Excessive Immigration

by Winston C Banks

  Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, was found blasphemous by Muslims and a fatwa was issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran to kill Rushdie. The book was banned, burned, and bookshops attacked. A large reward was offered for Rushdie’s murder. The affair had international proportions and Rushdie was forced to go into hiding for many years. The fatwa is still in effect. The reaction among non-Muslim Westerners was mixed, with many saying he should never have misused freedom of speech to portray Muhammad insultingly. It is this feeble protest against the monstrous fatwa that has had far reaching consequences. We could say it culminated in the murder of twelve members of staff at the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. We cannot say this however because we do not know when enraged Muslims may strike again with what they regard as legitimate defence of their Prophet. Indeed, the rise of ISIS and whatever similar militant groups may follow it suggests that formal or anxious voluntary censorship will remain a feature of Western life. Some of us have been shocked to witness this regressive development in the West, and moreover witness support for it among other religious groups and the politically correct community.

  The Rushdie affair is complicated. He himself was born in a Muslim family in Bombay and was educated both in India and Britain. He is a British citizen who has lived in New York for years. Most Britons have not read his books and they probably do not think of him as strictly ‘one of us’. But the fatwa did arouse a spirit of quiet outrage that an Iranian Ayatollah could voice incitement to murder well beyond his own country’s borders and cause widespread violence and censorship. Many were simply mystified that fiction could excite such homicidal passions. The combined impact of the fatwa, of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and associated Islamist terrorist incidents means that we are subdued. Rather than Khomeini and other violent Muslims being the villains, apparently ‘lslamophobes’ are now the main suspects of villainy (Titley et al., 2017). Tiny microaggressions against ‘the oppressed’ are the chronic focus of attention. Freedom of speech has been diminished and in some cases made illegal. Much has been written about free speech and its limits, about the responsibility of citizens to be sensitive to others’ traditions and feelings. One of very few to defend absolute freedom of speech is Kapoor (2017), and the online publication Spiked regularly calls for expansive free speech (e.g. O’Neill, 2017c). Those deemed to be in need of protection against hate speech include many who exploit the naïvety of liberal promoters of new laws to effectively silence opponents.

  Since these matters are still developing internationally, perhaps it is understandable that clarity and the will to tackle them are lacking. Most of our judgements in this arena are now of an emotional and damage limitation kind. Some believe that when the Dutch politician Geert Wilders says he ‘hates Islam’ or the French novelist Michel Houllebecq calls Islam ‘the most stupid religion’, these are self-evidently racist hate statements to be condemned and the speakers should face court action, as they have done. What then is the status of this statement: ‘I dislike the religion of Islam and I consider it is probably the most backward and aggressive of all religions’? Is this legitimate opinion? Is it hate speech? Can the claim that Islam is more aggressive than other religions not be observed or objectively evaluated? Can this statement be compared with the absurd claim (illegal in many parts of the world) that the Holocaust never happened? Was Enoch Powell making hateful racist remarks or simply expressing his observations and concerns? Is Ingrid Carlqvist, a Swedish investigative journalist who exposes suppressed race-related crime rates in her country (as well as questioning aspects of the Holocaust), a reprehensible, hate-generating person? As far as I know, one can make public criticisms of Christianity or of white Englishmen without too much fear of censorship, death threats, or being fired from one’s job.

  It can be argued that conditions are febrile, that Muslims in Europe are currently targeted and vulnerable to 1930s-style persecution of Jews, and are therefore a special case in need of protection. If so, however, how is that to be balanced by necessary attention to those who would exploit this ‘special case’ and claim a defence of victimisation, as many terrorists who hide behind human rights laws do? In the context of mass immigration and failing multiculturalism, tacit codes of conduct cannot be taken for granted, universal decency cannot be assumed, and trust is limited. One of the side effects of our unwillingness to clarify these matters is that leftist critics often refer to dogwhistle politics and discourse. But if you cannot openly and without fear of attack say exactly what you mean, you are forced to use euphemisms, which can then be called dogwhistle tactics. This is all part of radical SJWs’ chess game.

  The head of the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Alison Saunders, has said ‘Left unchallenged, even low-level offending can subsequently fuel the kind of dangerous hostility that has been plastered across our media in recent days’. This refers to ‘hate crimes’ committed online and proposes harsher sentences for perpetrators. The move has links with an alleged rise in people feeling emboldened to voice their views about immigration following the Brexit referendum, and to a recorded rise in the incidents of retaliatory rhetoric following Islamist terrorist atrocities (Saunders, 2017). The reported rise in hate crimes includes anti-Semitism, online abuse of children, insults against Muslims, and unpleasant things said about everyone who is PC-protected. But while the police may deal with 15,442 hate crime prosecutions, with an 83.2% conviction rate (2015–16 figures), jihadis are plotting their next massacre, paedophile rings are going unchallenged, foreign criminals are illegally entering the UK, and burglaries are going under-investigated. Public bodies like the CPS and police forces appear to lack the sense of proportion required to prioritise their endeavours. Hate crime is a new and emotive topic, and warrants some scepticism and close philosophical analysis. Hate crime can indeed include actual murder, but its very definition also hinges on the perception of the victim. Wolf-whistling at women has been mooted as a potential hate crime. Anyone publishing anything critical of transgender issues, Islam and mass immigration can be accused of a hate crime. We surely need to know what low-level offending really is in relation to nebulous laws focusing on self-reports of self-defined perceptions of feeling hurt by something someone said. Soon we will need an exhaustive public document outlining exactly what can and cannot be said or written. I am offended by what the Quran says about infidels. Gays are offended by the Quran. Everything is offensive to someone!

  Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has spoken out against what she sees as the widespread Islamophobia of British media. Actually, she referred specifically to the Daily Mail, Daily Express, The Sun, and The Times. She accuses them of ‘poisoning our public discourse’, of exploiting ‘bigoted stereotypes’, and says ‘hate speech has become a plague’. ‘Islamophobia is Britain’s latest bigotry blind spot. It’s where the respectable rationalise bigotry, couch it in an intellectual argument and present it as public interest or honest opinion that allows the rot of Islamophobia to set in’ (Ruddick, 2017). Warsi has been embroiled in several controversies, including one with Anjem Choudary in which he expressed his view that she was not a true Muslim. Warsi is one of five children born to Pakistani immigrant parents in West Yorkshire (her father is successful businessman), and she herself has five children. She has opposed what she regards as the ‘militant secularisation’ of Britain. She was critical of the Casey Report (2016) for its focus on Muslims as problematic. (The Guardian complained that Casey mentioned Muslims 249 times but Polish communities only 14 times.) Given Warsi’s critical position on hate speech, we must ask where she would draw the line between bigotry (to be outlawed as a hate crime) and legitimate intellectual opposition to Islam and mass Muslim immigration, as expressed for example by Douglas Murray (2017), Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2015), Bruce Bawe (2006), Raheem Kassam (2017) and many others. Is the honest opinion expressed in this book rationalised bigotry? Is it a stereotype to say that Muslim families are larger than the average British family, th
at Muslims commonly practise cousin marriage, that Islam appears to have some medieval characteristics, or that Islam is currently the home of the majority of terrorists?

  The disjunction between religious calls for increased censorship and modern respect for rationality and free debate is alarming. There is no way around the stand-off between traditional religious dogma and logical-scientific analysis and open expression of views. From the rational point of view, religious appeals to divine revelation and scripture are backward, rooted in pre-scientific and non-rational beliefs. We can search for more euphemistic, sensitive terms for this — anachronistic, regressive, and so on — but I share the common secular view that religion is of the past and science and rationality of the future. Accuse me of temporal and rational supremacy if you will, and argue for the special protected status of religion, but for some of us all religion including Islam is anachronistic. Inviting or allowing hundreds of thousands of believers in the most fundamentalist of religions into the UK, indeed into Europe, is to invite conflict (Bawer, 2006; Murray, 2017). Most Muslims are not about to set aside their adherence to Quranic dogma, and their increasing numbers in the West put ever greater pressure on those who regard God as a defunct and ridiculous myth. We can keep our mouths shut or pretend to respect religious claims. Or we can speak openly and risk being accused and convicted of hate crime, or even being killed. We can ignore or take seriously the threat posed by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation which opposes free speech against Islam. ‘One of its main goals is to internationally outlaw and ultimately criminalize all criticism of Islam, Muslims, Islamic terrorism, Islamic theocracies, or Sharia law,’ in the view of Weiss (2012). The OIC lobbies the United Nations and European Union to seek such changes in international law. As Ruthven (2002) puts it, the ‘geological accident of oil’ allowed Saudi Arabia to ‘create the outer shell of modernity … without undergoing the epistemological revolution, the institutionalization of doubt — that made modernity possible’. It is this sacralised banishment of doubt or sceptical reason that links Saudi Arabia through Wahhabism to ISIS and, we might say, to the hermetic wall of political correctness that effectively banishes freedom of speech from Western university campuses (Winegard & Winegard, 2018).

  Another area in which confusion reigns is academic freedom of research, publication and expression. I have discussed some of the problems of race and IQ above. Should such research be banned altogether in the interests of interracial peace? Is it inherently mischievous or racist? Are there any conclusive, objective ways of evaluating it? And who is to decide? Currently there is a growth in departments of black studies and of publications critiquing white history and allegedly racist institutions. Should we assume that this is all legitimate and non-mischievous? ‘That British academics tend towards the left is pretty obvious and unsurprising’, says Morgan anecdotally (2017), who nevertheless criticises the lack of formal evidence for this. Should we seek to implement affirmative action policy here, and hire more right-wing, pro-white staff? Should restrictions on freedom of speech at British universities be re-examined (Stevens, 2017)? Should leftists be free to exercise online censorship against certain Wikipedia entries, for example, that they consider to be racist hate speech, fringe theory or disputed research, while others are silenced? Do British publishers favour left-wing authors? The conundrums are endless.

  I have mentioned elsewhere the case of Bruce Gilley, whose scholarly paper on colonialism was first accepted, and then withdrawn under pressure. Most academics who have dared to express in writing views not favourable to the liberal egalitarian worldview, have experienced career difficulties, sometimes extending too to death threats. Consider too the work of Rushton (1997) on race differences, whose original publisher, Transaction, came under intense pressure from left-wing academic groups in the social sciences to withdraw the book, which they did. Such actions are always perpetrated on grounds of alleged racist science, poor research and hate speech. But it looks increasingly likely that they are actually motivated by a totalitarian, Cultural Marxist suppression of anything that challenges egalitarianism. The anti-racist mob is characterised by taboo and censorship rather than by free expression and viewpoint diversity.

  15

  Speculations on Decline and Inequality

  The main focus of this book is on the modern UK and immigration into it, but some brief probing of large-scale patterns driving migration and conflict should be helpful. As I have argued, the perspective of the left on the global distribution of wealth and state of well-being tends towards two somewhat contradictory positions. First, in the view of leftist academics, particularly cultural anthropologists, the notion of a worldwide hierarchy of industriousness, creativity, talent, intelligence, co-operation and other traits is inadmissible. There are no better or worse societies, no primitive and modern, and there is no better historical trajectory than others. All cultures are equally valuable, or the West may even be seen as inferior in some ways (see Diamond, 2013). All differences are to be treasured, except those deemed bigoted or unorthodox. Secondly, however, where there are significant differences, especially around wealth, health, infrastructure and other indices of national well-being, those at the ‘lower’ end of the scale owe their sorry state to the historical actions of the West. The causes of problems of the Third World, or developing world, are invariably to be laid at the door of past invasions, exploitation and colonialism of Western powers. But they are also due to an ongoing capitalist rape of resources, aggressive foreign policies, and massive historical debts. In other words, advanced economies benefit from the plight of poor countries and are squarely guilty. Even where foreign aid is given to poorer countries, this is never enough, it is patronising, and fails to address the real problems.

  The continent of Africa is the prime example. Leftists invariably lay the blame for its ills with colonialism, even fifty and more years after this ended (Meredith, 2013). A no doubt extremely unpopular and necessarily simplified hypothesis for African woes goes roughly as follows. (This is obviously open to critique, modification, or outright rejection by outraged anti-racists.) Africa is the cradle of the species, from where the first diasporas gradually fanned out across the globe. The climate and environment was once very different, and those anatomically modern humans who lived in northern Africa and others who moved into the Middle East probably benefited from those advantages but also from cumulative experience in overcoming physical adversities, solving problems, and developing cognitive sophistication. Those ‘ecotypes’ who remained behind may have flourished in their own way but did not evolve in such cognitively complex ways as those who went ahead. By some accounts, some African countries liberated from British colonial rule sank into helpless chaos, just as Russell (2010) has argued that some black American slaves on being freed lamented the lack of direction facing them and pined for the old plantation days. This narrative is disputed by writers who describe complex African cultures that were grievously disrupted by Western invasion and colonial rule, and have yet to recover (e.g. Mendonsa, 2002; Rodney, 2012). Calderisi’s (2007) argument follows the line of corrupt dictators, mismanagement, tribalism and dependency. We can link this with the claim that African IQs are among the lowest in the world and correspond with the lowest levels of wealth (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2002; Rindermann, 2018) and health (Eppig et al., 2010). Add to this argument the fact that over 50% of Africans are under the age of 18 (Calderisi, 2007). This is projected to rise to almost a billion by 2050, when 40% of all the world’s children will be in Africa. African population will be at 25% of total world population by 2050, and 39% by 2100 (BBC, 2014). Blame colonialism forevermore if you wish, but these trends are deeply worrying for Africa, the world, and countries in the West to which many Africans continue to flock.

  We might ask, why is it that the ever-rootless and persecuted Jews, who can claim to be among the first of relatively modern diasporas, even in their minority numbers became so resourceful, successful, intelligent and influential? Invid
ious as it may be to ask, why did the same thing not happen substantially with Africans? Why is it that former British (and European) colonies like Singapore have been able to develop themselves and become relatively economically prosperous? Are the arguments above pure racism, misinformation or faulty inference, or do they carry some explanatory weight? It should be stressed that I am not claiming that Africans are culpably lazy or incapable. There may well be some explanation for under-development that combines geodeterminism (the fortuitous influence of place, geological features, climate, disease, animal distribution, natural resources, etc.) with timing, opportunity, tradition and other external factors. Eppig et al. (2010) advance the theory that parasite prevalence and infectious disease may contribute to the uneven spread of cognitive abilities, which chimes with cold winters theory insofar as northern climates tend to repel or reduce disease carrying parasites.