Why I’m optimistic about multiculturalism
I agree with Toby Young below. English customs, traditions and attitudes are powerful in helping people to get along with one-another. Australia retains a strong English influence but is even more multicultural than Britain -- and we too have an almost seamless multiculturalism.
When I sit in my favourite breakfast cafe, I often find that among all the customers there is only one or two who have my fair Celtic skin. There are always people of Chinese and South Asians as fellow-diners there plus a great majority with Mediterranean skin -- presumably from everywhere between Spain and Iran. And there is NEVER the sligtiest disruption. People line up nicely to order their food and the waiters keep bringing out wonderful-looking meals. I have never heard so much as a raised voice. That is real-life multiculturalism at work.
And it so happens that I have these days a female friend of Indian heritage whom I am rather soppy about. See below:
Many of my conservative friends are beginning to catastrophise about the future of Britain in light of the pro-Palestinian protests that have erupted in our major cities over the past month. ‘I think you’re screwed,’ an American philosopher told me on Monday. ‘You should have raised the alarm about immigration from Muslim countries 25 years ago and now it’s too late. The fox is in the hen house.’
Such pessimism is coming to a head this weekend, with tens of thousands of protestors threatening to disrupt the Remembrance ceremonies which are taking place over two days owing to 11 November falling on a Saturday. If the two-minute silence is interrupted on either day by chants of ‘from the river to the sea’ or the Cenotaph has a Palestinian flag draped over it, we can expect a lot of hand-wringing about the failure of multiculturalism from right-of-centre columnists, as well as some Tory MPs. But unusually I find myself at odds with my colleagues on this issue. I’m not quite ready to conclude that a significant percentage of Britain’s Muslim population remains stubbornly unassimilated and rejects our way of life.
To begin with, the vast majority of Britain’s four million Muslims haven’t participated in these protests. Let’s suppose – generously – that 250,000 people have taken part in a pro-Palestinian protest in the UK since 7 October. If you subtract the 50,000 or so who aren’t Muslims but the usual middle-class rabble clutching Socialist Workers party banners, that means just 5 per cent of the Muslim population have been on the streets calling for the destruction of Israel.
And what of that 5 per cent? The press has focused on the most extremist people, like the two young women with pictures of paragliders stuck to their jackets and the young men using loudhailers to denounce the Jews – and such behaviour is deeply shocking. But there’s no evidence that most of the protestors support Hamas or Hezbollah or want Israel’s seven million Jews to be slaughtered by Islamist paramilitaries, even if that would certainly be their fate if the state of Israel ceased to exist.
I think the majority are engaging in a kind of wilful blindness, their natural humanity temporarily silenced by the excitement at being swept up in a tribal conflict. They remind me of QPR fans on their way to play a local rival like Fulham. Loud and intimidating and prone to chanting some quite unpleasant things, but they don’t even represent themselves – certainly not their best selves – let alone the entire population of Shepherd’s Bush.
Am I being too generous? Not according to the survey evidence. An ICM poll for Policy Exchange carried out in 2016 found that more than half of the UK’s Muslim population want to ‘fully integrate’ (53 per cent) and the vast majority share the hopes and concerns of the rest of Britain’s citizens. True, they’re more likely to believe conspiracy theories – 7 per cent believe the Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks – but they’re also more likely than the general population to condemn acts of terrorism (90 per cent compared with 84 per cent) and less likely to sympathise with terrorists (2 per cent against 4 per cent).
We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Britain is one of the most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith societies in the world. We have a Hindu Prime Minister, a Buddhist Home Secretary and a Muslim Mayor of London. Yes, there are occasional bouts of ethnic conflict, such as the clashes between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester following India’s victory over Pakistan in the Asia Cup cricket match last year. But, in general, Britain’s different ethnic groups rub along together remarkably well. In my part of west London I’ve never witnessed any racial tension. Catholic Poles and Muslim Somalis may not worship in the same temples, but when Saturday comes they cheer along the same football team at Loftus Road.
I hope I don’t sound too complacent. I know anti-Semitic incidents have increased by several hundred per cent in the past month, which is one of the reasons I helped create the October Declaration, an expression of solidarity with Britain’s Jews that has attracted more than 75,000 signatures. But I don’t feel as depressed about the future of our society as some of my fellow conservatives. I pray that nothing will happen to undermine the solemnity of the Remembrance weekend, and the pro-Palestinian protests will fizzle out as winter comes in. My hope is that the ugly scenes we’ve witnessed on our streets will be remembered as a blip, not as a watershed moment when we realised how catastrophic mass immigration has been for our way of life.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/why-im-optimistic-about-multiculturalism/
*******************************************************NewsGuard: Surrogate the Feds Pay to Keep Watch on the Internet and Be a Judge of the Truth
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” – beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser – “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as COVID-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the "overall reliability of websites" and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the Twitter Files revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works with through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations – such as the Stanford Internet Observatory – to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the Internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings – which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in – use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective – the New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100% rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80% rating.
Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5% rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5% rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the Internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95% of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and the New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process into libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. "We're asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.
NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing reputations.
A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer – whose COVID vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests.
The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during Twitter Files reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.
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The Greatest Hypocrites Are Among Us
Hamas is less hypocritical than its American apologists. This is clear after listening to the cant coming from many in our colleges and Congress. Hamas has been comparatively straightforward in its hatred and intent to exterminate Israel; not so for those seeking to cover for it here at home.
In 1948, immediately after Israel declared its independence, what is today known as Gaza was used as a launching point for Egypt’s (and four other Arab nations’) attack on Israel. Despite this failed attempt to wipe out Israel, Gaza remained under Egyptian control. It was then used again in 1967’s Six-Day War — yet another attempt to destroy Israel. After this second attempt, Israel remained in Gaza. (READ MORE: Five Stupid Things the Left Would Have You Believe)
In 1988, Hamas issued its charter, which clearly laid out its intent:
This is the Charter of the Islamic Resistance (Hamas) which will reveal its face, unveil its identity, state its position, clarify its purpose, discuss its hopes, call for support to its cause and reinforcement, and for joining its ranks. For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave.
Hamas identified itself and its enemy in no uncertain terms: “Hamas is one of the links in the Chain of Jihad in the confrontation with the Zionist invasion.” And there was no mistaking its goal: “Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: 0 Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”
Israel’s presence in Gaza lasted roughly four decades until it withdrew in 2005. In short order, Hamas won control of Gaza’s government. In 2017, Hamas released a revised charter that, in the words of a RAND Corporation analysis at the time: “appears to soften the group’s stance toward Israel”:
The major takeaway is that Hamas is open, at least in principle, to accepting the 1967 borders of a Palestinian state—a major sticking point in previous failed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Its previous position had always been to call for the destruction of the state of Israel.
Even so, the revision still contained “some of the more incendiary language of the original.”
Six years later on Oct. 7, Hamas apparently reverted to its original charter and its original intent by putting those earlier words into action. Yet some here in America continue to dispute both the words and the deeds of Hamas.
Early in the conflict they called for a ceasefire. They did not, however, call for one immediately — when Hamas was still conducting its prolonged terrorist attack. What came immediately were instead supposedly pro-Palestinian rallies, such as the one in New York on Oct. 8 that was organized by none other than the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — the party that includes Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), both members of the Squad (more about this far-left House group later). This pro-Palestine rally included the burning of an Israeli flag and a rally attender displaying a swastika on his cell phone.
On Oct. 16, several members of the far-left House group known as the Squad introduced a resolution calling for a ceasefire. It would be interesting to know if the ceasefire they imagine would look anything like what existed on Oct. 6 — before Hamas broke it with a hideous terrorist attack targeting Israeli citizens.
Does the ceasefire they imagine require Hamas to first release the hostages it had taken? Interestingly, the Squad members’ resolution makes no mention of the Israeli hostages Hamas took. Does it envision Hamas turning over the terrorists who committed the atrocities in Israel? These would all seem to be reasonable preliminary steps of a party now seeking ceasefire.
These apologists certainly profess concern about civilian casualties. But do they in any way blame Hamas for these — first for the innocent civilians that were its deliberate and premeditated targets in Israel and second for the innocent civilians that are its deliberate and premeditated collateral damage in Gaza? By embedding its terrorist infrastructure deeply in and around civilian targets, Hamas knew exactly what it was doing to the human shields it was using. And Hamas has used them in other instances for some time.
What those calling for a ceasefire in Congress and on campuses are seeking can be fairly ascertained from a video that Tlaib released, in which she included protesters chanting “from the river to the sea.” The river is, of course, the Jordan River, and the sea is the Mediterranean. What lies between these two points, Tlaib? Israel.
Despite Talib’s hollow claims that the chant is “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” from the river to the sea leaves no place for Israel. The chant is nothing more than the Hamas charter simplified into a slogan. It is not surprising that the House voted to censure Tlaib, but it is appalling that 188 members voted against it and four could only vote “Present.”
There have always been what the Bolsheviks once called “useful idiots” — those people who repeated the rhetoric and propaganda of liars bent on evil. While the two may seem but two sides of the same counterfeit coin, there is ultimately a forthrightness in the liar. Liars’ actions become their admission. There is a truthfulness in liars’ deeds that never exists in pure hypocrites — those who continue to insist that the lie is the truth and that what happened did not.
Hamas has made itself clear — an admission by atrocity — that it is who it said it was from the beginning. In contrast, its American apologists are still trying to obfuscate. They are still speaking the old, and now disproven, lies; still calling for our actions to respond to those lies.
America’s Hamas apologists are not the greater evil, but they are clearly the greater hypocrites. And, apparently, they imagine us the greater fools.
https://spectator.org/the-greatest-hypocrites-are-among-us-hamas/
****************************************************Women pay the price for the government's productivity ambitions
Despite a rapidly declining birth rate across the Western world, new research out of the United States shows many people want more children than they are having. The study published by Ohio State University’s Institute for Population Research suggests demographic decline could be reversed if people simply had the children they claim to want.
Yet birth rates in countries like Australia continue to fall. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that the birth rate has fallen three per cent since 2021 and the total fertility rate has dropped to 1.63 children per woman.
The reasons for this are both socio-political and financial. They are proof that we live in a society that increasingly does not value motherhood, children, or family.
Last week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made this abundantly clear during a recent keynote address to The Australian’s Economic and Social Outlook conference.
‘We’ve narrowed the gender pay gap to its lowest point on record– and we’re not done yet,’ he said. ‘That’s why we have made equality for women a central economic priority – because it is central to our future economic success.’
Increasingly the political class measure a woman’s success by her contribution to the national economy. This feeds into the narrative that success should be viewed through a commercial lens and that employment is empowerment.
Mr Albanese continued, ‘Making child-care more accessible and affordable is an economic reform that boosts productivity and participation for working women in particular.’ He added, ‘It has also delivered real and immediate help for around 1.2 million family budgets.’
What the Prime Minister pointedly failed to admit is this policy only helps mothers who want to return to the workforce, not the stay-at-home mum. Today’s policies around childcare, while pushed in the name of female empowerment, have everything to do with economic interests and very little to do with giving women a choice.
This is further exacerbated by an economic climate that is not family-friendly. According to the ABS, the average annual income for a man in Australia is about $90,000. However, with inflation at 5.4 per cent and interest rates recently increased to 4.35 per cent, the average salary does not stretch as far as it used to.
Confronted with rising rental and housing prices, many women are forced to return to work sooner than they would have liked. Cost-of-living has killed the stay-at-home mum, and for many women, the choice between returning to work or devoting more time to caring responsibilities has been made for them.
Today, women’s workforce participation in Australia is at 62.2 per cent. However, according to the latest Gallup poll, 50 per cent of women with children under 18 would prefer to stay at home.
Women are being sold a lie. It suits the interests of the political class to support the perception that wealth, career, and lifestyle are the key markers of success. It certainly suits the budget bottom line. The Prime Minister acknowledges this when he says that women’s productivity is ‘essential to boosting productivity’.
When you hear motherhood described as ‘unpaid caring’ and a ‘penalty’, replace those words with ‘unpaid taxes’ and a ‘penalty on the national GDP’. These politically opportunistic catchphrases have nothing to do with empowerment but are rather about encouraging women to make a rapid return to work.
Under the guise of supporting women, the Prime Minister in fact does a disservice to all women by making the ‘gender pay gap’ a top priority for his government.
Moreover, this type of rhetoric fuels the grievance industry by promoting the idea that the patriarchy is preventing women from succeeding in the workforce.
Our elected representatives should be focusing on much more pressing issues, such as improving the national economy by cutting taxes, income splitting, and making housing more affordable, thereby enabling families to survive on a single income.
The 3 per cent fall in the birth rate since 2021 speaks to a society that has forgotten the value of family and the stay-at-home mum.
While feminism has achieved huge wins for women, we must not be deceived by anti-motherhood and anti-family rhetoric. True liberation is about choice, not employment.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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