In "Eurabia," The Euros will be the Jews

The piercing mind of
Mark Steyn
sees irony and more ahead in what he calls the “Israelification
of Europe.” The fight over Israel is an argument to see which culture
shall hold sway over Palestine, the Israeli or the Islamic. In Europe
they decided some time ago that Israelis were occupiers
and Palestinians were helpless victims. For the Euros that legitimated
the decision of the Palestinians to use terror to publish their victim status.

Thinking ahead, Mark opines that it won’t be long until “wily Islamic leaders
in the Middle East will embrace the cause of the rights of European
Muslims in the
same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians.” So what will
the Euros do then, when they become the Jews?

Some people might say that it will serve them right after all the centuries
of anti-Semitism. More likely, though, “some people” will be calling on the United States
to pull
Europe’s chestnuts out of the fire. Again.

Enthusiastic Christianity? In London?

It’s not just Al Qaeda that is taking over in London. At the Dominion Theatre in the London theater
district is Hillsong, an enthusiastic church for twenty-something Brits who are in to
“praying and swaying.” And they push contributions:
“God wants to give you great riches, [they’ll] say, but you’ve got to prove
first that you’re willing to give to Him.”
Mary Wakefield is not amused.

It’s what I assumed I’d never see in England, the full-on, Texas-style health and wealth gospel with all the trimmings:
plastic cash buckets, talk of leadership and empowerment.

Didn’t you know darling? Sociologist Rodney Stark has found that high-cost churches are also
high-commitment churches.

What Will the Brits Do Next?

Everyone is hanging out the British Union Jack today
in solidarity with our British
friends after the Tube Tragedy on 7/7, and so we should. But we’d better not expect
the Brits to be sticking their necks out any more in the War on Terror. Actually,
as official pessimist John Derbyshire suggests, we
won’t really have a real war on terror until a western city gets hit by
a nuclear device. Only then will things get “tribal.”

Ever since World War I the Europeans have believed in appeasement
and a quiet life guaranteed by the welfare state. The British got tricked into
going the distance in World War II and they won’t make the same mistake again.
And they have developed a good expertise in appeasement in their dealings with the
IRA.

The excellent Mark Steyn
agrees. The British government. Tory and Labour, did a real
appeasement job on the IRA—after all, who really cares who governs Northern
Ireland? Bottom line for Steyn:

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle,
for Britain and the West. It’s hard not to be moved by the
sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual
in the face of terrorism. But, if the governing class goes about
business as usual,
that’s not a stiff upper lip but a death wish.

The New York Times’s man Thomas Friedman
reminds the moderate
Arabs that this is their problem. Hardly, old chap. They will be saying that
they really don’t have a dog in this fight.

But the wise Lee Harris thinks that we are in a blood feud. Our Islamicist
adversaries do not think in terms of the Clausewitean decisive battle but in
punishing the West for its insults and its crusades.

For what it is worth Thomas Sowell, in his Race and Culture trilogy, observed that the immigrants
that struggled to thrive in the United States were those who had not known law and self-government
and who had lived in a culture of force and feud. But, of course, every immigrant wave thus
far ended up assimilating to the American Way of law and self-government. Even the Hatfields and the McCoys got over
their blood feud and moved to the suburbs.

Even Saudis Don't Like Saudi Government

Those of us that worry about the Saudi monarchy and its extremist Wahhabi ideology have company. The
inhabitants of Saudi Arabia. Most of the Saudis think of the ibn Saud family as oppressors and Saudi
Arabia as an empire.

Frontpagemag’s Jamie Glasov
interviews John R. Bradley, author of Saudi Arabia Exposed:
A Kingdom in Crisis. Saudi Arabia is not exactly the monolithic fundamentalist state
we’ve been told about.
The people of Saudi Arabia have been

historically very resistant to Al-Saud-Wahhabi hegemony. In the formative years of
the 1920s, when these regions were being conquered by the Al-Saud and Wahhabi zealots, there
were at least 26 major rebellions, and one historian says as many
as 400,000 rebels resisting the Al-Saud forces were put to the sword.

They remember their local histories and
“see their country as an empire whose various regions were conquered and
are still ruled over by this alien royal
family, who use the Wahhabi ideology to oppress them.” The Saudi people are waiting for the
chance to get out from under the yoke of their Saudi oppressors.

Pitch Perfect Blair on London Terror Blasts

On the day that the terror war comes to London Tony Blair hits exactly the right note:

I think we all know what they are trying to do.
They are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us,
to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, trying
to stop us from going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do
and they should not and they must not succeed.

and also:

It is important, however, that those engaged in terrorism
realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life
is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to
innocent people in a desire impose extremism on the world.

Whatever they do it is our determination that they will never succeed
in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised
nations throughout the world.

We all send our thoughts and prayers to the British on this day of outrage.

More Money to Fight Aging?

The biogerontologists, the scientists of aging, are worried.
“Public funding for ageing research is far lower than it should be.”
And Instapundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds
seems to agree. The problem is that most people believe that “aging is not a disease”
when plainly, writes Reynolds, any visit to a nursing facility will show you that it plainly is.

Aging is a disease, a disorder, a killer. We should be doing something about it.

You would think that this is an area where the environmentalists would have a lot to say. Forget about
global warming, species extinction, biodiversity, and the precautionary principle. If humans
start meddling with the natural human life expectancy, all bets are off. But the enviros seem to have
other fish to fry.

The essential keystone in the edifice of sexual reproduction is death. Amoebas, they say, never die. They
just go on budding. But birds and bees must die. They must die to clear their habitats for the
benefit of the young generation. If a redwing blackbird doesn’t weaken and die then there will never
be an opportunity for the up-and-coming redwing blackbirds to get access to the bulrushes that redwing
blackbirds use for breeding. The old guy will keep them out.

Many of the advocates for extending life expectancy are vigorous and ambitious over-achievers in their
thirties and forties. They experience extended life expectancy as a chance to write
more papers and do more research. But
most people are not like that. They work hard in their young adulthood not because they want to but
because they have to. Once their young are fledged and off the nest they choose to work less and relax more. But they
do not vacate the prime human breeding grounds of modern America, the sprawling suburbs of single-family homes. They stay
on in their huge suburban nests and expect the young generation to find new breeding habitat elsewhere.

But that is not the worst of it. In our welfare state people acquire a right
to support from the rest of society in their sixties
and that right extends until they die. The immediate effect of extending life expectancy will be to increase
the number of people that expect, by right, to be supported by the rest of society. The cost will be huge. It already is
huge.

The process of aging, what Reynolds and the biogerontologists want to call a disease, is nature’s little
plan for clearing the decks for the young generation. Every advance in biogerontology is clears away
another of nature’s strategems for ensuring that life goes on for the young generation.

The consequence of meddling with the basic proposition of sexual reproduction, that the wages of
sex is death, is bound to be huge. Has anyone thought about that in the biogerontology community?

Go Ahead, Make My Day

Everybody agrees that the current battles over judicial nominations are abominable.
Why can’t we all just get along?
Tony Blankley
shows how even a foot soldier in the judicial wars like Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del) can
can do his bit to poison the process by equating conservative principles with “ideology.”
But maybe the ruthless partisan attacks on conservative
judicial nominees by hard-left liberal interest groups like Ralph Neas’ People for the American Way
Foundation and Nan Aron’s Alliance for Justice
end up doing conservatives a favor.

The big problem that conservatives have complained about is not their ability to get conservatives
onto the courts but what happens to conservatives after they get there. Tom Bethell coined the
phrase “Strange New Respect” to symbolize how conservative judges would often submit
to the liberal line after a few years in Washington and how, sooner or later, some liberal pundit
would approvingly report on the strange new respect that the heavy hitters in the nation’s capital
had now come to hold for the former conservative
firebrand.

When you have to fight to get a nomination through the Senate, you create a band of brothers, you make
buddies out of the participants in the fight. And you chemically imprint into the nominee’s mind that
the opponents to your nomination are enemies that can never be trusted and that your supporters are
friends who will always be there to come to your aid.

So maybe Ralph and Nan are helping conservatives, after all. They are forcing conservative
nominees through a hell that will scar them for life, and will teach them to appreciate who their
friends are.