"Disappearing" Tommy Robinson

The UK government made a big mistake arresting Tommy Robinson over the weekend, then made it far worse by immediately ordering a media blackout. Within hours of his arrest, Robinson was sentenced to thirteen months in jail. That could well be a death sentence because Muslim inmates have threatened to kill him. They beat him within an inch of his life when he was serving an earlier sentence. Other Muslims have threatened to kill his family as well.

Robinson was arrested outside a British court for reporting on the trial of Muslim men for molesting hundreds of young girls. It’s a story mainstream media refused to cover for more than a decade until two women: Professor Alexis Jay and Dame Louise Casey investigated and reported on what the Yorkshire Post described as:

“[a] sexual exploitation scandal in which an estimated 1,400 victims were abused over a 16-year period in the town — largely by men of a Pakistani-heritage background… and the blatant failures by senior figures at Rotherham Council over the town’s child abuse scandal — and alleged attempts to cover up what was happening.”

Evidently social workers, police, and the highest officials in local Rotherham government chose not only to avert their eyes, but hide it all. Media cooperated by ignoring the story. Rotherham is only one example of what is happening across the UK and much of Europe as millions of Arab and African Muslims flood into EU countries. Rapes have skyrocketed, but EU governments continue to do what Rotherham officials have done: pretend it’s not happening, and when it is reported, cover up who the rapists are.

 

How could such a thing go on in Rotherham for so long? When asked why they refused to act, officials there said that, because of who the molesters were, they were afraid of being called “racist” if they brought attention to it. But people who live in working-class neighborhoods, however, knew what was going on. They also knew government and media were denying the problem and still are. How do they feel about it? To borrow a chant from an old movie, many are shouting: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

One of them is Tommy Robinson who grew up in working-class Luton, an industrial town of 167,000 people with a large Muslim population. He’s been arrested and imprisoned numerous times for protesting radical Islam in the UK. Robinson isn’t afraid of being called “racist.” He knows the charge is ludicrous and has developed an immunity. So have other working class Europeans across the continent. Only elite, multicultural Euroweenies fear the word now. Radical Muslim sex traffickers hide behind it.

New Hampshire’s Mark Steyn, who published two books on the Islamization of Europe which were best sellers across the English-speaking world, describes the situation: 

“On Friday, Robinson was live-streaming (from his telephone) outside Leeds Crown Court where last week's Grooming Gang of the Week were on trial for ‘grooming' — the useless euphemism for industrial-scale child gang rape and sex slavery by large numbers of Muslim men with the active connivance of every organ of the state: social workers, police, politicians. Oh, and also the media.”

Steyn calls the proceedings in Leeds a “Grooming Gang of the Week” trial because there were several such sex slavery rings operating with impunity around the UK until Professor Alexis Jay and Dame Louise Casey exposed the coverup in Rotherham. Now the British government is trying to silence Robinson for covering trials using streaming video on his iPhone, but it’s already backfiring. On Tuesday, the Drudge Report published a link to a zerohedge.com story: “Britons Rage Over Robinson Arrest As Mass Protests Break Out Worldwide.”

European government and media elites are learning that they cannot brush off ordinary citizens as the equivalent of Hillary’s “Deplorables” or Obama’s “Bitter Clingers.” They’ll continue to do so at their peril because muzzling free speech, jailing dissidents for “hate speech” and “breach of the peace” aren’t working. Such practices only shine a brighter light on results of failed, multicultural, European immigration policies.

Our founding fathers understood that one of the functions of our First Amendment right to freedom of speech is that of a safety valve. As people express dissatisfaction with government, debate ensues. There’s discussion. Policy changes can be proposed. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. Closing off public anger entirely the way multicultural elites have in the UK is dangerous.

Robinson never claimed all Muslim men are rapists. Neither did Donald Trump claim that all Mexican illegals were rapists, but media continue to claim they did. Trump would not be silenced and gained the White House. Neither will Robinson, but now he’s in danger of being killed by Muslim gangs in prison. If that happens, expect hell to break loose across Europe.

Tension in Barcelona

Opposite our hotel

Though I wasn’t looking for it, I couldn’t avoid politics during our three days in Barcelona. My wife leaves all the trip planning to me so I booked the little Hotel Bagues based its proximity to the Gothic Quarter and the sea. We could walk to places of interest along La Rambla, a popular, tree-lined pedestrian boulevard. It’s very popular and it appeared there were tourists from just about everywhere else in the world.

There were mimes, tourist shops, and restaurants with sidewalk tables along La Rambla. Above the first floor restaurants and shops were residences with small balconies overlooking the streets and nearly half displayed political banners, flags, and posters draped over them calling for Catalan independence. Tourist literature called our section the “nerve center” of Barcelona — the city which is itself the nerve center of Catalonia.

We were sipping wine on our little balcony our first night there when we heard chanting in Spanish getting louder by the minute. Then demonstrators marched out of the street across from our balcony which connected La Rambla to the Gothic quarter. They carried Catalan flags and signs and chanted a phrase neither of us understood.

Last October, Catalonia tried to hold a referendum declaring independence but Spanish authorities violently disrupted the vote. According to CNN: “Police fired rubber bullets at protesters and voters trying to take part in the referendum, and used batons to beat them back   using rubber bullets.” Nine hundred people were injured.

Across from our balcony was another owned by a local woman with a Catalan flag and another banner I couldn’t read. Our bellman told me she is a leader in the independence movement. Last October counter demonstrators gathered on the street below and tried to get her to come out, but she wouldn’t. “They would have killed her,” said the bellman.

As if that weren’t enough, the previous August, another kind of political violence flared up when Moroccan Muslim immigrants mowed people down along La Rambla with a rented van. Sixteen people were killed and more than a hundred wounded. Our bell man told me three people died under our balcony and a dozen more lay gravely wounded. The door man pulled out his phone to show me videos too gruesome to show on television. The night before, an imam blew himself up in another area as he tried to construct explosives with gas cylinders.

Last Saturday in the Gothic Quarter very heavy drumming filled the air of a plaza where we were eating breakfast at a sidewalk cafe. Heavy base vibrated my sternum as it bounced off the stone buildings on all four sides of the plaza but I couldn’t pinpoint its source. We paid our bill and walk up the front steps of a gothic cathedral across the square where many people milled about. Looking over their heads, we could see the drummers surrounded by people holding banners and flags. When it stopped, one man with a banner told me they were rallying to keep Spain united.

Below our balcony

Saturday night six motorcycle police gathered there and two vans of heavily armed soldiers with automatic weapons positioned themselves below our balcony at dusk and hotel employees said that wasn’t unusual for a Saturday night. Going to our cruise ship Sunday, there were more soldiers with automatic weapons deployed at the waterfront. 

Naples

Two days later in Naples, Italy I saw an even heavier military presence soldiers with two very alert soldiers with automatic weapons were deployed every fifty yards along a pedestrian walkway in the center of the city. On Friday we’ll be in Nice, France where two years ago a Tunisian Muslim driving a cargo truck killed 84 people and wounded 458 others. Clearly tension is high in heavily-trafficked pedestrian zones of Mediterranean cities.

Truck Attack in Nice

A huge, 13th century castle dominates the Bay of Naples where our cruise ship tied up, built by the French when they dominated the region. It’s a reminder that political conflict is nothing new here as it’s been besieged many times. Muslim navies terrorized the entire Mediterranean for centuries. The last Muslim armies were expelled from Spain in 1492, the same year Columbus discovered America.

Castle Nuovo in Naples

Castles and other material fortifications are useless, however, against the kind of terrorism plaguing the region now. The European left encourages Muslim immigration, while the rising European right wants to cut it off, especially in eastern Europe. The right claims Muslims don’t want to assimilate, don’t want to become Spaniards, Italians, Germans, or French, and have a long-term strategy to take over Europe by demography. Demographic studies indicate that native Europeans are not producing offspring in numbers sufficient to maintain population. Meanwhile, immigrants are having large families.

Europe is changing but it’s still possible to travel peacefully, for now.

Addendum:

(ANSA) – Naples, April 26 – State and Carabinieri police arrested a Gambian national in an antiterrorism operation in Naples on Thursday, sources said.

The arrest comes after investigators found evidence the suspect was planning an attack, the sources said.

Alagie Touray, 21, admitted to investigators that he had received a request to drive a car into a crowd, the sources said. The evidence against him includes a video published on Telegram in which he allegedly pledges alliance to ISIS leader Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi.

He was detained as he left a mosque in Licola, in the province of Naples. Touray landed in Messina along with over 100 other asylum-seekers in March 2017….

We were there Tuesday. Touray was arrested Thursday. The first sign one sees when arriving in Naples by sea quotes Pope Francis and pleas for no borders. Let everyone come who wants to.

Europe is committing suicide.

Knife Control

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, says, “There’s never a reason to carry a knife.” Well, Mr. Khan: there’s always been a knife in my pocket for more than fifty years. It’s a little one with a two-inch blade and a very handy tool. Mr. Khan further states: “Anyone who does will be caught and will feel the full force of the law.”

I’ll be in London April 28th, but only for a stopover on the way back from Barcelona. I won’t be carrying my knife because it’ll be in my checked luggage. A real visit to Great Britain is on my bucket list however, and I plan to carry my pocket knife after I go through customs in London —unless it’s confiscated.

It’s made by Schrade, says “Old Timer” on the handle, and costs $16.01 on Amazon and given that I turned sixty-seven last Saturday, the “Old Timer” label is ever more appropriate. I ordered four of them recently to have spares on hand because I lose them sometimes. Three times I’ve had to forfeit my knife at airport security checkpoints because I forgot to put it in my checked luggage.

One of my students told the principal several years ago that she got scared when I used it to peel an orange in my room during snack time. He came up to see me and said, “You’re not supposed to have those you know.” I responded that I was going to keep my little pocket knife until he told the custodians they couldn’t have utility knives and the cooks couldn’t have cutlery. He left me alone after that.

Just last month New Hampshire’s Berlin Daily Sun reported that a Gorham, NH high school teacher was being investigated for doing a classroom demonstration on search and seizure using a jack-knife which he temporarily gave a student for the demonstration. When the parent complained, the superintendent, the police chief, and the district attorney all got involved to consider charges against the teacher. All this over a jack-knife that boys in my Cub Scout den carried. “There were other students in the classroom at the time,” said the article. Of course there were; it was a demonstration! What’s next? Will the school provide grief counselors for students who’ve seen a jack-knife?

So far in 2018, the city of London has had more homicides than New York City. Most have been stabbings so Mayor Khan wants a knife ban. Handguns have been banned in the UK since 1997. Khan is also banning acid because there were more than four hundred “acid attacks” in 2017 mostly by young men against other young men in certain London neighborhoods.

Acid attack victim

Though NYC police are banned now from using “stop and frisk” tactics, London police have been empowered to “stop and search” suspected knife wielders. Mayor Khan had previously called that “racist” and “Islamophobic” because they were often done with Muslim immigrants. Nearly all the attacks, however, occur in Muslim immigrant neighborhoods — also called “no-go zones” because police and other civil servants are violently discouraged from going there by their Muslim inhabitants. Officially, however, there aren’t any “no-go zones” in the UK and if you claim there are, you may be investigated for a hate crime.

Snopes insists “no-go zones” don’t exist in Europe anywhere. Last month, however, German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted they do. When asked to clarify a statement on citizen safety in public places, she said: “It means for example that there cannot be any no-go areas, that there cannot be areas where no-one dares to go but there are such places. One has to call them by name and do something about it.”

According to the Daily Wire: “Parliament is also set to take up heavy ‘knife control’ legislation when it resumes this week. The U.K. government is expected to introduce a ban on online knife sales and home knife deliveries, declare it ‘illegal to possess zombie knives and knuckledusters [brass knuckles] in private’ — ‘zombie knives’ are those defined as being manufactured for the purpose of being used as a person-to-person weapon — and ban sales of caustic materials to anyone under the age of 18, the Independent reports."

British actions would seem to empower classic arguments long made by gun control opponents in the US, like: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Killers use what’s available whether it’s guns, knives, poison, or explosives. It’s not the instrument; it’s the person, they insist. 

“It’s also not clear what local Londoners will now use to cut their food,” says the Daily Wire.

Hot Showers and Indoor Toilets

Indoor toilets and hot showers are great. Both are only short steps from my bed and I start every day with them. Central heat is nice too. I hope to have all three for the rest of my days - about twenty more years for an almost-sixty-year-old, heterosexual white guy according to the actuaries - but I’m not fully confident that I will. For that, I’ll need steady and affordable supplies of electricity and fossil fuel for the next two decades and those require a stable infrastructure, both physical and financial. In spite of what the lefty Cassandras proclaim about us running out of fossil fuels, we’re not, and we won’t for centuries to come. It’s the cracks in our financial infrastructure that worry me. Maybe it’s the widespread strikes in France over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. French unions are shutting down refineries and pipelines. Maybe it’s the riots in Greece over similar benefit and retirement issues. Both portend unrest here in America, which is on the same path many European countries have been traveling. Frenchmen and Greeks and many other Europeans are like petulant children who expect their parent government to take care of them while they put their feet up and relax. They want to retire young, then collect full pensions and benefits for two or three decades. They don’t seem to care or even understand how unrealistic those expectations are. They don’t have enough young people to work and pay the taxes necessary to keep it all going - and it’s their own fault.

When so many French, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, and Greeks choose not to bear enough children even to replace themselves, who did they think was going to keep working to support them in their declining years? Yeah, I know children are expensive, take a lot of energy and sacrifice and are a pain to raise sometimes, but what’s the alternative? Did they think immigrants were going to fill in for the children they never had? Immigrants, legal and illegal, have swarmed into Europe from Muslim countries to the south, but they’re not assimilating. They don’t want to become Frenchmen, Spaniards, Norwegians, Swedes, or Italians, and they are proving to be a net drain on government services instead of contributing to the pensions and benefits of aging Europeans. Rather than showing affection for their new homelands, the new immigrants seem disdainful. Immigrant neighborhoods are breeding grounds for terrorists. All this has lead German Chancellor Angela Merkel to declare that multiculturalism - the liberal dream that people from every culture would come to Europe and be smiling, happy people holding hands - “has utterly failed.” She might as well have said that European socialism has utterly failed as well because it has. It’s responsible for a generation of selfish, pampered, spoiled citizens who want what they want no matter what it costs. They don’t care if everything comes crashing down after them, as long as they get theirs while they’re still living.

After 33+ years as a public-school teacher in Maine, there’s a pension coming to me for the rest of my days - theoretically. I have no debts. My expenses are low. My wife and I know how to live frugally, having spent most of our lives together working multiple jobs, paying the bills and raising a family. With a pension, we could cut back our workload a bit and live fairly comfortably but one thing nags at me: Can I depend on that that pension being there in five years? Ten years? Maybe. Maybe not. State pension funds are in trouble all over the country, underfunded by over $3 trillion. As Andrew Biggs writes in the Wall Street Journal: “According to accounting rules adopted by the states, a public sector pension plan may call itself "fully funded" even if there is a better-than-even chance it will be unable to meet its obligations.” Many don’t even reach that threshold. Just as in Europe, government employee unions and left-wing politicians here signed extremely generous agreements over the years that both sides must have known were little better than Ponzi schemes. They worked well for the first waves of retirees, but - as with Social Security - bankruptcy looms for baby boomers like me who are beginning to retire now. The forty million babies aborted in America over the last four decades would have come in handy about now, but oh well. It’s likely they’d have been much more productive than the 12-20 million illegal immigrants from Latin countries to our south who have been allowed in to replace them. Like Muslim immigrants in European countries, they’re a net drain on our system, but at least they’re not plotting to bring down western civilization as Muslim immigrants are in Europe. That’s a consolation. Socialist Democrats running the White House and Congress have added over $3 trillion to our national debt in less than two years. The Federal Reserve is printing $100 billion a month, yet unemployment is still rising. Nonetheless, my toilet worked this morning. Hot water was there in the shower. The heat came on. I still have a job to go to and the election is less than two weeks away.

One day at a time.

Scarey Court Cases

Two recent court cases on two continents make me very nervous. That they’re even being tried is outrageous. That either may succeed is ominous, and few people know anything about either one.

First is the case of Roger Barnett - an Arizona rancher who has been under siege by illegal immigrants and drug dealers. In the Washington Times, Barnett claims illegals “tore up water pumps, killed calves, destroyed fences and gates, stole trucks and broke into his home.” Now sixteen illegals are suing him in federal court for $32 million, accusing him of “conspiring to violate their civil rights when he stopped them at gunpoint on his ranch next to the US-Mexico border.” The sixteen illegals claim Barnett caused them emotional distress by holding them at gunpoint and they want $2 million each.

Chief among our federal government’s responsibilities is to protect American citizens from foreign invasion, but it’s done little or nothing to help Barnett. Rather than protecting him, our government instead enables foreign invaders to sue him. That’s how bad it’s gotten.

The US Department of Homeland Security acknowledges virtual anarchy on the border and warns that Mexico itself is on the verge of collapse. That would come as no surprise to Barnett, who must wonder about his own country as well if it cannot, or will not control its borders. The DHS report states: “[Mexico’s] government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. . . . Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”

Drug cartel power depends on moving drugs across our border. We are their market. I’d say an American response is overdue already, wouldn’t you? USA Today reported in 2005 that: “First [New Mexico Governor] Richardson, then [Arizona Governor] Napolitano, declared a state of emergency this month in portions of their states along the border with Mexico.”

The second case is that of Geert Wilders in Holland: A Member of Parliament, Wilders has been charged with hurting Muslim immigrant feelings in Holland by “inciting racial hatred.” He made a film called “Fitna” comparing the Koran to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” As Dr. Sami Alrabaa reports in Canadian Free Press: “Wilders’ comparison of the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and describing it as a fascist book is not inappropriate. Hitler referred to the Jews as “rats and vermin” and the Koran and fascist Muslims call the Jews “The descendants of apes and pigs.”

When radical Muslims incite racial hatred in Holland, it’s okay. When a member of Holland’s government points it out, it’s a crime.

Dr. Alrabaa also writes that “Muhammad Sayyid Al Tantawi, president of Al Azhar University [established 975 AD in Cairo] also approves of killing and maiming Christians, Jews, and other infidels. He added, ‘This is not my personal view. This what the Shari’a Law says, the law of Allah, the only valid law on the earth.’”

There. I’ve pointed it out. I’m a criminal too.

Geert Wilders was invited by a member of the British House of Lords to show his film there. When he landed in London last Friday, he was promptly deported. The London Daily Telegraph reported: “Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary refused Mr. Wilders entry because his opinions ‘would threaten community security and therefore public security’ in the UK.”

So, when Muslim clerics in the UK preach hatred and violent jihad against the British government, it’s all right. But when Wilders expresses a negative opinion about that preaching, he’s the threat, not them.

This is what Europe, seat of western civilization and democracy, has come to.

Back here, groups like MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) use the US Constitution to bring suit against Americans like Roger Barnett when he tries to defend his property. MALDEF doesn’t recognize the US border. Similar radical Mexican groups like MEChA deny the legitimacy of state governments all across the southwestern United States, calling the area “Aztlan” and claiming themselves as indigenous people not subject to US law. MEChA has chapters in most colleges across the American southwest. If you check out their web site here, you’ll see their symbol: an eagle gripping an Aztec war club in one talon and a stick of dynamite with its fuse lit in the other. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante are former members.

MEChA receives funding from La Raza (“The Race”). Politicians across America go out of their way to pay homage to “The Race.” President Barack Obama and Senator John McCain addressed the organization during the 2008 campaign, where both virtually promised amnesty for illegals. Two out of three voted for Obama.

Barnett and Wilders are brave men defending western civilization on the front lines. If they go down, watch out.

EUnuchs

It’s sad to watch a big person tormented by a small one who knows intuitively the big guy hasn’t the will to defend himself. The little fiend pours on abuse - verbal insults that escalate into humiliating condemnations. Then he’ll throw things at the big weakling who turns away, unable to make eye contact. Then come painful punches and kicks. Onlookers feel his humiliation and plead with him to defend himself, to use his strength to dispatch his tormenter. They want to do it for him but know they cannot. Something vitally important is lacking in his big body - a pride, a belief in himself that would enable him to fight. They know only he can find it - and if he doesn’t, he won’t survive.

That’s how it feels now watching Iran torment Britain. Fifteen British sailors were seized by Iran and they’re forced to make humiliating televised “confessions.” Iran insists that Blair agree his sailors strayed into Iranian waters - even though they didn’t. Blair has asked the UN Security Council for help. That’s how we know he hasn’t got the guts to stand up to the mullahs.

The UN? Is he kidding? He thinks Iran respects the UN? The sailors were captured because they obeyed UN rules of engagement. They couldn’t shoot unless they were shot at. Ask black Christians in Darfur about UN “help.” Ask the Tutsis in Rwanda. This is the UN whose Human Rights Commission last Friday passed a resolution which “expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations.” Nobody should be hanging by the neck waiting for the UN to rescue him.

Blair is articulate. He might work something out if he weren’t dealing with a government of nut jobs who deny the Holocaust, pledge to wipe Israel off the map, and are waiting for the Twelfth Imam to come out of the Iranian well he’s been living in for thirteen hundred years. They believe that if they create chaos here in earth by making nukes and blowing up Israel with them, the imam will come out of the well and establish 1000 years of peace and justice.

I’m not making this up.

Blair thinks he can negotiate with these people? What’s happened to the Prime Minister who fought alongside the United States after September 11th? If he’d just issue an ultimatum like: “Release the hostages in 48 hours or else,” we could help. But no, he’s putting his tail between his legs and whimpering to the UN. Pathetic.

Whatever Britons there are left who haven’t succumbed to the multiculti emasculators of the European Union (EU) are pining now for the days of Margaret Thatcher - the “Iron Lady.” Thatcher would know what to do with Iran’s theocratic dictators. When Argentinean dictators took over the Falkland Islands, she dispatched a naval task force to the area. When no diplomatic progress was made as the fleet was sailing, there was little doubt what it would do upon arrival.

A generation has passed since Thatcher was in office. Today’s Britons are are so enamored with the EU, they’ve become EUnuchs who, like the UN, are worried about offending Radical Islam much less standing up to it.

For example, London's Daily Mirror reported Monday that:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

Iran smuggles weapons and terrorists into Iraq to kill British and American soldiers. They’ve set up a proxy army (Hezbollah) to bring down the Lebanese government and attack Israel. Now they’ve kidnapped British sailors and publicly humiliate them every day. The price of oil is going up in anticipation of Britain doing something about it. Iran has threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz (entrance to the Persian Gulf) if it’s attacked and the big western countries are afraid to call its bluff. So, the torment continues. For how long? Don’t hold your breath waiting for a respite.

Americans remember when Iran took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The United States was humiliated for a year and a half while President Carter tried to use his big smile to negotiate with the Iranian theocrats - who only released them on the day his successor, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated. Historians say that was the beginning of our War with Radical Islam.

Something’s lacking in the big western countries like Britain and the United States who represent western civilization itself. Iran and Al Qaeda know it and their torments will only escalate. If we can’t find the will to defend ourselves, if we all become EUnuchs, we won’t survive either.

Staving Off Extinction

Humans are becoming an endangered species in the northern hemisphere. I don’t care much about polar bears or ivory-billed woodpeckers but I am worried about us. Our young people are not reproducing as they should. Something’s wrong.

In Japan, for instance, grandparents outnumber grandchildren because the birthrate has fallen to 1.3 babies per woman - well below minimum replacement rate of 2.1. Four grandparents compete for the attention of a lone grandchild. There are so few little girls that doll manufacturers were going out of business. Instead of making dolls that look like babies for little girls to pretend they’re mothers, they now make dolls that look like grandchildren for old folks to pretend they’re grandparents. “Grandchild” dolls are programmed with recordings like: “Why are bunnies’ eyes red?” or “I wonder why the stars don’t fall to the ground,” or “Where does the wind come from and where does it go?” - the kinds of things senior citizens would love to discuss lovingly with the flesh-and-blood grandchildren they don’t have. Sad. Very sad.

Look around the rest of the hemisphere and remember that every woman must produce 2.1 children just to sustain a population at current levels: Canada is at 1.5. Cross the Atlantic and Ireland is at 1.87. Germany is 1.3, Spain is 1.1 and Italy is 1.2. Italy. Imagine. Russia is also at 1.2 and China is 1.7. Back in 1979, China’s government ruled that families could have only one child. Women who got pregnant a second time were often forced to have abortions and/or sterilizations.

South Korea didn’t get that drastic, but in 1961 they began pressuring families to have no more than two children. According to an article by Joseph A. D'Agostino of The Population Research Institute:

“Government employees with more than two children were denied promotions. Third and younger children were denied many benefits, and small families received preference in housing allotments. The birthrate plummeted to 1.7 by the ’90s, and South Korea finally abandoned her population control program in 1996. But it was too late. Cultural attitudes and economic realities had changed.”

Now South Korean women have only 1.08 children each and their government has reversed course. Facing the specter of its population shrinking by half every generation, it’s providing incentives for more children, but it fears it won’t be able to change cultural attitudes back to what they were a half-century ago.

It’s not that bad in the United States - yet. American women have 2.07 children each - a teensy bit below replacement level, but the trend is downward. The more America’s secular/progressive blue states emulate shrinking socialist countries of Europe in their politics and mores, the more their birth rates go down. By contrast, religious/conservative red states have much higher birth rates. A recent book by Mark Steyn entitled “America Alone” makes a convincing case that western civilization as we know it is self-destructing and the chief culprit is declining demographics. In a recent companion “Wall Street Journal” piece, Steyn writes: “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.”

Warnings against those most cherished secular/progressive policy issues of abortion and gay rights - which seek to separate sex from reproduction - are not theoretical. Resulting cultural attitude changes work against the traditional family - the basic unit of society - and have lethal effects on population levels. The biggest enemy of secular/progressive policies in Europe, Canada and the United States is the Roman Catholic Church, which works tirelessly against non-marital sex, abortion and gay “marriage,” and in favor of the traditional family unit all around the world.

Consider the Catholic Nuptual Mass ceremony. The priest asks the couple: “Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage? Will you love and honor each other as husband and wife for the rest of your lives? Will you accept children lovingly from God and bring them up according to the Law of Love and Compassion?” Assuming the answers are all yes, the ceremony continues: “Since it is your intention to enter into marriage, with your hands joined declare your consent before God and his Church, this community of your family and friends.” From there, they do the “for richer or for poorer” and “forsaking all others” parts.

At the reception, kids run around underfoot. Grandparents look on sagely. Toaster ovens and envelopes with money are given and accepted because everyone has a stake in the marriage. It’s harder to divorce after such public ceremonies and couples are pressured to keep traditional religion and culture alive by producing children and staying together to raise them. That’s the whole point of marriage - staving off extinction. It’s not stifling. It’s not repressive. It’s how we survive. That’s why society has a stake in it. How could we have forgotten something so elementary?

Time To Be Trampled?

They struck us September 11th because they sensed we were weak. Maybe they were right. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” said their leader, “they will like the strong horse.” He wasn’t referring to the United States as the strong horse. He was referring to Radical Islamists like himself who dared attack us because we were a “paper tiger,” a country with a powerful military, but without strong enough belief in itself to sustain a fight. Maybe they were right. Perhaps they know us better than we know ourselves.

They watched as “progressives” among us rooted religion out of our culture while the rest of us stood around and allowed it. Radical Islam’s aim was to impose their religion on every person in the world or kill them. They listened as our university professors blamed the evils of the world on Western Civilization and that was one thing Radical Islamists agreed with. They watched and listened as our intellectual and media elites bewailed selected victim groups among us and they learned that if they portrayed themselves as victims, they would get sympathetic coverage in our media.

It’s enlightening to look at ourselves as our enemies see us. They’ve observed us as we blame capitalist, white-guy leaders of Western Civilization - not only for the miseries of victim groups in the US and the Third World - but also for destroying the planet itself with pollution, extinction and global warming.

As our liberal leaders in universities and the courts do all this - purge religion from the public square, lament the miseries of victim groups, and condemn the depredations of capitalist warmongers - they overlook glaring contradictions in their own rhetoric. What about the old idea that we were created by God to have dominion over the earth? No, they say. Only fundamentalist simpletons believe that. We evolved just as any other species in nature did, and we’re no more special than they are. But if it’s true that we’re just another ordinary part of nature, why do we blame ourselves for killing trees or wiping out passenger pigeons? Wouldn’t that be nature acting through us? Beavers are part of nature when they flood an area and kill off trees, right? Aren’t we being our natural selves when we cut down mahogany trees in the rain forest? If a threatened species can’t make it, shouldn’t it disappear to make way for more adaptive species? That’s what Darwin taught us, isn’t it?

The guy we nearly elected president six years ago travels our country preaching “The End Is Near” in the form of an impending global-warming catastrophe. Some of us listen and ask ourselves: Who caused the global warming that melted glaciers of the last ice age ten thousand years ago? Was it those evil cave men making their campfires too big? And what about the first three ice ages when evil white guys hadn’t evolved yet? Who caused the global warming back then?

Though 99% of all species that ever existed are now extinct, whichever ones disappear while we’re around must be our fault. If we look deeply enough, we’re sure we’ll discover that Dick Cheney and Halliburton were somehow involved but have covered it up.

It’s pretty obvious we have forgotten who we are and what we’re about. We don’t know where we came from and we don’t know where we’re going. Meanwhile millions or Radical Jihadists around the world are willing to die to kill us. They’ve declared war and attacked us in the most dramatic fashion - and we don’t seem to realize what’s going on. They gather by the thousands chanting “Death To America!” and “Death To Israel!” They’ve infiltrated Europe, Canada and the United States. They’re blowing themselves up to kill us and plotting to do it on a bigger scale with nuclear weapons.

How do we respond? Do we concentrate on defeating them and saving our civilization? No. We look in the mirror and wring our hands. “Why do they hate us?” we ask. “It must be something we’ve done!” Instead of figuring out how to defeat them, we’re worried we might discriminate against them.

They call us the Great Satan. Their goal is to convert us to Islam or kill us. Meanwhile, what’s our goal? It looks like we’re trying to figure out a way to surrender without it looking like surrender. It looks like our enemies know us well. We can’t sustain a fight. We wimped out in Iran in 1980. We pulled out of Lebanon in ’83 and Somalia in ’93. Now we’re getting ready to pull out of Iraq. The country that defeated fascism and communism in the last century hasn’t got what it takes any more.

As Martin Luther King said, “If a man has nothing he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.” Maybe it’s time to lay down and let the strong horse trample us.