I couldn't help being reminded of this excellent sketch by comedy duo Mitchell & Webb after a quick visit to the BBC website to see how the news of the riot protesting against paedophile Muslim gangs was playing out on Britain's politically correct state broadcaster. I was not disappointed.

While the BNP website was reporting "running battles" between "300 local anti-grooming protesters" and police and Muslim taxi-drivers, all connected to the issue of the 'grooming' of underage White girls by Muslim gangs, the BBC had miraculously reduced it to an attack on a takeaway restaurant by "gangs of youth," as if it were a tiff about being overcharged for a doner kebab or mere youthful exuberance.

Recently it was revealed that all sexual assaults involving rape in Oslo in the last five years were committed by “males of non-Western background.” The figures released by the police showed that in the five years between 2005 and 2010, there were 86 rapes, in which 83 of the perpetrators were described as having a “non-Western” appearance. The remaining three cases involved unknown attackers, but, given the identity of the other 83 attackers, it would be reasonable to assume that they, too, were non-Whites.

The women attacked were, of course, overwhelmingly Norwegian.

At the beginning of 2010, 151 000 persons or 3.1 per cent of the Norwegian population had a refugee background, with Iraqis (19,768) and Somalis (17,665) forming the largest groups. Of course, no one is surprised anymore that a remote, historically White country like Norway should now have a burgeoning non-White population. The CIA Factbook figure based on a 2007 estimate put the total non-White population at only 2 percent, so the latest figure marks an alarming rise.

On the Norwegian TV news report that mentioned the rapes, one of the victims, a young blonde girl mentioned that her attacker was a man of Pakistani origin who claimed he had the right to do exactly as he wanted to a woman, “because that is how it was in his religion.”

So, how does such an unnatural situation arise, where a supposedly democratic country allows its young women to be raped by an imported population that has no connection and no cultural affinity with the host country?

To understand this aberration we have look deep into the problem of our so-called “democracy” and how we are represented by our leaders. Whether we have ever passed through an actual period of true democracy (something that could be defined as a period when the government actually did more or less what the people wanted), it is clear that we are now living in a post-democratic world, where governments find ways to impose policies, such as refugee policies, mass immigration, rising taxation, the end of the capital punishment, gay marriage, massive overseas aid, and wars that the vast majority of people, even in their mass media-brainwashed state, simply disagree with.

Peter King’s hearings on the radicalization of the American Muslim community were probably doomed to failure from the beginning.  An investigation into what we used to call “subversion” doesn’t really work when there’s nothing left to subvert.  As the borders remain open, Presidents send military technology to hostile states, the primary mission of NASA and the military is Diversity, and homeland security seems to have been outsourced to the Southern Poverty Law Center, concern for  left-wing subversion of the government seems archaic and rather quaint.  Such an effort would presuppose a government that actually cares about the continued existence of the nation, rather than doing everything it can to destroy it.  As the media establishment ceaselessly attacked him, I felt sorry for Representative King, who has been a heroic figure on critical issues, but seems to have missed that the real investigation should target Congress itself.

It was therefore unnecessary and disappointing to see the Southern Avenger, Jack Hunter, piling on, along with Mark Potok.  Hunter called King’s hearings “grandstanding buffoonery,” because he did not address the question of our foreign policy being responsible for most homegrown American terrorism.  He brought up the question of whether the so called War on Terrorism has actually become a War for Terrorism, creating more problems than it is ostensibly designed to solve.

Saying such things was ballsy in 2004, scandalous in 2006, boring in 2009, and beside the point now.  We all know the neoconservatives are stupid for blaming Islamic terrorism on “evildoers” and refusing to address the arguments by the likes of Chalmers Johnson in Blowback.  However, events from the last few years, not just in America but around the world, should tell us that violence inspired by Islam is not caused by American foreign policy, but the presence of Muslims in Western societies.

Thanks to the glorious ability of Muslims to enrich the American cultural fabric, Americans enjoy a constant stream of religiously motivated crimes that would have been considered barbaric in the Middle Ages.  In Binghamton, New York, a progressive professor named Richard Antoun, who wrote books with titles like Understanding Fundamentalism: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Movements, was butchered by a Saudi graduate student, Abdusalam al-Zahrani (or, to use media language, a “New York man.”)  His roommates note that al-Zahrani constantly screamed slogans in Arabic and would insult the country for no reason.  In Buffalo, the leader of a Muslim television network designed to show ignorant and racist Americans that Islam is a religion of peace beheaded his wife for seeking a divorce.  In Arizona, a Muslim man ran down his daughter with his car for being too Westernized.  Similar honor killings have taken place in Georgia and Texas.  It’s unclear how any of this would be changed if America withdrew from Iraq or Afghanistan.

There are also the constant stream of crimes by Muslims who feel that alleged oppression within America justifies their attacks. The DC Beltway snipers, for instance, murdered, celebrated the 9/11 attacks, and called for jihad against Americans.  While homosexuals are generally progressives, this hasn’t stopped them from being attacked randomly by Muslims in Washington and San Francisco.

Even more damaging than individual acts is what amounts to the colonization of entire areas of the United States by hostile Muslim immigrants. Minnesota’s reputation for its atmosphere of “Minnesota nice” is being transformed by roving Somalia gangs, responsible for seven shootings in 10 months in 2007 and 2008.  In Lewiston, Maine, Somali Muslims randomly attack Americans on the street with sticks and rocks.

Though this may shock the CATO Institute, it’s no surprise to the alt Right that these “hardworking immigrants” who shame us all with their devotion to free markets and the American Dream also deliberately choose Maine so they can get on welfare.

Mosques are also being constructed all over the country from Ground Zero to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with many communities expressing outrage.   Many of the mosques in this country receive funding and materials from the Saudi government, which promotes the extremist Wahabbi sect of Islam.  Of course, there is also a larger point than alleged connections to terrorism and extremism.   While Jack Hunter, to his credit, proudly champions the League of the South and stands up for Southern culture, what does that matter if a Southern town like Murfreesboro just becomes another Dearborn?  What difference does “constitutional conservatism” make in the face of well-funded groups that are not afraid to openly organize on the basis of religion, ethnicity, and identity?  If a philosophy of liberty does not allow the South to organize so it can remain “the South” in any meaningful sense, then what is it worth?

Does this excuse the foreign policy of the United States or mean that the neoconservatives are right?  Of course not. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to do with protecting Americans, and pointless crusades aren’t somehow “conservative” because they involves the military. Point granted.  And there are some terrorist attacks that seem to be explained by our foreign policy.  The murder of an American soldier in Little Rock, Arkansas, recruitment center was supposedly inspired by Washington’s Middle East campaigns.  Army Sergeant Hasan Akbar also stated the reason he murdered two fellow soldiers and wounded 14 others was that he was concerned they would be fighting against Muslims in Iraq.  Nonetheless, we would not be having these problems if we did not have Muslim populations in the first place. If our country makes a mistake, it is our mistake to make.  We should not have to deal with a sullen population who must be permanently begged, bribed, and appeased in order for us not to be killed.

Hunter’s argument really falls apart when one looks at Europe, where Muslim immigration is far greater than here.  No country waged a more forthright opposition to the war in Iraq than France.  However, this has done nothing to win over French Muslims to the French population, which suffers more or less constant riots among the Muslim population.  Muslim hostility towards their supposed Patrie is a fact of life in France that the government is seemingly helpless to prevent.  There are vast “no go” areas for the French police.   Nor can we blame identity politics or government policies, because, like any good little classical liberals, the Republique believes race doesn’t exist.  Religion also doesn’t matter because even the French President Jacque Chirac is there to tell us, “[Europe’s] … roots are as much Muslim as Christian.”  To the surprise of everyone except the real Right, pretending this is all just about law enforcement or economics is not working.

Nor is France alone.  In the Netherlands, Theo van Gogh was butchered in broad daylight for daring to criticize Islam’s treatment of women.  In Sweden, rape by Muslim immigrants has reached crisis levels and in the city of Malmo, immigrants brag about crime as part of a “war against Swedes.”  In Denmark, of course, there were threats of violence and riots because of a cartoon.  Even a Church of England bishop has warned of “no-go areas” throughout Britain for non-Muslims.  In every nation and major city of Europe, there is now the problem of how to properly integrate a growing and hostile Muslim immigrant population.  None of this was necessary, and none of it has anything to do with the foreign policy of any European country, with the possible exception of Britain.

Jack Hunter’s rise to prominence should be cheered, and ultimately he is on the side of the angels.  Here, however, he offers the American Right a false choice.  On the one hand, we are given phony wars that do nothing to protect us against the threat of radical Islam.  On the other is the naïve belief that terrorism and Muslim hostility to the West is a result of our foreign policy and that if we simply adopt a less aggressive posture, we won’t have an Islamic problem in the West.  The solution is not neoconservatism or libertarianism—neither bombing them into democracy or preaching about the gold standard in Mecca.

The solution is for the West to separate as much as possible from the Muslim world.

They don’t hate us for our freedom.  They also don’t hate us just because of our foreign policy.  The attacks in the streets of Minneapolis, Paris, and Amsterdam demonstrate that they hate us for who we are.  Instead of trying to save them or appease them, for once, let’s look after ourselves.

Les banlieues are beginning to resemble scenes from The Road.  

Welcome to America! 

German Chancellor Andrea Merkel’s acknowledgement that multiculturalism had “utterly failed” in her country merely affirms what most Germans have long known. During the 1950s and 1960s large numbers of guest workers, mainly men, were recruited by Germany and other Northern European countries as laborers in rebuilding their economies following World War II. They were expected to return home after the work shortages ended, but in a monumental absence of mind, were not asked to leave or deported. In Germany, the bulk of these workers came from Turkey as part of a Turkish-German agreement. By the 1970s these men began bringing families and as a consequence Germany now has a Muslim population of over three million people, or 3.7 percent of the population and the Muslim community continues to grow.

The Turkish Muslims, even those who have the means, tend to remain in ethnic enclaves, many of which are coming to resemble underclass communities in the United States. The German political scientist Volker Eichener expressed the fear of “an Americanization of German cities” and a “danger of social disintegration.” In the Muslin Neukolln district in Berlin, for instance, a subculture has developed “with its own value systems and ways of behavior… formed by youth gangs.” The segregation of this community does not appear to be diminishing, and may, in fact, be growing. The district has Berlin’s highest percentage of welfare recipients and the highest use of housing benefits. In March of 2006, the district received wide media coverage when the head of a secondary school wrote an open letter desperately seeking help from education officials “because violence in the school had made the lessons unbearable.”

Crime in Germany grew by an astounding 372 percent between 1965 and 1995, and much of that rise is attributable to immigration. It has declined marginally since then, but this may be the result more of under-reporting than of any actual decrease. According to Stephen Brown, police on routine checks in immigrant neighborhoods in major German cities “are met with angry crowds and often risk assault.” Sometimes the police are swarmed by residents when they try to make an arrest. “Overall, Germany’s police union recorded an average of 26,000 such occurrences in recent years.”

A correspondent recently complained about the tendency of generic conservatives to adopt "Islam oppresses women" as a major reason for opposing Muslim assertiveness and expansion. Doesn't that approach (he asked) play into a feminist analysis of society, and end by supporting feminist solutions generally? And as a factual matter, can it really be true that Muslim society is fundamentally a system whereby men oppress women? Doesn't it have other more basic problems, and wouldn't there be more give and take on that particular point?

I'm sympathetic with such concerns. The "Muslims oppress women" theme tends to merge opposition to violent jihad and the spread of Islam in the West into a general crusade for global liberation understood in a left/liberal sense. It easily turns into "religion oppresses women" and "tradition oppresses women" unless there's a focus on the specific nature of Islam, which there never is.

More basically, though, the Muslim treatment of women is their problem. Why should we get involved in their problems, when we've got our own and can't do much about theirs anyway? I'd prefer "Muslims engage in terrorism" and "Muslims are anti-Western" as themes, where "Western" refers to something more specific and complex than universal principles of freedom, equality, and scientific rationalism. I suppose "we don't want to be Muslim" should be part of the mix, and the position of women is part of that, but it's not as if relations between the sexes are in great shape in the West, so it's odd to put it first and foremost.

We do need to know what we're dealing with, so we should discuss the merits. On that point I'd say women are unquestionably at a disadvantage in Islam. Men can have several wives, and they can divorce at will. So the bond between man and woman is weaker and less balanced, and there is less mutual trust and more use of force than in traditional Western society.

Principles like that have some effect on day-to-day life, and a big effect on the likelihood of the kind of extreme situation that makes the news. So there are a lot more honor killings and stonings for adultery in Muslim societies, just as there are more babies who get their skulls punctured and brains sucked out in liberal societies.

General principles don't determine everything though, and in any event there are also general Islamic principles requiring fair treatment and whatnot. On the whole, people are people, life is mostly particular events, domestic ill-feeling is no fun, and women know how to get their way even if men are supposedly in charge. So I don't think the "generalized system of sexist abuse" theory holds water. How could such a system be maintained in household after household century after century over whole continents? Why would so many people go to such an effort?

I know something about life among at least some Muslims, since I spent a couple of years before all the unpleasantness began as a Peace Corps math teacher at a government boarding school in a small village in Afghanistan.

(The school where I taught, in Helmand Province, has since become Forward Operations Base Delhi. You can see a row of classrooms I taught in at around 1:40 in this video.)

There weren't many polygamous marriages where I was, and a lot of them had to do with special situations (your brother dies so you've got a second wife all of a sudden). And there were few or no divorces. There really can't be: at the crudest level, bride price might be 5 years salary for a schoolteacher, and the woman's family isn't going to be pleased if you toss her aside, so basically you make a go of what you've got.

It was hard for a single foreign man to observe family relations directly, but you could pick up this and that. Girls went around freely in public until they were 12 or so, and fathers seemed no less attached to them than to boys. There was one teacher--a very intelligent man who had studied in America and spoke excellent English--who notoriously beat his wife, and people looked down on that. There was another who was reputedly a great lover, and the women would giggle and tell stories behind the scenes.

Mostly the bits and pieces I heard about sounded like normal domestic life--A's wife had worry B about the children, C's wife wanted some sort of fancy cloth so he picked it up for her, etc. The most respected of the teachers, who everyone called "Father," had a much younger wife people called "Mother" who went around without a veil and did what she wanted. She was a very spirited woman, and nobody messed with her.

So far as I could tell, a lot of the differences had to do with the nature of the society rather than Islam as such. The two are connected, but it's complicated. Maybe it's something of a chicken-and-egg problem--Islam catches on in societies to which it's adapted. Or maybe the nature of the pre-Islamic society makes a big difference in how Islam turns out. Others will have to say.

The women didn't have much public presence where I was, but that didn't mean what people here would expect. There's less public life in Muslim countries. The classic Middle Eastern city was a bazaar and some palaces, mosques, and barracks in the public sphere, and also walled quarters where people lived among their own and ran their own affairs.

The family was generally a unit of production as well as consumption, so the idea of "career" was mostly irrelevant. That's still largely true, by the way. Career depends on large formal organizations, and such things don't work well in the radically divided societies you find in the Middle East and Central Asia. People are mostly farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers, and the ideal is having enough to live on so you can sit at home drinking tea.

I remember a guy in Kashmir (another Muslim region) asking me--very tentatively, he didn't want to seem like a fool who takes everything he hears seriously--whether it was true that in the West people didn't think it was enough to have money to live on and hang with their friends but also wanted to work as a positive good thing.

So the basic idea has always been that everything's behind walls, with extended families living together in compounds, and outsiders only admitted to the relatively small public areas. Behind the scenes, which is where everything took place, the women were much freer and certainly part of what was going on. There was also lots of to and fro through back doors into other compounds. The images of imprisonment you get in the West aren't at all accurate.

I suppose another influence leading to the absence of women from public life was the possibility of abduction. It's expensive to get a wife, so why not steal one? That can be a real possibility in a radically divided society without much public order in which everything takes place in walled quarters and compounds and there's more emphasis on arbitrary fortune than free choice anyway. That's not the sort of thing that's a big current issue, but I think it had a role in how the system developed and the possibility still has an influence somewhere in the background.

A problem with the whole picture is that the way of life doesn't transplant to all settings. It doesn't work at all in a bureaucratic and industrial society in which people live in small apartments in large buildings and make their livings as operatives and functionaries in big organizations. So traditional Muslims in the West have problems and modernization runs into problems in Muslim countries. I have no doubt that one result is increased conflict and violence.

Whether the Muslims will be able to pick and choose among aspects of modernity and come up with something that works for them I don't know. If they want to convert to Catholicism I'd be glad to send them a catechism or even explain why it's a good idea, but if they want to do their Islamic thing I can't help them.

Converting them to liberalism--by force or any other way--doesn't seem to be the answer. We in the West have our own problems, and we're in no position to straighten other people out. Let the Muslims have a go at it where they run things and let's leave each other alone. Each should mind his own business, barring extraordinary circumstances, and maintain boundaries for the sake of peace.

A time there was when the awarding of a title of nobility in European countries was intended as formal recognition of the recipient's service to the crown, to the country, or to the state. Under the feudal system, the honour was given in exchange for military service and was hereditary; but in modern times it has been given, at least in theory, as a very special life-time award by the state to a tiny handful of individuals deemed by it to have led a singularly meritorious career. That is why the process has been termed 'ennoblement' -- the implication being that these individuals are somehow noble and worthy of such appellation. For this reason, concommittant with the very exclusive privileges they obtain, ennobled citizens have added responsibilities, especially with regards to standards of conduct.

When Tony Blair's Labour regime seized power in 1997, the nobility as a system had long been on the wane, the aristocracy having been progressively stripped of its legal powers through successive reforms. All the same, the majority of the House of Lords prior to 2000 was in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy, which were largely Conservative members. During the late 1990s, Blair undertook his long-threatened 'reform' of the House of Lords with gusto and in a partisan fashion, determined, above all, to increase Labour's representation in the chamber (according to him and his supporters, it needed to be more modern and 'democratic'). While at it, he also undertook to multiculturalise this old institution, as it was too uniformly White and male for his liking.

Two beneficiaries of Blair's policy were foreign-born Muslims: Manzila Pola Uddin (from Bangladesh) and Amir Bhatia (from East Africa), who became Baroness Uddin and Lord Bhatia respectively. They joined Indian-born Swraj Paul, since 1996 Lord Paul, and a wealthy long-standing supporter of the Labour Party and of the man who most diligently ruined the British economy in the decades since World War II, Gordon Brown.

Having been ennobled under such extraordinary circumstances, one would have thought that their Lordships and Ladyship would have gone the extra mile to prove their worth. After all, does not aristocracy mean 'rule by the best'? 

Yet, how did they repay the British state for the honours it bestowed upon them?

By theft.

All three have been found guilty of misappropriating public funds through fraudulent expenses claims. 

Needless to say that they are not the only ones in Parliament who have been found guilty of misconduct. The Parliamentary Expenses Scandal of 2009 provided a most unedifying spectacle, with many of these peers' 'blood-and-soil' British colleagues also caught with their arms elbow-deep in the cookie jar -- essentially pickpocketing me and all other taxpayers.

All the same, it is still especially galling when individuals who were not even born in the country and who have been awarded high honours instead of worthier citizens, behave in such corrupt and dishonourable fashion.

All now face suspension from the House of Lords and have been asked to return the £200,000 ($300,000) they stole. But in a just world, they would be stripped of their peerages altogether: these are not individuals deserving to be called 'noble'.