melanie phillips vs. alan dershowitz

steyn & eurabia

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760

there have been quite a number of books published in the past few years regarding the subject of 'Eurabia' (or an Islamic Europe).. Bat Ye'or started the trend with her work Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis which argued that there was a set of formal/informal alliances between Europe and the Arab world as against Israel & America.. since then the likes of Claire Berlinski, Bruce Bawer and Mark Steyn have written books with different emphasizes on Europe's current cultural suicide.. the above article by Steyn focuses on demographics and is, in effect, a condensed version of his book America Alone - though the article (and the book) also refer to all the problems with politically correct secular, socialism that Europe faces.. i find him pretty funny, though obviously in a terrifying way..
an extract and some of the birth rate stats:

'What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.'
...

'There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.

Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world'

double standards

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3630461/a-lethal-double-standard.thtml

A great piece by Melanie Phillips (as always) in the article above comparing the, frankly hypocritical, response of the Western media/intelligensia to the recent Sri Lanka-Tamil Tigers conflict and their treatment of Israel in the recent 'seige' of Gaza.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/the_two_state_solution_is_87_y.html

a brief article by victor sharpe on the proposed two state solution and the history of the conflict over israel, with an emphasis on britain's role.. well worth a read

the israel-nazi moral equivalence

last night i had a somewhat heated (yet still amicable) debate with a friend about the whole Israel-Palestine issue..
without going into details of the proceedings or my position on the recent conflict in Gaza (perhaps for another post) i was pretty disgusted when he essentially called Israel a 'Nazi state'..

the worrying thing is that this kind of rhetoric is now becoming common place amongst many people and not just your average left wing Sussex University student..
im wondering if people who make this kind of analogy a. really understand what they're saying and b. if they really believe it..

the reason this is a disgusting moral inversion is simply shown by just looking at the facts..
this article here (from 2007) lists all of the major world conflicts since 1950 and the amount of casualties involved..
notice that Israel-Palestine comes in at 49th with 51,000 deaths.. i think that roughly around a quarter to a third of these deaths are Israeli Jews but, for the sake of argument, even if every single one of these deaths was of a Palestinian Arab this is no way equates to 5-6 million Jews in 2-3 years ala the Holocaust ala the Nazis, which the state of Israel is now constantly being compared to..

go up the chart abit to number 39 - North Yemen 100,000 deaths from 1962-1970 - eight years of bloody conflict and i haven't even got a clue what it was all about..
or to put it into another perspective go down to number 61 on the list: 25,000 Palestinian Arab deaths at the hands of their fellow Arab neighbours the Jordanians, all more or less in one month (the infamous Black September)..
looking at all this it seems that if the Jews were really Nazis committed to the genocide of Arabs then if we're honest they've done a pretty bad job - only 51,000 deaths in 50 years..

last i remember it was Hamas in it's charter that was committed to the destruction of Israel and recently said it was justified in killing Jewish children all across the world.. that sounds more Nazish than anything i've heard coming officially from the state of Israel..

so what does all this 'Israel is a Nazi state' rhetoric really boil down to? personally i think Melanie Phillips has it spot on:
''the now common analogy that is drawn between Israel and the Nazis, or Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, as used by such Israel-haters as George Galloway, Jenny Tonge, the British Muslim Initiative and others.. Its import lies in far more than its mere offensiveness and demonstrable barmyness. It is used for very specific political purposes. Since Nazism is totally beyond the pale – and since the Israel-haters believe, falsely, that Israel’s legitimacy rests upon the Holocaust – tarring it as a Nazi state delegitimises it and thus advances the agenda of its destruction.''

you dont have to fully agree with every Israeli policy or action to see this kind of talk is both dangerous and perverted