Tommy Robinson is Britain’s best-known “Islamophobe”. I regard this label as a compliment. I follow him on Facebook, because I agree with some of what he says. I think he should be allowed to say whatever he wants about Islam, without being persecuted by the police, as he is at present. (See Robinson’s biography “Enemy of the State”, and my blog entry “Enemies of the State”).

I don’t sympathise with his attitude to patriotism, monarchy and the armed forces. But I don’t bother to argue with his followers on Facebook about these subjects, since there is one far more important subject on which we disagree, one where his view undermines everything else he says.

He is a keen supporter of Israel, not realising that this little state has a lot to answer for in helping perpetuate the most important problem he is concerned about – Islamic terrorism.

I don’t mean the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 by Jews is a reason for Islamic terrorism in London in 2017. Leftists sometimes hint at this, and Islamic terrorists sometimes refer to it, but this is just an excuse. To use Jewish terrorism to excuse Islamic terrorism is no more logical or ethical than the Israeli argument that the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arabs is a reason for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs by Jews.

The reason Israel is partly responsible for Islamic terrorism is more complicated, and I explain it below.

Having had his freedom of speech suppressed, often violently, by the authorities, leftists and Muslims, on numerous occasions, Robinson is a keen defender of freedom. Except for people he disagrees with – he called on the mayor of London to ban the “al-Quds Day” march on 18 June 2017, smearing all support for Palestinian rights as support for terrorism.

The “anti-fascist” left shout “Nazi” and “white supremacist” at Robinson and his followers, who wave Israeli flags and promote the most mindlessly uncritical Zionist propaganda you can find.

Israel is not a product of white supremacy. It’s a product of Jewish supremacy.

Robinson amalgamates resistance to Israel with Sunni extremist attacks on civilians in the West. But Israel is not an opponent of these Sunni extremists.

Islam is divided into two main branches – Shi’ite and Sunni.(See “Understanding the Origins of Wahhabism and Salafism” on the Jamestown Foundation’s website).

The chief inspiration of terrorism is a sub-branch of the Sunni branch, Salafism. The main source of this ideology, the extremely literal interpretation of the Koran and some of the Hadiths which drive ISIS and its ilk, is the Gulf States, with Saudi Arabia at the head. The British government has suppressed a report which explains the link between the Gulf States and terrorism:  “Report calls for public inquiry into Gulf funding of British extremism”, Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 5 July 2017.

Most of ISIS’s victims have been Shi’ite civilians in Iraq. The Shi’ite Islamic state, Iran, and the Shi’ite army, Hezbollah, have been determined opponents of ISIS. 

The two Islamic groups which concern Israel are the Shi’ite group Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, and the Sunni group Hamas, based in the Gaza Strip. Both are classified by the submissive US government as “terrorist”. Neither of these groups have ever organised attacks in Western Europe or North America. Neither of them are of any concern to Western people, who would be better off taking a neutral stance on their conflict with Israel.

The groups which do attack Western targets are al-Qaeda and its offshoots, including ISIS. Israel supporters have an interest in confusing Westerners about these groups and their relationship to Hamas and Hezbollah. Particularly Hezbollah, which has been fighting against ISIS and al-Qaeda for years, and which is therefore fighting in the interests of Western people, alongside the governments of Syria and Iran, with Russian support.

Yet, incredibly, when president Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May 2017, he unconditionally backed the Sunni monarchy, and identified Iran as the main problem. If the US really wanted to beat ISIS, it could have done so already, simply by giving support to Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. Instead, on 18 June 2017, the USA shot down a Syrian jet. It can’t be that Trump doesn’t have the information – he just has to ask the CIA * and the State Department. There’s only one possible explanation for his seemingly lunatic inversion of the true state of affairs – that is the lobby.

Saudi Arabia does have a well-funded lobby in the USA. But surely it pales in comparison with the Israel Lobby. Senators and congressmen don’t regularly give speeches putting Saudi interests before those of their own country – but they do grovel before Israel.

Israel is in an unstated, de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia and several other Sunni states. The reason for this is they have a common interest in countering Iranian influence. One of the battlegrounds is Yemen, where the Saudis have caused a famine which has killed thousands, and created a cholera epidemic. The other is Syria. There, Israel wants to prevent Iran achieving a “Shi’ite corridor” from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea, by “population transfers” (moving Shi’ite civilians into Sunni areas, and vice-versa).

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu… said Israel views “with utmost gravity” Iranian attempts to gain a foothold in Syria or to provide advanced weapons to Hezbollah, its Lebanese proxy

– Breitbart, 25 June 2017

Preventing a decisive Syrian victory is in Israeli interests. A byproduct is fertile ground for the training of terrorists who attack Western countries.

It’s therefore moronic to support Israel because you think it has a common cause with the inhabitants of Western countries – fighting Islamic terrorism. Not all “terrorists” are the same – in fact, they’re not all terrorists. At least one so-called terrorist organisation is potentially an ally of the Western countries. If only Western politicians were as canny and cynical as their Israeli counterparts.

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Enemy of the State, Tommy Robinson, December 2015 – http://www.amazon.com/Tommy-Robinson-Enemy-State/dp/0957096496

Understanding the Origins of Wahhabism and Salafism, Trevor Stanley, 2005 – https://jamestown.org/program/understanding-the-origins-of-wahhabism-and-salafism/

“Report calls for public inquiry into Gulf funding of British extremism”, Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 5 July 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/05/report-calls-for-public-inquiry-into-gulf-funding-of-british-extremism

*  Woops! Just after writing this, I read the following, from the new director of the CIA: “Pompeo said that while Islamic State remains an “enormous” threat to the US, he considered Iran a greater menace”, Mike Pompeo, 24 June 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/24/trump-cia-edward-snowden-leaks-state-secrets

“Israel Strikes Syrian Army Two Days In Row Following Projectile Fire into Golan Heights”, Breitbart, 25 June 2017, http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/06/25/israel-strikes-syrian-army-two-days-row-following-projectile-fire-golan-heights/

 

 

 

This article is an attempt to bring together various pieces I’ve written about expressions of the misleadingly-named phenomenon known as “Cultural Marxism”, “Political Correctness” and “Social Justice”. It argues that this tendency is opposed to the positive achievements of Western societies.

The article also considers the alleged Jewish role in these tendencies.

First, I’ll explain how one expression of political correctness, “anti-racism”, undermines three key Western values: freedom of speech, presumption of innocence, and the proscription against being tried twice for the same crime.

 

“Anti-racism”

By the phrase “anti-racism”, in inverted commas, I don’t mean “opposition to racial prejudice, violence and discrimination”. I mean ideas like “Critical Race Theory” and their political implementations.

I’ll start by listing some of the consequences of these ideas.

When eighty-eight professors at a US university falsely accused three of their students of rape because they are white men, and their accusers are black women, they were taken seriously by students, most of the media, the police, the district attorney, and the president of the university.

“Anti-racism” also influenced the 1997-1999 inquiry, led by Sir William Macpherson, on the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, which accused the London police force of various nebulous kinds of “racism”. A consequence was nationwide police oversensitivity to such allegations. This helped Pakistani Muslim child-traffickers to “play the race card” and escape investigation. Some of the offenders also used “anti-racism” to convince underage white girls that the reason their parents were suspicious is because they are white.

I cover these examples in more detail below. They illustrate the effects on Western societies and individuals of persuading them to overcompensate for the racist past by inventing a racist present.

“Words That Wound”, Matsuda et. al., 1993, is a representative collection of essays on the variant of “anti-racism” known as Critical Race Theory. Because, it claims, “racist hate messages are rapidly increasing” in the USA (page 24), and because minorities suffer more from bigoted speech than the white majority, it argues that freedom of expression should be limited.

“Words That Wound” also attempts to undermine another principle of Western civilization, the presumption of innocence:

Matsuda asks that we listen first to the voice of the victims of hate speech 

(page 9).

This doesn’t mean quite what it says. Note first of all that it claims that one can be a “victim” of “speech”. Secondly, it is true that the police do have to literally “listen first” to the victims of alleged crimes. But from that point on, the defendant is presumed innocent, so what she and her lawyers say is presumed to be the truth until it is proven to be false. This implies that the alleged victims of alleged crimes are disbelieved unless and until their allegations are proven. So to reform the legal system into what they say it should be, the critical race theorists would have to

• criminalize some forms of speech
• shift the balance of proof from plaintiff to defendant.

As I describe below, in the UK, “anti-racism” has led the law to undermine an ancient right – the injunction against “double jeopardy”: it is no longer necessarily true that, if you are found not guilty of a crime, you cannot be retried for it.

The Duke University alleged rape case of 2006 is one of the most dramatic examples of an attempt to apply the principles outlined in “Words That Wound”. The case was tailor-made for the “anti-racist” left: white fraternity members were accused of rape by black women. Activists organized noisy vigils outside the fraternity house, on the basis that

the daily violence of racism/white supremacy, sexism/transphobia/patriarchy, classism/capitalism, and homophobia/heterosexism are the intersecting sources of sexual violence.

– “Serena and the Potbangers”, Johnson, K.C., 9 May 2007.

But the students were innocent. The full story can be found in “Until Proven Innocent: political correctness and the shameful injustices of the Duke lacrosse rape case”, Taylor, S. Jr. & Johnson, K.C., 2007. A collection of more recent examples of the campus grievance industry’s opposition to due process can be found in the same authors’ “The Campus Rape Frenzy: the attack on due process at America’s universities”, Taylor, S. Jr. & Johnson, K.C., 2017.

 

 

The use of anti-racism by Zionists

Another variant of “anti-racism” is the effort to help the state of Israel by suppressing criticism of it in Western countries, by labelling this criticism “anti-semitic”.

A UK parliament committee recommends making illegal, among other thought-crimes, claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour – “Antisemitism in the UK – tenth report of session 2016–17”, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, 13 October 2016.

A similar law, but applying only to colleges and universities, the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act”, is being considered in the USA, but it is widely regarded as unconstitutional, thus unenforceable: “The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would damage free speech rights on campus”, Liz Jackson, Los Angeles Times, 6 December 2016.

In the recent article “A Modern Education” in the Dartmouth Review, Jack Mourouzis describes the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment from Israel movement as follows: “Protestors expressing support for the anti-Semitic BDS movement”, without explanation, in the middle of an article criticizing “ideological intolerance” by the left. He criticizes the current wave of student assaults on freedom of speech for alleged “racists”, while using the same technique himself to challenge freedom to criticise Israel.

Other examples of Zionist use of left-wing language can be found in the blog of leftist Alex Press: “Left-Wing Language for Your Right-Wing Needs”. The author seems to accept the validity of using alleged hurt feelings to argue for the suppression of ideas, as Zionists do with regard to BDS, but only for the left-wing causes he agrees with.

 

The hate industry

There has been an effort to exaggerate the amount of racial prejudice endemic to American society since, at the latest, 1950, when the Frankfurt School’s “The Authoritarian Personality”, by Theodor Adorno et al. was published. To be precise, The Authoritarian Personality exaggerated the degree to which white people exhibit ethnocentrism, by interpreting data using different methods for different demographics, with white rural Americans getting the least favourable treatment. Since then, a growing number of academic departments and well-funded political organisations has continued the work of the Frankfurt School.

Laird Wilcox criticised the hate industry in his pamphlet “The Watchdogs” in 1999:

Indeed, there is an anti-racist industry entrenched in the United States that has attracted bullying, moralizing fanatics, whose identity and livelihood depend upon growth and expansion of their particular kind of victimization.

Here are some examples. The National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence alleged there is an epidemic of “ethnoviolence” in higher education facilities – but its definition of the term is so broad it includes any “perceived expression of insensitivity” (“Hate Crimes”, Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., 1998, page 49). Mari Matsuda wrote that “a marked rise of racial harassment, hate speech, and racially-motivated violence marks the beginning of the 1990’s” in “Words That Wound” (1993, page 44). Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt’s “Hate Crimes” complained of “a rising tide of bigotry and bloodshed” at that time (1993, page xi). Kenneth Stern’s article “Militia Mania, a Growing Danger”, 1996, claimed that local officials in rural America were being threatened with death by right-wing terrorists, and Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote a book entitled “Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat”, in 1997.

These claims are false. Acclaimed populariser of evolutionary psychology professor Steven Pinker took a year off from Harvard to write a history of violence, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: why violence has declined”. He used a chart from James Payne’s “A History of Force”, 2004, which shows how racist lynchings declined steadily from 150 per annum in the 1880s to close to zero by the end of the 1960s (page 385). Another graph in his book covers racist murders, 1996-2008 (page 386), using statistics from the FBI. From five victims per annum in 1996, this went down to one in 2008. One is less than 0.006 percent of the 17,000 murders which occur in the country each year.

Following the vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016, some of the media claimed there was a spike in reported hate crimes. This claim has been discredited: “The truth behind the Brexit hate crime ‘spike’”, Brendan O’Neill, “Britain has not become racist overnight”, Luke Gittos, “A supposed outpouring of online hatred against Jo Cox, a murdered MP, was exaggerated”, The Economist, 17 December 2016.

The election of Donald Trump as president of the USA on 9 November 2016 also saw a spike in hate crime reports. Many of them were found to be false alarms: http://fakehatecrimes.org/graphs.

 

 

A show-trial for the London police

“Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics”, by Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi, examines the Macpherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager murdered by white thugs in London in 1993. It took eighteen years to convict them. The Macpherson report claimed the reason for the delay was racism in the police. Though the murderers used racist language while committing the crime, they also had a long history of violence against white and other people. But for Macpherson, the failure of many officers to recognise the murder as entirely racially-motivated was evidence of police racism. The fact that the police made mistakes in the investigation, though there was no evidence that these mistakes were caused by racism, was nevertheless adduced as though there was. The use of the old-fashioned word “coloured” instead of “black” by one officer was evidence too. Even denying racism was evidence of racism; an example of what Eric Raymond has characterised as a “Kafkatrap”.

Macpherson’s report liberally throws around phrases like “institutional racism”, “inherent racism”, “systemic racism”, and the like. Police racism is described as “‘concealed’, ‘predominantly hidden’, and yet has the power of ‘an inbuilt persuasiveness’” – Dennis, N., Erdos, G. and Al-Shahi, A., pages 109-110. All these vague phrases have the benefit of being unfalsifiable.

The reason it took eighteen years to convict Gary Dobson and David Norris of the murder of Stephen Lawrence is not police racism, but because the prosecution service thought the evidence was insufficient, given the need to prove defendants’ guilt beyond doubt. It was right: the men could only be convicted after several retrials and an acquittal. The final trial depended on the abolition of the injunction against “double jeopardy” in murder cases – being tried twice for the same crime. The abolition of this right, in murder cases, was a recommendation of the Macpherson report.

Behind Macpherson’s assault on defendants’ rights lies the “anti-racism” industry. Here is Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya’s contribution to vague, unprovable, unfalsifiable definitions of “racism”:

Racism has five typologies. These typologies are overt, polite, subliminal, institutional, and systemic racism…

To take one example:

Subliminal racism involves unconscious prejudice towards other groups. This form of racism is tied to ethnocentric views that most racist people are unaware of, because it has structurally been conditioned and socialized in them through societal forces like their culture, institutions, and media.

Dear reader, if you can’t see why the above passage is an Orwellian assault on freedom, based on pseudo-science, I’m not going to explain it.

With breathtaking chutzpah, Nazemroaya criticizes Critical Race Theory on the grounds that “ironically it is intolerant to diversity of thought and free speech”. There’s nothing ironic about it. Of course it’s intolerant of diversity of thought and free speech: its purpose is to undermine them. And the same is true of any variant of it, including the version Nazemroaya defends.

The above quotes are from Nazemroaya’s introduction to Denis Rancourt’s “Hierarchy and Free Expression in the fight against racism”, 2013. Rancourt’s book recommends student rebellion against “racism” among other grievances. In the last year or so, mobs of leftist students around the USA have prevented talks they disagree with, screamed racist abuse against white people, and forced resignations from academics and administrators.

The conclusion of “Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics” is more concrete than Macpherson’s:

Macpherson produces no evidence that racism lay behind the inappropriate behaviour of these police officers. 

– page 71.

Believe me, I am no admirer of the London police, but I don’t believe in convicting anyone on the basis of false, or meaningless, allegations. Moreover, Macpherson had unintended consequences.

 

 

 

Broken and Betrayed – the effects of the “anti-racism” campaign on the police

The Rotherham scandal proved beyond doubt the poisonous influence of political correctness on Western society. One of the reasons the authorities in Rotherham, UK, and at least seventeen other towns and cities, allowed hundreds of schoolgirls to be groomed, trafficked and raped by Muslim men for decades, was because they thought that, if they investigated, they would be accused of “racism”. When a social worker pointed out that most of the rapists belong to Rotherham’s Asian minority, she was sent on a diversity course.

Another reason the police failed to investigate the rapists was their contempt for working-class people. The South Yorkshire Police, responsible for Rotherham, provides exceptionally good evidence for a Marxist class analysis of the police – witness its behaviour at Orgreave coking plant in 1984, and at Hillsborough football ground in 1989, both of them violent attacks on working-class people. Officers from the force have been reported as having referred to working-class girls below the age of consent (sixteen) as “slags” and “prostitutes”, apparently unaware that sex with a minor is rape, not prostitution. As a result, some pundits have attempted to downplay the “political correctness” aspect, claiming that the only cause of police neglect of underage girls’ welfare is that the girls are working-class.

For example, Suzanne Moore, in “Poor children are seen as worthless, as Rotherham’s abuse scandal shows” – The Guardian, 27 August 2014. On 22 June 2017, the leader of the Labour Party referred to the disasters at Hillsborough football ground and the Grenfell Tower fire: “working-class people’s voices are ignored”. He also brought up “the child sex-abuse scandal” as confirmation of this class analysis. His only reference to Muslims is “young Muslim men banging on the door who had broken from prayers” to awaken people to the Grenfell fire.

However, consider this passage from “Broken and Betrayed”, by Rotherham whistleblower Jayne Senior:

One evening he set out to find her, having been told by police that “it wasn’t their problem”. He quickly located her and banged on the door of a terraced house, demanding that whoever was in should open up and give him his daughter back. Unfortunately as he was shouting he used a racist comment towards the people inside. He shouldn’t have said it, and it’s unforgivable, but that’s what happened. Neighbours heard the fracas and reported that someone was racially abusing people in their street. The police arrived pretty damned quickly, the door was opened and they went inside. By all accounts, Jessica was just getting out of bed with her abuser when the police came through the front door. She hid under the bed while the man was caught putting on his trousers. When they finally brought her out from under the bed she was intoxicated, semi-naked and clutching a police truncheon. She didn’t come out quietly, apparently, which led to her being arrested and charged with disorderly behaviour, as was her father. And although the house was full of men, one of whom had just been in bed with a fourteen-year-old girl, not one of them was spoken to, arrested or charged with anything.

Jessica subsequently told me that when she was driving around with her abuser in his flashy car, he’d often play the ‘race card’ if stopped by the police. 

– Broken and Betrayed, Jayne Senior, pages 91-92

How would class prejudice lead to the police arresting a white working-class man for racist language, but letting Pakistani working-class child-rapists off scot-free? The data is more compatible with the hypothesis that the police has been corrupted by political correctness than the notion that it is just using it as an excuse for exercising its real function, the defence of capitalist society.

Jayne Senior is also concerned about “racism”:

Of course there was a grooming problem involving Asian men and white girls – you’d have to be blind not to see that – but there was no way I was going to contribute to any political point-scoring on behalf of the BNP or the EDL

(pages 229-230).

She doesn’t explain why not. The local Labour council allowed girls in its care to be raped, and tried to suppress the evidence, and ruin the career, of whistleblower Jayne Senior. But after all this, she “contributed to political point-scoring” on Labour’s behalf. She campaigned for it, while dismissing the rival United Kingdom Independence Party’s “1,400 reasons not to trust Labour” poster (page 353). If UKIP pointing out Labour’s responsibility for mass child-rape was “a disgraceful attempt to make political gain”, what was Labour’s campaign? And why did she support it?

Like many others, she uses the euphemism “Asian” to avoid the more specific and accurate term “Muslim”. The word “Islam” occurs just twice in the book – in both cases to refer to girls who were forced to convert after being raped (pages 77 and 263). “Muslim” occurs six times, and “Asian” sixty-seven.

Only once does she use the word “Muslim” in a negative way, despite the overwhelming overrepresentation of men with Muslim names among child-traffickers. Her solution is a plea to “the Muslim community”:

If the Muslim community has a problem with abusers – and it clearly does – then people inside those communities need to accept that and have the confidence to report matters to the authorities

(pages 357-358)

If I’d ever met anyone who had proposed drugging underage girls and gang-raping them, I would have reported him to the police, and if it did nothing about it, would have campaigned until it did. But in some Muslim communities, there’s solidarity between the child-rapists, often family members, and there’s solidarity with them from other Muslims. It’s no good telling them they need to “have the confidence”. It’s not confidence they lack. Something about particular branches of Islamic culture – not all of them – makes some Muslims complicit in child abuse, and something about British society makes it hard to stop them. Jayne Senior clearly expresses that weakness.

Rotherham is the tip of an iceberg. Senior’s book, together with Peter McLoughlin’s account (“Easy Meat”), Alexis Jay’s official Rotherham report (“Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham”), Andrew Norfolk’s and Julie Bindel’s articles in the Times, and the reactions to them, exposed

• hundreds of girls under sixteen in dozens of towns being trafficked and raped by gangs of men with mostly Muslim names
• police collusion with these child-rapists
• political correctness in the social services preventing social workers from exposing the narrow demographic of most of the offenders
• the destruction of evidence of child rape by city council workers
• little feminist concern with the problem
• leftist violence, with police collusion, against people protesting against the rape gangs
• media suppression of evidence, for fear of stirring up “racism”
• the promotion of Muslims into positions of power, where they protect their co-religionists

Muslim prosecutor Nazir Afzal claimed “There is no religious basis for the abuse in Rotherham”.

 

 

 

 

 

Feminists and Social Justice Warriors

Because feminism is close to the left, because the left is “anti-racist” to a fault, and because most of the Muslims in Britain are darker-coloured than the indigenous population, hardly any feminists noticed the problem of Muslim rape gangs targeting underage white girls. One of the few exceptions is Julie Bindel:

The pimps are adept at trading on teenage rebellion and use similar methods, according to Crop, of convincing the girls all white people are racist… “Like most teenagers, I was going through a phase of arguing with my mum,” says Gemma. “Amir told me they didn’t understand me and were racist and ignorant. I believed him.”

– “Mothers of prevention”, The Times, 30 September 2007.

Feminists often accept rape claims uncritically – “it wasn’t Jackie’s job to get the details of her rape correct” wrote Jessica Valenti, even after Jackie’s claim to have been raped at the University of Virginia, published uncritically in Rolling Stone magazine, was exposed as completely false.

Chelsey Wright of Sunderland claims to have been raped by refugees, and ignored by the authorities. There is a petition to support her (May 2017): “Would you please sign this petition and help the UK overthrow its rape culture?”. In this case, because the alleged offenders are Middle Eastern, and the woman and her supporters white, she gets little support from feminists. Some of them claim that the only reason white men are concerned about the case is because they believe they “have a duty to protect “their” women from the rape-crazed hordes of non-white men”. Feminists ignored the march to support Chelsey Wright pressuring the police to take action. Here is a typical feminist reaction, from a discussion on “Ask Feminists” on reddit.com, 20 May 2017:

This is not protecting women’s rights. It’s asserting white men’s ownership over white women. It’s a total denial of women’s rights.

 

 

 

The assault on science

In June 2015, Nobel Laureate and cancer researcher, Sir Tim Hunt, formerly of University College London, made a self-deprecating joke about sexist scientists at a conference in South Korea. A feminist, Connie St. Louis, didn’t see the joke, and tweeted approximately some of what he said. When he returned to the UK, he thought he’d flown to North Korea by mistake. He was told to resign, or be fired: Tim Hunt: “I’ve been hung out to dry. They haven’t even bothered to ask for my side of affairs”, Robin McKie, The Guardian, 13 June 2015.

Back in October 2007, another Nobel Laureate, James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was forced out of his job because he said that the underdevelopment of Africa may be related to average differences in intelligence between the races of humanity: “Watson Loses Cold Spring Harbor Post”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Science, 19 October 2007. If America is still in the grip of “white supremacy”, as the social justice warriors claim, why would the greatest living geneticist get the sack for defending a scientific hypothesis which may offend black people?

Toward the end of 2015, the assault on reason continued to grow when students on both sides of the Atlantic, demanded, and in most cases, got, apologies and resignations from academics and administrators at numerous colleges and universities for vaguely specified thought crimes.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the intensity and scale of this campaign. At the time of writing, the campaign continues unabated. Mobs of “anti-fascists” in Britain and the USA try to stop anyone they disagree with speaking, from feminist Germaine Greer to “The Bell Curve” co-author Charles Murray. In two cases, in Berkeley, CA, the city has instructed the police to allow leftists to assault people attempting to attend meetings addressed by politically incorrect speakers.

Students at Evergreen College in Washington demanded white people be excluded from the campus for a day, and invaded a lecture by a professor who doesn’t agree, shouting the allegation that he is “racist” for not leaving campus. The president of the college, instead of telling the campus police to defend this professor’s freedom to teach, has capitulated to threats of violence. Self-censorship is endemic. You can express politically incorrect ideas more freely anywhere than in a department of sociology, or in any whose name ends in the word “studies”.

Academia, for the most part, hasn’t just failed in its mission of allowing freedom of expression, it has actively collaborated in its suppression. It has turned into its opposite.

What caused this assault on the bases of Western civilization? Why is it tolerated? How far beyond academia has it spread? How can it be defeated?

 

 

Pathological altruism

Above, I discussed how Rotherham whistleblower Jayne Senior continued to support the Labour Party, after she’d exposed its complicity in Islamic child rape, and her reluctance to use the word “Muslim”.

Following the Manchester bombing of 22 May 2017, by the son of a Libyan refugee, the brother of one of the victims asked people not to criticise immigration because of it. Both father and son had fought with an al-Qaeda offshoot in Libya – during an uprising which had Western support: “Victim’s brother: stop using Manchester attack to denounce immigration”, Helen Pidd, The Guardian, 31 May 2017.

Consider also the case of a 14-year-old British girl who wrote an essay arguing against deporting criminals from foreign countries because it’s “racist”. Shortly afterward, she was murdered by a criminal who had already served time in his native Latvia for murdering his wife: “Revealed: Alice Gross argued against banning foreign criminals before her murder”, Jamie Grierson, The Guardian, 11 July 2016.

Even after her murder, her parents urged anti-immigration groups not to “exploit” her death; not to use some of the evidence of the dangers of the policy of importing criminals to argue in favour of not doing it. There could be no more dramatic illustration of the pathological nature of “anti-racism” – except perhaps in Germany, where women assaulted by immigrants have claimed it was white German men, in order to avoid stirring up anti-immigrant feeling.

The German government’s response to the Europe-wide epidemic of Islamic terrorism is to clamp down on online reactions to it: “Germany Raids Homes of 36 People Accused of Hateful Postings Over Social Media”, David Shimer, New York Times, 20 June 2017.

Another variant of pathological altruism is the tendency of the denizens of universities to abase themselves before the dominant grievance culture. I mentioned above the University of Virginia fake rape case. Rolling Stone magazine has settled the case, offering the libelled students millions of dollars. But they are giving most of it to 

organizations that provide sexual assault awareness education, prevention training and victim counseling services on college campuses

in other words, to feminist hate groups.

As K.C. Johnson puts it, in more measured language,

This struck me as a very odd decision, given the specifics of this case (the students were wrongly accused, and these “organizations” joined the crusade against them).

“The Curious Provisions of the Rolling Stone Settlement”, Johnson, K.C., 16 June 2017.

 

 

 

The West is the least racist culture

“Show Racism the Red Card” is more than an organisation of social justice warriors trying to police offensive humour at British football matches. It is trying to extend its influence into schools – according to Ged Grebby in The Guardian, 20 May 2015, “England’s young people aren’t racist – but they need better education”.

A specific example of what Grebby calls “racism” is

we have found that there is a large amount of negativity when young people are asked questions about “immigration” or “Muslims”.

Show Racism the Red Card aims to weaken children’s fear of Muslims. Unfortunately, this fear is justified. It’s true that the majority of Muslim men in the UK are not child-traffickers, but it’s also true that a Muslim man is over 170 times more likely than a non-Muslim man of having been convicted of child-trafficking offences.

Being wary of Muslims is analogous to being wary of strange men. Most strange men aren’t child-molesters, but we teach children to use statistics to err on the side of caution, and avoid strange men. It should be exactly the same with Muslim men. If we can use statistics to stigmatise the group “strange men” in the eyes of children, why not the group “Muslim men”? The second follows logically from the first. But our pathological altruism short-circuits logic and endangers children.

There are children who form no racial stereotypes. But they are also too friendly to strangers, according to this report in Nature: “Children who form no racial stereotypes found”, Janelle Weaver, Nature, 12 April 2010.

Here is a map of “racial tolerance” published by the Washington Post in May 2013, classifying areas of the world according to percentage of inhabitants who would not want to live next to people of a different race. The people of the Western countries, particularly the Anglo-Saxon ones, are among the least prone to objecting to neighbours of a more distant ethnic origin.

The implicit claim of Social Justice that white Europeans are uniquely, and ubiquitously, ethnocentric, couldn’t be further from the truth. White guilt is endemic. The reason the hate groups of the left, the multi-million dollar hate industry, the university departments of African-American studies, etc., are allowed to exist, is because so many white Europeans tolerate and support them.

As Douglas Murray argues,

More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past.

– “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam”.

 

 

The Jewish question

Douglas Murray also writes

it genuinely shocks me to discover… many Jewish groups and Jewish leaders have been taking a conspicuous lead in welcoming refugees.

He seems unaware of the argument that, because it defends their interests, Jews are overrepresented in the leadership of the Social Justice assault on Western values, with Jewish organisations’ support for mass immigration being the icing on the cake. Professor Kevin MacDonald’s “The Culture of Critique” contains the most well-known and well-developed version of this claim.

Gilad Atzmon, a refugee from Israel, is the primary critic of “Jewish power” in Western societies – for example “The Wandering Who?”, Atzmon, G., 2011. He has bravely stood up against the power of his former nation in negatively influencing Western societies.

I agree with him, but think he’s looking at only one part of the problem.

On his website, he criticises Jewish attacks on freedom of speech. Here is an example, from London University: “London School Of Economics – everything but the truth”.

But he failed to criticise an attempt by Muslims to prevent an ex-Muslim atheist speaking at the same university. These Muslims are supported by feminists: “Goldsmiths Feminist Society stands in solidarity with Goldsmiths Islamic Society”, and LGBT activists: “Following recent events on- and offline, we would like to state and show our solidarity with the sisters and brothers of our Goldsmiths ISOC”.

Here are two recent examples of attempted censorship at universities in California, published on the same day on the same website, “Campus Reform”. One is anti-, one pro-Israel. Both use the language of political correctness to attack freedom of speech: “CA university adopts strict definition of anti-Semitism”, and “SJP shuts down another pro-Israel event at UC-Irvine”.

Atzmon and I both support a Palestinian rights activist in Portland, Oregon, who was fired after a campaign by self-described “anti-fascists”. In this case, the leftists were, paradoxically, consciously or otherwise, working for the Israel Lobby. But this is part of a much larger problem, in which the “Antifa” oppose many other examples of freedom of speech, some of them supportive of Israel – for example, they have used violence to stop speeches by pro-Israel speakers Milo Yiannopoulos and Anne Coulter in Berkeley.

Atzmon’s method is to find examples which back up his critique of Jewish power. Where he can’t find them, he makes them up. For example, he gives credibility to attempts to exculpate Muslims from Islamic terrorist crimes. In March 2012, in Toulouse, an assailant murdered seven people, including two French-African soldiers and three Jewish children.

Guardian writer Fiachra Gibbons jumped to the conclusion that white far right extremists were responsible. The newspaper ended up with egg on its face when the killer turned out to be French-Algerian: “Toulouse shootings: race, religion and murder”, The Guardian, 19 March 2012.

There was some slight basis to the Guardian’s assumption. Only one party, in French history, has murdered black soldiers and Jewish children: the Nazis, during the 1940-1945 occupation.

In contrast, Gilad Atzmon speculated that it may have been an Israeli “false flag operation”. This idea was more tentative; it had no basis in fact whatsoever: “Is it an Israeli False Flag Again?”, 22 March 2012.

And unlike the Guardian, Atzmon made his mistake after the fatal shooting of Mohamed Merah by the police. Why would Israel murder Jewish children? Well, argued Atzmon and his followers, by making it look like a Muslim had done it, it could stir up “Islamophobia”.

I’m not making this up.

And Atzmon has not changed his approach since, continuing his method of finding, or inventing, Jewish crimes, and explaining Muslim ones as “possibly” or “probably” “false flag operations”: “Amidst a Religious War in Europe or is it just another False Flag Operation?”, 8 January 2015, and “‘Australian IS jihadist’ is actually an American Jew Named Goldberg”, 11 September 2015.

Political correctness is used by Jewish activists, but it is also used by other political forces – sometimes against Jewish interests. “Anti-racism”, the assault on science and reason, and the rest of the nonsense I have covered in this essay, are not reducible to Jews acting in Jewish interests, even if self-identified Jews played a disproportionate role in their genesis (for example, Franz Boas, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin).

But a more fundamental problem than Jewish power is what makes it – and the other pathologies covered in this article – possible. White Western European societies (including the ones in North America and Australasia) are particularly receptive to criticism, accurate or otherwise. There is a growing realisation of this weakness, and a backlash.

I repeat my prediction that this year will continue to be a good one for freedom, and a bad one for Social Justice. A side-effect will be to make discussion of the Jewish question less taboo.

---

“Words That Wound”, Matsuda, M., et. al., 1993

“Serena and the Potbangers”, Johnson, K.C., 9 May 2007, http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/05/serena-and-potbangers.html, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Until Proven Innocent: political correctness and the shameful injustices of the Duke lacrosse rape case”, Taylor, S. Jr. & Johnson, K.C., 2007

“The Campus Rape Frenzy: the attack on due process at America’s universities”, Taylor, S. Jr. & Johnson, K.C., 2017

“Antisemitism in the UK – tenth report of session 2016–17”, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, 13 October 2016, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/136/136.pdf, retrieved 8 June 2017

“The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would damage free speech rights on campus”, Liz Jackson, Los Angeles Times, 6 December 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jackson-anti-semitism-awareness-act-20161206-story.html, retrieved 6 December 2016

“A Modern Education”, Mourouzis, J.F., Dartmouth Review, 8 May 2017, http://www.dartreview.com/a-modern-education/, retrieved 29 May 2017

“Left-Wing Language for Your Right-Wing Needs”, Alex Press, https://alexnpress.com/2016/06/05/left-wing-language-for-your-right-wing-needs/, retrieved  June 29 2017

“The Authoritarian Personality”, Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J., & Stanford, R.N., 1950

“The Watchdogs”, Laird Wilcox, 1999, Editorial Research Service, Kansas, http://www.fakehatecrimes.org/The-Watchdogs-by-Laird-Wilcox.pdf, retrieved 9 June 2017

“Hate Crimes”, Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., 1998

“Hate Crimes”, Levin, J., and McDevitt, J., 1993

“Militia Mania, a Growing Danger”, Stern, K., 1996

“Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat”, Dees, M., 1997

“The Better Angels of Our Nature: why violence has declined”, Pinker, S., 2011

“A History of Force”, Payne, J., 2004

“The truth behind the Brexit hate crime ‘spike’”, Brendan O’Neill, The Spectator, 15 February 2017, https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/truth-behind-brexit-hate-crime-spike/, retrieved 15 February 2017

“Britain has not become racist overnight”, Luke Gittos, Spiked Online, 28 June 2016, http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/britain-has-not-become-racist-overnight-brexit-eu/18511, retrieved 4 March 2017

“A supposed outpouring of online hatred against Jo Cox, a murdered MP, was exaggerated”, The Economist, 17 December 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21711931-trolls-twitter-seem-be-less-numerous-feared-supposed-outpouring-online-hatred, retrieved 21 June 2017

“Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics”, Dennis, N., Erdos, G. and Al-Shahi, A., Civitas, September 2000, http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs05.pdf

“Kafkatrapping”, Raymond, E., 18 July 2010, http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122, retrieved 14 June 2017

“Hierarchy and Free Expression in the fight against racism”, Rancourt, D., 2013

“Poor children are seen as worthless, as Rotherham’s abuse scandal shows”, Moore, S., The Guardian, 27 August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/27/poor-children-seen-as-worthless-rotherham-abuse-scandal, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Working-class people’s voices are ignored”, Jeremy Corbyn, House of Commons, 22 June 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxSG_TBg2FA&t=2m12s, retrieved 23 June 2017

“Broken and Betrayed”, Senior, J., May 2016

“Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal”, McLoughlin, P., March 2016

“Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham”, Jay, A., August 2014, http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham

“There is no religious basis for the abuse in Rotherham”, Afzal, N., The Guardian, 3 September 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/03/nazir-afzal-there-is-no-religious-basis-for-the-abuse-in-rotherham, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Mothers of prevention”, Bindel, J., The Times, 30 September 2007, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mothers-of-prevention-v6wn7b8vrjc, retrieved 8 June 2017

“It wasn’t Jackie’s job to get the details of her rape correct”, Valenti, J., The Guardian, 6 April 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/06/jackie-uva-rape-details-rolling-stone-report, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Would you please sign this petition and help the UK overthrow its rape culture!?”, 20 May 2017, https://np.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/69akk1/would_you_please_sign_this_petition_and_help_the/, retrieved 8 June 2017

Tim Hunt: “I’ve been hung out to dry. They haven’t even bothered to ask for my side of affairs”, McKie, R., The Guardian, 13 June 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/13/tim-hunt-hung-out-to-dry-interview-mary-collins, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Watson Loses Cold Spring Harbor Post”, Bhattacharjee, Y., Science, 19 October 2007, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2007/10/watson-loses-cold-spring-harbor-post, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Victim’s brother: stop using Manchester attack to denounce immigration”, Pidd, H.,, The Guardian, 31 May 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/31/manchester-attack-victim-martyn-hett-brother-dan-stop-using-politicise-immigration, retrieved 31 May 2017

“Revealed: Alice Gross argued against banning foreign criminals before her murder”, Grierson, J., The Guardian, 11 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/11/revealed-alice-gross-argued-against-banning-foreign-criminals-before-her, retrieved 11 July 2016

“Germany Raids Homes of 36 People Accused of Hateful Postings Over Social Media”, David Shimer, New York Times, 20 June 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/europe/germany-36-accused-of-hateful-postings-over-social-media.html, retrieved 26 June 2017

“The Curious Provisions of the Rolling Stone Settlement”, Johnson, K.C., Minding the Campus, 16 June 2017, http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/06/the-curious-provisions-of-the-rolling-stone-settlement/, retrieved 25 June 2017

“England’s young people aren’t racist – but they need better education”, Grebby, G., The Guardian, 20 May 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/20/england-young-people-racist-education, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Children who form no racial stereotypes found”, Weaver, J., Nature, 12 April 2010, http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100412/full/news.2010.176.html, retrieved 13 October 2013

“The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam”, Murray, D., 2017

“The Culture of Critique”, MacDonald, K. B., 1998

“The Wandering Who?”, Atzmon, G., 2011

“London School Of Economics – everything but the truth”, Atzmon, G., 5 December 2015, http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2015/12/5/london-school-of-economics-everything-but-the-truth, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Goldsmiths Feminist Society stands in solidarity with Goldsmiths Islamic Society”, 4 December 2015, http://goldfemsoc.tumblr.com/post/134396957048/goldsmiths-feminist-society-stands-in-solidarity, retrieved 8 June 2017

“Following recent events on- and offline, we would like to state and show our solidarity with the sisters and brothers of our Goldsmiths ISOC”, Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ Society, 4 December 2015, https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=635682619906781&id=517587828382928&refid=52, retrieved 9 June 2017

“SJP shuts down another pro-Israel event at UC-Irvine”, Campus Reform, 15 May 2017, http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=9185, retrieved 16 May 2017.

“CA university adopts strict definition of anti-Semitism”, Campus Reform, 15 May 2017, http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=9180, retrieved 16 May 2017.

“Toulouse shootings: race, religion and murder”, Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian, 19 March 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/19/toulouse-shootings-race-religion-murder-france, retrieved 9 January 2017

“Is it an Israeli False Flag Again?”, Atzmon, G., 22 March 2012, http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/is-it-an-israeli-false-flag-again.html, retrieved 14 June 2017

“Amidst A Religious War in Europe or is it just another False Flag Operation?”, Atzmon, G., 8 January 2015, http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2015/1/8/amidst-a-religious-war-in-europe-is-it-possibly-a-false-flag-operation, retrieved 8 June 2017

“‘Australian IS jihadist’ is actually an American Jew Named Goldberg”, Atzmon, G., 11 September 2015, http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2015/9/11/australian-is-jihadist-is-actually-an-american-jew-named-goldberg, retrieved 8 June 2017

 

 

Caution: To paraphrase Orwell, some things are true, even though the Internet says they are true.

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Footnote, October 23rd 2016 – Islamist girls’ school that taught pupils gay people should be killed and men could beat their wives forced to close – the Independent, October 14th.

The British Labour Party has been under a lot of pressure from Jewish racial supremacists recently, to purge all critics of Israel from its ranks. In particular, those who somehow can’t see the “legitimacy” of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, on which the Jewish state’s existence depends. If those driven out of their homeland in 1948, plus their descendants, were allowed back into Israel, they would outnumber the Jews.

This pressure has taken the familiar form of allegations of “anti-semitism”. This includes what I just said above – denying the “legitimacy” of Israel.

It even includes pointing out that the Nazis and the Zionists collaborated before World War II. This is what veteran leftist leader Ken Livingstone has been suspended for. There is overwhelming evidence of this collaboration. Before they decided to try to kill them, the Nazis were in favour of the Jews moving somewhere outside Europe – Palestine, for example. This coincided with the aim of the Zionists, so they worked together.

One example of this co-operation was the Havara Agreement [1], signed in August 1933 by the Nazi government and the Zionist Federation of Germany, to help facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine.

Zionists were still collaborating with the Nazi government in 1944, when the attempted genocide of the Jews was in top gear, arguing against resistance. They allowed the murder of 450,000 Hungarian Jews in return for a few hundred being allowed to escape to Palestine, according to chapter twenty-five of Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (PDF) [2], “Hungary, the Crime Within a Crime”. This is just one example from many of Nazi/Zionist collaboration from Brenner’s detailed historical masterpiece.

Labour has responded exactly as I predicted – by capitulating. It is expelling long-standing comrades for telling the truth, and they are apologising. They don’t seem to realise that throwing scraps of food to the wolves at the door only encourages them. The Labour Party is Israeli-occupied territory.

1. The Havara Agreement, Wikipedia, retrieved April 29, 2016: https://archive.is/PvFJa.
2. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Lenni Brenner, Lawrence Hill publishing, 1983. Retrieved as a PDF file April 29: http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres/LBzad.pdf.

Gad Saad is one of the “vloggers” (Youtube bloggers) who defends good stuff like freedom of speech and evolutionary psychology, and opposes bad stuff like radical feminism. He’s in roughly the same league as Lauren Southern and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Among the illusions these “cultural libertarians” are trying to dispel is the usefulness of the term “Islamophobia”. In a recent interview with Irish atheist Michael Nugent, Saad agrees with Nugent’s statement that rational people should give up “the silencing word ‘Islamophobia'”. Nugent goes on to argue that the word

conflates bigotry against Muslims as people, which is a bad thing, with criticism of Islam, which is a good thing

But Saad, who is Jewish, takes a completely different view of the phrase “anti-semitism”. In another recent video, instead of denouncing it as a political tool, as he does with the term “Islamophobia”, he uncritically accepts a report by the Anti-Defamation League, on “Global Indices of Anti-Semitism“.

He gives examples of the questions the Anti-Defamation League asks to establish if someone is “anti-semitic”. One of them is

Do you think it’s probably true that Jews have too much control over the US government?

Without irony, Saad lists the West Bank and the Gaza strip, which are either occupied by the Israeli army, or regularly bombed by planes bearing the star of David, as having the highest rate of “anti-semitism” in the world. He then goes on to list all the other countries with a high rate of “anti-semitism”, and they’re all Muslim.

It’s unfortunate that someone so clear on the political use of words like “Islamophobia” and other nonsense-terms invented by social justice warriors, should be so blind to the obvious analogy with the use of the phrase “anti-semitism”. It’s a clear example of Jewish double-standards. But we know what the Anti-Defamation League would call that observation.

In reaction to the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists by Islamists in January 2015, I wrote “The difference between my culture and Islam is not relative. It is absolute.” Reading the new book “Islam and the Future of Tolerance” ⁱ, a discussion between leading American atheist campaigner Sam Harris, and British ex-Islamic extremist Maajid Nawaz, has made me rethink a bit.

But, like Harris and Nawaz, I still reject the term “Islamophobia”, and the regressive leftists who use it to provide cover for Islamic prejudice and violence. (See my articles).

The book starts with Harris recollecting his first discussion with Nawaz, in which he said that Islam isn’t a religion of peace, and the so-called ‘extremists’ are seeking to implement what is arguably the most honest reading of the faith’s actual doctrine.

It’s difficult to argue with Sam Harris, but Nawaz rises to the challenge.

He starts with how he became an extremist. He claims there was a lot of “racism” against people like him when he was young. This caused an “identity crisis”, which led Nawaz to join a group which tried to persuade army officers in Muslim countries to stage coups. As luck would have it, he landed in Egypt to campaign for this group on September 10th, 2001. He ended up being tortured, and serving five years in jail, after which Amnesty International rescued him, and he founded Quilliam, which tries to persuade young British Muslims not to blow themselves up on trains.

At this point, it’s time to define some terms. Nawaz lists four rough categories of Muslims:

1. Jihadists, who want to impose strict Islamic law by force

2. Islamists, who want Islamic law, but won’t use force to achieve it

3. Conservative Muslims, who believe in Islamic law, but don’t want to make everyone else obey it

4. People who just happen to have been born into Muslim families, and have a “Muslim” identity

Nawaz and Harris agree that the majority of the world’s Muslims belong to group three. Though they don’t plant bombs, they do consider it may be right to cut off the hands of thieves.

Harris adds the statistic that, in the wake of the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, a poll found 68% of British Muslims believed that citizens who “insult Islam” should be arrested and prosecuted. Harris seems unaware that that is not far from existing British law against “incitement”. At least as shocking is a poll in 2009 which could not find a single British Muslim who thought it was OK to be homosexual ⁱⁱ.

Nawaz believes “Islamism must be defeated”. He says he’s trying to persuade all people, Muslim and infidel, to adopt secular values. He makes it clear that “secular” doesn’t mean “atheist”, it means “the strict separation of state and religion”. He wants to end the mutually-reinforcing trap whereby Western people think that Islam is a religion of war, and make war against it, and Muslim extremists use this to promote their view that the West is against Islam.

Despite Harris having once insulted Nawaz by saying he was being dishonest about the nature of Islam, Nawaz was big enough to answer politely that Islam is a religion neither of peace nor of war. He says

Religion doesn’t inherently speak for itself; no scripture, no book, no piece of writing has its own voice. I subscribe to this view whether I’m interpreting Shakespeare of interpreting religious scripture.

But Harris has no difficulty demolishing this argument. Islam can’t be interpreted to mean it’s OK to serve bacon sandwiches at a gay wedding reception. Personally, I have found Muslims have more difficulty in understanding secularism than any other religious people I’ve come across.

Before that, Harris takes another detour into exposing Islamic chutzpah. He points out that Muslim extremists complained when the West didn’t intervene to save Bosnian Muslims from Serbian militia, but when they attacked secular dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, they said this was an attack on Muslims. I’d add that the perpetrators of September 11th forgot the aid they’d received from America in “liberating” Afghanistan from the Russians in the eighties. Harris says there were many good reasons to oppose the Iraq War – but “the West is attacking Muslims” was not one of them.

Harris and Nawaz both reject with contempt the “social justice warrior” apologists for Islamic extremism. They say the p.c. left is exercising a form of racism – it says that non-white people can’t help reacting to oppression irrationally. Unlike the left-wing apologists, Harris argues for taking the extremists at face value – when Muslims say they are murdering cartoonists for insulting the prophet Mohammed, they are not really protesting against drones or “white privilege” ⁱⁱⁱ.

Western apologists for Islamism aren’t limited to the p.c. left. The problem goes right to the top. President George W Bush said “Islam is peace” six days after 9/11 ^iv, and more recently, Barack Obama said “ISIL is not ‘Islamic.’ No religion condones the killing of innocents.” ^v.

Nawaz admits that, though most Muslims oppose the Islamic State, many of them believe in “honour killings”, where a girl can be murdered for flirting with someone not chosen by her parents. There are thousands of examples of “honour violence” each year in the UK alone, several of which result in death.

But Nawaz points out that, in fact, religious people draw any number of conclusions from the scriptures. Which would mean that some Muslims interpret the scriptures as saying “rape under-age kufr girls”, and some think they say “don’t rape under-age kufr girls”. Islam is a broad church.

There are Islamic theologians undermining the worst aspects of Islamism by re-reading scripture. For example, Nawaz’s ally in Quilliam, Dr Usama Husan, has managed to argue plausibly that apostasy from Islam is not a crime. If a large number of Muslims can be persuaded that that’s what the scriptures mean, then that is what they mean.

I’ll admit that until reading this book, when I heard Islamic “moderates” downplaying the least palatable aspects of their faith, I just thought it was “taqiyah”, or lying. Having skimmed various Muslim religious books, I thought I’d detected that Islam leads to

– violence toward non-believers

– the oppression of women

– hatred of homosexuals

“Islam and the Future of Tolerance” made me slightly moderate my opinion.

There are four reasons for this.

1. If it’s good enough for Sam Harris, it’s good enough for me

2. Nawaz is such a good arguer, if you kept calling his arguments “taqiyah”, you’d have to be impervious to reason

3. Like most religions, Islam is so vague and contradictory, it’s possible to draw a wide range of conclusions from it

4. Other religions also advocated crimes against humanity, but their modern followers have given up most of them.

Even if Islam did “logically” lead to throwing gays off buildings and crashing aeroplanes into them, since religious people are, by definition, illogical, why should they follow the logical consequences of their religion? The Church of England hasn’t done that for decades, and even the Pope of Rome has been forced to make concessions to the achievements of the more advanced societies of the global north.

In short, maybe Islam can be reformed. This will not be achieved by bombing Middle-Eastern countries. Nor by statements like my “The difference between my culture and Islam is not relative. It is absolute.” Neither will it be achieved by apologists such as 9/11 truthers and left-wing fellow-travelers.

This reform, if it can be achieved at all, will be achieved by rational unbelievers listening to the fearless criticism of people who know what they’re talking about, such as Maajid Nawaz.

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Gilad Atzmon and Alison Weir are major critics of the elephant in the room – the Jewish Lobby. Both have helped us break from the approach, led by left-wing gatekeepers such as Noam Chomsky, which assumes that unconditional support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is in the interests of Western capitalists. In fact, as I showed in my article “Faithful Circle”, support for Israel is against the interests of the vast majority of the West’s inhabitants, rich and poor ⁱ.

Atzmon and Weir have both been subject to attempted censorship by groups within the Palestine solidarity movement on both sides of the Atlantic (but not in the Gaza Strip nor the West Bank). These groups try to persuade people not to book Atzmon and Weir to speak on the Palestine question. Atzmon is deliberately provocative, and the humorless left takes everything he says literally. Weir is more careful. Everything she says and writes is well-researched and referenced. It was more difficult to invent a case against her, but eventually Jewish Voice for Peace discovered that she once gave an interview to an obscure radio show run by a guy called Clayton Douglas, whom they claim is a “white supremacist” ⁱⁱ, and started trying to persuade peace groups and Palestine solidarity organizations not to work with her.

That’s not the real reason they don’t want you to listen to Weir. No-one would have heard of Douglas unless JVP had publicized him. A more plausible reason is the success of Weir’s recent “Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the United States Was Used to Create Israel”, ⁱⁱⁱ whose title speaks for itself. Weir’s opponents don’t want us to find out that the main reason for American support for Israel is the Lobby, because this realization might lead to weakening that support. It would also make Jews in the USA feel less comfortable, and Jewish Voice for Peace is more concerned about that than it is about dead Palestinian children.

Despite my respect for Atzmon and Weir, I think it’s illogical when they help spread the latest left-wing debate-stifling accusation – “Islamophobia”. Atzmon thinks Jewish organizations are responsible for stirring up “Islamophobia” ^iv, whereas I find that these groups often use the word to try to manipulate white guilt to undermine discussion of the negative aspects of Islam. For examples, go to the Anti-Defamation League’s website and search for the word “Islamophobia”. I regard this as homologous with the effort to suppress Weir’s and Atzmon’s arguments on the grounds that they are “anti-semitic”. These allegations are part of the assault on our freedom known as “political correctness”.

Max Blumenthal is an influential gatekeeper, working tirelessly to maintain Jewish control of the Palestine solidarity movement. Despite his vitriolic attacks on her ^v, Weir generously says his “Great Islamophobic Crusade” ^vi which claims “Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country” is “an excellent article” ^vii. In effect, Weir says to Blumenthal “I support your use of hyperbole to exaggerate anti-Muslim sentiment, but I object when you use the same p.c. leftist techniques to smear me as anti-semitic”.

I don’t deny there is some irrational prejudice against Muslims in the West. A 14-year-old Sudanese American boy was arrested in Texas in September 2015 because his teachers thought the clock he brought to school might be a bomb. But look at the reaction. The story rapidly spread on Facebook and Twitter, became front-page news around the world, professional victims were able to make plenty of political capital out of it ^viii, and the boy was invited to the White House ^ix. The country is not “saturated with anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia”, as Linda Sarsour claims.

Consider that president George W Bush said, shortly after September 11th 2001, that “Islam is peace” ^x.

Consider how often the media and politicians condemn “Islamophobia” as if it is a thing, but call ISIS the “so-called” Islamic state, as if they want to protect the religion from association with its unpalatable expressions.

Consider the reaction of Australians to the terrorist attack of December 2014. Thousands signed up to #IllRideWithYou, offering Muslims protection against a backlash ^xi.

Finally, consider that the fear of being accused of “Islamophobia” was one of the reasons the authorities in Britain ignored Muslim gangs raping and trafficking hundreds of under-age girls for decades ^xii.

We should be free to think critically about Islam and its consequences, without worrying if we are being “Islamophobic”. I am not convinced, as Atzmon is, that Muslim atrocities are likely to be “false flag operations” ^xiii, nor that Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League stir up irrational dislike of Muslims, as Weir believes.

In conclusion, if we want to appeal to the mass of people, most of whom have every interest in ending Western support for the Jewish state, we need to abandon the accusatory, debate-stifling language of the leftist thought police.

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This is a response to Spencer Sunshine’s article for Political Research Associates, Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism, ¹. I argue that it doesn’t oppose racial discrimination, rather, it defends one form of it by greatly exaggerating another.

There are a few factual errors in the article. As an example of a passage which I could pick apart, because I directly experienced the events in question, but don’t think it’s worth the effort, here’s Sunshine’s account of the reasoning behind the successful efforts of Jewish leftists to oust a Palestine activist from the co-operative movement:

Pacifica Forum members attended Occupy events in Eugene and Portland, Oregon, attempted to use a left-wing bookstore in Portland to host an antisemitic speaker, and one was a board member at an annual co-operative conference.

But that’s not the main problem. More important is to explain the hidden cause of Mr Sunshine’s logical errors.

The above sentence follows from a passage in which Sunshine asserts, without explanation, that anyone who tolerates the airing of what he labels “far right” ideas, should be treated the same as someone who actually believes these ideas. This is subject to a logical contradiction. Suppose you adopt Sunshine’s prescription, and treat anyone who tolerates any “far right” ideas in the same way as people who actually hold those ideas. What about someone who tolerates people who tolerate “far right” ideas, but doesn’t herself tolerate those ideas? Do you treat her in the same way as those whom she tolerates, who tolerate “far right” ideas? Where do you draw the line?

Whereas most of us might be concerned about how how true or false a given proposition about the world is, Sunshine’s position involves adopting a complex classification system, in which some ideas are classified as “far right”, and some as “progressive”. His elaboration of this classification makes it clear he cares primarily about “anti-semitism”. He uses this term very broadly, to include anyone who challenges Jewish interests.

Apart from the logical absurdity of Sunshine’s position, it could lead to violence.

I’ve written some articles which, while generally what Sunshine would call “progressive”, utilize some “far right” ideas. This is one of them: Invention, Imagination, Race and Nation ².

Part of Spencer’s anti-fascist front uses violence against peaceful “far right” meetings (see my 2012 article on the incident at Tinley Park ³). So, if generally “progressive” people who make use of some “far right” ideas are regarded as being as bad as these “far right” activists, some of Sunshine’s friends might try to disrupt our meetings. This could lead to a tragedy.

So far, in my experience, anti-fascist harassment has only led to one Palestine solidarity activist getting fired, because he worked at a co-op which was easily persuaded by Jewish activists that he believes “far right” ideas. The real reason was that he was trying to persuade the co-op movement to boycott Israeli goods.

Why take anti-fascism seriously? Sunshine’s article includes warning of “a revival of fascist influence within countercultural music scenes”, and the influence of the “far right” among environmental activists.

The article becomes more serious when Sunshine says the president of the Palestinian rights advocacy group, If Americans Knew, Alison Weir, is “crypto-antisemitic”, because she talks and writes about the power of the Israel Lobby. Since it can be shown that the Lobby is the main reason for American support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, suppressing discussion of this issue helps it continue (see my article, Faithful Circle ⁴).

His attempt to discredit Weir is the most obvious giveaway of Sunshine’s real aim – thought-policing the left in the interests of Jewish privilege. Alison Weir is liberal to a fault. Her message of support for the victims of Jewish supremacy is becoming increasingly heard. That’s why Jewish racialists within and without the left are slandering her more than ever.

Another clue as to Sunshine’s covert racialist aims is his attempt to amalgamate any critique of any aspect of Jewish over-representation, in positions of power and influence, with Nazism:

The same goes for those who repeat traditional Nazi-era antisemitic conspiracies, such as that Jews control the government, banking system, or the mass media… while repeating classical antisemitic narratives, deploy code words such as “Zionists,” “Jewish neocons,” or the “Frankfurt School” — instead of “the Jews.”

He wants us to believe that if you attribute the notorious pro-Israel bias in the US media to Jewish over-representation in its ownership, or criticize a large section of the Jewish community for its support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, or mention the role of the neo-conservatives in persuading the US government to massacre the inhabitants of Arab and Muslim countries in various wars since September 11th 2001, while noting that the majority of the neo-cons are self-identified Jews, you are in the same league as the murderers of Anne Frank.

The degree of Jewish control of the media, and whether or not it matters, are empirical questions. We shouldn’t care at all whether or not a theory conforms to a “classical antisemitic narrative”. Objecting to a position because it sounds like Nazi propaganda is illogical; just because the Nazis claimed the Soviet government murdered the Polish officer corps ⁵, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning “breathtaking hypocrisy”. Sunshine alleges

Allowing Far Right participation can also pose a security risk. Far Right actors may use such opportunities to collect personal information on progressive activists and information about their organizations. This has been an ongoing problem, in particular for antifascist and other groups that monitor the Far Right.

But this is at least as true of allowing anti-fascist participation in progressive movements. The Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance has had its members’ details publicized, because, of the wide range of conspiracy nuts hosted by the group, one or two of them mentioned the idea of Israeli involvement in September 11th. Overt Zionists are copying what anti-fascists do – “doxxing” (publishing the names etc.) of Palestine activists, hoping employers will take notice, while remaining anonymous themselves.

For example, The Canary Mission “is publicizing the identities of pro-Palestinian student activists to prevent them from getting jobs after they graduate from college. But the website is keeping its own backers’ identity a secret” ⁶.

As a result of its chutzpah, the anti-fascist left is immune to irony. Sunshine’s piece treats the Southern Poverty Law Center as if it is an authority. The SPLC describes a group as a hate group if it spreads ideas about some other group of people which inspire a person, or persons, to commit violence against that second group. But the SPLC’s labeling of the Family Research Council as a hate group led a man to shoot a security guard at the group’s headquarters with a 9mm Sig Sauer semi-automatic pistol – which means, using its own criteria, the SPLC is a hate group. The attacker can be heard on this Youtube video admitting to the police that he found the FRC via the SPLC ⁷.

“Anti-semitism” is one form of racial discrimination which has never been very important in the US. You can tell this by looking at statistics for lynchings – if a particular minority has been seriously discriminated against in US history, you can be sure some of its members will have been murdered by mobs. What the SPLC and its allies mean by “anti-semitism” is opposition to a minority using its privileged position to oppress others. Logically, genuine opponents of racial privilege would surely prioritize undermining Jewish supremacy, rather than exaggerating the danger of white nationalism. The role of anti-fascists like Spencer Sunshine is to try to prevent us from drawing that logical conclusion.

The Iran deal is a victory for Israel, leaving her the only nuclear armed power in the Middle East. The fight between Democrats and Republicans is a game. When the Democrats succeed, it makes it look like a setback for Israel. The idea of a two-state solution, which would leave the Palestinians as ethnically-cleansed as they are now, is fiercely opposed, so if it is ever implemented, it will look like a massive concession by Israel. Both US parties are completely subservient to the Lobby. Their only dispute is which policy best serves Jewish interests.