If the estimates are to be believed, our tiny island will soon be packed tighter than the crotch in Terry Wogan's slacks. Seventy-seven million of us by 2051 apparently. Time to buy shares in loft conversion firms. Or at least buy a hard-hat for all the flak this scenario will unleash.

Forget the fact that this is just guesswork based on the freakish immigration-flow from Eastern Europe over the past few years.

That medical advances will make us live much longer and be fertile much later. Or that if people are still leaving their homeland to graft here in 30 years, it's good news because it means our economy will still be expanding, and those new workers will be paying taxes to keep all of us 110-year-olds in pensions. Forget that, because we know how these figures will be used...

As vindication by right-wing doom-mongers for their claims that immigration is an evil which has dragged us to our knees. That we have enough foreign parasites swamping our green and pleasant land, and leeching off our welfare state. And more of them, on the scale predicted will sink the British nation into oblivion.

They're right in one respect. Immigration has to be controlled. Too many communities feel their traditional culture is being stolen by too many new arrivals.

Chief Rabbi: Multiculturalism has run its course

''Multiculturalism has run its course and it is time to move on." So begins Jonathan Sacks' new book on the future of British society and the dangers facing liberal democracy.

Arguing that global communications have fragmented national cultures and that multiculturalism, intended to reduce social frictions, is today reinforcing them, Sacks argues for a new approach to national identity. We cannot stay with current policies that are producing a society of conflicting ghettoes and non-intersecting lives, turning religious bodies into pressure groups rather than society-building forces.

Sacks maintains that we will have to construct a national narrative as a basis for identity, reinvigorate the concept of the common good, and identify shared interests among currently conflicting groups. It must restore a culture of civility, protect "neutral spaces" from politicization, and find ways of moving beyond an adversarial culture in which the loudest voice wins. He proposes a responsibility-based, rather than rights-based, model of citizenship that connects the ideas of giving and belonging.

Offering a new paradigm to replace previous models of assimilation on the one hand, multiculturalism on the other, he argues that we should see society as "the home we build together," bringing the distinctive gifts of different goups to society as a whole, and not only to our particular subsection of it.

Sacks warns of the hazards free and open societies face in the twenty-first century, and offers an unusual religious defense of liberal democracy and the nation state. A counterweight to his earlier The Dignity of Difference, Sacks makes the case for "integrated diversity" within a framework of shared political views.''

mesopotami west on LIBERAL MAN:

One should always know one's opponent and so, in that vein, I give you today, The Liberal Man, a brief description of the views, prejudices and fantasies of Canadian liberals of all stripes, shapes and sexes.

Nationalism
The Liberal Man is a post-nationalist. He doesn't really believe in the nation state, preferring the United Nations and the EU as more congenial conglomerations. If you ask him why; he will say he finds nationalism somewhat distasteful, too boastful, even fascist in origin. The whole idea that one country is better or more deserving of praise than another makes him uneasy.

Multiculturalism
The Liberal Man is proudly multicultural. He believes that all cultures are equal -- he is a cultural relativist -- and that none has any right to special status over another. Because of this, he finds excuses for such 'cultural' abnormalities as genital mutilation, honour killings, arranged marriages, stonings and second class status for women. 'Who are we to judge,' says The Liberal Man.

Western Guilt
The Liberal Man has intense feelings of guilt. Despite the fact the West ended slavery on the high seas (Britain) and in North America (the Union) and in practice (The Civil Rights Act), he still feels the burden of all those years when Western nations peopled their sugar islands with blacks brought over in chains. As a result, he is inclined to take the side of every tin pot dictator in black Africa and elsewhere over that of any Western nation. The many virtues of British Colonialism are ignored; the many vices of current African dictators likewise. When it comes to race, the West can do no right, the rest, no wrong.

Military Force
The Liberal Man is horrified at military force and does everything to avoid paying for it, using it or thinking about it. This is one reason why The Liberal Man is anti-American; Americans are prepared to use force to overthrow dictators, and force is bad, bad, bad. When Canada uses force The Liberal Man has regrets, second-thoughts, night sweats.

Weapons
Because he is against force, The Liberal Man is also against guns. Guns, he says, cause crime! And they're noisy. Ban them. Secretly, the Liberal Man thinks guns are symbolic of male aggression. He thinks banning guns will end male aggression. This makes sense since it's the guns that cause the aggression, not the males.

Religion
The Liberal Man is post-religious. It's not that he's an atheist, it's that he's too busy buying MP3 players, SUV's and flat-panel TV's to consider the possibility of another life, or an after life, or indeed death. The Liberal Man has never seen a dead person in the flesh and has no inkling of his own mortality. Because he is not religious, he has no concept of good and evil.

Of course we cannot take the comparison too far, but one basic feature is the same: beside the hard core of fanatics there is a penumbra of people who could go either way. In Germany, they were (and are) called the Sympathisanten, the "sympathisers". Among European Muslims, they might very roughly be correlated with those who, in surveys, refuse to condemn suicide bombings, although that figure is inflated by attitudes to Palestine. One analyst estimates that while the hard core may comprise 1% of British Muslims, the penumbra of Sympathisanten, the could-go-either-way group, is perhaps 10%.

If you look at the biographies of actual jihadist assassins over the last six years, from the September 11 bomber, Mohammed Atta, radicalised in Hamburg, to Mohammed Bouyeri, murderer of Theo van Gogh, you find again and again the same story: young men who were first attracted to a modern, western way of life, quite different from that of their parents, but then angrily rejected it in favour of a violent, extremist version of political Islam. Fortunately, there are also people who travel the other way. Read Ed Husain's book The Islamist for an illuminating account of how one young British man was sucked in to extremist Islamism, but then turned away from it, while still remaining a Muslim. So much now depends on whether the 10% veer towards the barbaric 1%, or, like Husain, rejoin the civilised majority. (This is not a clash of civilisations; it is a clash between civilisation and decivilisation.)

SIMON KUPER: Europe can feel at home with 16m Muslims 

When Italians immigrated to France in the late 19th century, many French be­lieved these often under­educated, religious newcomers would never integrate. Some Italians were killed in race riots, write Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse in their book Integrating Islam*. Later, Portuguese, Polish or Jewish immigrants were deemed “unable to integrate” into France, but they did.

Now the European Union’s 16m or so Muslims are often considered unassimilable. Fifty years after they began arriving in Europe, their rates of joblessness and incarceration remain high. A very small number are fundamentalist terrorists, as in the recently foiled plot in Germany. Muslims also traditionally have more children than native Europeans. Hence the American neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz, in his new book**, predicts that western Europe will be “conquered from within by Islamofascism”.  <Registeration Needed>

 

In a very concise way, Muravchik has given the reason why this declared war on democracy by those who champion Islamism will begin sooner rather than later. This war might be a traditional shooting war that the Islamists will most certainly loose. But there is another possibility. Why risk loosing to technological superior enemy when the much more covert tactics of media, demographic, litigation, institutional, financial, economic and thuggery jihads are proving quite successful.

A gown designed for female Muslim patients who wish to preserve their modesty for religious reasons is being introduced to hospitals in Lancashire.

The £12 outfits - made in Yorkshire - cover the entire head, neck and body, leaving just a slot for the eyes. The burqua-style gowns come with trousers, two styles of head-dress and elasticated cuffs to prevent women's arms from being revealed.

They will be available to patients at in Chorley and Preston from November. The gowns were trialled at Royal Preston Hospital and proved so successful that a number of other NHS Trusts have also expressed an interest in offering them.

 

Perhaps there will not always be an England. An exodus unprecedented in modern times, coupled with a record influx of foreigners, is threatening to erode the character of the land of William Shakespeare and overpowering monarchs, a land that served as the cradle for much of American thought, law and culture.

The figures, making headlines in London newspapers, tell only part of the story. Between June 2005 and June 2006 nearly 200,000 British citizens chose to leave the country for a new life elsewhere. During the same period, at least 574,000 immigrants came to Britain. This number does not include the people who broke the law to get there, or the thousands unknown to the government.

Britain's Office of National Statistics reports that middle-class Britons are beginning to move out of towns in southern England that have become home to large numbers of immigrants, thereby altering the character of neighborhoods that have remained unchanged for generations.

Britons give many reasons for leaving, but their stories share one commonality: Life in Britain has become unbearable for them. They fear lawlessness and the threat of more terrorism from a growing Muslim population and the loss of a sense of Britishness, exacerbated by the growing refusal of public schools to teach the history and culture of the nation to the next generation. What it means to be British has been watered down in a plague of political correctness that has swept the country. Officials say they do not wish to "offend" others. <Full Story>

1. investigate radical mosques

   support anti-Islamofascist freedom fighters

   thwart attempts to impose Sharia law

   form an anti-Islamofascist publishing network

   create an anti-Islamofascist portal on the Internet

   establish an anti-Islamofascist speakers bureau

   wage an ideological assault on Islamofascism

   support efforts to evangelize Muslims in Europe and the Middle East

   create a global anti-Islamofascist coalition

   reframe the illegal immigration issue as one of national security

   end dependence on foreign oil that's funding the Islamofascists.  

   We need a serious dialogue -- not knee-jerk hysteria -- about the 1st Amendment, what it protects and what it should not protect. Here are a few baseline principles to consider:

   • We should be allowed to close down websites that recruit suicide bombers and provide instructions to indiscriminately kill civilians by suicide or other means, or advocate killing people from the West or the destruction of Western civilization;

   • We should propose a Geneva-like convention for fighting terrorism that makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous. A subset of this convention should define the international rules of engagement on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims; and

   • We need an expeditious review of current domestic law to see what changes can be made within the protections of the 1st Amendment to ensure that free speech protection claims are not used to protect the advocacy of terrorism, violent conduct or the killing of innocents.The most effective form of counterterrorism fights not the terrorists but the ideas that motivate them.

   • This strategy involves two main steps. First, defeat the Islamist movement just as the fascist and communist movements were defeated - on every level and in every way, making use of every institution, public and private. This task falls mainly on non-Muslims, Muslim communities being generally incapable or unwilling to purge their own.

   • In contrast, only Muslims can undertake the second step, the formulation and spread of an Islam that is modern, moderate, democratic, liberal, good-neighborly, humane, and respectful of women. Here, non-Muslims can help by distancing themselves from Islamists and supporting moderate Muslims.

A quarter of Dutch Citizens support the banning of the Koran and half think its text is more violent that the Torah or the Bible according to a recent poll conducted after Geert Wilders of the right-wing, anti immigration and anti-Muslim, Partij voor de Vrijheid, called for it to be banned. The poll doesn’t say how many people actually bothered to read it. A lot less than a quarter I’d guess.

6.5% of the Dutch population is Muslim, which is probably less than France but more than the UK. France’s uncompromising stance and marginalisation of Muslims led to riots and now they’ve elected a fascist as president, the chance of community relations improving have got to be slim. Holland’s political elite has also marginalised and vilified its Muslim population, which has led to a wave of Islamophobic violence, a rise in fascism and Islamic extremism. <Quick Read>

It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that what pricked Livingstone's imagination, provoking him to tears, was not so much the hard fact of the slaves' misery as the poignant image of Livingstone himself being moved by the slaves' misery.

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, has a phrase for such a process, which is particularly widespread in modern politics. He describes it as "moral judo", whereby the practitioner takes every opportunity to trap his opponent in a tight hold that proves his own moral superiority.

It is worth remembering that Livingstone's weeping for slavery has come just as he is engaged in a very vigorous bout of moral judo regarding the London mayoral contest. <<Quick Read>>

''Far from damping this fire down, the Government itself is fanning the flames still further. Because it refuses to acknowledge that this is an Islamic religious war against the West, the political and security establishment is actually trying to use Islamist religious extremism as an antidote to Islamist terrorism without acknowledging the unbroken line between the two.

''So it is actually promoting, as role models for impressionable young Muslims seeking a purpose to their lives, Islamists who claim not to support violence - even though they spout hatred of the West, Americans and Jews.

''Ludicrously, it has even recruited Islamist radicals into government - to act as advisors against Islamic radicalism.

''This lethal misjudgment has had disastrous results. Extremism has multiplied. The police themselves have been compromised. As the former radical Ed Husain has written, Islamists who work closely with the police to "represent Muslims" have been tipping off jihadists about police activities.

''And the Government's refusal to outlaw Hizb ut Tahrir, on the spurious grounds that although it promotes the Islamic takeover of Britain it is not committed to violence, has meant that this group continues to recruit thousands of students on campus to the cause of jihad against the West.'' <<Quick Read>>

Britons take it easy in the new age of terrorism 

''The threat level in Britain is “critical”. This means that a new terrorist attack could be imminent. Would-be car-bombers are said to be still at large. Iraq-style terror tactics have arrived.

''But the British public seems to be more worried about the threat from the domestic tabby than the menace of suicide bombers. Checking the BBC website on Monday for news of the latest arrests, I noticed that the “most read” story in the UK was headlined: “Experts warn on cat allergies.” Terrorism did not make it into the top five.

''Certainly the Londoners I travelled to work with did not seem terrified – or even particularly anxious. The crowds on the Tube were, as usual, immersed in their free newspapers and insulated by their iPods. People seem to have decided that the “British” thing to do (to use our new prime minister’s favourite word) is to stay calm. But the commuters around me were not putting on a brave face. They seemed genuinely relaxed.

''There is an obvious explanation for this. None of the three attempted bombings so far has killed anyone. Ever since the Tube bombings of July 7 2005, we have been warned that further attacks are inevitable. Given the grisly array of possibilities – dirty bombs, truck bombs, even nuclear terrorism – the startling incompetence of the recent attacks has come as something of a relief. Setting yourself on fire and then punching a policeman, while shouting “Allah”, is about as low-tech as it gets.''<<Full Read>>

''In radical Islam, the vision is advanced along two tracks: as a war for supremacy within the community, and as a war for supremacy without. It may be futile to speculate about what precisely drove the jihadis to strike at this particular moment: It could have been in reaction to the knighthood awarded to novelist Salman Rushdie; it could have been a send-off to the detested Bush poodle Tony Blair; it could have been an invitation to the cabinet of Prime Minister Gordon Brown–stuffed with opponents of the war in Iraq and Israel’s war against Hezbollah–to draw the same lesson Spaniards did from the Madrid train bombing and withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever the case, it stemmed from a generalized hatred of a civilization that can’t quite decide what to say or think about the niqab.

''In this battle, radical Islamists will almost certainly lose: Britain has nearly four decades of experience combating, and defeating, vastly more competent terrorists. The country is much less sure-footed when it comes to fighting the battle against radical Islam on the first track.

''Consider the case of Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation). Banned in Germany for anti-Semitism and in much of the Middle East and Central Asia for advocating the replacement of existing governments with an Islamic caliphate, Hizb ut-Tahrir nonetheless has no proven links to terrorism and is not listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. In Britain it disseminates “its thoughts through discussion with the masses, study circles, lectures, seminars [and] leaflet distribution,” as it explains on its regularly updated Web site, hizb.org.uk. It sees no distinction between “political” and “traditional” Islam. Not surprisingly, it is at the forefront in opposing efforts to curb the use of the veil.''<<Full Read>>