Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald profiles supreme eurodhimmi Chris Patten, who in an interview several days ago reiterated his determination to bring Turkey into the EU:
Chris Patten is an awful man. His pronouncements on the world, and especially on Islam and the Middle East, need to be displayed, laid out for all to see, and ridiculed for what they reveal about his understanding of men and events.Despite his self-evident clownishness, he has been made Chancellor of Oxford. This is intolerable. What's next -- giving Cornel West a professorship at Princeton? Giving Jeffery Sachs his own "World Institute"? Letting Clinton parade around with his "Clinton Global Initiative"? Giving the Lannan Prize to a "Palestinian" propagandist in verse named Mahmoud Darwish?
The London Library has been opened to non-readers to lounge, chew gum, play music. Oxford itself permitted a business school, the Said School of Business, to sully the atmosphere. There goes the neighborhood, from the meadows of Magdalen to Holywell Manor.
And now Chris Patten is attempting in his criminally negligent way to force Turkey, and 80 million Muslims, down the throat of Europe.
In Europe, as in America, more and more people believe that their ruling classes do not represent them. The distrust of the EU and its bureaucrats, of which Patten was a prime example (and his views were fixed in that role), has become a dislike of the very idea of the European Community -- and rightly. The infiltration of various institutions has proceeded apace – notably, the U.N., where Edward Mortimer is Director of Communications in the office of the Secretary-General. Mortimer is an admirer of Khomeini ("quite the most glorious morning in the history of mankind" was how he began his report on Khomeini's arrival to take power), and antisemite (for only an antisemite can enthusiastically endorse the sinister charge that "Zionists and Nazis" collaborated, a charge made by one Lonnie Brenner in a book to which Mortimer's enthusiastic review is now appended). The BBC has also been infiltrated: John Simpson is world affairs editor. He is also a friend of Peter Hounam (now under arrest in Israel), author of an antisemitic calumny, Operation Cyanide, which purports to show how Israel plotted carefully its "premeditated" attack on the USS Liberty, that staple of antisemitic conspiracy theorists -- a book with an introduction by John Simpson. Then there is the ACLU: google "Nancy Murray" and her daughter "Rebecca Murray" to see who is in charge, in Massachusetts, of the "disinterested" campaign by the ACLU to eviscerate the Patriot Act.The EU, however, is a different and much larger affair. Its decline into Eurabia began just after the Yom Kippur War and the quadrupling of oil prices. The Europeans were under the impression -- a completely false impression, caused by smoke, mirrors, and an inability to think clearly -- that they had to succumb to Arab demands in order to make sure oil would keep flowing. They did not realize that OPEC countries were simply one large gas station. I am not in the habit of doing special favors to my local Texaco or Shell beyond paying the price posted -- are you? But the EU signed a series of agreements, many of them not publicly known (but Bat Ye'or's Eurabia lays it all out, in all its horrible idiocy), by which it effectively accepted the demands for the spread of Arab "culture" and Arab political views and Arab propaganda throughout Europe. It is no accident that the BBC and Canal Cinq and the rest have engaged in several decades of vilification of Israel, of misstatement after misstatement, omission after sly omission -- all in that querulous and nasty tone that, if you have heard Judy Swallow, or Robin Lustig, or Lyse Doucet, you know all too well. The BBC World Service, under Simpson, is directed not by the regular BBC overlords, but by the Arabists of the Foreign Office. And we all know how successful they have been in keeping prices down and winning hearts and minds in the Middle East.
Patten is, like Romano Prodi and Javier Solana and the rest, part of the EU phenomenon. A monstrous conspiracy of stupidity and hypocrisy, the EU's foreign policy has adopted the cause of the recently-invented "Palestinian people" as its own. It ignores the nature of Jihad and the tenets of Islam that fatally vitiate any possible treaty signed between an Infidel state such as Israel and the forces of Islam. The Pattens, Solanas, and Prodis long ago gave up even a semblance of any fairness toward Israel.
But what is even worse, perhaps, is how, in their deliberately avoiding the real nature of Islam, how they are permitting the destruction of European self-confidence, of Europe as an idea, of Europe as a demographic reality, from within. If Patten is right, and there is nothing to worry about except American policies -- ah yes, America the imperialist power that has behaved so wickedly toward Europe in the last 100 years and continues to threaten it with its mad policies. Patten should leave one speechless. He is essentially stupid – he has also stated that Arabs consistently show a greater desire for democracy than any other people. What? What does he think the word "democracy" means when Arabs are asked "Do you favor democracy?" Does it mean "democracy" with full human rights for women, non-Muslims, and apostates from Islam? Of course not. It means something to them quite different -- shorthand for: “I want the corrupt and cruel government that runs this country (fill in any damn Middle Eastern name of a Muslim regime you care to here) gone, I want democracy.” How stupid can Patten be?
While in Hong Kong, did Patten ever learn the Chinese phrase ta-suan (you know: "swan pan" or abaucs), which means, Pinyin or Wade-Giles, the entirely admirable ability to plan, to calculate ahead, as one should? Has Patten that gift? Can he see beyond next week? What will Europe look like in five years? Ten years? Twenty years? What exactly does he think is going to happen to the ever-increasing Muslim population in Europe? It will be so grateful that the state of "Palestine" exists that everything will be hunky-dory? Is he paying attention to northern Nigeria or to the southern Sudan? Does he think the Buddhists being massacred in Thailand are paying for the putative sins of Wolfowitz, or Abu Ghraib? What about the 2,300 churches that the Barnabus Fund records as the low estimate for the number of churches destroyed in 2003 alone, in Indonesia? Did that reflect dismay with G. W. Bush and American foreign policy? How about those Hindus being raped and killed in Bangladesh, or the Hindus and Christians in Pakistan, or those Hindus and Sikhs in Kashmir, all by Muslim murderers? Again, disenchantment with John Ashcroft? Unhappiness with the Patriot Act?
What makes someone able to continue in office when he is so clearly idiotic, as Patten is, so willfully ignorant of what is happening all around him, so absurdly blind in his comments on the belief-system of Islam? How can he not be laughed at everywhere he goes? The only explanation is that the stupidity and hypocrisy are even worse than they were in the 1930s. For at the end of it all, the English and the French were prepared to fight. But Islam is now winning from within, slowly corrupting through the organs of the press and television, such as the BBC, and of the political class, such as the EU bureaucracy -- which contains only little Chamberlains and petits Daladiers, with nary a Churchill in sight.
I'm thinking of going into the real estate business, taking as my niche market those Europeans who wish to buy land in America as a hedge against that future when they will have to flee. We were lucky once, with all those physicists and art historians and nuclear scientists fleeing the Nazis. And lucky twice, with all those computer engineers and biochemists and mathematicians and artists fleeing the Communists. It looks as if we are going to get lucky (and Europe unlucky) again. Meanwhile, let's get that real estate company going. Anyone care to back me?
Don't sugar-coat it Hugh.
Hugh - possibly the best assessment of Patten and Euro-idiocy I've read.
Another point screaming to be made, it seems to me, is to compare and contrast Britain's ex-colony, Hong Kong, with 99 years of British Common Law behind it, at least has some sort of fighting chance against the totalitarian Communists. The people have a legal structure in place to protect them from arbitrary rule at least somewhat.
Iraq's instant democracy (just add voters and stir) can never stand up to totalitarian Islam. There's simply no there there. It is infuriating that "the Bush team" so utterly fails to comprehend the situation. Either to comprehend the true depths of the traditions that allow self-governing nations to succeed, nor the tenets, traditions or "atmospherics," as Hugh would say, of Islam that most expressly militate against that success.
When Patton set sail leaving Hong Kong behind him, (a real jewel in the crown), he also left behind a great deal of all that is best in the British tradition. Colonialism is a dirty word today, but it shouldn't be. The great colonial dismantling that occured after WWI and again after WWII is proving to have been much too premature. Premature for Africa and premature for the Middle East, where much could have been done in the Kemalist mold to chain down the Islamic beast years ago if any one had bothered to understand how necessary it was.
Real estate schemes? Evacuating Europe? What fresh hell will our children be forced to discover due to the idiocy of our present leadership?
Great points Robert and Rebecca --
As a supporter of the war in Iraq, and the goals of establishing a democratic beach head in the heart of fascist Arab/Islam I don't know if it is as hopeless as you say... But the more I observe, the more I wonder --
After reading your site for several years, I now understand that the same Muslims who are attempting to orchestrate the failure of the Iraq project are simultaneously generating a new pretext with which to crucify the US and the UK -- If Iraq fails, then we will never hear the end of post facto justifications by Muslims for every transgression and attack against us "Remember the imperialist crusade in Iraq... and Bush the new Roman..."
Their self loathing leftist brethren will chime in and agree that we deserve to be attacked for ever having the affrontery to intrude into Muslim internal affairs -- never mind that a major aspect of "Muslim internal affairs" seems to entail attacking "infidels" then demanding concessions from them for the sake of Islam. This is what EVERY Islamic terror attack is really about after all is said and done--
I am coming to understand that the various petty pretexts that Muslims put forward (treatment of Palestinians, "insults" to Islam like porcelain pigs or the Patriot Act... American armed forces hunkered down on "sacred" land in Saudi Arabia) are just ISLAMIC SMOKESCREENS. Part of the confusion in the West arises from the fact that Islam's thralls (along with their dhimmi counterparts in the Dar al Harb) sometimes fervently believe in the truth of these apparitions...
It is also far more difficult, threatening, and ominous to contemplate the realities of the Great Islamic Jihad when these phantom pretexts provide easier to swallow and more logical seeming explanations for the heinous acts of perpetually pissed off Muslims...
Many are comforted by the notion that if we just stopped pissing them off for whatever supposed insult to Islam, then they would stop attacking us -- nevermind that Muslims will always have ready made pretexts for their Islamic victimology to justify ANYTHING they do in "retaliation" against non-Muslims... Note the ubiquitous requirements for apologies and accommodations, the non-stop assertions that insults have occurred -- the never ending demands placed on our side to change our policies, re-think our strategies, change our society to accommodate THEM... How ironic that the Islamic side is the one with all the most obvious warts -- the most ugly visage -- the most deplorable track record -- yet WE are the ones who have transgressed, WE are the ones who must change -- WE are the ones who owe Muslims apology after apology after apology --
Muslims are extracting concessions from non-Muslims through the most massive extortion scheme ever invented, the religion of extortion: ISLAM...
In addition, perhaps the stresses and strains on Europe after 100 years of vile fascism incubated in their heartlands have finally proved too much. Communism. Nazism. Socialism. Post-modern deconstructionism. For all their laudable accomplishments in the last 200 years, it appears to me that the horrors the Europeans unleashed in the 19th and 20th centuries have robbed them of all spirit -- and perhaps rain can no longer stir their dull roots --
************************
The Second Coming -- WB Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Patten/patten1.html
This awful man came from the Conservative Party. Above interview is from 1989
Patten is capable of real gems at times. A few years ago when a few members of the European parliament at Strasbourg were circulating a petition to have the EU parliament investigate how the "Palestinian Authority" was spending the money received from the EU and whether Judeophobic incitement was part of its school curriculum, Patten was not very happy. He was then the EU foreign affairs commissioner --on the EU Commission. "I need an investigation like a hole in the head," he is reported to have said. Now there's a man who believes in transparency.
jsla - love you for posting the Yeats poem.
With the oft quoted lines, "The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity," I disagree. Rather, the best are full of passionate intensity, and the worst lack all convictions.
Does it have to be passionate intensity? Could just passion do?
OT
Does anyone know if the book
Jihad and Fighting According to the Shari Policy
by Muhammad Haykal is published in English?
Thanks
Hugh,
Passion without intensity is like the sky without blue.
What is your work or Robert's, if not passionately intense?
Well I'll say this for the colonial era in the Middle East and North Africa...the dhimmis were allowed to repair their old churches and build new ones. You could even say this period was the apex of religious freedom for that part of the world.
"the colonial era in the Middle East and North Africa.."
-- from a posting above
European colonialism -- as opposed to, say, Arab colonialism -- was very short-lived in North Africa and the Middle East. The only real exception was Algeria, where in order to finally put paid to the Muslim pirates (officially sanctioned by the Dey of Algiers, for these "pirates" had to register their intended target or targets in advance), the French seized control in 1830, and for 132 years ruled, and brought vineyards, printing presses, universities, and other elements of civilization that, in the years since the horns in Paris and Marseille ceased to honk "Al-ge-rie fran-cais-e," had gone back, despite the French civilizating connection, back to its Islamic condition, half-Hobbesian lack of order, half-despotic and corrupt generals requiring too much order. It is the same all over the Muslim world. The ruling family or junta, the corrupt well-connected, and then the masses, with their consolation of Friday Prayer, and the escape of visas to the Lands of the Infidels where, alas, those people who are in fact refugees from the world of Islam fail to recognize that they have fled Islam, and instead bring the cause of their own land's disorder -- Islam and its teachings, its attitudes, its atmospherics -- with them when they go to Europe or to North America. And this is the problem.
As for Morocco and Tunisia and Libya, the French in the case of the first two, the Italians in the case of the second, took control -- via local leaders -- in the period 1912-1914. Egypt's civil service was made efficient, and less corrupt, under Lord Cromer's administraiton, from 1882-1922; British influence remained under the ancien regime and British troops returned during World War II. But it was hardly colonialism. The land now known as Saudi Arabia was never under any colonial domination. And save for Aden, the British in the Persian Gulf were there only to protect the sea lanes to India, and to suppress the Arab slave trade, consisting almost entirley of black Africans. Syria and Lebanon were carved out of the Ottoman Empire and hardly exploited, in the roughly 20 years in which the French were the mandatory (not colonial) authority. Iraq and Jordan (originally the Emirate of Transjordan) were both lands under Ottoman rule, and then promoted to nations by the British, who like the French were present under authority from the League of Nations' Mandates Commission.
There is no reason to repeat the Arab nonsense about "colonialism" because of all the peoples and polities in the world, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, even in North America (there were colonies here as well), it was the Arabs who not only suffered least, but who in fact were in many places actually freed from Turkish overlords by the military action of the European powers. And furthermore, the Arabs themselves are the most practiced, and thorough-gooing, practitioners of colonialism -- a colonialism in which those colonized do not even recognize the fact that they are asked to forget, to be indifferent or even hostile to, their own pre-Islamic pasts, and whatever non-Islamic elements remain in their present, to bow toward Arabia, to take Arabs as their models, to assume Arab names, and to want, in every way, to become like Arabs. That constitutes the most successful imperialism -- cultural and linguistic imperialism as well as, sometimes, political -- in human history. And it has no end, for islamization is a vehicle for arabization.
Chris Patten's determination to bring Turkey into Europe is arrant arrogance! The people of Europe have made their feelings quite clear: They don't want Turkey to be let into Europe. Period!
These twerps and fatheads talk of democracy so often; yet they don't practise it. Were they to do so, then they would have to put this to the vote. Then we'd see what the Europeans really think of their ridiculous plans!
Chris Patten running Oxford. Next thing you know, they'll be hiring Tariq Ramadan.
Yeah, yeah. I know. They have already given TR a job there.
"Chris Patten running Oxford. Next thing you know, they'll be hiring Tariq Ramadan."
--- from a posting above
No, he doesn't run Oxford at all. A ceremonial post, but for all that, one that in some confused minds may carry a certain weight. And as for Tariq Ramadan, he has a short-term appointment made at the most suspect of programs, that on the Middle East at St. Antony's (built with money from the Jewish trader Anton or Antoine Besse, who made his money in Aden), established in 1957, and from a year after its inception run as a private fiefdom by that plump abbot dispensing favors to his monks, Albert Hourani. No wonder that was the place where that former Beirut propagandist for the "Palestinians," one Rashid Khalidi could obtain his D.Phil. (no courses required, just a thesis vetted by someone eager to promote him), and where that comical fellow, Avi Shlaim, is every Muslim Arab's favorite Israeli "scholar" -- or at least the favorite until Ilan Pappe comes calling. It would be fascinating to find out what, if anything, one could learn about Islam or the history of Muslim conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and about the relevance of both to everything that the fellows of the Middle East Centre purport to study, at St. Antony's (Middle East wing, and most definitely not the other, East European and Russian wing, which is a legitimate operation, insofar as its members keep away from, and do not permit themselves to "learn about the Middle East," from the people at the Middle East Centre).
So it's not quite so bad as it might seem from a distance. Now about that problem adjusting the humidity level in the Pitt-Rivers Museum, which has been causing such damage to the shrunken heads....