family planning

Population control. The Malthus nightmare. Limited procreation to maintain national characterstics. An affront to bourgeois values, liberal, humanistic axioms. As Allan Greenspan said, “a billion is not what it used to be.” But a billion moslems facing off against an equal number of Christians? But, is this so-called European population bomb merely confined to Europe, or is it really a broader offensive that locks horns with liberal, secular society as opposed to religious observance. In part, that seems to hold; even in Israel, the fears of secular Zionism, the vision of Herzl and Weizmann as the land of the “new” Jew, give them a fancy sounding new Hebrew language name, a rifle, and bingo, a new species.

---The painting by Marc Chagall entitled “Solitude” is an example of a cultural treatment of alienation and not solitude as usually understood with reference to a person. The intention of Chagall is to represent Jewish culture at the momentous turn of 1933 Europe. The sacrificial ox, the image of God’s messenger, the Torah or scriptural scroll, the traditional headdress, the image of an historical rabbi or elder personifiying Judaism, make this clear. The painting’s title of “Solitude” may raise the question of why eremitism hardly exists in Jewish traditions. The biblical image of Ezechiel as hermit never served as a model for Jewish eremitism. The medieval Carmelities presented it as an historical precedent for their presence in Palestine, but this analogy was only theoretical. --- Read More:http://www.hermitary.com/thatch/?p=295

But the fastest growing segment are the “hareidim” the religious, and like the influx of Islam into Western Europe, their birthrates far exceed secular society. Should their reproduction rights be limited to a given number, as Christopher Hitchens implied, and are these large families using children as a biological weapon, the so-called War of the Womb?

Christopher Hitchens: ( see link at end) …The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization [italics mine]….

Read More:http://www.artfinder.com/user/6856/collection/indian-persian-miniatures/?_view=two&page=30

…The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity….

A mesenger brings news to Siavosh. Read More:http://www.artfinder.com/user/6856/collection/indian-persian-miniatures/?_view=two&page=30

Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call “replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to Western societies. Anticipating Harris in a way, Steyn writes:

Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent….

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Prince playing polo. Read More:http://www.artfinder.com/user/6856/collection/indian-persian-miniatures/?_view=two&page=30

This is a highly reductionist view of the origin and nature of the Bosnian war—it would not account, for example, for Croatian irredentism. But paranoia about population did mutate into Serbian xenophobia and fascism, and a similar consciousness does animate movements like the British National Party and Le Pen’s Front Nationale. (Demographic considerations do not appear to explain the continued addiction of these and similar parties to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.)…

Nor can there be much doubt that the awareness of demography as a potential weapon originates with the Islamists themselves. Anybody who, like me, has publicly criticized Islamism gets used to the accusation that he has “insulted a billion Muslims.” A vague but definite threat underlies this absurd charge, and in parts of Europe it already intimidates politicians. Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, once told me that when he lectures in North Africa his listeners often ask how many Muslims live in France. If he replies that he believes the official figures to be mostly correct, scornful laughter erupts. The true figure, his listeners say, is much higher. France is on its way to becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb (“House of War”), but without a fight. Steyn has no difficulty producing equally minatory public statements from Islamist triumphalists. And, because his argument is exponential, it creates an impression of something unstoppable.

Read More:http://www.artfinder.com/user/6856/collection/indian-persian-miniatures/?_view=two&page=32

Yet Steyn makes the same mistake as did the late Oriana Fallaci: considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion (as Iraq reminds us). Little binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes—seeking asylum and to build a better life. A young Afghan man, murdered in the assault on the London subway system in July 2005, had fled to England from the Taliban, which had murdered most of his family. Muslim women often demand the protection of the authorities against forced marriage and other cruelties. These are all points of difference, and also of possible resistance to Euro-sharia.

The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq and aware of their own distance from “the struggle,” now regard the jihadist version of their religion as the “authentic” one. Compounding the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s “real” spokesmen. As Kenan Malik and others have pointed out in the case of Britain, this mind-set cuts the ground from under the feet of secular Muslims, encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish….

…This is not to deny Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization. His gift for the illustrative anecdote and the revealing quotation is evident, and if more people have woken up to the Islamist menace since he began writing about it, then the credit is partly his. Muslims in one part of England demand the demolition of an ancient statue of a wild boar, and in another part of England make plots to blow up airports, buses, and subway trains. The two threats are not identical. But they are connected, and Steyn attempts to tease out the filiations with the saving tactic of wit….

…When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders…Read More:http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_urbanities-steyn.html

Its difficult to tease out the exact fibres of Hitchen’s volley; especially the secular fears of being overrun by religion in the public space and what that might entail, to a simple genocide against the “old stock” through an erosion from within. In Israel, the same dynamic is in play, with Yair Lapid, “wanting to flush the bums out of the yeshiva,” and Tzipi Livni resigning with the defiant, ” refusing to surrender to the political blackmail of the hareidim.” Gideon Levy looking for bacteria, and dirt in Hebron to polemicize to the faithful in Tel Aviv, and we see a real powderkeg between traditional Zionism and the religious. When Rabin sunk the Altaleena back in 1948, who would know that those ghosts would be coming back to take their due…

ADDENDUM:

“Europe is concerned about the increase in racist and extremist parties following the influx of foreign immigrants with hateful beliefs into their countries,” Eichler said. “Hatred and racism are enemies of democracy and a threat to human freedom and the state, police say.”

However, he said in a clear allusion to Livni’s liberal politics, “No one dares talk about selling out the country to illegal African immigrants, and the Gentiles.”

“The only racist statements are those made by Tzipi Livni, who resigned from the Knesset today,” he added.

Eichler claimed Livni was “inciting against the ultra-Orthodox public again,” adding that she made her remark, “As if the hareidi are foreign immigrants who invaded her country.” Read More:http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/155344#.T6EY0cXT3PQ

…During the conference, Lapid outlined his version of the alternative to the Tal Law, which exempts hareidi-religious soldiers from service in the IDF, and is at the heart of a controversy which will lead to early Knesset elections.

In his remarks Lapid directly address the hareidim and said, “I’m not anti-hareidi, there’s no anti-hareidi message here, but we cannot pay for you and we cannot serve our country alone. We are telling the hareidim: you are Israeli citizens like us and we all have the same rights and obligations. We want to propose a model that will offer both mutual respect and livelihood – it’s not an order from above that you will always be the poor sector in the country.”

He added, “We do not want to enter Bnei Brak with tanks and turn this into a civil war. We want to flush the bums out of the yeshivot.” Read More:http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/155353#.T6EacMXT3PQ