underlying premise, which Mr Kamm defends with the agility of a dancer in an alcoholic coma.

But today he turns his clumsy attentions to the usual nonsense about the EU being our sole hope for economic survival. Mr Kamm starts with a couple of unassailable truisms: Britain’s manufacturing is in recession, mainly because of its sluggish productivity growth; our trade balance suffers as a result; as do wage increases in real terms.

These points are worth making, but specifically in the Brexit context they mean nothing – unless an argument can be made that, as a result of the continued vandalising of our constitution, our productivity will increase.

Even Mr Kamm laudably refrains from making such obviously meretricious claims. Instead he says that “The EU is our principal trading partner, accounting for 44.6 per cent of our exports…”

It appears that, arithmetically speaking, our exports outside the EU account for 55.4 per cent of the total, which number seems higher than 44.6. Moreover, Mr Kamm chooses not to notice that, while our exports to the EU are declining, those to the rest of the world are growing.

Hence The Guardian (a paper that can hardly be accused of euroscepticism) comments that the first four months of 2015 “showed that much of the growth in exports came from sales to countries beyond… the European Union. That will reassure businesses… for trade in the eurozone continues to suffer from shaky business and consumer confidence.”

Allow me to translate from The Guardian to human: the eurozone is an economic basket case, and we’re much better off doing business with more reliable partners. What does Mr Kamm have to say about this?

Nothing really, other than that “We don’t have just free trade with our European partners; we have access to a single market of 500 million consumers.” He seems to imply that leaving the EU would put paid to this access, which is patently cloud cuckoo land.

Britain managed to have access to world, and European, markets throughout her history – this without having to transfer her sovereignty to the tender care of the most corrupt setup in Europe, this side of Putin’s Russia.

Mr Kamm warns that by leaving the EU we’ll suffer the same tragic fate that has befallen Norway and Switzerland, which have stayed outside the EU but still have to comply with its regulations without having much of a say in its policies.

I’d be tempted to add that somehow those two countries happen to be Europe’s two most successful economies, but obviously facts won’t make a dent in Mr Kamm’s innermost convictions.

Really, his usual clamour for the advisability of the split infinitive and other grammatical solecisms seems almost sound by comparison.

 

 

Britain has values, declared Dave in his uncompromising New Year message. And these are the values that are well and truly… well, non-negotiable.

Unfortunately, the text released to the public has been edited so tightly that both the subtleties of meaning and the thunder of delivery have been lost.

However, as he always does, Dave did send me the unexpurgated text beforehand. “Alex, me old China,” he said (Dave likes to remind people that he’s just a common bloke when he’s at home, and he’s only ever really at home when in public), “have a read. This is what I really want to say, not the b******s they’re going to publish tomorrow. Djahmean?”

Of course Dave insisted on complete discretion on my part, which I solemnly vowed. “My word’s my bond, Dave,” I said. “I’ll never divulge this original version of your speech.” So here’s the unexpurgated text:

“British values are strong, and they are getting stronger by the minute. Property values especially, and those in my favourite neighbourhoods of Notting Hill and Islington are outstripping the overall mean growth by a wide margin.”

“But it’s not all about property values, although without this narrative our economy would be well and truly… well, less prosperous. We have other values as well: freedom, tolerance, responsibility, loyalty, to name just a few. And these matter to us at least as much as the price of a semi-detached, four-bedroom, two-bath house in Notting Hill.

“These are the values threatened by a seething hatred of the West, one that turns so many people against their own country.

“They don’t seem to understand the concept of tolerance and loyalty. But they won’t defeat us. For we – well, false modesty aside, I – have come up with a sure-fire way of countering their poisonous narrative of grievance and resentment.

“In essence, without boring you with too many details, we’ll give them nothing to grieve or resent. The narrative of tolerance means being ready to amend our ways, accommodating those good, peaceful people of the Muslim persuasion who find our ways so objectionable that they are prepared to blow themselves up on public transport.

“We are not going to appease the extremists. We are going to take their ideology apart piece by piece. For, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the best way to overcome an ideology is to yield to it.

“Islam, as we all know, is a religion of peace, and desire for peace is one of those British values that are well and truly… well, indispensable.

“We’ll ask, ‘You resent every reminder that Britain used to be a Christian nation?’ Worry not, we are ready to become more Muslim than Christian to make you abandon your evil ideology.

“You’re upset that the English common law still holds sway in those tiny parts of our jurisprudence that don’t come down to us from Brussels? Not a problem: you can live by Sharia in your own communities, with the English common law well and truly… well, invalidated.”

“You lament the relatively small size of your communities? Point taken: we’ll admit millions of your coreligionists from other countries just to keep you company and make you happy.

“For, as any teacher will tell you, it’s easier to instruct people who are next to you than those hundreds of miles away.

“How else can we inculcate people around the world with British values, and I don’t just mean property values, everyone seems to grasp those with no outside help, if not by bringing those potential pupils to Britain, where those values are well and truly… well, flourishing.

“This is the narrative we wish to narrate forcefully and narratively. Because we have great confidence in – indeed we revel in – our way of life.

“Our way of life constitutes, narratively speaking, the greatest narrative of British values. And there’s no British value that my government can’t – or won’t – well and truly… well, uphold.”

Having read Dave’s speech, I immediately rang him on the dog, to use his parlance.

“Dave,” I said, “Churchill’s blood, sweat and tears speech has nothing on your uncompromising oratory. He only rallied the nation to fight a war. You’re rallying it to avoid one – and the best way of doing so is to surrender in advance.”

“Ta, mate,” said Dave. “You really understand me – and my narrative.”   

 

 

 

 

 

 

The friend I’m talking about is the columnist Edward Lukas. I can only profess my friendship for Mr Lukas vicariously, for I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him.

And the demise I mention has nothing to do with his dying, an event I hope won’t happen for many years. No, it’s just that after his article The EU’s Empire Is a Mess but We Must Stick by It I’m not sure I feel very friendly towards Mr Lukas.

My previous warm feelings were based on his articles about Putin’s Russia, for the columnist Lukas is one of the few pundits who see that kleptofascist state for the global menace it is.

Possessing such clarity of vision despite the fog of ignorant effluvia enveloping Putin in our press takes an analytical, dispassionate mind impervious to intellectual fashion and ideological befuddlement. One would naturally hope that such admirable qualities would be transferred on to other areas that catch Mr Lukas’s interest, affecting his comments on other menaces threatening us all.

Such as the EU, a contrivance not yet as violent as Putin’s Russia but rivalling it for corruption, mendacity and most refreshing amorality. Alas, as Mr Lukas’s article shows, when writing on this subject he leaves his intellectual assets behind, relying instead on meaningless, factually incorrect waffle, of the kind we gratefully receive from Dave, George and their jolly friends.

Why must we ‘stick by’ the EU? After all, such adherence involves denying two millennia of English, subsequently British, political history in the course of which England demonstrated to an envious world her most glorious achievement: the knowledge of how to run a country in a just, balanced, relatively nonviolent, civilised way.

At the heart of this glorious achievement, recognised as such by friend and foe alike, lies Britain’s unique sovereignty based on the monarch, Parliament and, in the phrase of my good friend Gerard Batten, the monarch in Parliament.

This sovereignty by definition has to be compromised, nay abandoned, when it has to be pooled in one giant concoction with the sovereignties of other countries whose political track record is, to be kind about it, less admirable.

Make no mistake about it: this is a tremendous, cataclysmic sacrifice to make, and it can only be made for overwhelmingly persuasive reasons. Alas, so far I haven’t heard a single one that doesn’t fall short of overwhelmingly persuasive, instead touching upon false, disingenuous and daft. And my former friend Edward Lukas hasn’t changed this lamentable situation at all.

He praises the EU for possessing “the most long-standing bulwark of the empire… the competition directorate, a formidable bureaucratic weapon… charged with maintaining the integrity of the single market. Without it, monopolies and goverment subsidies would disadvantage consumers.”

This is basic economic illiteracy that shouldn’t see the light of day lest both the author and the paper be grossly embarrassed. To start with, ‘competition directorate’ is an obvious oxymoron (we can just about accommodate, say, a ‘watchdog’), especially when qualified by the adjective ‘bureaucratic’.

Mr Lukas’s concern for the interests of consumers is truly touching, and his belief that government subsidies would be inimical to such interests is laudable. But surely he must know that the whole EU economy is one giant subsidy, a transfer of funds from competitive economies to moribund ones by way of bribing them into docility? What does he think, say, the Common Agricultural Policy is, if not a competition-stifling subsidy? What does he think happened in Greece a few months ago?

Surely a man of some intelligence must realise that the EU is a political, not economic entity, and claiming the opposite means just repeating EU propaganda? Apparently not.

Then Mr Lukas displayes his evidently sole area of expertise by correctly describing Russia’s gas export business as “abusive and discriminatory”. However, he then undoes his good work by crediting the EU with destroying it, “to the huge benefit of those once in its grip.”

What degraded (far from ‘destroyed’) this business, Mr Lukas, isn’t the EU that has been playing lickspittle to the KGB junta for decades, but the global collapse in hydrocarbon prices, augmented by the US-led advances in hydraulic fracturing. As a result, it became feasible for European countries to seek alternative sources of oil and gas, those not run by organised crime. The EU with its protectionist practices isn’t so much a facilitator of this process as a huge hindrance to it.

What else? Oh yes: “It is now possible to see how the common currency can work.” Exactly what made Mr Lucas’s eagle eye so acutely penetrating? The current and recent performance in the Eurozone, in which the euro acts as an unmistakeable millstone pulling struggling economies to the bottom? The plight of France being murdered by German competition because she can’t control and devalue her currency? Really.

And so on, in the same vein. Practically the only mild problem Mr Lukas has with the EU is its democratic deficit, something that has the potential of driving European electorates into the proffered embrace of the National Fronts of this world.

I’d say this is the least of the EU’s problems, for a political entity doesn’t necessarily have to be democratic to be just. The real problem is that the EU is a wicked ideological contrivance rivalling Putin’s junta and the Muslim threat for destructive potential.

One can only pray and hope, against much evidence, that the British people will find the strength to extricate themselves out of this mess in 2016.

A Happy New Year to all, including Mr Lukas who, one hopes, will henceforth stick to writing about things he understands.

 

In her Christmas address, Her Majesty said nothing much, but she said it well. Staying away from any specifics, she struck a note of Christian hope:

“It is true that the world has had to confront moments of darkness this year, but the Gospel of John contains a verse of great hope, often read at Christmas carol services: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’.”

This isn’t a policy recommendation. It’s a reiteration of the Queen’s faith, and long may she reign over us, for her heir has already said he’d like to be known as ‘Defender of Faith’, rather than the monarch’s statutory title ‘Defender of the Faith’.

The Prince’s broadmindedness is consonant with the Zeitgeist, that particularly toxic spirit in which no religion is bad, even though some practitioners of some religions, such as Islam, may be unsavoury.

However, any attempt to tie their practices to their faith must be nipped in the bud. Islam is supposed to be like Christianity, a religion of peace. That the Koran contains 146 verses inciting violence, whereas the New Testament contains none, can be glossed over with enviable sleight of hand.

When this ignorant folly stays in the realm of mindless chatter, it’s palatable. Unfortunately, however, it seems to be guiding the West’s policy, steering it into troubled waters.

The Pope inadvertently demonstrated this in his own Christmas message, where he didn’t limit himself to an abstract statement of love being the essence of Christianity.

His Holiness went a step further by recommending that Israelis and Palestinians negotiate a bit more and work out a two-state settlement to allow them “to live together in harmony”.

Alas, specific recommendations elicit specific questions. Such as, “Haven’t there been enough negotiations over the last 65 years?” Or, “Don’t you think that the Muslims’ visceral hatred of Israel in particular and Jews in general (some of those 146 violent verses deal with this specifically) just may be a permanent obstacle to settlement?” Or, “Considering the situation, for Israel to accept the creation of a terrorist Islamic state on her border would be tantamount to suicide, wouldn’t it?”

I’d suggest that the Pope should either follow the Queen’s lead and outline general Christian principles without going into specifics or, like Urban II in 1095, call for action based on a realistic assessment of the nature of Islam:

“I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds… to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends… Moreover, Christ commands it.”

Instead the Pontiff steered a middle course, proving yet again that sometimes nothing is the best thing to say. Our own prelates, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, should also have heeded the Queen’s example.

The Rt Hon Welby compared ISIS to Herod in that both set out to wipe out Christianity at source, adding diplomatically that ISIS hates not only Christians and Jews but also “Muslims who think differently”.

I’d be tempted to suggest that “Muslims who think differently” are questionable Muslims in that they ignore those 146 Koran verses, not to mention the examples set by their religion’s founders.

In essence the good Archbishop enunciated the oft-repeated mantra of Islam being a religion of peace lamentably hijacked by a few extremists (Messrs Bush, Blair, Obama and Cameron, ring your office).

And his Catholic counterpart, the Primate of England and Wales, delivered a message of downright pacifism: “In a life shaped by faith in God, there is absolutely no room at all for gratuitous violence. Is there any space for violence in the Christmas crib? No!”

True enough, there was no violence in the crib. But eventually the baby in it grew up and uttered these words: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

Open-ended pacifism isn’t just bad policy – it’s bad Christianity. History’s greatest Christians, while accepting that war is evil, still believed that there exist evils that can be even worse. If such evils can only be stopped by violence, then in that instance violence is no longer gratuitous and is to be condoned.

That’s why such seminal figures as St Augustine of Hippo (whose The City of God first expressed the concept of just war in Christian terms) and St Thomas Aquinas, have always blessed righteous war for as long as it stayed righteous – and damned unjust war for as long as it stayed unjust.

Urban II clearly regarded armed opposition to Islam as just war, while Cardinal Nichols denies the very existence of this notion – not even if war is to be waged in defence of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

So is the Queen a better Christian than the prelates? It’s either that or she has better advisors. Then again, her 63 years on the tottering British throne have taught Her Majesty the sage art of saying little.