No, sheik, sorry isn't good enough

Assalamau Laikum all,

He has taken the concept of wild slutty womens many steps forward. This lund is a retard...don't listen to him....no woman should EVER be raped.

I think what he means to say is that dressing up as a slut is more likely to get you raped and therefore it's your fault.

Well this statement may have some truth in it....there is no need to push out the boat.

Already Western womens are under pressure to wear the Hijab....let them go there...why push them away from Allah as this lund is attempting to do.

Naseem, do you have any statitics or hard evidence to support your statement. Can you define what "dressing up as a slut" looks like ? Can you explain to me how the act of rape can be anybodies fault but the person actually committing the rape ?

"He has taken the concept of wild slutty womens many steps forward."

he probably looked at muslim women, zombies with half a brain

"This lund is a retard..."

as the totality of muslim people

"no woman should EVER be raped. "

for you, I would gladly make an exception

"I think what he means to say is that dressing up as a slut is more likely to get you raped and therefore it's your fault. "

in muslim countries, muslim whores (and there are many) dress up in burkas, therefore I assume, if you dress up like a muslim whore, you deserve to be raped.

That's why muslim men rape their women so often.

"Well this statement may have some truth in it....there is no need to push out the boat. "

on the same line, I would add that the more muslim people behave like backward animals, the more they will deserve to be kicked out or worse.

This imam authorized us to the most brutal backlash, it has already started, too bad that in cesspool pakistan where you live, the press is cut down to meet your limited brain capacity.

There is no single day where wester papers are filled with anti-muslim letters.

Here in the west we don't regard our leaders like your cesspool countries regard your caliph.

People is what matters.

What the farmer do whem locusts are too many and too damaging?

YO Naseem, you found work yet?

I noticed that your brethren when they immigrate to Norway live off welfare payments.

Still apologizing for your religion? You think this old Iman doesn’t know what he’s talking about? He has been under watch for several years and pretty soon he will be deported. He will be back in your country eating dirt.

I understand that prostitution in your country is still a problem. It’s because you force women to wear masks. They have taken advantage of it. Now you don’t know the prostitutes from the good women. How many guys are walking around in Burkas? I bet all of those transsexuals are! You don’t even know who they are!

Maybe you will find this out.

God willing, of course

After reading the story about what happened in Cairo during Eid, I think that we can kiss the idea that women are at fault for rape, good-bye. If you read the story you will discover that the journalist is a man, and he was shocked by the violence and the way in which the girls were violated in the streets of Cairo. He was shocked by the mob mentality.

The article above is excellent, and I hope that more women journalists will step up and out, and that they will re-evaluate their own stance about Islam.

The Mufti and his colleagues (one in Melbourne and the other in Perth) have a mysogenic view of the world at large. They do not examine the reality of the situation and by coming out and supporting Bilal Skafe they have shown a total disregard for the personhood of all women. I am not a feminist, but this is one subject that is close to my heart.

The majority of western women do not dress like sluts. They are elegantly dressed, and that will not stop a Muslim male from attacking if he is in a mob situation. Here in Australia, the Muslim Lebanese have so little regard for the Australian, Chinese, Indian etc. women, that they call the Australians "skippy" and they brag about their intentions. During the Cronulla riot a woman was accosted whilst sitting in her car. It was the mere fact that she was an Australian woman that brought about the potential rape situation, not the way that she was dressed.

Since al-Hilaly has such a large influence amongst this group of people, and we do not know how he stirred up the mob during the riots, my bet is that he has for a long time been saying things about Australian women that helped to turn these other men into roving mobs who were willing to rape any woman. In hindsight, it is probable that he was giving some stirring speeches before the mob headed for Cronulla for more looting and burning cars.

If the Lebanese Muslim Association has backed down from getting rid of this man, then they are being cowards in not dealing with a man who has for years been making inflammatory statements, and who needs to be ejected from public life.

If there was a way that we could see him returned to Egypt legally, then I hope that we can find that way. (Maybe some legistlation that has support from both sides of the house would be helpful)

Mmmmm.... Wild slutty womens, heineken and bratwurst!

Assalamau Laikum all,

Hey hold on here....on the subject of rape ...being a woman I feel strongly about this and am on your side.

This lund can go to hell, I have no sympath for him, lay into him...I don't care...

I am on the side of righteneouss...I am on your side ...I am on the side of Islam

Naseem, I much prefer a slutty looking women to some one who looks like a post box. And I am of course man enough to keep my lustful intentions in check, unlike your fellow Muslim males.

I read about the incident in Cairo, it was pretty disgusting, all those sexually repressed men running around attacking women, you must be really proud to be a Muslim, huh?

This article was an excellent reply, she got it down to a tee, even the attempt to deflect to Bush and Howard and when that did not work the pope, he most probably faked his heart attack to get the heat off.

We just have to keep at them all the time now, every comment we find unacceptable should be flagged up and attacked.

Hilali really needs to be a speciman in a zoo. Either that or he should be subjected to all kinds of tests to determine what ails him (besides Islam of course). In any event, he needs to shut his face already.

Naseem is full of it. There had to be concerted pressure put on Pakistani women to stop them wearing saris which bared heir midriffs. As far as I'm aware Bangladeshi women still wear them as a matter of routine and indeed in rural areas the peasant women don't even bother to wear a choli (cutaway bodice) underneath.

To: Sheik Hilali

Subject: About that Fatimah -

She's the sexiest woman I've had!
Here's a shot of her, scantily clad.
This magnificent lay—
She's your wife, do you say!
I'd no earthly idea! My bad.

Maggie,

If you're still out there.

Janet Albrechtson's email address is:

janeta@bigpond.net.au

She's written some pretty fine editorials for The Australian on this issue.

I sent her a note with a link to JW and DW.

Perhaps a similar note from a fellow Aussie (that would be you) would get her attention.

Her 'No, Sheik,...' editorial noted that "Abdul El Ayoubi of the Lebanese Muslim Association was: "We did accept his apology and we want to move on."

Time, I think, to make it clear that the Muslim community's acceptance of the Sheik's lame apology isn't good enough for Australia's non-Muslim majority, either.

Ummm, Naseem, I feel no pressure to wear a hijab or burka for that matter. Where are you getting your info? No one I know is feeling pressure either.

"Already Western womens are under pressure to wear the Hijab"

Not where I live.

"...I am on your side ..."

I doubt it.

"I am on the side of Islam"

As I said ..

Don't the actions of Muslims in every country on earth make you ashamed to be a Muslim? If not, why not? Muslims apparently are dead to shame.

Islamists claimed that Sheikh's remarks were quoted out of context. In fact, it's the clerics' standard bromide on such issues. Another muslim cleric is spewing the same venom in that country now.

Read it in 'Western Resistance' below:

http://www.westernresistance.com/

Naseem is a TROLL, please stop acknowledging it in any way. Absolute proof is that I have informed it about 2 million times that 'women' is a plural and doesn't need an 's' at the end. The troll still writes 'womens', just to annoy.

Troll.

Janet Albrechtson is a gem. She gave the introduction to the Mark Steyn/Owen Harries talk in Sydney (which I attended) and made some excellent points in a short time. One which stood out was a comment about the fact that western civilisation is always generating and testing ideas. It's what we do. Many of the ideas are bad (communism, nazism etc), but the key to weeding out the bad ones is to strengthen the free market of ideas. Purveyors of bad ideas always want to shut the debate down. Fortunately, with the internet, it is much hard to do that these days.

Regarding the last sentance concerning Hilali's comment: "They are unacceptable in an enlightened world."

This brings up the inevitable question - what are you going to do about it?

Brett,
if you are still there, here is a transcript:
(sorry for the cut and paste - I don't have the link).

It's not "Them", It's Us:
The Need to Regain Confidence in Western Culture

BIG IDEAS FORUM

Sydney, 14 August 2006

Introduction: Greg Lindsay
Chairman: Janet Albrechtsen
Address: Mark Steyn
Another Perspective: Owen Harries
Q&A

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Greg Lindsay:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Greg Lindsay and I am the Executive Director of The Centre for Independent Studies. I’d like to welcome you all to the fifth Big Ideas Forum. The series began with a debate between Francis Fukuyama and Daniel Pipes and since then it’s gone on to cover interesting issues, none more interesting and important than tonight’s.

I’ll be handing it over to Janet Albrechtsen, who will be responsible for the proceedings tonight, but I just thought I should let you know how it will work. Janet will come up when I’m finished and introduce the topic, then Mark Steyn, then Owen Harries, and then we’ll go to questions. There’ll be two roving microphones by members of the CIS staff in the two hallways there. If you are upstairs, and you wish to ask a question you’ll have to come down, there’s no other way we can really do it. We can’t see you; that is one of the reasons. And then we’ll conclude around 7:20 and hopefully you’ll have been filled with all sorts of interesting things to think about on your way home. So it is my great pleasure now to ask Janet Albrechtsen to take over the proceedings.

Janet Albrechtsen:

Well thank you Greg, and welcome to The Centre for Independent Studies’ Big Ideas Forum. I hope under all that office attire and suits we have some overalls because tonight we’re putting our heads under the bonnet of Western civilisation to try to work out this conundrum which is apparently confronting the West. Are we suffering a crisis in confidence? Is western self esteem waning? And if so, why?

Now as chairperson, chairman/moderator, I have to put the overalls on first but as Henry VIII said to each of his unfortunate wives, I promise not to keep you long. Now, I admit to being a bit of a ‘Moaning Myrtle’ on this subject of defending the West and if you’re not familiar with the Harry Potter movies or films, Myrtle is that dreary girl ghost who annoyingly wafts up from behind the cubicle in the girls’ bathroom at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft to wail about the world and having spent quite a few columns moaning about the West’s lack of confidence, I plan to put that aside tonight. So here’s my one minute diagnosis, because that’s all I’ve been given…those that imagine the West is on some sort of suicidal trek, that Western values are in retreat, I think need to take a step back, because it strikes me that the West is doing no more or less than what it has always done: confronting ideas, challenging them and testing them. The West’s greatest achievement after all, is its ability to experiment with ideas and ultimately, and most importantly, to self-correct. Much like the free market for goods and services, the West’s free market for ideas has a very neat, in-built mechanism for self-correction. And it comes from contesting ideas. The West has seen off Fascism, it defeated Communism, and Capitalism has won the day, quite simply, because it works. But if we have let things slip, if Western values seem to be in retreat, then I think it’s because we’ve not done enough to keep this contest of ideas alive. And after all, in a multicultural society, talking openly about the virtues of Western culture has always been regarded as rather naff. And I think that has been our mistake. Sadly we know that when free speech is curtailed then the bad ideas tend to overstay their welcome and the good ideas are soon forgotten. Free speech is, if you like, the oil that fuels the West’s self-correcting mechanism; without it, it grinds to a halt. But true to form I think this self-correcting mechanism is still working, evidenced by the recent talk, the talk in recent times, about what is best about the West. There’s no doubt that the West’s greatest asset is also potentially its most serious weakness. Our obsession with critiquing ourselves lies at the core of our political evolution. We constantly question our values, our ideas and our institutions. So of all the Western traits, the greatest is what we’re about to embark upon tonight: the contestability of ideas and this Western disposition to wonder about them and to challenge them and to strive for better ones. And tonight we’re in for an amazing treat; our speakers hardly need an introduction but they’ll get one anyway.

A few days ago our Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told me a secret. He said, that after he’d a particularly bad day on the political hustings, he slinks home and he does three things: he sits down on a sofa with a glass of whisky, he turns on the television to watch FOX news and downloads the latest offerings from Mark Steyn, just to remind himself that there is some sanity in the world. Now Mark is one of the finest commentators on anything Western and indeed not-so-Western, and we’re very fortunate that he’s with us here tonight. He’s appeared in almost every leading newspaper in the English-speaking world, and he writes regularly for the Chicago Sun Times, the New York Sun and the Washington Times, just to mention a few. And he manages, as I’m sure you already know, to hold up a very penetrating mirror to the challenges confronting the West, in a way that few others can. And thank goodness for his brilliant wit, because otherwise his very sharp and very depressing observations about the West’s demographic problems and what he calls the ‘Sly Virus’, the West’s anti-Westernism, might have us running off to the doctor for some Prozac. But there’s no need to do that of course, because once you stop laughing you realise that Mark is in fact throwing down the gauntlet to those of us in the West to do something before it’s too late. If you go to his website, Steyn Online, you’re treated to Steyn on America, Steyn on Britain, on Canada, on culture, on the world, and fortunately for those of us in Australia, or at least those discerning readers of the newspaper, The Australian (and yes, that’s a plug) we’re regularly treated to Steyn on Australia. And needless to say, the world is a much richer and bolder place for his writing.

Like Mark, Owen Harries has also contributed enormously to our understanding of life in the West. His critical eye and piercing observations often make for very uncomfortable reading and that is obviously why he occupies such an important place in the intellectual life of Australia and beyond. Refreshingly, Owen recently reminded us that when it comes to predicting the future, intellectuals tend to get things hopelessly wrong. Four years after WWI, intellectuals were predicting the end of armed conflict. In the 1970s, they predicted that overpopulation and economic growth would kill us all. Owen injects a much-needed dose of realism into our debates. He founded The National Interest in 1985 and as editor of that fine journal for more than 15 years he helped shape debate on crucial issues. Francis Fukuyama has said that under the editorship of Owen Harries, The National Interest became the home of important commentary on modern foreign policy realism. Owen has held distinguished positions within Government in Australia and on the international stage, including his role as Australian Ambassador to UNESCO in 1982. And he has written in every serious publication you could possible name. Someone once described Owen as a person who enjoys talk the way others enjoy football. And as a Senior Fellow of the CIS, and a visiting fellow of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, he continues to challenge us with his big ideas. So with no further ado, its time to hear from our speakers, and we’ll first hear from Mark Steyn and as Greg said, after Owen, we’ll have question time so that you can prod our intellectual mechanics on tonight’s topic: the need to regain confidence in Western culture. Thankyou.

Mark Steyn:

Thank you, thank you very much Janet. I’m honoured to be here on what’s beginning to feel a bit like my End of The World Tour. Everywhere I go I just talk about depressing issues like the decline and death of the West, but my End of the World Tour is a bit like Barbara Streisand’s Farewell Tour: if the world doesn’t end I’ll be back to do another End of the World Tour in a couple of years. Let me start with a request, I feel a bit like Kylie Minogue when the crowd call out for all the early hits. I got to Australia a week or so back and people keep asking me to repeat a quote I mentioned in a column a few months ago. We crazed right-wing war mongers are often said to be hot for war and slaughter and so forth. But I’m not. I don’t want to make an argument for more war, more bombing, more killing but for more will, more civilisational confidence that’s the best way to avoid all the death and destruction.

Here’s what I mean, here’s the quote I get requests for. It’s about a relatively minor imperial administrator. Two hundred years ago, in a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of Sati—that’s the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husband. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural. He said: ‘You say that it’s your custom to burn widows, very well. We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their neck and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it my carpenters will build a gallows; you may follow your custom, then we will follow ours.’ As it happens, my wife’s uncle was named after General Napier which I guess makes me a British Imperialist by marriage. But India today is better off without Sati. And what’s so strange about the times we live in is that even to say that is to invite accusations of cultural supremacy. If you don’t agree that India is better off without Sati, if you think that’s just dead white-male-euro-centricism, fine, but I don’t think you really do believe that. Non-judgemental multiculturalism, cultural relativism, is an obvious fraud and I think it’s subliminally accepted on that basis. I think that, after all, most people, given the choice, don’t want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. They think that pretending that all societies are equal is in a sense part of the wallpaper of living in an advanced Western society. And they think you can contain multiculturalism, they think multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting them to sing jingle bells. Or that your holistic masseur uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality. But it doesn’t mean that you or anyone that you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society.

I checked into my hotel yesterday and I’d been in the room 10 minutes when I got a call from the Spa asking if I wanted to have a new kind of massage they were offering a special on using techniques I think developed from Buddhist spirituality. And I’m very grateful for that, I think its marvellous and that it adds a lot to the gaiety of life, but it’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug if it goes beyond that. And if you think Sati is just an example of the rich vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your present suburb would be like if 25, 30 or 48% of the people around you really believed in it too. That’s the situation that much of the Western world is facing; that we’re losing the consensus within our populations on what it means to be a citizen of a pluralist society. Multiculturalism, I believe, was conceived by Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own and in that sense it’s the real suicide bomb. Islam and terrorism would not be a threat to the Western world if the Western world weren’t so enervated that it gives the impression that it’s basically just dying to keel over and to surrender to somebody.

Sati’s gone, nobody in India burns widows, so when Indians immigrate to Sydney, or London or Toronto, they’re not building pyres in the front yard for grandma anymore. But there are other cultures where women lack basic rights. Under the Taliban, Afghan women were prevented by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces; by law. As Ahmed Al-bakar (spelling unclear), an MP from the one of the more progressive Muslim nations, Kuwait, recently put it, mixing the proposal to give women the right to vote, ‘God said in the Holy Koran that men are better than women…why can’t we settle for that?’ Why indeed. Well here’s a story from the Associate Press in Multan, Pakistan. Nazeer Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25 year-old step-sister to salvage his family’s honour. Well, you know, I suppose to a lot of us, Pakistan’s a crazy place a long way away. But the honour killings, the murder of Muslim women, punished often for no other reason than that they happened to have been raped by some fella, the honour killings are getting closer. In London last summer, the Metropolitan police announced they were reopening investigations into 120 deaths among British Muslim girls that they’d hitherto declined to look at too closely on grounds of cultural sensitivity. Now think about that. Think about that. One hundred and twenty women are murdered and their murders go uninvestigated because the cops thought it was just some multicultural thing. I believe you had a similar issue here when one of your state police departments announced that it was changing the basis on how spousal abuse and battery of women was investigated according to what cultural community you happened to belong to. So in other words, in parts of Australia, law enforcement takes the view that whether you’re allowed to beat up a woman depends on who you are. If I try it, I’ll be going to jail; but if other people try it, it’s part of their rich cultural tradition. You cannot have a society organised on that basis. I don’t want to live in a country where honour killing is regarded as part of the rich tapestry of cultural diversity, like a slightly livelier version of a national dance at the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony. So those are the sorts of things you can make judgements about competing culture, judgements on liberty, on religious freedom, the rule of law, we need to recover the cultural cool that General Napier demonstrated. That’s really the word: cool. You don’t have to go through a whole lot of excitable talk about nuking Mecca and all this kind of thing; that’s all a waste of time. If we knew who we were, we wouldn’t have a lot of the problems that we seem to be having and rousing ourselves to defend our society. If we know who we are, if we’re secure in our sense of where our society came from, we’ll be fine.

Let me give a small example of the wrong way of looking at things. It’s not life threatening, but if you don’t understand the philosophy that underpins it, it can become life threatening. In your nation and in mine, many people have acknowledged, and indeed even boasted, that immigration changes our country. For example, in Australia, and to a lesser extent in Canada, there are a lot of people who wish to replace the monarchy with a republic and there are respectable arguments for and against the monarchy. But the dangerous argument is the lazy line pedalled by too many politicians that in an Australia or a Canada of evolving immigration patterns, an immigrant from Moldova or China or Brazil or Saudi Arabia can’t be expected to relate to the Queen, to the existing constitutional system. Now try this line the next time you’re in Saudi Arabia: if you immigrate to Saudi Arabia and say ‘hey man, I just can’t relate to the House of Saud, and what’s with this Wahhabism, can’t we get a couple of sports bars with wet t-shirt nights every Thursday’? The Saudis would have a grand old laugh about it and then behead you. So when we accept that argument, in essence we’re explicitly promoting the principle of reverse assimilation; that immigration imposes not the obligation that the immigrant assimilate to his new land, but that his new land assimilate to him. And thereby lies great peril, not for the Queen, she’ll get by, but for a whole bunch of the rest of us. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen, its whole merely the sum of its parts. And so in the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide. Or in the superb summation of the American writer James C. Bennett, ‘democracy, immigration multiculturalism … pick any two’.

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally valid. And to accept that proposition means denying reality; the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, global population movement. And multiculturalism isn’t the first ideology founded on the denial of truth. You recall Herman Goering’s memorable assertion that ‘two plus two makes five, if the Fuhrer wills it’. Likewise we’re asked to accept that the United States’ constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation. If a generation of multi-culti theorists in American universities, if the ethnic grievance lobby, and even if a ludicrous resolution of the United States congress so wills it, that’s what happened. The United States Congress passed a resolution hailing the Iroquois Confederation as the inspiration for the US Constitution, which would have been news to the dead white euro-centric males who wrote it. Harmless, harmless isn’t it! What’s wrong with playing make-believe if it helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other. Because it’s never helpful to put reality up for grabs; there may come a day where you need it. And today is the day that we do need a shot of reality. We need to understand what it is that is important and vital and rare about our society, because if we don’t, then in a thousand, silly, itsy-bitsy, little ways, like removing pork from Australian hospital cafeteria menus, we’re giving the very clear message that we lack the will to defend our civilisation. In 1773, one of America’s founding fathers Simeon Howard, addressed the ancient and honourable artillery company in Boston, and ‘an incautious people’ he said, ‘may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them, especially if they’re persisted in.’ During the Danish cartoon Jihad, you may recall, over the representations of the prophet Mohammed earlier this year, the New York Times gave one of its routinely pompous explanations as to why it wouldn’t be showing readers these offensive cartoons: sensitive news organisations, the editors explained, have the duty to ‘refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbol symbols’. The very next day, the Times illustrated the story on the Danish controversy with an illustration of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung … a piece of New York art from a couple of seasons earlier. They had no problem with gratuitous assaults on religious symbols when it came to a dung-covered Virgin Mary or the Piss-Christ—the crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine that was the sensation of the New York art world a couple of seasons back. He was the biggest artist in America for a while, a guy called Andre Serrano. I don’t know what he’s doing now, haven’t heard from him a couple of years, I don’t know what he’s doing … maybe he got cystitis or something … anyway, his career dried up.

A friend of mine did a satirical play in England a couple of years ago, he’s an old leftie, very anti-Iraq war, so in his show he had Bush and Blair come out and sing ‘we’re sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus’ … ha-ha, very funny. Well how about if you have a couple of Imams dancing around singing ‘we’re sending you a schoolgirl bomb from Allah’. Well oddly enough, my pal was far more reluctant to do that, on the reasonable grounds that unlike insulting Christianity, if you insult certain other faiths, a far more motivated crowd is likely to be waiting for you at the stage door. Multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke, in which the American tells the Soviet that ‘in my country, everyone is free to criticise the President’ and the Soviet guy replies ‘same here! In my country everyone is free to criticise your President’. Under the rules, as understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West’s Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one had to choose, on balance, Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elite’s loathing of their own. Now I have a great sympathy for Muslims that face demands that they assimilate; it’s on the front pages of all the newspapers in London this weekend. Even if you wanted to, even if you wanted to, how would you assimilate with say, Canadian national identity? You can’t assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It’s much easier to dismantle a society than put anything new and lasting in it place. And across much of the developed world, that’s what’s going on right now.

The advantage for the US and for Australia, and to a lesser extent other parts of the English-speaking world, is that Europe, in its civilisational exhaustion, is ahead in the line, and its fate might wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the continent. But it comes down to this: we are the issue. It’s about us. We don’t understand that the world we’ve lived in since 1945 is very precious, very unusual, and very rare and is at odds with most of human history. And if we want our world to continue, if we want our children to grow up in the kind of society we’ve lived in this last half-century, then we have to understand the blessings we enjoy are not an accident. If we don’t value it, we won’t have it. Thankyou very much.