Nik Nakba Paddy Wackba

Shit heading (sorry) but interesting article:

Recognising the Jewish 'Nakba'
Acknowledging the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries – written out of history – could be the key to Middle East peace

Lyn Julius

This week, before an audience of peers and MPs, an 80-year-old Jewish refugee named Sarah told the story of her traumatic departure in 1956 in the wake of the Suez crisis. Her husband lost his job. Taken ill, she had remained behind in Egypt with her new baby, while he left to look for work in Europe. She departed with nothing – along with 25,000 other Jews expelled by Nasser and forced to sign a document pledging that they would never return. In a final act of spite, the customs officers ransacked her suitcase and even her baby's carrycot.Sarah was speaking at a House of Lords briefing as part of the Justice for Jews from Arab Countries congress. JJAC, an international coalition of 77 organisations, is holding its inaugural congress in London, and aims to highlight the neglected rights of (according to indisputable UN figures) 856,000 Jewish refugees like Sarah.The exodus began 60 years ago when Arab states, hell-bent on crushing the new state of Israel militarily, also turned on their peaceful Jewish communities. Street violence killed over 150 Jews. Within 10 years, more than half the Jews had fled or been expelled, following discriminatory legislation , extortion, arrests, internment and executions. Those who remained became subjugated, political hostages of the Arab-Israeli conflict.Today 99.5% - all but 4,500 - have gone. As the historian Nathan Weinstock has observed, not even the Jews of 1939 Germany had been so thoroughly "ethnically cleansed".The displacement of Jews from Arab countries was not just a backlash to the creation of Israel and the Arabs' humiliating defeat. The "push" factors were already in place. Arab League states drafted a law in November 1947 branding their Jews as enemy aliens. But non-Muslim minorities, historically despised as dhimmis with few rights, were already being oppressed by Nazi-inspired pan-Arabism and Islamism. These factors sparked the conflict with Zionism, and drive it to this day.
(Read on.)

Too much diversity in front of camera... not enough behind it...

'Too many black and Asian faces on TV,' says BBC director Samir Shah

Broadcasters have overcompensated for their lack of executives from ethnic minorities by putting too many black and Asian faces on screen, a leading television industry figure said last night.

Samir Shah, a member of the BBC's board of directors, said this had led to a "world of deracinated coloured people flickering across our screens - to the irritation of many viewers and the embarrassment of the very people such actions are meant to appease".

(Read on.)

Shami & DD sitting in a tree...

Not often that articles in major newspapers slag off someone that some members of this board are personally acquainted with...

Marina Hyde:

In bed with the DUP? This is the really curious journey

Andy Burnham's remarks about Shami Chakrabarti and David Davis were those of a man with a very New Labour talent

'The individual has no right to anonymity," Andy Burnham once explained during a robotic defence of identity cards. "The state has a right to know who you are." Yet despite his concerted efforts to draw attention to himself with dazzling feats of brown-nosery, the cloak of anonymity has hung heavy on the current culture secretary, with very few citizens of this state having the first clue who he is. Indeed, for most of the final years of Tony Blair's premiership, he was presumed to be lodged in the prime ministerial colon, only emerging blinking into the daylight the minute Gordon took over, whereupon he announced to the press: "I was a Blairite, and now I am a Brownite."

This week, however, Burnham gave people a better of idea of who he is, when he broke his silence on David Davis's endearingly misguided decision to trigger a byelection to campaign against the government's plan to detain terror suspects for up to 42 days without charge. Burnham found "something very curious", he told Progress magazine, in Davis's "late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls with Shami Chakrabarti".

Mmm ... Could you bring the sledgehammer down one more time, secretary of state? There's a chance that a couple of slightly backward 10-year-olds still haven't understood what you were on about. And yet Andy is now upset that his comments have been interpreted as anything other than the cogent engagement with the 42-days issue that they so obviously were, and cannot for the life of him work out why the Liberty director is taking offence - "if personal offence has been caused", as one of his flunkeys put it. (Read on)

Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts

Hardly an Islamic Reformation, but the first step in a journey of 1000 miles?

Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts
BBC News
26/2/08

Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion. The country's powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.

The Hadith is a collection of thousands of sayings reputed to come from the Prophet Muhammad. As such, it is the principal guide for Muslims in interpreting the Koran and the source of the vast majority of Islamic law, or Sharia.

But the Turkish state has come to see the Hadith as having an often negative influence on a society it is in a hurry to modernise, and believes it responsible for obscuring the original values of Islam. It says that a significant number of the sayings were never uttered by Muhammad, and even some that were need now to be reinterpreted.

Commentators say the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion. Its supporters say the spirit of logic and reason inherent in Islam at its foundation 1,400 years ago are being rediscovered. Some believe it could represent the beginning of a reformation in the religion.

Turkish officials have been reticent about the revision of the Hadith until now, aware of the controversy it is likely to cause among traditionalist Muslims, but they have spoken to the BBC about the project, and their ambitious aims for it. The forensic examination of the Hadiths has taken place in Ankara University's School of Theology.

Fr Felix Koerner, a Christian theologian who has observed the project, says some of the sayings - also known individually as "hadiths" - can be shown to have been invented hundreds of years after the Prophet Muhammad died, to serve the purposes of contemporary society.

"Unfortunately you can even justify through alleged hadiths, the Muslim - or pseudo-Muslim - practice of female genital mutilation," he says. "You can find messages which say 'that is what the Prophet ordered us to do'. But you can show historically how they came into being, as influences from other cultures, that were then projected onto Islamic tradition."

a piece of history from the Balkans :)

Today is the national holiday here, the day of the Antifascist Movement in Croatia. On this day, 67 years ago, 77 people established the first antifascist partisan formation in occupied Europe, in the Brezovica forest, near Sisak (southeast of Zagreb). The one Jon didn't believe it existed.:)) It happened on the day the Nazi attacked Soviet Union. ( http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_antifa%C5%A1isti%C4%8Dke_borbe)

check out the photo of an old partisan at:
http://www.jutarnji.hr/vijesti/clanak/art-2008,6,22,brezovica_obiljezavanje,124085.jl
:))

Croats were always known after Ustacha regime, but it isn't so well known that the first antifascist formation in the whole occupied Europe was established by Croats and in the Croatian territory. These guys were famous after diversions on the railways and stuff like that.

What also isn't known widely is that many Jews joined partisans here in their fight. My grand-uncle joined too, and actually had a rank of major in the partisans. He kept the family tradition, and was active as a partisan- photographer. :)

Ireland votes no on the EU Treaty

This is an excellent article on the EU's reaction to Irelands no vote on the EU Treaty:

"Now it’s clear: the EU is an alien imposition in Europe

They have been libelled as an uneducated ‘horde’, yet Irish voters’ rejection of the Lisbon Treaty is a brilliant blow against the EU oligarchy.

Oligarchs cannot stand public humiliation. So when, last Thursday, the Irish electorate pointed their fingers and shouted ‘The Emperor has no clothes!’, the political elites of the European Union pretended that it was not them who stood exposed, but the Irish people.

EU officials, politicians and their friends in the media all read from the same carefully rehearsed script following the Irish electorate’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. Adopting a kind of fantasy language, with all the hallmarks of classic Orwellian doublespeak, the EU and its representatives told the world that the ‘No’ vote did not really mean ‘No’, since Irish voters were thoroughly confused.

They argued that the vote lacked meaning or legitimacy because the campaign against the Lisbon Treaty – the name given to the rebranded EU Constitution – encompassed far too many different interest groups to be taken seriously. Apparently, a campaign that successfully brings together people from the far left to the Catholic right cannot be a genuine expression of popular will.

Once the results were announced, EU officials went straight into action, making it clear that the outcome of the Irish referendum would not be respected. Consider the breathtaking cynicism of the EU Commissioner Margaret Wallström. She told the BBC that we must ‘analyse’ the Irish result and then conduct a public survey to find out what was behind the ‘No’ vote. Taking on the role of a disinterested doctor or scientist, Wallström believes that ‘research’ can discover the source of the Irish disease; such ‘research’ will no doubt lead to the cobbling together of a diagnosis, and then a cure.

The rejection of the proposed EU Constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005 represented an important blow for freedom, and a challenge to the aloof, technocratic politics of the EU. However, even though Ireland is a small nation which lacks the economic and political influence of France or Holland, its ‘No’ vote was, in many respects, even more significant. Perhaps the most important contribution made by the Irish ‘No’ campaign has been to give some clarity to the disconnection between the electorate and the political class.

Voters and the political class do not only inhabit different worlds – they speak in different languages. Of course, the disconnection between the people of Europe and the institutions of the European Union has been evident for some time. Yet normally, this distance between voters and their rulers expressed itself in falling voter turnout and declining levels of participation in party political activity; surveys also showed that EU institutions lack legitimacy amongst the public, and that officialdom is out of touch with public sensibilities. The ‘No’ vote in Ireland, however, has revealed something far more important: that for a significant section of the public, elite EU institutions are not only illegitimate – they are an alien imposition.

It is rare indeed for the entire EU oligarchy and political class to join together with the media, the trade unions and the Catholic Church to take on the people. Even the poor old Pope got in on the act: he tried to provide some moral support to his mates in Brussels and Dublin in the run-up to the Irish referendum by giving a speech on the importance of the EU for countries like Ireland. This display of elite unity is probably unprecedented; such unity was not achieved during the referenda in Holland and France. During previous referendum campaigns, things were a lot more confusing; they lacked the clarity of what took place in Ireland, where the people were on one side and virtually all of their ‘representatives’ were on the other.

The cultural dissonance between the elite and the people was on full display during the Irish referendum. It’s worth noting that those media commentators who denounced the rag-tag army of ‘No’ voters happily overlooked the rag-tag army of elite interests behind the ‘Yes’ campaign.

Another striking thing about the Irish experience is how clearly – crystal clearly – it showed up the anti-democratic impulse behind the EU project. In previous times, the EU’s public relations machine had some success in confusing the debate, with its representatives suggesting that it was the opponents of the EU who were a threat to democracy. Officials and commentators frequently argued that ‘No’ campaigners in Holland and France were motivated by a base hatred of foreigners; their campaigning and their voting choices were denounced as ‘xenophobic’ and ‘anti-immigrant’.

The press frequently portrayed opposition to the EU Constitution as a revolt of the reactionary and the prejudiced against modern and enlightened institutions. One British newspaper described the Irish ‘No’ campaigners – all those ‘ultra-rightwing Catholics, neoliberals, pragmatic Eurosceptics, traditional nationalists and Trotskyists’ – as ‘not so much a rainbow alliance as a horde of Goths at the gates of Rome’ (1). Such a representation of recent events and votes in Europe has always been inaccurate; it has been a rather self-serving caricature of the electorate. Anti-immigrant and chauvinistic prejudice did motivate some of the individuals who have voted against the EU, but it has far from been the defining feature of the various ‘No’ campaigns of recent years.

Although a few people have tried it on, these tired old arguments about a revolt of the xenophobes against the enlightened EU cannot be credibly recycled in relation to the Irish referendum. There were simply no angry mobs of right-wing nationalists. So instead, EU propagandists were forced to fall back on explicit nineteenth-century style anti-mass arguments. Back in the nineteenth century, one of the arguments used by arrogant reactionaries against the expansion of the democratic franchise was that the people were too stupid to understand the complexities of parliamentary democracy. It was argued that people of low intelligence, who lacked refinement and good schooling, could not possibly be trusted to exercise any public duties judiciously.

More or less the same arguments were voiced during the Irish referendum campaign. Time and again, the EU and its supporters informed the world that the Irish electorate was thoroughly confused about the issues at stake, and that it was the strength of this ‘public ignorance’ that propelled the ‘No’ campaign. This vitriolic contempt for the people really exposed the reluctance of the ‘Yes’ campaign to acknowledge the poverty of its own ideas.

One of the most disturbing features of the EU’s propaganda before, during and after the Irish referendum was the systematic attempt to infantilise the opponents of the EU. The Irish were described as ‘ungracious’ and ‘truculent’, as school pupils who disobeyed their teachers; they were depicted as children who refused to show sufficient gratitude for all the presents they have received from the EU (see Ireland, you ungrateful wretch!, by Brendan O’Neill). The Irish were continually reminded that their recent prosperity has been founded on EU largesse.

The message is clear: the immature response of the Irish people to the Lisbon Treaty should not be taken seriously. This relentless attempt to infantilise an entire people is an alarming historical moment. The reprimand of a naughty child always hints at future punishment. Will the EU do more than simply threaten to take the Irish children’s toys away? Let’s keep a very close eye on what the EU does next.

Frank Furedi is author most recently of Invitation To Terror: The Expanding Empire of The Unknown, published by Continuum Press. Visit Furedi’s website here."

'Troops out of Afghanistan now'

Peter Hitchens argues that British Troops should be brought home:

"Troops out of Afghanistan Now

How exactly could a government minister explain what 100 British servicemen have died for in Afghanistan? We know that the Defence Secretary who sent them there, Comrade John Reid, hadn't a clue why they were going, and famously thought they would not fire a shot . I believe they have since fired five million shots, many of them long after this posing booby and shameless ex-Communist went off into a retirement that couldn't be premature enough for me.

Why aren't they there? They aren't there to abolish the burqa and liberate Afghan women. Most Afghan women, especially in Pashtun areas, are still shrouded or veiled in one Islamic way or another (Persian-influenced Islamists prefer the chador, which is pretty restricting but not restricting enough for the Taleban, to the burqa), and this is not likely to change. if British troops went around ripping off their burqas we'd soon know what a real Afghan war was like. They aren't there to stamp out the opium poppy fields. This would be too dangerous, as it would threaten the farmers involved with destitution. In any case readers of the Mail on Sunday know that opium poppies are being grown commercially and legally in Oxfordshire, for medical purposes, so why couldn't a similar arrangement be made for the Afghan farmers?

They aren't there to stamp out 'The Taleban', a murky body which, like 'Al Qaeda', shrinks and expands to suit our needs. Many Pashtun Afghans more or less favour the sort of Islam and the sort of culture associated with the Taleban. It is based on their tribal traditions. Afghanistan is also an ethnically divided society, in which the differences between the Pashtuns and the Uzbeks are crucial, though there are several other groups as well, including one which adheres to Shia Islam and so is specially loathed by the austerely Sunni Pashtuns. If you get on with one group, the chances are you will be the enemy of the others.

The word also applies (in our own minds) to certain people at certain times, but doesn't apply to the same people at other times. When they are 'village elders' cooperating with us, or being paid off by us, Pashtuns in Helmand are our allies. When they later get behind a rock and shoot at us they are 'The Taleban'. We couldn't stamp them out if we wanted to. They may accept various forms of help from us, but they don't want us there, for dozens of reasons. Even if we carpeted the place with schools, hospitals, factories, irrigation projects and the rest, they still wouldn't want us there. Afghans are very persistent about this and have driven out every would-be conqueror who has ever come their way. So why are we there, where we are so obviously not wanted?

We aren't there to support Afghanistan's 'democratically-elected President' - who barely controls his own Kabul bedroom. But he is a democrat, isn't he ? Well, you can believe if you want to that President Hamid Karzai is in office with the full-hearted consent of the Afghan people after an open contest in a free society, where people voted thoughtfully according to the issues. . Something tells me that he is there because various warlords and faction leaders told their supporters to vote for him. In return, he agreed to leave them alone to tyrannise their slices of the country as they see fit, which is what they do. Some of them are just as bad as the Taleban, but in different ways. General Abdul Rashid Dostum, for example, is not an attractive character (look him up) , and I do not believe he reads 'the Guardian' or 'The New York Times'. Yet he is, on the basis of our enemy's enemy being our friend, the ally of 'The West' in its attempt to build a new Afghanistan.

Even those who have not fallen for any of the above empty reasons for our being in Afghanistan tend to be bamboozled by the propaganda trump card. This goes that under the Taleban. 'Al Qaeda' maintained its headquarters in Afghanistan, and if we let the country fall back under Taleban control, 'Al Qaeda ' will be back, and will organise the next 11th September from there.

How many holes are there in this? The perpetrators of 11th September were mostly Saudis ( from a country whose laws and rules are remarkably similar to those of the Taleban, yet which is a full-scale ally, oil supplier to and arms purchaser from the 'West' , with big embassies in London and Washington). Terrorist atrocities can be cooked up anywhere, not least in our own cities among the many fanatical Islamists who have been brought to Europe by the globalist immigration polices of the 'West', supported so enthusiastically by the Murdoch media and 'neo-conservative' commentators, who also stoke up the 'war on terror', without the slightest sign of seeing any contradiction between these two positions

If there is a second 11th September, it is as likely to have been planned in Leeds as in Kandahar, as our government keeps telling us, though it can't do much about that either. The idea that terrorist outrages can for the most part be prevented by vigilance is, sadly, baseless.

In any case, what sort of Army would we have to deploy even to control the Pashtun areas? ( answer : bigger than we have ) And how hard would it have to fight? (answer , very hard indeed). Casualties dropped recently because we stopped trying to muscle our way into Pashtun tribal zones, and negotiated deals with 'elders' who of course weren't the Taleban ( see above).

Then there's Pakistan. Pakistan is naturally interested in Afghanistan because it's on its northern border, remarkably close to the capital, Islamabad. Also, if there's trouble in Afghanistan, Pakistan has to cope with the refugees. But there's much more to it than that. Pakistan's 'border' with Afghanistan is a silly fiction. It is based on the Durand Line, a British imperial folly forced on the Afghans by naked power in 1893, but one of those imperial granny knots, like the borders of Africa and the middle East, that cannot be unravelled without causing even more problems than we have already.

It runs, madly, right through Pashtun territory. The Pashtuns simply ignore it, making it worthless as a security barrier. The real border is elsewhere. Peshawar, officially in Pakistan, is for all practical purposes an Afghan city, which is why there is a military control post on the Indus River, way inside Pakistan, on the road between Islamabad and Peshawar. That is where Pakistan really stops. There are also huge numbers of Afghan Pashtuns in Pakistan proper, particularly in that vast and volatile city, Karachi. Their votes, and the feelings of their tribal chieftains, cannot be ignored in Pakistani politics.

Now, despite the big fuss about restoring democracy a few months ago, and the overdone praise of the late Benazir Bhutto by her many rather gullible friends in the Western media, Pakistan appears to be drifting back towards control by the same faction that used to be on good terms with the Taleban. This group, not very far distant from the ISI intelligence services and the army, is said to be trying to take over Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League, with a view to taking over the country in time. I can't really see how this - a consequence of the recent elections - is better than having the place run by General Musharraf and the Army, though I was never very convinced by the General's claims to be a doughty warrior against 'Terror', or 'our' principal ally in the region. It just goes to show how complicated things become when you start messing around in other people's countries.

Then there's the other question, about where Osama bin Laden actually is. I seem to remember a senior Afghan official saying a few months ago "Well, he's either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, and he's definitely not in Afghanistan", which I thought was rather a witty way of pointing the finger. In which case, are we going to despatch troops to Pakistan? Of course not. Unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan is not so weakened by repeated invasions and civil wars that foreign armies can impose themselves upon it.

What can we really do about these developments? Search me. But the presence or absence of a British army contingent in Helmand province will certainly not help. All we are doing is sending brave men to a place where they can do no good, and where they provide targets for our enemies. The British presence in Afghanistan is at least as stupid and pointless as their continuing presence in Iraq. they should come home, immediately. They only stay there because the politicians who sent them haven't the courage to admit that they don't know what they are doing. Now we have all seen Foreign Secretary David Miliband's grasp of world affairs on display last week, can we really believe that these people understand what is going on, or have any right to order better men than they are into such danger? One death in this pointless war was indefensible. A hundred are a hundred times as indefensible. Bring them home."

Pipes: Obama vs McCain on the Middle East

Obama vs. McCain on the Middle East
by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
June 5, 2008

With the Democratic Party primaries over, American voters can focus on issues of political substance. For instance: How do the two leading candidates for U.S. president differ in their approach to Israel and related topics? Parallel interviews with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who spoke in early May with Democrat Barack Obama and in late May with Republican John McCain, offer some important insights.

Asked roughly the same set of questions, they went off in opposite directions. Obama used the interview to convince readers of his pro-Israel and pro-Jewish bona fides. He thrice reiterated his support for Israel: "the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea"; "the need to preserve a Jewish state that is secure is … a just idea and one that should be supported here in the United States and around the world"; and "You will not see, under my presidency, any slackening in commitment to Israel's security."

Obama then detailed his support within four specifically Jewish contexts.

* Personal development: "when I think about the Zionist idea, I think about how my feelings about Israel were shaped as a young man—as a child, in fact. I had a camp counselor when I was in sixth grade who was Jewish-American but who had spent time in Israel."
* Political career: "When I started organizing, the two fellow organizers in Chicago were Jews, and I was attacked for associating with them. So I've been in the foxhole with my Jewish friends."
* Ideas: "I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn't know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris."
* Philosophy: "My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives."

In contrast, McCain felt no need to establish his Zionism nor his pro-Jewish credentials. Taking them as a given, he used his interview to raise practical policy issues, particularly the threat from Iran. For example, asked about the justness of Zionism, he replied that "it's remarkable that Zionism has been in the middle of wars and great trials and it has held fast to the ideals of democracy and social justice and human rights," then went on: "I think that the State of Israel remains under significant threat from terrorist organizations as well as the continued advocacy of the Iranians to wipe Israel off the map." Again referring to Iran, McCain committed himself "to never allowing another Holocaust." He referred to the threatened destruction of Israel as having "profound national security consequences" for the United States and he stressed that Tehran sponsors terrorist organizations intent "on the destruction of the United States of America."

A second difference concerns the importance of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Obama presented it as an "open wound" and an "open sore" that infects "all of our foreign policy." In particular, he said, its lack of resolution "provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions." Asked about Obama's statement, McCain slammed the idea that radical Islam results mainly from the Arab-Israeli confrontation: "I don't think the conflict is a sore. I think it's a national security challenge." Were the Israeli-Palestinian issue resolved tomorrow, he pointedly continued, "we would still face the enormous threat of radical Islamic extremism."

Finally, the two disagree on the import of Israelis continuing to live on the West Bank. Obama placed great emphasis on the topic, commenting that if their numbers continue to grow, "we're going to be stuck in the same status quo that we've been stuck in for decades now." McCain acknowledged this as a major issue but quickly changed the topic to the Hamas campaign of shelling Sderot, the besieged Israeli town that he personally visited in March, and whose predicament he explicitly compares to the mainland United States coming under attack from one of its borders.

Goldberg's twin interviews underscore two facts. First, major-party candidates for the U.S. presidency must still pay homage to warm American ties to Israel, no matter how, as in Obama's case, dramatically this may contradict their previously-held views. Second, whereas McCain is secure on the topic, Obama worries about winning the pro-Israel vote.

Dalrymple on marriage

"Some traditional two parent families are miserable, joyless places. Yet - argues Theodore Dalrymple - the denigration of the "ideal normal" of family life has done nothing to improve the quality of childhood in Britain.

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The decision of the House of Commons not to require a woman seeking in vitro fertilisation to have a man even remotely in tow will not have much of an effect, demographically-speaking. After all, I have already met too many mothers whose sexual partner and co-parent of whose child was a syringe to worry very greatly about the statistical effects of Parliament's decision. The idea that, but for this decision, the British population would be playing happy families is, I am afraid, delusory.

Forty-two per cent of births in Britain are now out of what used to be called wedlock; and in some areas of the country - not those with the highest levels of social well-being - the figure must be fast approaching one hundred per cent. In such areas, to ask a young person who his father is has become almost indelicate, and if insisted upon is met either with incomprehension ("Of what relevance to anything could it possibly be?"), or with a shrug ("How should I know?"), or with an enquiry - is what is meant the adult male who is currently most frequently to be found in the household, though not necessarily to the extent of living in it full-time?

As to wedlock itself, it is not what it used to be, at least from the point of view of stability. Although marriages are more stable than other forms of cohabitation, a quarter of them do not last ten years. This means that, in the statistical sense, it is abnormal for a British child to end his childhood with the same adults in the household as when his childhood began. Instability is the norm.

There is another meaning of the word normal: that is to say, the normal that is the unattainable goal which people nevertheless try, as near as possible, to attain. It is surely beyond doubt that monogamy accompanied by faithfulness to the spouse has never prevailed since the world began. DNA tests would have demonstrated throughout history that even in the most monogamous of societies a goodly percentage of men's supposed children were not their own.

So successful, however, has been the attack not only on the practice, but the very ideal, of marriage, that it hardly exists any more as an ideal. This is obvious from a quick look of the works of the most popular and prolific author of children's books of our time, Jacqueline Wilson.

In most of her books, it is taken for granted that the young protagonists do not live in nuclear or two-parent families (the parents being of opposite sexes). Many of the children, on the contrary, have emerged from what would once have been thought of as anomalous or even pathological domestic circumstances. When pathology is normal, however, it becomes mere physiology. No one notices it any longer.

This kind of children's literature is both a cause and an effect. It is a cause because the children who read it will grow up without an awareness that the social arrangements described in it were ever thought of as odd or aberrant. The long march through the generations will have been entirely successful.

It is an effect because, of course, the publishers believe - rightly or wrongly, but sales seem to suggest the latter - that children want to read something that is recognisable to them, that reflects the world in which they live. And there can hardly be a child in the country who does not have a friend whose parents are divorced, separated, never married, completely unknown to each other, in murderous hatred of one another, etc. The literature is therefore an implicit recognition of a change that has already taken place, of which it is a consequence.

Now one would have imagined from the passion with which the case against the necessity, or even desirability, of a father (or merely a father-figure) was argued that something of vast practical effect was at stake, such as (was once) the granting property rights to women. And this passion explains some of the strangeness of what was said.

For example, an editorial in The Guardian, titled "Progress prevails", reported with disapproval what one Member of Parliament had said in the debate:

A knight of the shires, Sir Patrick Cormack, aired [a pernicious message]: "in Staffordshire, at least, it is considered normal for a child to have a father."

This might not be accurate, sociologically-speaking, but it is difficult to see why, if true, it would be a pernicious message. The editorial then explains why:

It is hard to see who is helped by the unstated branding of children from non-traditional families as "abnormal".

But it is clear that the knight of the shires - ex officio to be despised - did not brand any children as abnormal, or advocate any such branding. The normality to which he referred was the normality of a family structure, one in which children (on the whole) lived with their progenitors.

It is, of course, perfectly true that in the past some children were cruelly and unjustly stigmatised. Mothers of illegitimate children were sometimes confined to lunatic asylums merely by virtue of having given birth to such children. Not even the most traditionalist knight of the shires would propose returning to such practices.

But this is not quite the same as saying that such stigmatisation was so bad that it means that society as a whole should make no judgment at all as to what kind of association between men and women is best for children (again, speaking statistically, for there is no form of association that absolutely guarantees either success or failure).

Neither is the avoidance even of the possibility of such stigmatisation the only, or even a very important, purpose of policy. And I think we can be tolerably certain that our willing, even eager, destruction of an ideal normal of family life has not improved the quality of childhood in Britain. Furthermore, it leaves us intellectually defenceless against, for example, the demand for the official recognition of polygamy, for where much is encouraged, eventually everything will be permitted."

"Doomed, I tell you. Doomed"

A thread dedicated to deeply pessimistic predictions.

Christopher Booker in the Telegraph writes that unless politicians move fast, within six years the British will all be reading by candle light:

"Power blackouts only a foretaste of the real energy crisis to come

The power cuts that blacked out a swath of middle England on Tuesday may be the tiniest foretaste of what we can expect in a few years. If there is one fact that should be at the top of our political agenda it is that within six years we stand to lose 40 per cent of our electricity generating capacity.

At the moment we need 56 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to meet peak demand. Our seven nuclear power stations supply 10GW, but by 2015 we may have lost all but one.

We shall have lost nine coal or oil-fired power plants too, which provide 13GW more, because of the prohibitive cost of making them comply with new anti-pollution rules under the EU's Large Combustion Plants directive, 2001/80. So in a few years we will have lost 22GW of the 56GW we need, leaving a massive shortfall.

Waking up at last to the abyss yawning before us, the Government realises that the only sensible way to fill that gap is to order 20 nuclear power stations from the few companies capable of building them, at a time when other countries all over the world are queuing up to place their own orders (in 2006 we sold off the last of our own firms, Westinghouse, for a giveaway £2.8 billion, and it already has 19 orders on its books).

New nuclear plants would take 10 years or more to build, and we would have to rely on companies such as France's state-owned EDF, without being able to offer any inducement by way of subsidy, because this is forbidden by EU "state aid" rules. New EU-compliant coal-fired stations are one hope, but have the greenies screaming up the wall.

If we try to fill the gap with yet more gas-fired plants, we shall need to import ever more gas from the likes of Vladimir Putin, at a time when prices are already soaring. Meanwhile we are ordered by the EU by 2020 to generate 38 per cent of our power from "renewables" (currently 4 per cent), which the Government knows is sheer lunacy, and not even remotely feasible.

Truly our energy policy, thanks to years of neglect and wishful thinking, redefines the term "fuel poverty". Perhaps the Tories would like to tell us how they would avert the catastrophe now roaring down on us like a bullet train."

Unlikely Thatcherites

This is a new thread on unlikely admirers of Thatcher.

First up, here's Shawn Ryder from the Happy Mondays:

"I look at this city before Thatcher was in power - round here it was loads of tunnels, factories and fuckin' smog," he says peering through the bar's Venetian blinds. "Then, all of a sudden, that industry gets shut down and we've got lots of sunshine and open skies and a whole new industry. I'm not a working-class Tory. I just think what Thatcher did had to be done for the good of the country. It's sad - we all know what happened with the miners - but we were still living in the fucking 1800s in the mid 70s. It was almost Luddite-ish. And the Luddites had to be done the same way for us to move on as a fucking race."

Dalrymple on immigration in Britain

Thought provoking piece on immigration in Britain. Worth reading in full.

Here's the article.