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Our gun is primed, loaded and ready for yet another cock-up.

Syria is very much in the news and momentum is gathering behind the battle cry WE MUST DO SOMETHING! No one is quite sure exactly what, when and especially what for. Uncertainty reigns.

So much more grateful we must be to Tony ‘Yo’ Blair who took time from his busy tour of Mediterranean yachts to teach us morality in international relations.

Now when the likes of Tony begin to pontificate on this subject, we know we’re in trouble. And when he laces his moral cocktail with strategic insights, it’s time to run for the hills.

Tony, you remember, was the only Western leader prepared to play poodle to George W. Bush in the calamitous invasion of Iraq. A few billion pounds and, more important, a few hundred wasted British lives later, the whole region has been turned into a bloodbath.

What does Tony, able abetted by ‘heir to Blair’ Dave, want to do now? Having dug us into a hole he wants to go on digging. Let’s now attack Syria, he screams in his Times article. For openers.

His reading of the situation can’t be faulted: “Syria [is] mired in carnage between the brutality of Assad and various affiliates of al-Qaeda.”

Correct. So where does this leave us? Logically, we have two options: a) let them sort it out between themselves and b) support one of the sides.

Since doing nothing goes against Tony’s impetuous nature, option b) is the only one on the table. So which side should we support?

Tony is clear on this: “…the side of the people who want what we want; who see our societies for all their faults as something to admire; who know that they should not be faced with a choice between tyranny and theocracy.”

Right. Assad represents tyranny, his al-Qaeda opponents stand for theocracy, and we should waste more British money and lives to support the latter because they admire our societies. Makes sense. Let’s win one for al-Qaeda.

So what’s Tony’s problem with Iran then, which also troubles him? “Iran still — despite its new president — a theocratic dictatorship, with a nuclear bomb.”

No doubt Tony has his own intelligence data on the second part – the rest of us don’t realise that Iran already has a nuclear bomb. But he’s right on the first part: Iran is a theocracy, just like the regime with which al-Qaeda rebels wish to replace Assad’s tyranny.

Does this mean we should support Iran “despite its new president” who, as a Muslim cleric, isn’t according to Tony a theocrat? Don’t know about you, but I’m confused.

Let me get this straight. We must go to war in Syria on the side of al-Qaeda to uphold Tony’s morality offended by Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons, which was a terrible thing to do.

However, numerically it’s less terrible than many other instances of states murdering their own citizens. Russia, for example, is now being run by an organisation (and led by its veteran) that murdered 60 million people. The ruling communist party of China ran up a similar score.

Yet the West happily buys Russian gas and Chinese undergarments – how does Tony reconcile his flaming conscience with that?

He answered this query while still prime minister: “They ask why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let’s get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can, you should.”

So Tony wants to hit Syria for the same reason a dog does something one can’t mention: because he can. Should it stop there? Not as far as Tony is concerned:

“From the threat of the Iranian regime to the pulverising of Syria to the pains of the Egyptian revolution, from Libya to Tunisia, in Africa, Central Asia and the Far East, wherever this extremism is destroying the lives of innocent people, we should be at their side and on it.”

We’ve just left the area of self-vindicating idiocy and entered one of lunacy. Our dwindling army must, according to Tony, engage every unsavoury regime on earth to comply with his moral tenets. Methinks our 80,000 men (the size of our army in a year’s time) may be stretched a bit thin.

Compare this rant with the words of a politician from the time when the West was run by statesmen, not spivs. Speaking of America, John Quincy Adams (d. 1848) said, “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

That’s how statesmen think. They know that nations go to war to uphold their interests, not their debatable take on morality.

But sorry, according to Dave ‘heir to Blair’ Cameron, the projected bombing raids on Syria don’t constitute an act of war: “Let me stress to people this is not about getting involved in a Middle Eastern war or changing our stance in Syria or going further into that conflict.”

Yes of course, Dave, bombing a sovereign nation doesn’t mean getting involved in a war, we all know that.

A reality check is in order. Britain has nothing to gain from being instrumental in radicalising and Islamising Syria – which, as the experience of Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt etc shows, will be the only possible result of Western meddling.

In some instances, Tony and Dave, nothing is the best thing to do. God spare us from spivs drunk on their own power and with activism coursing through their veins.

Will no one rid us of this troublesome lot?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please click http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.fr/2013/08/god-is-liberal-democrat.html

Before Dave returned to London he had met at a secret location with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and François Hollande. The subject of the conference was Syria.

By one of those serendipities that define history, I’ve managed to get hold of a transcript of the meeting, and I’m happy to share its contents with you.

BO: What’s happening, Dave? How they hanging, boy?

DC: Well, I was chillaxing in Cornwall with Sam when you called…

BO: Ah, the girl with the dolphin tattoo. Michelle has a lot of time for her.

AM: Was ist das, ‘chillaxing’?

DC: It’s what the French do in August.

FH: But oui, toute la France et en vacance. But we must get back to our muttons, is that not so?

DC: Quite. I say bomb the bastards flat. How else are we going to get rid of the last secular regime in the Middle East?

BO: Yes, but Sergei told me the other day I don’t know what the (expletive deleted) I’m playing with. Said there’s every chance the Russkies would fire on any (expletive deleted) ship firing on Syria.

DC: Yes, and pigs will fly.

AM: Schweinen don’t fly.

DC: That’s the point. The Russians are all talk. Lavrov is just bluffing. They won’t engage us in a month of Sundays.

AM: A month has only four Sundays. Vier.

FH: Not in France in August (laughs).

BO: Guys, let’s keep our eyes on the ball. What are we trying to achieve here?

FH: But mon cher Barack, you know what it is. We want the Middle East to be as Musulman as Saint-Denis, but no?

DC: Like Bradford.

AM: Like Duisburg.

FH: Yes, no laïcité for the Middle East. We want it all for ourselves, but no?

BO: But guys, the UN is playing hard to get. The Russkies and the Chinese are gonna block any resolution on military action…

AM: Who cares about the UN when God is on our side? Gott mit uns.

FH: Isn’t that what your SS used to say?

AM: Jawohl! And they could fight. Unlike some others I could mention…

FH: Ecoute, sale boche…

BO: Guys, c’mon, not now… Tell’em, Dave. Like it is.

DC: Yes, well, crikey, gosh, chaps, let’s be serious now. Our economies are in the poo…

AM: Mein economy isn’t in the dreck.

DC: Fine, Angie, yours isn’t. But if we all go down the tubes, we’ll suck you in with us. So what we need is a war, the bigger the better. And anyway, Assad used gas on innocent people…

AM: Like François after dinner.

FH: Ecoute, you sale boche…

BO: But I hear some of those innocent people eat human organs…

AM: At least they don’t eat frogs…

DC: Angie, please. You may think you’re going to win your election no matter what. But I need a war and François… well he definitely needs one. In the last poll he was behind Heinrich Himmler.

AM: Himmler ist tot. Dead.

DC: I meant figuratively. And Barack, why are you holding back? Didn’t you say that gas meant crossing the red line?

FH: He doesn’t want to attack les Musulmans. Peut-être because he himself…

BO: Oh shut the (expletive deleted) up already, Frank. Not that old chestnut again.

AM: I don’t like chestnuts.I like würst.

DC: Chaps, can we stay on the subject? Please? We want war, we want an Islamised Middle East. Over to you, Barack, let those Tomahawks fly. Assad used gas…

BO: Or not. Those UN guys…

DC: Are being used for target practice.

AM: Das ist verrückt. Mad. All this talk. When you decide to go, you go. Marschieren!

FH: Oui, all the way to Stalingrad.

BO: Guys, guys…

DC: Chaps, chaps…

BO: Guys, what are we arguing about? We know what needs doing. Let’s just wait a day or two, see what comes down the pike. Easy does it.

AM: Nein! Easy doesn’t do it! We Germans do it!

DC: Well, on that note…

To my horror I’ve just realised that the last page of the transcript is missing. This means I can’t tell you how the meeting ended. Not to worry, we’ll find out in a day or two. Just like Barack says.

Meanwhile I hope you’ll share my joy at knowing that the future of the world is in safe hands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the last 20 years the Rev. Lively has been waging a tireless international campaign against homosexuality. This has become the focus of his life.

Now I’m suspicious of single-issue advocates – even if I happen to agree with the single issue. Effective action needs to be launched from a sound intellectual platform, which is impossible to construct without putting narrow issues into a wide context.

Yet the American pastor is a man driven by passion, not ratiocination. This took him to Uganda where over the years he made a number of well-attended appearances preaching against his bogeyman vice.

Eventually a private member’s bill was introduced in Kampala’s parliament, calling for punishing homosexuality by prison terms or, in extreme cases, by death.

To his credit, the Rev. Lively refused to support the bill because of the death-penalty clause: “I was very disappointed when the law came out as it is written now with such incredibly harsh punishments.” His aim, he said, was not to punish homosexuals but to rehabilitate them, while preaching scriptural commandments on the family.

Nevertheless, given the ethos of the time, the Rev. Lively predictably got in trouble. He was sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a US homosexual pressure group acting on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a Uganda-based coalition of LGBTI advocates. Ten days ago a US federal judge ruled that the case could proceed.

SMUG claims that the anti-homosexual law, for which they hold the Rev. Lively partly responsible, has led to deadly street attacks. I have no independent evidence to prove or disprove this assertion but, given the political and civic culture of the place, SMUG may well be right.

But even if no such attacks had taken place, these chaps would still be out to get the pastor. Our post-Christian modernity is more than ready to punish word as severely as deed, and any homosexual lobby would regard the Rev. Lively’s words as incendiary.

For, while opposed to the brutal harshness of the Ugandan law, he hasn’t changed his view that “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

His detractors tend to equate the absence of anti-homosexual laws with liberty, which is hard to justify either morally or historically. After all, the first major country without such laws was Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1934, a place and time not otherwise known for a laissez-faire attitude to life.

Where I disagree with the Rev. Lively is his belief that the “gay movement” is mainly to blame for the problems of “the marriage-based society”. No doubt it contributes to such problems, but only because it’s being used for that purpose by a much larger entity: the modern political state.

When Christendom was more than just a figure of speech, or else a matter of antiquarian interest, the family was seen as a key building block of society. Social fabric in those days was woven out of families and family-like groups: parish, guild, clan, monastery, village commune, township.

When familial localism shifted to bureaucratic centralism (otherwise known as liberal democracy), the post-Christian state began to see the family not as its ally but as its competitor.

Sensing this, John Locke, who laid out the groundwork for the liberal democratic state, countenanced not only divorce but even polygamy: “He that is already married may marry another woman with his left hand…”

It’s reassuring to see how solicitously our Lockean modernity is trying to make sure his anti-marriage desiderata can come true. If in Locke’s time hostility to marriage was still embryonic, by now it has grown to full maturity.

Today’s political state in the West, while still not strong enough to abolish marriage and family, is strong enough to erode them. Promotion of homosexuality, including such abominations as same-sex marriage, is one tactic employed to that end, but it’s far from being the only one.

Even more pernicious is the welfare state that robs the family of its economic function by squeezing the state’s bulk into the slot formerly occupied by the father. Thereby the state assumes the provider role traditionally played by the father, which makes him redundant. The father takes the hint and vanishes.

Hence, according to the Office for National Statistics, last year 47.5 percent of children were born to unmarried mothers. The figure has risen from 25 per cent in 1988 and just 11 per cent in 1979. If the trend continues at the current rate, by 2016 the majority of children will be born to unmarried parents.

Another anti-marriage arrow in the state’s quiver is its tax laws that encourage cohabitation without the benefit of marriage. In fact, marriage confers no fiscal benefit whatsoever: it pays for people to stay single. The arrow hits its target with unerring accuracy.

The Rev. Lively is right to point out the anti-Christian, indeed antisocial, nature of wanton sexual promiscuity in general and homosexuality in particular. One wonders, however, if a bit less fervour and a bit more reason would serve his cause better.

On second thoughts, where would we be without impassioned men of action? The world would be run by philosophers, just as Plato wanted. It would then be even more miserable than it is now.

Please click http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.fr/2013/08/syrian-children-gassed-is-assad.html

Click http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.fr/2013/08/violence-in-sweden-echoes-in-britain.html

University of Rochester psychologists have just completed a review of 63 scientific studies about religion and intelligence dating between 1928 and now.

In 53 of these there was a “reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity”. In other words, atheists are brighter than believers.

They have a higher “ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience”.

Now it’s an established fact that IQ, the higher the better, is the single most reliable predictor of practical success in today’s world.

And success in today’s world is measured mostly by money, of which people with higher IQ scores tend to have more. Thus if a child has a high IQ, he’s more likely to make a lot of money at an early age.

Here’s an example of one such child, or rather a bright young man of 21. His IQ is undoubtedly 130-plus, which is higher than in 95 percent of the population.

His hunger for success is commensurately high, for success is something he knows he deserves – his IQ is high. The young German, Moritz Erhardt, is richly endowed with all the fine qualities that add up to intelligence. So he puts them to work.

Ability to reason: Moritz figures out that the shortest route to fiscal success runs through big international banks and other financial organisations.

Ability to plan: International banks like international experience, so Moritz enrols in University of Michigan. Since London is the financial centre of the world, he then wants to do internship at a major bank based in the City.

Ability to solve problems: Though he faces stiff competition from hundreds of other possessors of a high IQ, Moritz gets into Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London.

Ability to think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas,learn quickly: It doesn’t take Moritz long to demonstrate all of those. One thing he learns quickly, from both observation and experience, is that though a high intelligence is a necessary condition, it’s not a sufficient one.

His employers are prepared to pay him £45,000 a year to learn his trade, after which millions beckon. But they want something in return.

They want him to show willing and, if he doesn’t, he can take his high IQ back to Michigan, Germany or whatever. So show willing he does.

Moritz puts in 120-hour weeks, including ‘all-nighters’, those rites of passage to which all high-IQ interns are expected to submit. He’s in charge of his destiny, and this is the chance he isn’t going to miss.

The authors of the Rochester U study know all about lads like Moritz: “Intelligence may lead to greater self-control ability, self-esteem, perceived control over life events, and supportive relationships, obviating some of the benefits that religion sometimes provides.”

This description fits Moritz like a glove. Religion with its dubious benefits isn’t for him. It’s for silly, indecisive weaklings full of self-doubt. He, Moritz, is living proof that a man with a high IQ has ‘control over life events’.

Except that he doesn’t remain living proof for long. After working eight ‘all-nighters’ in the last fortnight, Moritz Erhardt collapsed in his bathroom and died of exhaustion.

He thus became the dying proof that there’s an infinitely higher intelligence than the kind measurable by IQ. It was best expressed by Thomas à Kempis:

“For the resolutions of the just depend rather on the grace of God than on their own wisdom; and in Him they always put their trust, whatever they take in hand For man proposes, but God disposes; neither is the way of man in his own hands.”

Moritz wouldn’t have regarded this statement as clever. According to the study, like others with a high IQ he probably believed that “religious beliefs are irrational, not anchored in science, not testable and, therefore, unappealing to intelligent people who ‘know better’.”

No doubt that this is exactly what most high-IQ atheists, including the authors of the study, believe. They’re too intelligent to realise just how stupid this belief is.

It’s clear that IQ tests measure not the outcome but the potential, not intelligence but the ability to acquire it. The distinction is crucial – it’s like the difference between musicality and musicianship.

For instance perfect pitch is a useful thing for a musician to have: it makes it easier for him to become a musician. Yet I know an internationally acclaimed violinist, winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition, whose pitch is acquired, not absolute. I also know another violinist, blessed with perfect pitch, who plays in a Brooklyn restaurant.

That a high IQ is a reliable predictor of success in the modern world says more about the modern world than about intelligence.

Thomas Aquinas, for example, was such a slow, ponderous thinker that his university classmates called him a ‘dumb ox’. Since speed of thought is an important factor in IQ scores, his was probably no higher than average – which didn’t prevent St Thomas from becoming one of the deepest thinkers the world has ever known.

Yet if he were alive today he’d probably fail to become a Merrill Lynch intern – they want bright youngsters like Moritz Erhardt there.

The average IQ of university graduates is 112, 12 points higher than the median. This is probably enough to develop the kind of surrogate intelligence that enables a graduate to earn a good living.

However, real intelligence, the kind that would enable a man to grasp the ineffable sagacity of Kempis’s words quoted above, is much harder to come by. It takes decades of contemplation, study, ratiocination – and help from the grace of God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mea culpa. In the past – even recent past! – I’ve been beastly to Richard.

Many a time I’ve questioned his intelligence, sanity, erudition, scientific attainment, integrity, ability to use words in their true meaning.

My comments on his statement that “Darwin told us why we exist and that’s not an easy question to answer. It’s not just us, it’s all living things” were nothing short of bilious.

It isn’t indeed an easy question to answer this side of Genesis, I hissed vituperatively. That’s why Darwin never attempted to do so. He merely tried to explain how all living things that already were got to be as they are.

Even that, I ranted, he didn’t do all that convincingly. I went so far as referring to Darwinism as a half-baked theory kept alive by politicised hard-boiled adherents, of whom Richard is the most strident.

I even dared to remind Richard – as if he didn’t know! – of the difference between microevolution (species adapting to their environment) and macroevolution (one species turning into another).

The former, I suggested, is demonstrable and irrefutable. The latter, however, has been debunked by just about every modern science: cosmology, physics, palaeontology, genetics, biochemistry, geology, microbiology.

To my eternal shame, I poked fun at Richard’s revelation: “that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.”

Such words, I jested, were already attempted 2,500 years ago by Parmenides: ex nihilo nihil fit or whatever it was in Greek. Nothing comes out of nothing, an idea Newton later expressed in his First Law of Thermodynamics. But then Richard, I added venomously, is woefully ignorant of philosophy, history, rhetoric and most other things in His creation.

“Dawkins,” I went on, “is the village atheist lampooned by Chesterton. That’s why he can only appeal to the village idiot.” Harsh words, and those I now regret bitterly.

For my new friend Richard finally uttered God’s own truth. “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge,” he said – much to the dismay of every loyal Dawkinsian.

Some even went so far as to accuse my new friend Richard of bigotry, which I to my regret used to do myself in a different context.

Belying his reputation for rhetorical inadequacy Richard responded to the criticism with quite some élan: “A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past.”

Well put. Richard didn’t stoop to citing the exact numbers, which are 32 Nobels won by the Trinity scientists versus 10 by the Muslims. But had he done so, he’d have had to add that only two of those 10 overachievers were scientists, two others writers, while six were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which has little to do with science, or indeed peace.

Among those worthy laureates one finds such unwavering champions of peace as Yasser Arafat. You know, the chap immortalised in the PLO anthem “Yasser, that’s my baby, Nasser, don’t mean maybe…”

I understand why my new friend Richard then had to say that “science by Muslims was great in the distant past.” He knows it wasn’t, but hey – Islam isn’t Christianity. One can’t be too bolshie in attacking it. By way of intellectual discourse one can get one’s throat slit if one isn’t careful.

In fact, while back in the Middle Ages the Muslims did create some superb architecture, decorative art and poetry, their original contribution to science was well-nigh nonexistent.

For example, crediting the Muslims with the invention of algebra is simply wrong. Algebra predates Islam by at least four centuries and probably longer. The Greeks and Indians invented; the Arabs merely transmitted.

They invented algebra in exactly the same sense in which the generally admirable Averroes and Avicenna invented Aristotle and scholasticism.

Even my late friend Bertie Russell, who otherwise had more time for Islam than for Christianity, had to admit that “the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy…”

His minor glitch about the Muslim science of yesteryear notwithstanding, I wish I could now take back everything I said about Richard in the past. Alas, I can’t – my sheer bloody-mindedness won’t let me.

As it is, I can only say that even a strident, militant ignoramus who pronounces on thousands of things is statistically bound to get one of them right sooner or later.

I’m truly sorry that Richard is being pilloried for the one thing he has ever got right rather than being drawn and quartered (metaphorically, I hasten to add) for everything he has got wrong. He must complain to God about this.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life is full of mysteries. Why does sour cream have a sell-by date? Why do seers never win the lottery? Why is there only one Monopolies Commission? Why did sports shops in Russia sell 500,000 baseball bats last year, but only three baseballs and one baseball glove?

Difficult as those questions are, I could venture an answer, if after long deliberation. One mystery I’ve never been able to solve is how The Guardian has acquired its reputation as a serious newspaper.

It’s not only that it’s madcap left wing, though this by itself suggests a certain degree of cerebral frivolity. It’s just that its writers are – how shall I put this politely? – rather remiss in the area of intellectual rigour and basic education.

Witness Leo Benedictus (an alias, one hopes) who the other day attempted a piece of satire aimed at UKIP. Now any student of the Swift, Thackeray, Austen, Waugh school of satire will know that it can only be effective if based on reality, however remotely.

A satirist can’t just pick up any stray thought hitchhiking down the road – some of those will end up stealing his mind long before he arrives at his destination. Satirists who don’t realise this are fools. Those who pass falsehoods as reality are knaves.

Yet it’s not necessary to choose between these two Shakespearean extremes. Benedictus’s piece Quiz: Would You Pass Ukip’s ‘Fruitcake Test’? shows it’s possible to be both.

In common with every other political party, UKIP is making its prospective candidates in the European elections answer a vetting questionnaire designed to filter out unfit candidates.

Benedictus proposes his own version of the quiz designed to pierce UKIP’s heart with the rapier of wit. Instead he bludgeons himself with the axe of ideology divorced from any recognisable reality.

He offers several questions, each with three answer options. Option 1 is The Guardian orthodoxy springing from the cloud-cuckoo-land ideology the paper espouses. Option 3 is the answer that a UKIP candidate of The Guardian’s fevered imagination would give. Option 2 is somewhere in between.

Option 3 and partly Option 2 are where satire is supposed to come in, bringing along its time-tested device of hyperbole. But satirical hyperbole is like a caricature: it works by exaggerating something real. If it exaggerates nothing but the author’s ideologically inspired silliness it’s zero multiplied by 1,000 to produce, well, zero.

Take Question 3, for example: “What measure would you prefer to use to limit immigration?” The view supposed to reflect UKIP’s philosophy is Option 3: “A 50ft electrified fence around coastline of the British Isles.” The Guardian’s philosophically and politically correct answer is Option 1: “None. Immigrants enrich British life, improve international relations and contribute growth to the economy.”

Now I probably know more UKIP members than Benedictus, yet I’ve never heard anyone express a view of which Option 3 is supposed to be a satirical hyperbole. My UKIP friends are opposed to excessive immigration, especially when it involves millions of people aggressively hostile to everything that has historically defined Britain.

They say it’s folly to believe that we can have the same country with different people – and they’re right. 

The Guardian’s Option 1 confirms that the paper has no wish for Britain to remain Britain. Well, it’s certainly entitled to its own opinion. But it’s not entitled to its own facts.

These show that the only long-term growth to which massive immigration contributes is that of the welfare state. Already by 1997 only 12 percent of the arrivals from what used to be called the British Empire came for work purposes. The rest, in overwhelming numbers, have become a burden on our creaking social services.

As to improved international relations, it’s hard not to notice that in the Muslim world hostility to European, and specifically British, civilisation has grown exactly at the time when all checks on Islamic immigration have been removed.

No doubt some immigration can enrich British life. No UKIP member will argue that Henry James, Rutherford, Hayek, Wittgenstein or T.S. Eliot should have been kept out by an ‘electrified fence’. One doesn’t even hear many complaints about the 300,000 Frenchmen now living in London.

What UKIP objects to isn’t immigration but colonisation – which is the only way to describe thousands of mosques across the country, and whole cities, such as Birmingham, Leicester, Bradford, Leeds and inner London, that are 20 to 30 percent Muslim.

Nor would any normal person, especially if he’s opposed to female circumcision, be able to see exactly how the arrival of 50,000 Somalis a few years ago enriched Britain. Next year’s confidently predictable advent of hundreds of thousands of Gypsies also finds few champions among UKIP members or indeed any sane people not blinded by The Guardian’s ideology.

Or take Question 4: “If you had to lead Britain into war with any country, which one of these would you choose?”

The Guardian, supposedly clever, answer is: “Syria, reluctantly, as part of a UN-led humanitarian effort.” The UKIP answer is supposed to be “France!”

Thus the intelligent people are supposed to escalate to war precisely the policy that has turned Syria from a stable, if unpleasant, country into a blood-soaked land torn apart by civil war. Yet Nigel Farage, who speaks several European languages and is married to a German, is supposed to hate France because he doesn’t think Britain should be ruled out of Brussels.

Reluctant as I am to drag myself into it, I share UKIP’s distaste for the EU. Yet I’m writing this in France, where I spend almost half my time and where I probably have more friends than the entire editorial staff of The Guardian put together.

When the weapon of satire misses its mark, it turns into the boomerang of self-mockery. In the words of the mayor in Gogol’s Inspector General, “Whom are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves!”

 

 

 

Hundreds, possibly thousands of people were killed yesterday, when Egyptian security forces stormed two camps Muslim Brothers set up in Cairo last month.

The Brothers were protesting against the ousting of the democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi, a theocrat in all but name. The army in its turn made a weighty argument for secularism.

The rest of the West must sit back and rue its own gullibility. For, largely as a result of neocon propaganda, America and her allies have got things criminally wrong.

It was 11 years ago that Americans girded their loins, hoisted democracy up on the flagpole and launched an aggressive war in the Middle East.

All along they were egged on by the neocons eager to sell their harebrained vision of the world to the world. Never mind religion, history, culture, ethnicity, race. The world of the neocons’ fancy is neatly divided along the watershed separating democracy from any other method of government.

It escapes their attention that most people in His creation despise democracy. It’s not the American way of life they crave but the American standard of living. Yet the neocons will have none of that.

According to them all Muslims daydream of American-style democracy and are only held back by ‘Islamists’, ‘Islamofascists’ and whatever other neologisms the neocons coin.

Hence it’s in the West’s and America’s interests to introduce democracy by force, thereby isolating the Islamists, making ‘moderate Muslims’ deliriously happy and turning the Middle East into an oasis of tranquillity.

Well, things haven’t quite worked out that way, have they? As a direct result of this idiocy Iraq and Afghanistan have been turned into cauldrons full of bubbling blood, Syrians are dying in their thousands – and relatively secular, if nasty, rulers have been replaced by wild-eyed madmen anxious to murder infidels.

On the rare occasions that neocon purveyors of democracy admit that things have gone awry they blame everyone but themselves. Yet it’s a good rule of thumb that whenever a massive undertaking fails, there’s something wrong with the intellectual platform from which it was launched. The Middle East is no exception.

For the real adversary of the West isn’t Islamism, Islamofascism or even Islamic terrorism. It’s Islam.

The neocons make the typical philistine error of believing that everyone either is or is dying to be just like them. They themselves ignore religion and usually regard it as an annoying irrelevance – therefore they assume that Muslims are roughly similar. But that assumption is wrong.

The levels of piety vary throughout the Middle East but nowhere do they drop down to the level of the West’s indifferent agnosticism. That’s why the green banner of Islam still has more unifying power than any other modern institutional symbol.

And history shows that Islam has been doctrinally hostile to the West for 1,400 years. In the past it was supposedly so because the West espoused a wrong religion; at present, it is presumably because the West espouses none.

Such hostility has seldom been allowed to seethe under the surface – usually it has been expressed through violent action, of which 11 September is only one small example. 

The conclusion is straightforward: the more consistently Muslim a state is, the greater danger it presents to America, Israel and the West in general. Therefore it’s in the West’s interest to support the most secular Muslim regimes, while isolating or trying to undermine those run by proselytising believers.

In practice this means supporting the most undemocratic regimes, for most Muslims, unlike most Christians and Jews, are active believers and practitioners of their creed. A democratic election is therefore likely to bring to power an Islamic theocracy – and this is exactly what happened in Egypt, to cite one example.

Alas, this strategic conclusion escapes Americans, particularly those of the neocon persuasion. Rather than encouraging more or less secular, which is to say non-democratic, regimes in the Middle East, the Americans have gone out of their way to help them on their way out.

Historically the army is the only force in the Islamic world that’s capable of reducing Muslim piety to peaceful worship. But the generals are unlikely to take over by democratic process. It’s military coup that’s the normal expedient.

This has been the case in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lybia – well, in every place where variously vile, nationalist but generally secular regimes were installed. Of course democratic demagoguery wouldn’t wear it.

Anyone with half a brain and elementary knowledge of modern history will know that an Ayatollah is the only realistic alternative to the Shah, the Muslim Brotherhood to Mubarak, tribal cannibals to the Ba’athist regimes in Iraq and Syria, Erdoğan to a secular government beholden to the army. A George Washington isn’t an option in any of those places.

Forgetting that their own state was born with the midwifery of a military coup, the Americans feel called upon to decry military coups on form rather than content.

Their God of Democratic Formalism is athirst and they don’t care how many will be sacrificed at its altar. Now John Kerry sheds crocodile tears over the hundreds killed in Cairo – forgetting that it was American meddling that brought them into the streets in the first place.

Our own Dave contributed an insight that violence is “not going to solve anything” and there must be “compromise from all sides”. Well, there was no violence in Egypt before Americans and their British poodle began to agitate for the ‘Arab Spring’.

The only compromise needed is between the neocons’ strident, half-witted ideology and life as it actually is. And this compromise will remain beyond reach – ideologues will never allow facts to interfere with their lapidary stupidity.