At last week's general election in Germany, the two main candidates for Chancellor were Angela Merkel of the Christain Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democrats (SPD). Merkel is relatively pro-free market and she supported the liberation of Iraq. Schröder is a socialist who opposed the liberation.

So in this election the Germans were choosing whether to continue on the path of appeasement and socialism, or to move in the direction of freedom, capitalism and opposition to tyranny. The result was a tiny (1%) swing from the SPD to the CDU/CSU, resulting in a slight majority for the latter, plus a somewhat larger swing away from both of them towards fringe parties. Under a rational electoral system (the British or American electoral system known as First Past the Post), that would have been an end of the matter. Merkel would now be Chancellor implementing her party's programme, and all the other parties would be holding endless post-mortems, struggling to improve their ideas so that next time, they can be the ones who persuade more electors than anyone else that they had the best policies for the future.

Unfortunately nothing of the sort has happened, nor can it happen – because of Germany's proportional representation (PR) electoral system. PR allows parties with a small share of the vote to get seats easily. This provides an incentive for parties to split into ever smaller parties, which then take seats in the legislature making it almost certain that every government will be a coalition government. By contrast, First Past the Post tends to amplify differences in the number of seats parties get, compared with their share of the vote, and so tends to give rise to parliaments in which one party has a clear majority.

As a result of the German election, no party will be able to implement the policies that it thinks are right. Consequently, nobody will be able to assign responsibility for the effects of the policies that do get passed. For instance if Merkel becomes Chancellor in a ‘grand coalition’ with the SPD, the anti-capitalist and anti-American tendency in Germany will blame her for everything that goes wrong and give the SPD credit for everything that goes right. So, ironically, she and her party might do better if she does not become Chancellor. Schröder is arguing that he should remain Chancellor because the two geographical divisions of the CDU/CSU should be regarded as separate parties, making the SPD the largest party after all. He also says that ‘the electorate has refused to give a mandate’ to either party. Nonsense. Quite possibly not a single elector took that view. It was a pure artefact of the electoral system.

Yet on such sophistry, the fate of a nation could hang. Another possibility is that Schröder will cling to power by forming a coalition with the far-left PDS – something that he pledged not to do, but the system may not leave him able to fulfil that promise. In that case the outcome of the small electoral swing in which the ruling party is overtaken by the opposition will be that the latter is frozen out of government altogether; and meanwhile the loony-left ideas of the fourth-largest party pervade the character of the next government, for its leader will have the power to remove the Chancellor the moment he displeases him. All in the name of greater representativeness. Such is the perversity of PR.

All sides in politics continually attribute their opponents' real or alleged errors to such factors as stupidity, corruption, misguided loyalty, naivety, prejudice, sentimentality and sheer malevolence.

It is possible, though, that simple factual ignorance is in reality a more significant cause of political error – at least, in the West – than any of those. We have previously conjectured that many opponents of the liberation of Iraq are literally unaware of the case in favour. We do not mean unaware of the merits of the case, but simply unaware of its content.

Now we read of a revealing incident in which the new Foreign Minister of France has displayed astounding ignorance of the basic events of the Second World War:

during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked – while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed – whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy's question was met by his hosts with amazement. "But Monsieur le minister," Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, "England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II."

The minister apparently was not content with this answer, which, according to the magazine, was given by the museum curator, and persisted, asking: "Yes, but were there no Jews who were deported from England?"

How can a person who is that unaware of the role played by Britain in the war be qualified to meditate and pontificate on the perfidiousness of the Anglo-Saxon character (which is, after all, fifty percent of a French Foreign Minister's job), or to make nuanced estimates of how shitty the Jews are (which is most of the remaining fifty percent)?

There is something very positive about ignorance, though. Perhaps we are allowing hope to triumph over good sense here, but the more of the bad opinions in the world are due to factual ignorance rather than any of the other causes above, the more the world is actually better than it looks. How one might go about remedying this ignorance, though, is less clear. Anything that succeeds at that should also succeed at diminishing our own ignorance. Our best shot so far has been to start a blog…

Update: As a matter of fact, some British Jews were deported – from the Channel Islands, the only part of Britain to be invaded by the Germans.

Pallywood. Have you watched it yet? It's fun.

Sometimes surrender is wise. This is not one of those times.

New Orleans should be rebuilt, as before but stronger and better.

So should the World Trade Center towers.

Wise or not, surrender to evil is ‘bad for the soul’. That is to say, it is harmful in many traceable and untraceable ways over and above the loss of the immediate thing being surrendered. The same is true of despair or resignation in the face of challenges from nature.

Correspondingly, defiance of evil, and of natural challenges, is good. It affirms life, and has unforeseeable benefits.

Following a recent spate of shootings in North-West London, local people say they have had enough, and have marched with police through the streets of the Borough of Brent, demanding an end to gun crime in the area.

It is not clear whether London's criminals were impressed by the march. Time will tell. The police are rather despondent, though:

Brent's borough commander, Chief Supt Andy Bamber, said the availability of firearms in the borough was "absolutely horrifying".

"People can easily get a firearm and the age group of those getting involved is coming down," he said.

It's not even remotely true that ‘people can easily get a firearm’. Thanks to Britain's stringent gun-control laws, it is only criminals who can easily get them.

Sometimes the government proposes bad ideas for fighting terrorism, like identity cards. The police would be able to harass people to produce their cards, which would cost somewhere between £93 and £300 each. Even if the cards had worked in pilot studies, and they have not, criminals and terrorists would be essentially unimpeded by them. In a speech on 2 September Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said we already carry lots of ID with us, so why not one more card? But if the market already produces lots of ID why do we need this ruinously expensive and useless bureaucratic monstrosity from the government? We suspect that Mr Clarke wants to introduce the card for a reason he announced in his 2 September speech:

“Big Brother society is already here and my job is to control it.”

Obviously Mr Clarke does not understand the difference between people voluntarily carrying useful ID and the government forcing people to carry ID. Nor does he understand what Big Brother states, i.e. – tyrannies – are. So we need organisations who keep an eye on the government's attempts to encroach upon civil liberties.

Amnesty International is ostensibly such an organisation. However, they have argued that the House of Commons ought not to pass legislation to allow the government to expel people who incite terrorism. They write:

• the absolute prohibition of torture or other ill-treatment, and the principle inherent to such prohibition according to which a person should never be sent anywhere where she or he risk being subjected to torture or other ill-treatment -- the principle known as non-refoulement;
• the right to seek and enjoy asylum, including the right of all persons who seek international protection to have their asylum claim individually and fully considered in fair and satisfactory procedures consistent with international human rights and refugee law and standards. Any intention to exclude someone from refugee status should be considered in the context of regular refugee status determination procedures, and should be subject to fundamental principles of procedural fairness, including the right to appeal against the decision to exclude, and to remain in the UK while that appeal is being considered;
• the rights to freedom of expression and association;

We are in the middle of a war against people who intend to destroy freedom by committing mass murder. People who advocate this are among our enemies in this war. The British government should not allow these people to recruit and raise money in Britain. Nor should the British government, in general, deport these people to any free country. Freedom of expression does not entitle people to incite, train, finance or recruit combatants for war against citizens of free countries. Freedom of association does not require the government to allow people to come together to support such a war. The new anti-terror legislation does not contravene human rights.

Another nice, long essay by Bill Whittle. This time he's a bit – cross.

So the narrative has settled down to the following:

President Bush and his friends need slaves in order to remain rich. The slaves are the unemployed [sic], the poor, illegal immigrants, and black people. President Bush and his friends have herded these people into environmentally vulnerable areas like New Orleans because they would rather they died. Then they caused hurricanes by not adopting the Kyoto Protocol. They also prevented the city and state governments from evacuating the unemployed, poor, and non-whites from New Orleans as the hurricane approached, and later prevented the survivors from being rescued, in part by sending the National Guard overseas to an immoral and illegal war, which itself is being fought in order to enrich President Bush and his friends. When they were finally sent in, it was to murder the black people. No wait, actually the war is being fought at the behest of Israel via a Jewish cabal who seized power through an illegal election and other sinister machinations, but don't get us started on that.

That a substantial constituency in the United States and throughout the world embraces or sympathises with this idiotic conspiracy-theoretic fantasy is a global catastrophe. We hope that the United States, and the world, can survive it.

Solomonia interviews Boston University History Professor Richard Landes about his new media watchdog project. The content is eye-opening.

At Ynet, The Golem learns of the special training that allowed Israeli soldiers to stay superhumanly composed during the evacuation of Gaza under the most extreme verbal abuse.

Cox & Forkum have finally come up with a design for a World Trade Center replacement that would satisfy the Left.

And LGF recalls Bob Hope and claims that some things don't change.

In Niger, millions of people are starving:

"For Niger's nomads, the situation is desperate. To these people, losing your animals is like losing your life savings. Without their animals, they have no means of survival," said Natasha Kofoworola Quist, Oxfam's Regional Director for West Africa.

That is a bona fide emergency. But Oxfam has a sinister take on the problem:

"Twelve centuries of nomadic culture are threatened with extinction if these people do not get long-term help to rebuild their livelihoods," she added.

Niger's nomads are so poor that if a family loses a single animal they might die. Because they are nomads, they can't do simple things like store food or set up irrigation systems to save their cattle when it is very hot, which happens a lot in Niger. And they have been living and dying like this for twelve centuries! Haven't they suffered enough yet? Why should it be their role in life to satisfy the voyeuristic needs of Westerners who consider it of paramount importance that someone (other than their too valuable selves) be made to act out spasms of quaint desperation for ever and ever?

Of course the charitable folk are as keen as any game warden to save the lives of the half-people in their human game reserve. But heaven forfend that the inmates ever acquire the means to escape. So they want to tailor their ‘help’ in such a way that it saves the inmates' lives but leaves their cruel, foul predicament – delicately referred to as ‘their unique nomadic culture’ – unchanged and unchangeable.

We have a better idea. There's this new fangled thing called agriculture. Instead of tuning their policies to make people limp from crisis to crisis in appalling poverty just so that the relationship of benefactor and grateful supplicant can continue, let charities give money instead, and with it, access to knowledge that would allow the nomads out the wilderness. If their unique culture should fail to survive this challenge, then good riddance. Let it go to the hell from whence it came.

Gordon Brown has said that if Robin Cook had not died he would have made him his deputy when he became party leader (and presumably Prime Minister). His reason would have been to restore “trust.”

Whose trust does he want to cultivate? Robin Cook was a socialist who felt he had “sold his soul” by joining up to New Labour. Presumably New Labour's superficial prattle about a Third Way between capitalism and socialism put off Cook who preferred more overtly socialist nonsense.

Cook also famously opposed the liberation of Iraq. So Brown wants to cultivate the trust of socialists who oppose deposing evil dictators who fund terrorism. The leader of a nation should argue for the policies he thinks are right and to purusue them as successfully as he can. After France fell in 1940, some members of Churchill's Cabinet wanted to accept a “peace offer” from Hitler. If Churchill had tried to win his colleagues' “trust” by pandering to this nonsense, he would have been guilty of a shameful abrogation of his responsibilities. Instead he gave them a speech that persuaded them not to surrender. Mr Brown has shamefully pandered to the worst elements in the Labour Party, hard core socialists and antiwar noisemakers.

Another potential leader has also shown that he can't be trusted. Potential Conservative Party leader Malcom Rifkind said:

“I believe it [the Iraq war] was a wrong war, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. The war was an extremely foolish and unnecessary one. The consequence has been to create a political vacuum in Iraq itself.

“Terrorists are operating within Iraq in a way we didn't have in the past, so the war has certainly assisted international terrorism in Iraq. If you destroy an existing regime - however evil it may be - you create a political vacuum...”

That is nonsense.

“If a prime minister has led his country to war on a false basis then he should bear the full responsibility. He should have resigned. If I had led the party at the time that would be the policy I would have pursued.”

That too is a bizarre remark. When a Prime Minister makes decisions about war and peace he must do so on the basis of the best information available. If that information turns out to be wrong he should only resign if this problem is a result of wrongdoing or incompetence on his part. There is no reason to think that was true in regard to the information on Iraqi weapons stockpiles, and all the other reasons for deposing Saddam turned out to have been underestimated.

Nor has Mr Rifkind explained how we can prevent terrorists from attacking Britain without removing tyrants who sponsor terrorism, like Saddam. Sometimes we may be able to do this without a war by sponsoring a resistance movement or through economic sanctions. But Saddam's Iraq was a Stalinist police state and economic sanctions did not harm Saddam's regime and had proved ineffective. Mr Rifkind and Mr Brown are opportunists who cannot be trusted to lead Britain in a time of war.

Cindy Sheehan has been causing a bit of a stir by following President Bush around trying to ask him why he killed her son. Her late son was a Marine who was in fact killed by the enemy. She seems to have changed her story about the President since she met him last year. But anyway, now a holy man, the Reverend Lennox Yearwood (leader of “the Hip Hop Caucus, an activist group”) has called her the “Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement”. We agree. Just like Rosa Parks, Cindy would do a lot of good if she tried her very best to get on a bus, sit down quietly in the seat of her choice, and ride it all the way home.

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Update: Solomonia has two good posts which anyone interested in the Cindy Sheehan phenomenon ought to read: Not a Saint and A Judenhass Horse.

Most decent people writing on the internet take care not to link to hate sites, such as those promoting antisemitism or Holocaust denial, if they can possibly help it. When they do have to link to them, for instance in order to illustrate a point about the hate-promoting ideologies themselves, they accompany the link with a warning of the evil that lies at the other end.

Adhering to such a policy is important for several reasons, one of which is that one does not want to become a source of publicity for hate sites, either directly or by increasing their score in search engines. Another is that one has a responsibility to readers, a proportion of whom must be young, or newly interested in the field in which one is writing, not to seem to endorse false claims such as Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and the associated conspiracy theories.

Wretchard of Belmont Club has not been adhering to such a policy. As we noted here, he recently linked to a major Holocaust-denying site, without comment. Today he has linked to an extreme antisemitic site (National Journal), again without comment.

On the first occasion, the passage that he quoted contained nothing directly hateful: it was merely a rather strained interpretation of George Orwell's writings, which compared Western media today with totalitarian ones, and also happened to contain the mistaken opinion that the Allied bombing campaign in World War 2 was genocidal. But one does not have to look far to see the role that such ideas play on that site, and the rest of the essay from which the quote is taken contains explicit Holocaust denial. On this occasion, again, the page that Wretchard links to contains explicit antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and the main content of the page is a deranged attempt to deny that anywhere near six million Jews could have been murdered, apparently on the basis of a misprint in a copy of the Daily Mail in 2003. Again, the passage that he quotes contains none of the hateful material.

We have seen no trace in Wretchard's own writings of any ideology of hate. Quite the contrary, he seems to be a passionate supporter of Western values. But his policy (or carelessness?) in this regard is not right. We urge him to be more careful about the sites he chooses to link to in future.

President Bush is the latest person to have been fooled by the disingenuous pseudo-scientific claptrap called ‘Intelligent Design Theory’. This purports to provide a scientific critique of the prevailing theory that the complex adaptations in living things came about through Darwinian evolution, i.e. through many rounds of random genetic variation and natural selection. Instead, it proposes that they were intelligently designed. The President has called for schoolchildren to be “exposed” to this “alternative”.

It is sad that the President has an embarrassingly deficient grasp
of science. But, let's face it, so do most people (see the Appendix and weep). Even though the vast majority of the population, including President Bush, are subjected to a dozen years of daily science lessons as children, including evolution lessons, very few of them could tell you what Darwin's theory of evolution is, let alone why it is preferable to any given crackpot alternative. There is no reason to assume that an Intelligent Design lesson would be any more effective than an algebra lesson or a French lesson.

So the issue is symbolic rather than practical, both for schoolchildren and for the President. Fortunately, like most people, the President does not work in a laboratory. His flawed understanding of scientific method makes little difference to anything important.

Fortunately too, unlike his political opponents, he does know the
difference between war and other types of struggle. And between right and wrong. And between liberty and tyranny. And between the West and its enemies.

Here's a “rare but effective” photo-fisking by Michael J. Totten (via InstaPundit).

Will Juan Cole respond with the same grace as Molly Ivins? Don't count on it.

When Yasser Arafat died, the world's conspiracy theorists predictably went into a frenzy of accusing Israel of having poisoned him.

This was not a conspiracy theory.

Although it fits well into the conspiracy-theoretic world view because it shares some of the attributes of conspiracy theories, it lacks a key attribute by which we recognise conspiracy theories as irrational and as false. As we have said in the first post in this series, a conspiracy theory is:

• an explanation of observed events in current affairs and history (✓) … which
• alleges that those events were planned and caused in secret by powerful (or allegedly powerful) conspirators (✓), who thereby…
• benefit at the expense of others (✓, sort of), and who therefore…
• lie, and suppress evidence, about their secret actions (✓), and…
• lie about the motives for their public actions (x).

For the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to have had Arafat poisoned, he would not have needed to lie about his motives, only his actions. Sharon and his government had said many times that Arafat was a mass murderer and actively engaged in terrorism, so their publicly announced and defended policy of targeting such people would in principle apply. It was only out of expediency that they had decided not to kill him. This means that the operation, had it existed, would have required no dupes: the active cooperation of only a few senior officers, politicians, undercover agents, and possibly a military scientist or two would have been needed, and all of them could have been informed of the operation's real nature and its real purpose. Hence there would have been no need for the impossible task of promoting dupes to conspirators, which is an archetypal flaw of conspiracy theories.

Lest any readers misunderstand our example here, we must stress that it is not even remotely plausible that Sharon had Arafat killed. But that is because of the specific political, military and moral circumstances, and not, as in the case of conspiracy theories, because the idea is irrational in its form.

This is a very bad sign about Pope Benedict.

As Thomas Friedman and many others have pointed out, criticism of Israel is not the same as antisemitism, but systematically singling out Israel for disproportionate condemnation most certainly is. And that is especially so in regard to Israel's anti-terrorism and security policies, which are a moral beacon and an example to all other nations, in a lowering and cynical world.

The Pope should wake up and see that light.

Fidel Castro says he is honoured to be Elian Gonzalez's friend. It is therefore safe to conclude that the Cuban authorities have been straining every sinew to ensure that Elian's experience of life in Cuba is the best possible one, and that he misses no nuance of the case for communism in general and for Castro's rule in particular.

Nevertheless, it won't stick. Elian is eleven now. We predict that despite all that effort, before another eleven years have passed, he will no longer be a communist. You heard it here first, folks.

What makes us think so? Communism, despite seeing itself as rational and humanistic, despite believing in science and in progress, just isn't convincing to people who live it. All the 24/7 output of the relentless Eastern European communist propaganda machines, running in an almost hermetically sealed environment for 40 years, were unable to lodge the idea in the minds of the victims. The moment the guns were no longer pointed at them, the Poles and the Hungarians and Czechs and all the other captive nations just shrugged off the memories of the Young Pioneers and all the values by which they had been living, in many cases all their lives, as if they had been a passing daydream. Even in Soviet Russia, after 70 years, the ideology hardly fared any better. Likewise, once Castro dies, no Cubans will remember for long what they ever saw in him.

Communism, though it resembles religions in some ways, is very unlike them in this one.

On Thursday 7 July, Islamist terrorists murdered over 50 Britons in a suicide bombing attack. The Metropolitan Police regard this as a terrible crime and are working to hunt down the people responsible.

However, the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers are funding an Islamic academic called Tariq Ramadan to speak to the Middle Path conference in London on July 24 to the tune of £9000. So what will Mr Ramadan say?

Asked by one Italian magazine if the killing of civilians was morally right, he replied: “In Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, there is a situation of oppression, repression and dictatorship. It is legitimate for Muslims to resist fascism that kills the innocent.” Asked if car bombings were justified against US forces in Iraq, he answered: “Iraq was colonised by the Americans. Resistance against the army is just.”

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said:

“Clearly this man has views about the struggle in Palestine and the struggles in Iraq which I find very difficult or offensive.

“(But) unless we hear these voices we are going to be in trouble...”

Sir Ian, and the other Mr Blair, do not seem to understand what they are doing. Mr Ramadan, who is barred from the United States for security reasons, is inciting violence against innocent people in Iraq, in Chechnya and in Israel. Incitement to violence is a criminal offence so Mr Ramadan is a criminal. Has he given convincing assurances he will not repeat those opinions again? If not, the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers are knowingly sponsoring him to commit a crime, and have therefore also committed a crime.

But they think that they are going to be “in trouble” unless they commit it. What sort of trouble?

Update: A correspondent writes "He's not just inciting violence. He's inciting war." Indeed.