Atlas left...with his cheese!

By Gary Jason
http://www.americanthinker.com
January 1, 2013

One of my favorite French actors is the larger-than-life Epicurean and all-around bon vivant Gerard Depardieu.  His latest role is that of Atlas shrugging -- or, more exactly, taking it on the lam.

It all started with the new French Socialist government's decision to jack up taxes to an historic degree -- in a country already known for its outrageously high taxes.  The Socialists raised the income tax on the wealthy to a stratospheric 75%.  They also raised the rates on middle class incomes, on business, and on capital gains; instituted a "total wealth tax" on all property (including unrealized capital gains); and imposed an "exit" tax on escaping entrepreneurs.

This prompted the sybaritic star to announce that he was putting his Parisian palace up for sale and moving to a Belgium town just across the border to escape the confiscatory taxes.  He first prudently stocked up on cheese, however.

This was hardly a unique event -- plenty of wealthy French have already fled the new Gaullic socialist paradise.  But none of these were as famous -- nay, iconic -- as the delightful Depardieu.

Here is where it gets delicious.

Depardieu's decision to decamp moved Jean-Marc Ayrault, the slimy Socialist French Prime Minister, to call the peripatetic player "pathetic" for moving out.  Another Socialist MP then called for Depardieu to be stripped of his citizenship.

Perhaps the most caustic cut came from the supercilious Socialist "Minister of Culture," Aurelie Filippetti, who said that the acclaimed actor was "deserting the field in the middle of a war against the [economic] crisis[.] ... French citizenship is an honor, and includes rights and duties, which include the ability to pay taxes."

It would appear that French leftists are like their American counterparts: they instantly anger if anyone their patriotism, but they are always the first to attack the patriotism of others.

This was more than the thorny thespian could bear, and he replied with a cri de coeur in a letter to the Journal du Dimanche, in which he said, "I'm leaving because you think success, creation, talent and anything different should be punished. I'm sending you back my passport and social security, which I have never used. We no longer have a homeland; I am a true European, a citizen of the world[.]"

The deeply distressed Depardieu pointed out to his detractors that over the last nearly half-century, he had always paid his taxes in full -- paying a total of 145 million euros (or about $188 million) during his lifetime -- and employs 80 people.  "I am neither worthy of pity nor admirable, but I shall not be called 'pathetic[.]'"

The aggrieved actor added, "You said 'pathetic'? How pathetic...I refuse the word 'pathetic.' Who are you to judge me this way, I ask you, Mr. Ayrault?"  Depardieu's Parthian shot was classic: "Despite my excesses, my appetite and love for life, I am a free being, sir, and will remain polite."

What is especially galling to the Gauls is that Depardieu is following the lead of another French actor, Christian Clavier, who moved to London earlier to escape the new high taxes.  In an irony not lost on the cynical French, both Depardieu and Clavier both starred in three major hit French movies in which they played two Gaullic heroes, Obelix and Asterix.

What has resulted is something of a national "teachable moment."  The leftists in the French media counted on being able to easily demonize Depardieu in the envious eyes of the French.  His public behavior over the years has been...well, noteworthy, including such outré escapades as urinating into a plastic bottle on a French airliner, as well as on a policeman's leg; smacking around a few paparazzi along the way; and sometimes being hard on other actors.

He is also an actor of rare talent.  Even with no formal training , and just a working-class background, he has made 170 movies, giving some legendary performances along the way.  He is not some pampered aristocrat who inherited his wealth.  And his lifestyle is fabulously French -- he owns vineyards and a couple of French restaurants, and he has written a French cookbook.

So while the French left thought it could vilify the pugnacious player, in fact the French public seems to be rallying to his side.  One poll showed that 70% of the public support him.

Mirroring the split in public opinion over Depardieu's decision is a split among his fellow actors.  One of them, Philippe Torreton, said Depardieu was "sulking like a playground creep" and made fun of his portly physiognomy.

This led to two legendary French actresses leaping to his defense.  First was the normally reclusive Brigitte Bardot, who said Torreton should "keep his venom, his mediocrity and his jealousy to insult someone worthy of bother."  She added that Depardieu had been "the victim of extremely unfair persecution."

Also defending Depardieu was Catherine Deneuve, who acidly attacked Torreton by saying that his "anger was borne of your hasty judgments made without thinking and this pettiness. You take aim at his physique! At his talent! This 'mess' that you speak of. What right, what democratic motive do you claim as your dirty condemnation?"

Ironically, more support for the persecuted performer has recently come from another branch of the French government itself.  The French Constitutional Court, its functional equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, has just ruled that the Socialist tax law is unconstitutional, because it violates taxpayer equality.  It turns out that the law leads to households earning the same amount of income paying different amounts of tax, depending upon how the income is distributed within the household.

Even more challenging for the Socialist government is the Court's decision that other of its recent tax increases were excessive, and -- most interestingly -- that the total wealth tax on unrealized capital games is unfair because it doesn't consider the victim's -- pardon, I mean the taxpayer's -- ability to pay.

The pathetic Socialist Prime Minister Ayrault immediately announced that the pathetic Socialist government will soon present a new pathetic law designed to get around the Court's ruling.  We'll see if the government succeeds.

In the meantime, don't expect the estimable and formidable Mr. Depardieu to consider moving to Hollywood, which would be a wonderful gift to American cinema.  Our country, mais oui, is run by the pathetic neo-socialist Obama, who has made it clear that nothing short of a 100% tax on the wealthy will content him.

And the state in which Hollywood is located is run by the pathetic Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and his now veto-proof Democrat state congress.

Quelle horreur!

Philosopher Gary Jason is a senior editor of Liberty and author of the recent book, Dangerous Thoughts.

Tax mad French aim for 300 percent tax hike for... chocolate spread

It's a nutty world of tax and spend in France. But this takes the (chocolate spreaded) biscuit

By Robin Shepherd, Owner / Publisher

The Commentator

On 11 November 2012

Tastes good, so tax it!

8

According to OECD figures, French government spending as a percentage of GDP is a whopping 56 percent. Just quote that figure to anyone who tells you we live in a neo-liberal, free-market capitalist world (the average in OECD countries is 46 percent, by the way).

Well, if you're going to bomb and strafe your people out of their hard earned money, it has to come from somewhere. So why not hit the poor beleaguered French family where it really hurts them, right there in the famous French kitchen.

According to France 24, the latest piece of dirigisme comes in the form of an attempt to hike taxes by 300 percent (!) on a key ingredient in the all too delicious Nutella hazlenut chocolate spread (no, they haven't paid us to say that, but donations would be very welcome).  

France 24 reports that:

"The bill, which was adopted by a Senate commission and heads to the National Assembly this week for review, has been dubbed by French media as the “Nutella tax”. Upon careful inspection of the spread’s ingredients, it turns out that roughly 20 percent of the product is made of palm oil, which is known to be high in saturated fats and can potentially cause heart disease.

"The widespread use of palm oil has also been criticised for leading to deforestation in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia."

Blah, blah, blah... any excuse for the nanny state to get its teeth (no pun intended) into every last corner of society to satisfy its rapacious appetite (again, no pun intended) for ever more private money. 

The report ruefully notes that, "the 'Nutella tax' could potentially have far-reaching consequences on the fate of French pastries and other processed foods, which are in part so delicious because they are filled with saturated fats such as… palm oil... France reportedly consumes around 130,000 tonnes of palm oil per year, or the equivalent of two kilos per inhabitant."

I like French food, and I like the French. But if there was ever a time for a new revolution in the Fifth Republic, surely this is it. I'm not sure whether the Paris Chocolate Spread Party has the same ring to it as the Boston Tea Party.

But the way the Western world is heading on tax and spend, I'd welcome it with open arms. Now, where's my baguette and my pot of Nutella?

Read more on: France 24, nutella tax, chocolate spread, nutella, France, communist party of france, France to be downgraded, S&P downgrade France to AA+, new president of France, president of France, France socialist, public spending, taxation, European taxation, taxation policy, unequal taxation, and palm oil

France sets 75% tax rate on 'super rich'

By Doug Powers
http://www.michellemalkin.com
September 28, 2012

Alternate headline: Francois Hollande on the verge of ensuring Warren Buffett, some of his rich friends and select celebrities who are begging pay higher taxes willnever move to France:

President Francois Hollande's Socialist government unveiled sharp tax hikes on business and the rich on Friday in a 2013 budget aimed at showing France has the fiscal rigor to remain at the core of the euro zone.

The package will recoup 30 billion euros ($39 billion) for the public purse with a goal of narrowing the deficit to 3.0 percent of national output next year from 4.5 percent this year - France's toughest single belt-tightening in 30 years.

But with record unemployment and a barrage of data pointing to economic stagnation, there are fears the deficit target will slip as France falls short of the modest 0.8 percent economic growth rate on which it is banking for next year.
[...]
To the dismay of business leaders who fear an exodus of top talent, the government confirmed a temporary 75 percent super-tax rate for earnings over one million euros and a new 45 percent band for revenues over 150,000 euros.

Together, those two measures are predicted to bring in around half a billion euros. Higher tax rates on dividends and other investments, plus cuts to existing tax breaks are seen bringing in several billion more.

They're counting their chickens before they've crossed the road into other countries. Those tax haul estimates are provided the "super rich" and businesses don't flee to more welcoming tax climes -- which won't be difficult:

If you have a US passport then you are subject to US taxation (you might not have to pay any because of a low income, but you’re still subject to those tax laws). It doesn’t matter where you live in the world you still cough up to Uncle Sam. The only way out of this, the only way to “avoid” such US taxation is to give up your US citizenship. At which point the Feds will charge you all of the tax you would ever have paid anyway. So avoiding US taxation by leaving the country isn’t really an option: there is no “exit” possibility as the economists like to say. This will clearly and obviously lower that e2 value, the amount of avoidance that anyone can do in the face of higher tax rates.

However, the French tax system is, indeed all of the EU tax systems individually are, based upon residence. If today you live in Lille then you pay French tax. If tomorrow you move to London then you are subject to UK tax laws, not those of France. You do not have to change citizenship, do not require a permit or permission to do this, you just buy a train ticket and 90 minutes or so later there you are. Free of the French tax system. The value of e2 is going to be rather different in such circumstances. When there is an easy and simple exit from the entire system available at the cost of perhaps 90 euros.

France is already losing its richest person over this, and more will follow.

Hollande has said the 75 percent upper tax rate would last "around two years." The vague, open-ended expiration date isn't likely to convince the wealthy who are on the verge of moving to stick it out and "take one for the team" for an unspecified amount of time.

'Europe is already falling apart’

Antony Beevor, chronicler of European history, has chilling warnings about the current rise in militant nationalism.

By Elizabeth Grice
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
28, May 2012

Nothing I’ve heard from politicians or economists on the world crisis has shivered my spine like an hour spent with the gentle‑mannered historian Antony Beevor, whose mighty new book on the Second World War is making him the pundit of the moment. He does not mean to be alarmist, and that is why the soft warnings in his sunlit garden are chilling.

Of course the rise of the Right in Europe is not the same as the rise of the Right in the Thirties, he soothes. But isn’t it terrifying the way the Greeks are portraying the Germans as Nazis in their popular press, with Angela Merkel in Nazi uniform? There are “far too many jibes” about a Fourth Reich. The weedlike eruption of extremist parties makes him “uneasy” – and if Beevor is uneasy, it probably means the rest of us should be scared witless.

“The great European dream was to diminish militant nationalism,” he says. “We would all be happy Europeans together. But we are going to see the old monster of militant nationalism being awoken when people realise how little control their politicians have. We are already seeing political disintegration in Europe.”

It’s fascinating the way serious historians are being treated as quasi-prophets for the economically bewildered. Tomorrow, Beevor is due to lecture to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Hague on the Second World War and the current euro crisis and he says he is having to change his script daily “as more and more terrifying news comes in”.

“I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself,” he says. “It never does. It is misleading and dangerous to make sweeping parallels with the Second World War. Politicians like Blair and Bush liked to sound Churchillian or Rooseveltian at times of crisis, but the comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Hitler were preposterous. Eden compared Nasser to Hitler and that led us into the Suez disaster.

“It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one’s got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It’s never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn’t mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.”

The only similarity between now and the late Thirties, he says unconsolingly, is that the public have not been told the truth about how desperate the situation is because no politician, then or now, dares to spell it out. “One must remember that Churchill was derided and scorned when he warned of the dangers of German rearmament. He could only come to power once war had started. That, I think, is rather alarming.”

Everything is rather alarming seen through the Beevor long lens. There is even drama in his person. He has a lot of silvery hair and leaping black eyebrows. Though his speech is a torrent of pure Queen’s English fluency, in occasional silences he picks at his fingers. Perhaps he is suppressing anxiety.

If so, it can’t be on account of his sales figures. The military historian – of whom it is always joyfully recorded that at Winchester he failed history and English A-level – has sold more than five million books. His most acclaimed, Stalingrad, won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, the Wolfson history prize and the Hawthornden prize, all in one week in 1999. With the money, he bought a house in Kent that friends like to nickname Schloss Stalingrad or Dunstalingrad. Here, in a pastoral retreat surrounded by sheep and alpacas, he and his wife, Artemis Cooper, do most of their writing. Her biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor comes out in the autumn.

After his non-compliance in formal education, Beevor joined the Army in 1965 and served with the 11th Hussars. On a posting to Wales, he was so bored that he began a semi-autobiographical novel that made him rethink his motives for being a soldier. They were all wrong: he realised he had a big chip on his shoulder about proving himself physically, a legacy of having been bullied as a child. From the age of four to seven he had walked with an armpit crutch, with one leg strapped up behind his back, because of a degenerative disease of the hip.

John Keegan, whose ground-breaking book Face of Battle revolutionised the chronicling of war, had taught him military history at Sandhurst. Once Beevor got into his considerable stride as a writer (he is from a long line of female authors), he found Keegan’s way of looking at history from the bottom up rather than the top down fitted with his own ideas of conveying the fear, chaos and horror of war from a soldier’s perspective. A soldier himself, he already understood the psychology of war.

“I’m not saying every military historian should have been a former soldier – that was the problem in the past – but some military experience is useful, if only to understand that armies are emotional organisations, not the cold mechanical institutions so often portrayed.”

Beevor’s skill is in making big historical events resonate with people through the detail of human experience gleaned from letters, interview transcripts and diaries. “I am not someone who believes I am going to find a historical scoop,” he says. “What I find satisfying is lots of good low-grade material [in Stalingrad’s cellars, lice are seen leaving the dead body of a German to take up residence in one that was still warm], which helps to build the mosaic through detail. I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.”

Interest in the Second World War was flat when Beevor started his four-year project on Stalingrad. The book was expected to sell 6,000 copies, but flew off the shelves. Berlin: the Downfall 1945, six years later, was another triumph. The resurgence of interest in history was a phenomenon he could never have predicted. “People’s interest in the past had changed. My timing was lucky. Timing is a big percentage in life, in love or anything else.”

Beevor claims there is nothing he likes better than to start a book with an idea and then to realise he was completely wrong. He has no time for historians who are simply out to prove a thesis. Much historical fiction makes him grind his teeth, especially where words and thoughts are put into the minds of real historical characters, as in the Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. “We are part of an age where there is virtually no distinction between fact and fiction. The failure to distinguish between historical truth and the imagination of the novelist is a danger area. I am not attacking the quality of Mantel’s fiction but I would have preferred it if she had not called the character Thomas Cromwell. My wife does not agree with me. She thinks I am being far too pedantic.”

He was dragged by his daughter, Nella, 22, to see the film of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (“an absolute load of tripe”) on the basis that it was so bad he might find it amusing. On leaving, Beevor heard a man say to his girlfriend: “That really makes you think.”

“So depressing,” he slumps. “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It is frankly grotesque that nearly 50 per cent of the population was persuaded that Mary Magdalene had a child by Jesus and the bloodline continued.” As for Tom Cruise in the 2008 film Valkyrie: “Most people seeing it would have thought it was an accurate account of the July bomb plot, when it was absolute rubbish. Sorry, but the interests of the entertainment industry and the interests of history are fundamentally incompatible.”

He admits to panic that he would drown in the sea of material for his latest book, The Second World War. Copying across information from the archives into skeleton chapters, he would find that he had 110 pages of notes for a single chapter. And yet there is one more massive Beevor analysis of the conflict still to come – about the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944 – before he starts an epic life of Napoleon, followed perhaps by a novel set in 1917‑45. He is 65, and at his present rate of production, that will take him well into his seventies. “I can’t envisage stopping writing,” he says. “My dear father-in-law, John Julius Norwich, is still writing at 82. My God, it really keeps the marbles jangling.”

Antony Beevor’s 'The Second World War’ is available to order from Telegraph Books for £20 plus £1.25 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk. He will be at the Telegraph Hay Festival at 7pm on June 9; www.hayfestival.com

Anarchy in the UK

By Mark Tapson
http://frontpagemag.com/
June 12, 2012

Amid the pomp and ceremony of England’s recent Diamond Jubilee, marking sixty years of the Queen’s reign, a grim truth was being glossed over: England is gradually capitulating to the law of the jungle.

Last month, nine Muslim men were convicted for organized sex crimes ranging from rape to sex trafficking over more than two decades of sexual violence against underage white girls in the north of England. The gang passed the victims around to have sex with several men a day, several times a week in houses, cars, taxis and kebab shops. One thirteen-year-old was forced to have sex with twenty men in one night.

The kicker is that authorities had evidence of it as far back as 1991 and could have prevented years of abuse to dozens of young girls. But complaints to the police and social workers were ignored.

Why? Former Member of Parliament Ann Cryer declared that the authorities were “petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness.” As journalist Melanie Phillips puts it, in politically correct Britain, no criticism of religious or ethnic identities is allowed: “And so the child rape industry proceeded with repeated failures to prosecute.”

Who are the British authorities not reluctant to punish? A 42-year-old white secretary who complained, in an expletive-filled rant caught on video, about the decaying effects of immigration and multiculturalism on British civilization. For that verbal explosion, which no doubt represented a collective sense of her countrymen’s frustration, she received 21 weeks in jail. The Islamist enemies within Britain can openly express their desire to destroy the country and yet still stay on the government dole; but a peaceful white working-class citizen who is fed up with watching her country go down the drain is sentenced to jail.

In a seemingly unrelated incident, American martial arts expert Tim Larkin was banned from entering the UK by Home Secretary Theresa May, who feared his “kill or be killed” self-defense philosophy could encourage “vigilante violence.” Former military intelligence officer Larkin believes that one’s life could depend on being prepared to inflict “crippling pain,” if not actual death, on an attacker. He teaches students how, for example, to break the spine and elbow of an attacker, or disable one by rupturing his testicles.

He had planned to teach his self-defense method in UK areas that had been hit hardest during last year’s riots. Instead, he was told that his presence in the UK was not “conducive to the public good.” Member of Parliament Rosie Cooper had warned the government about Larkin’s plans. “I’m grateful to the Home Secretary for taking the appropriate action and not allowing this man into our country,” she said. “He teaches extreme and violent self-defense that is unwelcome here.” Presumably Cooper and the Home Secretary believe that British citizens should be taught only non-violent self-defense, such as politely asking one’s attacker(s) to talk things out over tea and crumpets. “The decision to bar Mr. Larkin from the UK,” crowed MP Cooper, “demonstrates the value of constant alertness when it comes to border controls.”

Actually it demonstrates that England’s suicidally tolerant, high-minded authorities are betraying its citizens, just like its law enforcement betrayed those victims of the Muslim gangs, by abandoning them to increasingly violent criminality. British citizens can no longer depend on the police, who are too paralyzed by political correctness to even protect little girls from gang rape and sexual slavery; nor can they look to the government, which doesn’t even want them to learn how to defend themselves from violent assault.

MP Cooper’s pride in “constant border alertness” would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. If the authorities were truly “alert” about border control, for example, they would have prevented Islamic extremists from streaming into the country for decades and creating an aggressively unicultural underclass that is now expanding sharia throughout the country and violently asserting its supremacism. Instead, the authorities pat themselves on the back for protecting England’s shores from such vile threats as American talk show hosts, European politicians who dare to speak out against jihad, and now, self-defense instructors.

England is wrestling with cultural –even literal – civil war with an unassimilated, radicalized Muslim element that openly desires to bring down the country. Combine this with “Occupy” movement riots, ethnic gangs, increasing racial assaults both spontaneous and otherwise, and a government that has civilized itself into impotence, and you have growing anarchy in the UK, as The Sex Pistols once sang.

In his book The Suicide of Reason, Lee Harris points out that communities composed of “rational actors” – those who have rejected the fanaticism and unity of the tribe and instead embraced individualism and reason – don’t know how to cope when confronted by “the return of the jungle.” Valuing nonviolence, compromise, and tolerance, they deny such threats or seek negotiation. But the “tribal actors,” who value commitment to the pack, violent intolerance, and hatred of the enemy, view the opposite values as weakness, which encourages them to attack.

As Harris puts it in regard to Islamic fundamentalists:

The fanaticism of radical Islam… is teaching and training alpha boys to be willing to die. It is steeping them in myths of heroic self-sacrifice and martyrdom. It is producing a new generation of Muslims who bitterly resent Western modernity, and who have dedicated themselves to destroying it.

Fanatical devotion to their tribe is the source of their power. This also holds true for racial tribes and helps empower the Occupy tribe. Harris’ law of the jungle, which these mobs embrace, is increasingly gaining ground in England while the authorities cling to politically correct denial and expect civility to prevail. This does not bode well for national self-preservation. But the great essayist Fjordman wrote recently that self-preservation

is now systematically being denied to Europeans. If you are a person of European extraction, you become an ‘extremist’ not by wanting to colonize other people’s countries, but simply by resisting the colonization of your country by others.

A hundred years ago the sun never set on England’s empire; more recently it still stood tall under Churchill and kept its chin up under Thatcher. Thanks in part to its multiculturalist elites, who are either complicit with England’s enemies or in denial about them, it’s been reduced to a shadow of its former glory. Melanie Phillips declares that Britain is “sleepwalking off the edge of a cliff”; her tribute to the Diamond Jubilee is entitled, poignantly, “This is the Britain We Fear We’ve Lost.”

Churchill once promised that the English people would fight on the beaches and the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills, and would never surrender. I believe the average patriotic Brit-on-the-street can still be counted on for that. But increasingly, he is concluding that that might require embracing his own tribal mind. As Harris says,

If there is a tribe that hates me because they see me as a member of an enemy tribe, then my only hope of security lies in standing firmly with my own tribe.

England is not alone in this. The return to the ways of the jungle is evident throughout Europe. And as Thomas Sowell puts it in his essay “Learning from Britain’s Moral Rot, America’s “own politically correct elites are pointing us in the same direction.” Those elites are instilling in American youth the emasculating lie that defending yourself or others against bullying is no different from bullying itself; it is considered a case of two wrongs not making a right. A generation of Americans is being conditioned not to stand up for themselves or to defend the helpless, but to appeal to a mediating (preferably international) authority for peaceful resolution.

Our “tribal” enemies operate under no such self-restraint, and don’t respect authority or peaceful resolution. Unless England, and by extension America and the rest of the West, embrace what Lee Harris calls our own “enlightened tribalism,” and begin defending our culture as ferociously as our enemies are striving to destroy it, then we will witness the crash of civilization in our lifetime.

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British agent in underpants bomb plot had been working undercover 'for up to a year'

Future operations and Intellience sharing between Britain and the US may have been endangered by the leaking of sensitive details about the agent who infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell plotting an underpants bomb attack.

By Duncan Gardham, Tom Whitehead
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
11 May 2012

Both MI6 and the CIA are thought to be extremely unhappy that details of British undercover agent became public.

President Obama’s Administration was criticised yesterday and a top-level investigation opened in Washington after accusations that the information, released initially by unnamed US sources to an American news agency, had been used for political pointscoring.

Leon Panetta, the US Defence Secretary, condemned the disclosure. “As a former Director of the CIA, I have to tell you that those kinds of leaks are very harmful to the efforts of the intelligence community,” he said.

Downing Street declined to comment on the case. David Cameron's official spokesman told reporters at a regular daily briefing: "I understand there is an investigation under way, being led by the Americans. It is clearly a matter for the US authorities. Clearly, we think that sensitive information should be protected."

Nigel Inkster, a former assistant chief of MI6, said in a Twitter message: "The revelations about the British agent in AQ [al Qaeda] remind us that Beltway leaking is a major security threat," referring to the area of Washington DC.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, said that leaks about operations could be "extremely harmful."

"It can prevent the effective involvement of intelligence officers or agencies in operations that are designed to save lives either in this country or other countries," he added.

"Whether a leak arises in the US, the UK or elsewhere it is equally serious."

Patrick Mercer, the former chairman of the parliamentary sub-committee on Counter-Terrorism, said there was "inevitable friction" between the US and UK intelligence agencies, partly because the British agencies have to deal with a plethora of different American agencies.

The British agent who risked his life to infiltrate the al-Qaeda cell plotting had been working undercover for up to a year, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

As well as smuggling out the latest version of the bomb, the agent was able to pass on vital information to his handlers about the movements of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

His covert mission in Yemen also gave him an insight into the future plans of master bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri, which include using cameras and hard disk drives to try and hide explosives.

Sources have told The Daily Telegraph that the agent was moving in fundamentalist Islamic circles in Britain and at least one other European country when he was recruited by MI5, with the help of Saudi intelligence.

He is said to be in his late twenties or early thirties and of "Middle Eastern" origin. According to a report by the Associated Press last night, he was not originally a British citizen but was given the passport "as part of the ruse."

He travelled to Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, where he joined an Arabic language school in order to make contact with al-Qaeda extremists.

In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian student who had studied in London and tried to blow himself up on a trans-Atlantic flight to Detroit on Christmas Day three years ago using a similar device.

British and Saudi intelligence officers were hoping that the agent's British passport would make him an "irresistible" attraction for al-Qaeda seeking to get a suicide bomber onto a US-bound plane.

His handler was a Saudi intelligence officer who travelled with him to Yemen and helped him attract the attention of al-Qaeda and communicate with headquarters once he was undercover, one source said.

He is said to have been in the mountainous region of Shabwa in southern Yemen for several months and was waiting in Sanaa for some time before that, the source added.

He left two weeks ago on his "mission" and once he was safely back with his handlers, the CIA began a series of drone strikes against AQAP.

The risk he was taking was illustrated in March, while he was still under cover, when a video was released by AQAP in which three men confessed to being paid by the authorities to provide information for American drones to target the fighters.

The video then showed a prisoner being forced to his knees, as one of the fighters declared the man was a Saudi spy who hoped to infiltrate al-Qaeda and sentenced him to death.

The screen then went blank and a shot was heard to cries of "Allahu Akbar" [God is great].

In a rare public speech two years ago, Sir John Sawers, the chief of MI6, made a plea for secrecy, adding: "a lot is at stake."

"Secret organisations need to stay secret," he added. "If our operations and methods become public, they won't work."

The reason for the secrecy was to avoid putting undercover agents – the secret sources used by MI6 officers - at risk, he explained.

If they are exposed they "can get identified, arrested, tortured and killed by the very organisations who are working against us," he added.

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Asian sex gang: young girls betrayed by our fear of racism

Vulnerable teenagers were abandoned to their abusers because of our society’s nervous respect for their 'different' culture.

By Allison Pearson
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/
9 May 2012

Paedophile ring: eight of the nine men convicted of abuse: top, Adil Khan, Mohammed Amin, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid; bottom, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Qayyum, Hamid Safi and Kabeer Hassan Photo: PA

Nine white men are found guilty of grooming young Asian girls, aged between 13 and 15, whom they picked up on the streets of London. The girls were lured with free fish and chips before being raped or pimped as prostitutes. One Asian girl from a children’s home was used for sex by 20 white men in one night. Police insist the crimes were not “racially motivated”.

Imagine if that story were true. Would you really believe that race was not a factor in those hateful crimes? Do you think that, despite conclusive DNA evidence from a girl raped by two men, the police would have hesitated to press charges because the suspects were white and it could make things a bit sensitive in the white community? Would the Crown Prosecution Service have refused to prosecute, allowing the child-sex ring to flourish for three more anguished years?

OK, now let’s try switching the ethnic identities round. Change the fish and chips to kebabs, London to Rochdale, white to Asian and vice versa and you have the case that ended yesterday at Liverpool Crown Court. Nine British Muslim men were jailed for a total of 77 years for rape and trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation. The whole case made for disturbing reading, but somehow it was the tiny, paralysing details that made it real. Like the fact that one of the convicted men, father-of-five Abdul Rauf, was a religious studies teacher at a local mosque. Rauf asked his 15-year-old victim if she had any younger friends, and drove some of the girls to meet other men, who had sex with them despite knowing they were under-age.

You will already have noticed a lot of embarrassed evasiveness about this disgusting case, particularly on the BBC. Turning a blind eye to appalling, illegal practices because “it’s their culture” is what has brought our country to this obscene pass. I have watched it unfolding since I did my teaching practice in 1982 in Southall, west London. I remember being encouraged to “teach the children their own culture” even as I found myself wondering why British Muslim girls couldn’t be taught the enlightened beliefs of the egalitarian land in which they lived.

When it comes to women’s rights, not all cultures are created equal, particularly those whose attitudes are frozen some time in the mid‑14th century. But we weren’t allowed to say that. Actually, we weren’t even allowed to think that. If you inhaled enough toleration of the intolerable, then you were well on your way to the opium of political correctness.

All those years ago in the classroom, it was clear to me how dangerous it would be if we didn’t insist that newcomers signed up to our social norms. What was going to happen if we were nervous of offending them, not the other way around? This week, over Liverpool, the sky was dark not with rain clouds but with chickens coming home to roost.

Rochdale girls who were living in what is imaginatively known as “care” were recruited into sexual factory farming by Muslim men described as “pure evil” by detectives. The 59-year-old ringleader was banned from court for calling the judge a “racist bastard”. His barrister explained that his client “had objected from the start to being tried by an all-white jury. He believes his convictions have nothing to do with justice but result from the faith and race of the defendants.” In other words, a racist who treats poor white girls as sub-human seriously believes it is he who is the victim of racism, when he is called to account for organising the gang-rape of under-age females. To be fair, it takes 40 years of well-intentioned multiculturalism to achieve that kind of moral mess.

The layers of denial run so deep that it’s important to try to be clear where we can. First, it is an insult to Hindus, Sikhs and decent, integrated Muslims to classify those brutes under the catch-all title of “Asian males”. All but one are Pakistani Muslims who come from a patriarchal peasant culture that obviously regards young white British girls as easy meat. Those children were considered fair game for degrading sexual acts on an almost industrial scale. The men took a calculated gamble that no one gave a damn about the girls. And you know the worst thing? They were right.

The number of adolescents “passed around” like a congenial hookah pipe by the gang is believed to be more than 50. There were 631 documented cases of abuse over a five-year period, and many will have been too afraid to tell their story. Some may not even be alive to tell it. We will never know the full extent of their pain.

Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, who at least had the guts to bring the case to court after social workers and the police turned away for fear of being seen as racist, admitted that “imported cultural baggage” played a role in the crimes. That’s the same baggage that brought quaint customs like forced marriages, honour killing and female genital mutilation to these isles.
Crucially, Mr Afzal says that what defined the convicted men was their attitude to the opposite sex. “They think that women are some lesser beings. The availability of vulnerable young white girls is what has drawn men to them… These girls were on the streets at midnight. It made them easy prey for evil men.”

So the case turns out to be a tale of two cultures. On the one hand, we have white girls, raised in a godless, under-parented, over-sexualised society, who have little respect for themselves or their bodies and – even worse – no adults taking responsibility. On the other, we have a different kind of “respect”, the warped creed of a sub-section of unreconstructed, brutally over-parenting men. Their own daughters and young female relatives must not be violated or they will lose their market value, so why not take out your sexual frustration on the despised native slappers instead? It’s as simple as that.

It’s not just the Pakistani men who considered their prey to be beneath contempt. “I think the attitude of the local authorities for many years was that these chaotic girls were not held in very high regard,” explains Simon Danczuk, the MP for Rochdale, choosing his words carefully. “I don’t know if it’s political correctness, but the attitude was, 'These are the life choices the girls are making’.”
Life choices? Dear God, they were raped for years. One girl left a letter for the staff at her children’s home saying she was being abused. It was ignored. So the poor kid wrote another. It was only when a teacher spotted that one pupil was pregnant and a suspicious number of Asian-looking men were picking her up at the school gate that the alarm was raised.

I spoke to Mr Danczuk yesterday, and he strenuously disputes claims that this is a one-off case, or even a recent phenomenon. The grooming of white girls by a small sub-section of the Pakistani community was being discussed in Blackburn council 15 years ago. Recently, the MP was outraged when male relatives of the accused in a similar child-sex case came to his constituency surgery to ask for support. “They spoke about white women in an exceptionally derogatory way. I nearly threw them out.”

While the majority of Asian men in Rochdale are “extremely respectful towards women”, Simon Danczuk laughs at the view of Keith Vaz that “this was not a race issue”. One can only marvel at the skill of the optician who continues to supply Mr Vaz, the chairman of the Commons’ home affairs committee, with spectacles of ever-rosier hue.

Mr Vaz warned yesterday that blaming a particular race or religion for grooming young girls for sex “risks opening up a Pandora’s box over race relations”. If he would only take off his goggles for a minute he might spot the National Front supporters strutting their rancid stuff outside the Liverpool courtroom. The intimidation of two Asian barristers to the point where, shockingly, they withdrew from the case suggests that the contents of Pandora’s box are swarming all over the place.

What a relief to hear Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, a moderate Muslim youth group, accusing Pakistani community elders of “burying their heads in the sand” over this poisonous problem. He welcomes police intervention and insists that race is “central to the actions” of the criminals. “They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought; it is this sort of behaviour that is bringing shame on our community.”

By now, even the most trusting and generous-minded liberals must have woken up to the fact that our fear of being tarred as racist has allowed ugly practices and outmoded attitudes to flourish, hidden away behind a nervous respect for “difference”. Stymied by political correctness, social workers, carers, police, lawyers and council staff all failed to protect those young Rochdale girls.

They were victims twice over. First, of the despicable men who traded and abused them, and second, of our well-meaning, foolish and deadly desire to avoid the issue of race at any cost. They deserved better.

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British Peer Lord Ahmed suspended after 'offering £10m bounty on Barack Obama and George Bush'

A controversial British peer has been suspended from the Labour Party amid reports that he offered a £10 million bounty for the capture of President Barack Obama and his predecessor President George W Bush.

By Nick Allen and Tim Ross
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
16 April 2012

Lord Ahmed, 53, who in 1998 became the first Muslim life peer, was reported to have made the comments at a conference in Haripur in Pakistan.

A Labour Party spokesman said: "We have suspended Lord Ahmed (pictured above) pending investigation. If these comments are accurate we utterly condemn these remarks which are totally unacceptable."

According to Pakistan's Express Tribune newspaper Lord Ahmed offered the bounty in response to a US action a week ago.

The US issued a $10 million reward for the capture of Pakistani militant leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, who it suspects of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 166 people died as terrorists stormed hotels and a train station.

The British peer reportedly said: "'If the US can announce a reward of $10 million for the (capture) of Hafiz Saeed, I can announce a bounty of £10 million (for the capture of) President Obama and his predecessor, George Bush."

Lord Ahmed reportedly said he would arrange the bounty at any cost, even if he had to sell his own personal assets including his house.

He was said to have made the comments at a reception arranged in his honour by the business community of Haripur on Friday.

A former Pakistani foreign minister and a provincial education minister were said to have been present at the reception.

Lord Ahmed, who was born in Pakistan, became Baron Ahmed of Rotherham at the age of 40. In 2007 he was highly critical of the awarding of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, claiming the author had "blood on his hands."

In 2009 he was jailed for dangerous driving after sending and receiving text messages minutes before being involved in a fatal motorway crash. The Court of Appeal later suspended his 12-week jail sentence.

A week ago the US offered the bounty on Saeed in response to what it called his increasingly "brazen" conduct in Pakistan where he moves freely and appears on television.

Documents found by US special forces at Osama bin Laden's final hideaway in Abbottabad, 22 miles north of Haripur, last year apparently linked Saeed with the al-Qaeda leader. The evidence was said to have shown that bin Laden played a key role in planning the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

In its statement suspending Lord Ahmed the Labour Party said: "The international community is rightly doing all in its power to seek justice for the victims of the Mumbai bombings and halt terrorism."

Lord Ahmed firmly denied offering a bounty, but said he had told the meeting that Mr Bush and former-Labour prime minister Tony Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes.

Speaking from Pakistan to the Press Association he challenged the Labour Party to provide evidence for the suspension.

He said: "They have suspended me? That's a surprise to me. I did not know.

"I never said those words. I did not offer a bounty. I said that there have been war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan and those people who have got strong allegations against them - George W Bush and Tony Blair - have been involved in illegal wars and should be brought to justice.

"I do not think there's anything wrong with that. If the Labour Party want to suspend me I will deal with the Labour Party. They will have to give me some evidence."

The Left Resumes Its War on History

Among the Intellectualoids

Did you know Che Guevara was at heart an Irish freedom fighter?

By Samuel Gregg
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
March 28, 2012

An artist's impression of the Che Guevara monument on Salthill Promenade.

What does an Argentine-born Cuban Communist revolutionary executed in the Bolivian jungle 45 years ago have in common with a small town on Ireland's west coast? Apart from tenuous ancestral connections, the answer is nothing. Recent attempts, however, to manufacture such an association have provided yet another illustration of the left's on-going determination to whitewash history.

In February this year, Galway City Council announced plans to build a statute of Che Guevara to "honor one of its own" (one of Che 's grandmothers was born in Galway). It wasn't long, however, before several Irish business leaders, journalists, and eventually theChairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee vented their outrage about the council's decision. Why, they asked, would Galway erect a monument to someone who had personally killed several people without even the pretense of trials? Why would they honor a man who oversaw one of the Castro regime's most brutal periods of oppression -- including arbitrary imprisonments and summary executions?

The Irish left's initial reaction was to deny these facts and launch ad hominem attacks. When that failed, they produced extraordinary rationalizations which bordered on the absurd. One columnist, for example, wrote: "Yes, Che was ruthless and fanatical and sometimes murderous. But was he a murderer? No, not in the sense of a serial killer or gangland assassin. He was one of those rare people who are prepared to push past ethical constraints, even their own conscience, and bring about a greater good by doing terrible things."

Apparently murder isn't really murder if it's justified by "a greater good."

We shouldn't, however, be surprised by such responses. They reflect a pattern. Getting contemporary French left-wing intellectuals, for example, to acknowledge the ideological genocide unleashed in the Vendée by the French Revolution in the 1790s is almost impossible. In present-day America, any mention of Planned Parenthood's early association with the eugenics movement invariably results in stone-walling and, eventually, lame explanations that its founder Margaret Sanger was a "child of her time." The same approach shows up in most American liberals' studied refusal to discuss slurs employed by the likes of Bill Maher to describe conservative women.

But it's when the left is confronted with the history of Communism that the denials, ad hominem vitriol, sullen silences, and feeble excuses really get going. Back in 1997, several French intellectuals, many with left-wing backgrounds, published The Black Book of Communism. This text exhaustively detailed how Communist movements and regimes had imprisoned, tortured, starved, experimented upon, enslaved, and exterminated millions across the globe throughout the 20th century.

Though a few brave lefty souls conceded the book's damning evidence, the left's general response followed the usual playbook: attacks on the authors' credibility; arcane disputation of precise numbers killed (as if a million-less here-or-there made any meaningful difference to the overall thesis); claims that Stalin represented a "distortion" of Marxism; and even bizarre suggestions that such crimes shouldn't distract us from Communism's "genuine achievements."

Overall, the left has been remarkably successful in distorting people's knowledge of Communism's track-record. Everyone today knows about the Nazis' unspeakable crimes. Yet does anyone doubt that far fewer know much about the atrocities ordered by the likes of Lenin, Castro, Mao, and Pol Pot? Do those Occupy Wall Street protesters waving red hammer-and-sickle flags actually understand what such symbols mean for those who endured Communism?

But while the left's response to such awkward queries won't likely change, the unanswered question is why so many left-inclined politicians and intellectuals play these games.

Part of the answer is the very human reluctance of anyone to acknowledge the dark side of movements with which they have some empathy. Even today, for example, there are Latin Americans inclined to make excuses for the right-wing death-squads -- the infamous Escuadrón de la Muerte -- that wrought havoc in Central America throughout the 1970s and '80s.

The sheer scale of denial among progressivists, however, suggests something else is going on. I think it owes much to the left's claim to a monopoly of moral high-mindedness.

Anyone who reads progressivists' writings soon discovers they usually assert to be working to liberate the rest of us from all sorts of oppression. Normally, the end-goal is to usher some secular utopia. Karl Marx, for instance, described his particular end of history as a world in which it would be possible for everyone "to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner, just as I please."

Claiming the moral high-ground, of course, allows the left to dismiss its critics as unethical, disingenuous, or dangerous. In many instances, the same self-righteousness has been invoked to justify the left's use of ferocious measures against its opponents, real and imaginary.

Seeking, for example, to legitimize the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, its architect Maximilian Robespierre claimed: "The spring of… government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror.… Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue."

Unfortunately for progressivists, the lengths to which some leftists have gone to realize their objectives cast into extreme doubt their claims to moral authority. After all, who in their right mind would associate virtue with the guillotine in thePlace de la Révolution? Isn't it supposed to be reactionaries who do such appalling things? Could it really be that Saint Che himself once actually said: "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail.… a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

As a rule, conservatives generally aren't into utopias. Since Edmund Burke's time, they've underscored human fallibility and the folly -- not to mention hubris -- of trying to create heaven-on-earth.

For the left, however, any recognition of such hum-drum truths about the human condition severely compromises theirraison d'être. That same self-understanding also means they must wage a war of rejection and rationalization against whatever contradicts their mythologies, such as some very unromantic facts about not-so-angelic figures like Che .

Ultimately, historical truth usually triumphs over mere ideology. Lies have a way of disintegrating from within. But as Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, "When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness." Conservatives forget that advice at their peril.

- Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, his prize-winning The Commercial Society, and Wilhelm Röpke's Political Economy.

U.K. Thought Police Send Man to Prison

By Bruce Bawer
http://frontpagemag.com/
March 14, 2012

A few days ago I did some reflecting here on the steady rise of sharia in Britain, as exemplified by the BBC’s frank admission of its unwillingness to mock Islam, the harassment of an air passenger for an innocuous remark about hijab, and the see-no-evil response of a BBC reporter to mass displays of pro-sharia aggression in Luton.

Alas, the evidence of Britain’s decline and fall in the face of Islam just keeps on coming. This week’s case in point is that of Darren Conway (pictured above), who on March 6 was sentenced to a year in prison for posting anti-Islamic materials in the window of his ground-floor apartment in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. As the BBC puts it, he was “convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence for putting anti-Islamic literature in his window.”

For once, the language used by the BBC was restrained and objective in comparison with the rhetoric employed by local news organizations covering the story. Here’s how the website This is Lincolnshire began its report:

A Gainsborough man who plastered his front window with vile anti-Islamic hate literature has been jailed for a year.

Darren Conway, a self-confessed supporter of right-wing organisations, was given a 12-months’ sentence at Lincoln Crown Court.

Note the way in which the reporter deploys the words vile and self-confessed. The very inclusion of such language in a supposedly objective news report means that what we are reading here is not, in fact, anything of the kind; what it is, rather, is an effort by the writer and the website to signal to their audience that they’re on the “right” side of this issue. The use of such language is a gesture of dhimmitude, an implicit statement of submissiveness, a tacit communication of acceptance of the sharia-based notion that, yes, criticism of Islam is vile and should be punished. And it is a plea: don’t hurt us. Similarly, note the use of the words offensive, inflammatory, and racist in this opening sentence of the article about Conway in the Worksop Guardian:

The offensive actions of a Gainsborough man were blasted by a judge as he was jailed for displaying inflammatory racist posters in the front window of his flat.

The word racist occurs frequently in the articles about the Conway case. Although most of the descriptions of the items posted in Conway’s window are very sketchy, there is nothing in any of them to indicate that any of the materials were genuinely racist; it seems pretty clear that when the reporters writing about Conway employ the word racist, they are making the now familiar equation of Islam criticism with racism.

Exactly what did Conway post in his windows? The most extensive description I could find was in the Worksop Guardian, which said that he had put up “posters, literature and photographs which attacked the Prophet Mohammed and the Muslim religion,” “slogans such as ‘Jihad works both ways,’ ‘no surrender,’ ‘Muslims are the most hateful of them all’ and a letter confirming that he was a member of the BNP.” Another source tells us that the materials “contained derogatory comments about Islam” and “promoted the BNP,” while “one poster showed a picture of an English Defence League demonstration.”

It would be useful to actually see the items Conway posted, so as to determine for oneself just how “vile” they were, to discover whether anything was, in fact, racist, and to find out if Conway called for acts of aggression or for somebody’s murder or anything like that. If he did incite violence, there might be good reason to put him behind bars; but I have not found any suggestion anywhere that this was the case. (Conway himself has been quoted as saying, “I have no problem with Muslims, although I do believe the Islamic faith is very much flawed but as for people who follow it I have no personal problem with.”)

In any event, just as nearly all the major Western news organizations refused to show the Danish Muhammed cartoons, none of the media reporting on the Conway case have dared to vouchsafe readers a glimpse of the materials he posted. No, we’re simply expected to take their and the prosecutors’ word that the stuff was, indeed, vile. One prosecutor, Edward Johnson, is reported to have “described the material…as grossly offensive towards the Muslim faith.” Meanwhile the Crown Prosecution Service’s own website has posted an extensive statement on the matter by Judith Walker, Chief Crown Prosecutor for the CPS East Midlands:

Everyone has the right to live free from harassment in a tolerant society. Darren Conway displayed highly offensive posters in his window targeted at the Muslim community. Although they were targeted at Muslims, they would cause offence to virtually anyone that saw them.

Today’s conviction sends a strong message that targeting groups in society in this deliberately offensive way has no place in our community and will not be tolerated. The words and images used by Conway were particularly disgusting, so it was important to bring this case to court and ensure that he faced the full consequences of his actions.

The Crown Prosecution Service will continue to treat cases based on hatred with the utmost seriousness. It is essential that everyone in our community is free to live without harassment and that anyone who jeopardises that freedom will face prosecution.

We all owe Walker a debt of gratitude, for in this statement she takes us right to the heart of the matter, giving us a crystal-clear picture of how these people think. To place in the window of your home slogans and pictures that add up to a criticism of Islamic ideology is not to exercise your freedom of speech; it is to commit an act of “harassment” that has no place “in a tolerant society” and that must therefore be punished.

Note Walker’s chillingly Orwellian understanding of the concept of freedom, which has its roots not in Magna Carta or the Enlightenment but in sharia. When she says that it is “essential that everyone in our community is free to live without harassment,” she means nothing more or less than this: that it is the right of Muslims in Britain to live in a society free of criticism of their religion. And when she says that “anyone who jeopardises that freedom will face prosecution,” she means this: that any British citizen who thinks that he enjoys the right under British law to criticize anything, including Islam, is mistaken; he does not have any such right; and if he acts as if he does, he will be incarcerated.

Walker’s pretense to the contrary, there is, needless to say, a colossal double standard at the heart of her thinking. The recent history of Britain has shown that a great variety of statements and actions by British Muslims that many non-members of their faith might well consider exceedingly vile and offensive, and might legitimately regard as acts of harassment – including a number of the statements and actions recorded in the above-mentioned BBC report on Luton – are in little or no danger of leading to prosecution or imprisonment. Such is the kind of legal thinking, and juridical practice, that, more and more every day, is shaping the destiny of the land of John Stuart Mill and Winston Churchill.

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An upside-down family tree

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
December 23, 2011

Birth of St John the Baptist by Artemisia Gentileschi oil on canvas, c. 1635, Museo Nacional del Prado

Our lesson for today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth:

"But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John."

That bit of the Christmas story doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's in there – Luke 1:13, part of what he'd have called the back story, if he'd been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ's birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity – "for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years." Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth's pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle – the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus' birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth – all life – is to a degree miraculous and God-given.

We now live in Elisabeth's world – not just because technology has caught up with the deity and enabled women in their fifties and sixties to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it's broke but that it's old and barren. Which explains why it's broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency – "America's heading for the same fate as Greece if we don't change course," etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren – i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social democratic state where workers in "hazardous" professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren't enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.

Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars' worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent's economic "powerhouse" has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: one in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. "Germany's working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades," says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. "Rural areas will see a massive population decline, and some villages will simply disappear."

If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people's money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: it's run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever-fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it's made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate's somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple – or about half "replacement rate." Japan, Germany and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the "ideal" number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered "None." We are living in Zacharias and Elisabeth's world – by choice.

America is not in as perilous a situation as Europe – yet. But its rendezvous with fiscal apocalypse also has demographic roots: The baby boomers did not have enough children to maintain the solvency of mid-20th century welfare systems premised on mid-20th century birthrates. The "Me Decade" turned into a Me Quarter-Century, and beyond. The "me"s are all getting a bit long in the tooth, but they never figured there might come a time when they'd need a few more "thems" still paying into the treasury.

The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It's why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and, if necessary, die for your country. A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe's words at the dawn of the "Me Decade," "conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream."

Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don't need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don't need to have children. And you certainly don't need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It's no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool.

If you believe in God, the utilitarian argument for religion will seem insufficient and reductive: "These are useful narratives we tell ourselves," as I once heard a wimpy Congregational pastor explain her position on the Bible. But, if Christianity is merely a "useful" story, it's a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ's divinity in the miracle of His birth. The hyper-rationalists ought at least to be able to understand that post-Christian "rationalism" has delivered much of Christendom to an utterly irrational business model: a pyramid scheme built on an upside-down pyramid. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have seen where that leads. Like the song says, Merry Christmas, baby.

©MARK STEYN