Discovered: The deficit is about spending. The crisis, its speculators and its victims. Nuclear excuses. Islam and the open society. Burkas for pictures. When opposing fundamentalists insult the moderates.

 

1. A headline that was not but that could have been “Obama visits: Conditions in the Gulf of Mexico deteriorate.”

 

2. Ignored interrelationships. (1) There is only one way to reduce the deficit caused government outlays. Would you believe this? It is by cutting spending. (2) There is a reason why item 1 is so hard to digest. Reducing expenditures may be good economics but amount to bad politics. The less deserved an allocation the more vigorous the support it generates.

 

3. Markets are efficient. At the same time, this efficiency is limited by the rationality of those that participate in them.

 

4. Not the guesses of inebriated roulette players have caused the losses of investors. Market participants acted on falsified data and they were influenced by the politically inspired and market-defying signals that governments had emitted.

 

5. It is a ritual to pillory “speculators” that are claimed to be responsible for conspiring to ruin tottering debtor states. Actually, behind the charged term there are savers. Often they acted as members of pension funds. As such, they turned over what they put aside for a rainy day to a state they naively trusted.

 

6. The UN has boldly taken a position to advocate global nuclear disarmament. Subtly it is to begin with Israel. This must be a splendid idea as nuclearly virginal Iran cheers it. Naiveté is potentially deadly. This is the derivate of a reoccurring delusion that is embedded in that attitude. Gullibility feeds on an assumption that amounts to a mirage. Accordingly, even self-declared foes are, if treated with forgiving kindness, as ”nice” as  the sucker considers himself to be. This fact-ignoring innocence prompts those that suffer from the ailment to pursue a policy what amounts to suicide. A cute example comes from a recent letter to the editor. Its translated version is “Once Israel has dismantled her atomic weapons, no state of the Near East will continue to have the wish to acquire this instrument of power”. The assumption behind this forecast is that the “Muslim Bomb” is a means of dissuasion protecting those that Jerusalem threatens with extermination. In the light of the repeatedly expressed future foreseen for the “Zionist Entity”, a de-nuclearized Israel becomes a convincing reason to acquire WMDs.

 

7. The 64-thousand dollar question is whether Islam does fit into a democratic system. In a way, the question is not a question. It has been answered numerous times, both in theory and in the praxis. Alas, the results unearthed have always been the wrong, that is non-PC ones. The central problem issues from the concept of the desirable relationship between state and church. Even in case of the devout, in the advanced democratic and mainly Western entities, the principle of separation prevails. Here one would argue that the arrangement is to the benefit of both the worldly and the spiritual order. Islam’s tradition considers that the state is a worldly expression of the heavenly order. This determines not only the purpose of the state but also makes it subject to the supervision of those whose mandate comes from God. A democratic order will limit – and subject to revision – the power of all parties that are subject to its jurisdiction. At the same time, it upholds the right of any minority to take peaceful action designed to become a future majority. In fact, much of the effort of politics is to channel this process. Implied is a right to criticize but also to hold any order and its laws to be transitory. Democracy not only allows that the governors be deprived of power through a peaceful process but also assumes that this will happen in the future. In sum, democracy’s leadership, goals and order is alterable. Its detailed ordnances are regarded as fallible and disobedience, meaning dissent, – if within the law that protects all – is regarded as natural and constructive. Islam’s provisions for guiding the worldly order are not only different but also irreconcilably in contradiction. Islam does not believe in the separation of powers. Separating the branches of power and limiting their purview implies that, at times, they might be wrong. Serious conflicts are also to be found in the area of minority rights. Democrats assume that minority and majority roles are subject to a healthy rotation. No decision is irreversible. Eternal and unalterable qualities relating to right and wrong have nothing to do with achieving and losing pluralities.

At the same time, Islam assumes that legitimate government is an instrument of God and not of men. Therefore wanting to overturn and even criticizing a rule that claims a mandate of heaven is not a right. Nor is it a fitting subject to be decided by the judgment of a voting majority. For Islam, power comes from God. The worldly order is a blurred mirror image of the heavenly one. The order to which men are capable of is, due to man’s limited comprehension, inferior to what Deity ordains. The result produces men that are assumed to be inferior to those that are enlightened. Therefore, disagreements with the anointed interpreters of God do not amount to a right. Much rather, such dissent constitutes a crime against the natural order and that demands chastisement. Given that disagreement is not a legitimate position flowing from an alternative understanding of potentials and interests, there can be no minority rights – only, at best, a limited tolerance for deviants. As a result, opposition is a sin and its expression must be suppressed by the righteous.

In the abstract, Muslims might be right. At the same time, it stands as proven that, the views and values of their perspective contradict the assumptions and conditions of democratic theory and practice.

 

8. Shut down the museums. Mohammed, in one of his tantrums, had stated that all painters wind up in hell. The obvious reason for this pronouncement must be the work they do. This our fashionably sympathetic intellectual elites ignore as long as their exhibitions continue to be subsidized by the taxpayer. Sin involved in the activity as well as in what artists depict, makes museums into collections of evil works committed in the service of Satan.

Anticipate a future non-negotiable demand. The assemblage of evil works should be closed to the entire public because such collections disturb the sensibilities of some fellow-residents. Alternatively, there are ways to insure that the items exhibited are prevented from causing harm by giving rise to dirty thoughts. How about just enclosing the offending items into a burka?

 

9. That, as it is repeatedly emphasized, not all Muslims are radicals is obvious. This, however, does not solve the problem created by those that are. A pronounced affinity to radicalism among the adherents is undisputed. Even Communism has not produced per capita nearly as many radicals as Islam does in its current state of development. The cited observation plays a role in the struggle between laissez-faire native culture and immigrant intransigence. This is the case when Islamist encroachments that propose to curtail the rights of the indigenous to pursue their way of life, is to be countered. Those that like to remind host society of the limited following of radicals are, with questionable logic, inclined to oppose measures against subversive fundamentalists by pointing out that these would insult “all Muslims”. If this would be so then, the implication is that “all” Muslims are closer to the radicals than to the values of the majority whose hospitality they have petitioned to enjoy.