Aug 1, 2008

Time to scalp a wingnut, part 2: Browne in his own words

A follow on from my post earlier today, I've spent far too much time digging around dark and fetid corners of the web, places like The Spectator, collecting some choice quotes from Mr Browne. I'll comment on these later, maybe over the weekend, but for now, I'm going to let them stand on their own, as an archive. So no, no snark for you today.

"A popular topic for discussion on Arabic TV channels is the best strategy for conquering the West. It seems to be agreed that since the West has overwhelming economic, military and scientific power, it could take some time, and a full frontal assault could prove counterproductive. Muslim immigration and conversion are seen as the best path."
Saturday, 24th July 2004, The Spectator


"In Muslim tradition, the world is divided into Dar al-Islam, where Muslims rule, and Dar al-Harb, the 'field of war' where the infidels live. 'The presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule,' wrote Professor Bernard Lewis in his bestseller The Crisis of Islam.' "
Saturday, 24th July 2004, The Spectator


"In the last century some Christians justified the persecution and mass murder of Jews by claiming that Jews wanted to take over the world. But these fascist fantasies were based on deliberate lies, such as the notorious fake book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Now, many in the Muslim world are open about their desire for Islam to conquer the West."
Saturday, 24th July 2004, The Spectator


"At least, though, the Left in the Netherlands has seen that there is a clash between liberal democracy and cultural relativism; that some cultures are simply not compatible with Western traditions of freedom and tolerance; and that the old distinction between evil right-wingers and cuddly left-wingers no longer makes sense. It is one thing to turn a Christian church into a mosque, quite another to get radical Islam to accept liberal democracy. Outside the Netherlands, however, the Left has yet to learn these lessons."
Saturday, 20th November 2004, The Spectator


"Just as communism could only be upheld by totalitarianism, so multiculturalism is being upheld by curbs on free speech and democracy."
Saturday, 20th November 2004, The Spectator


"Is Hackney the future of the world? You may find it a horrifying thought, but many on the Left hope that it is. I don't mean the extortionate taxes, the crushingly bloated public sector, the government-by-political-correctness, the bankrupt school system, the dehumanising crime, the failing social services, and all the other things the Left love so dearly."
Saturday, 19th February 2005, The Spectator


"Even in supposedly Christian Europe, Christianity has become the most mocked religion, its followers treated with public suspicion and derision and sometimes — such as the would-be EU commissioner Rocco Buttiglione — hounded out of political office."
Saturday, 26th March 2005, The Spectator


"I have spoken to dozens of former Muslims who have converted to Christianity in Britain, and who are shunned by their community, subjected to mob violence, forced out of town, threatened with death and even kidnapped. The Barnabas Trust knows of 3,000 such Christians facing persecution in this country, but the police and government do nothing."
Saturday, 26th March 2005, The Spectator


"No, the real answer to why Britain spawned people fuelled with maniacal hate for their country is that Britain hates itself. In hating Britain, these British suicide bombers were as British as a police warning for flying the union flag."
Saturday, 23rd July 2005, The Spectator


"Britain's self-loathing is deep, pervasive and lethally dangerous. We get bombed, and we say it's all our own fault. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. The government and the BBC gush over 'the other', but recoil at the merest hint of British culture. The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London's internationalism — in other words, that there is little British left about it."
Saturday, 23rd July 2005, The Spectator


"Only in the last few years has it dawned on the government how dangerous the Left's war on Britishness really is."
Saturday, 23rd July 2005, The Spectator


"Livingstone also has — how shall we put this? — controversial views on relations with Muslim extremists. His notorious embrace of the Qatar-based, anti-Semitic, homophobic, totalitarian, Islamic extremist imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been roundly condemned. It wasn't only a naked appeal for the Muslim vote but was also driven by the principle that your enemy's enemy is your friend. Livingstone sees al-Qaradawi as a natural ally because they both hate America."
Wednesday, 28th February 2007, The Spectator


"No, it's lefties we should be furrowing our collective brow about. We shouldn't worry about the threat they pose to society (even though successful countries can survive anything except civil war and socialism)."
Wednesday, 5th September 2007, The Spectator


"The Left was definitely right on basic moral issues, particularly on promoting tolerance — whether it be gay rights, women's rights, or combating racism. But on most other social issues, it was wrong. About the causes of crime, family breakdown, the dangers of welfare dependency, personal responsibility, and the drawbacks of multiculturalism, the Right was right. When Iain Duncan Smith visited a rundown estate and was challenged: 'What are you doing here? This is Labour territory,' he replied: 'Yes, and look around you.'"
Wednesday, 5th September 2007, The Spectator


"Whether it is market forces in public services or multiculturalism, the Left first successfully demonises right-wing policies and then, when its own ideas fail, it adopts them without apology. The Left's great triumph has been to remain credible after adopting policies that it had demonised; the Right's failure has been to win the arguments but lose the debate."
Wednesday, 5th September 2007, The Spectator


"Universities are pretty much monopolised by the Left, and seem to rejoice in their lack of real-world impact. A whole raft of lobby groups from Liberty to Refugee Action to the Child Poverty Action Group get endless free BBC airtime promoting pretty uniformly left-wing viewpoints."
Wednesday, 14th May 2008, The Spectator


"In the US, the flourishing centre-right think tanks have helped push the whole political centre of gravity way to the right of that of the UK. The AEI is (in)famous for promoting the invasion of Iraq, while Heritage has kept social conservatism and the importance of religion high on the policy agenda. Cato has helped mute the siren calls of protectionism.

Those on the right of centre in Britain often complain that the Left has been far better at promoting its ideas, while commentators often complain about the shallow state of debate in Britain. But with such a weakened ideas industry, it's no surprise that our ideas aren't thriving. It would be far healthier for democracy and debate in Britain if our ideas industry managed to step up to the American level."
Wednesday, 14th May 2008, The Spectator


"The London magazine Time Out recently interviewed a Turkish immigrant who said that the English were now the foreigners in Stoke Newington. This, of course, was reported as a cause of celebration: we must celebrate diversity. We have to celebrate it, even though for white British people celebrating diversity basically means saying sorry. We have to celebrate diversity, because otherwise it might rise up and kill us: Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia, Israel, Rwanda, Gujarat, northern Nigeria have all recently suffered mass deaths as a result of diversity."
Anthony Browne, August 07, 2002, Times Online (cross-posted to VDARE.com)


"Mr Blunkett's warning shows just how dangerous it is to ignore the clear democratic will and impose mass immigration on a people that really don't want it. He in effect admitted that his policies of promoting legal mass Third World immigration while refusing to take action necessary to stem illegal mass Third World immigration are bringing Britain, normally one of the most stable democracies in the world, to the verge of anarchy."
Anthony Browne, January 28, 2003, VDARE.com


"The turning point was the murder of a policeman during a raid on a North African Islamic "asylum seeker." Asylum is the favoured means of illegal immigration to Britain, because once you just say "asylum" you get a whole range of benefits, housing, full health care (including free plastic surgery) and free immigration lawyers who will string your claim out for years, and then when eventually your claim to be escaping persecution is rejected (as happens in 90 per cent of cases) you can just stay in Britain anyway because the government finds it too hard to make anyone leave who doesn't want to."
Anthony Browne, January 28, 2003, VDARE.com


"This political earthquake is rumbling in Britain (the "coming storm" as the left-wing Observer newspaper put it) but it will explode once Islamic terrorist illegal immigrants claim the first life of an innocent civilian–not just a policeman–on British soil. The fear that will rip through the country when that happens will force the government to act, but the tragedy is that it will have set back race relations in Britain decades.

In the battle between the British public and the human rights lobby, it is Britain's five million ethnic minorities, and two million innocent Muslims who will be the real losers."
Anthony Browne, January 28, 2003, VDARE.com



"And although the government broadcaster, the BBC, feels compelled to brainwash the people about the delights of multiculturalism at every opportunity, the national newspaper media is both incredibly powerful and overwhelmingly right wing (there are few left wing papers, and
they are the worst selling)."
Anthony Browne, December 07, 2002, VDARE.com


"Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate."
August 1, 2005, Times Online


"The support of Islamic fascism spans Britain's Left."
August 1, 2005, Times Online


"Rather than tackling intolerance, it [Political Correctness] now promotes intolerance, brooking no criticism and denouncing any critics. PC has a vice-like grip on public debate and policy making, setting out what can and can't be debated, and what the terms of the debate are: anything or anyone who digresses from the PC script is automatically controversial."
January 4, 2006, Times Online


"But even Britain's new Muslim ally in the War on Terror, Muammar Gaddafi, recently advised of the dangers of admitting Turkey. He referred to it as "a Trojan horse" and warned the West of rising Islamic radicalism on its streets.Europe is already far from a Christian club — there are 15 million Muslims in the EU, more than the population of most individual member countries. Macedonia and Bosnia both have large Muslim populations, and are all already destined to join the EU along with Islamic Albania. It is not Christian intolerance of Muslims that is driving the "clash of civilisations", but Muslim intolerance of Christians and Jews."
March 26, 2004, Times Online


"The sheikh has used his influential sermons to promote suicide bombing by Palestinians in Israel. Before the Left gets too misty-eyed about suicide bombings, it should remember that it can involve blowing to bits innocent children on buses."
July 6, 2004, Times Online


"Compare and contrast 2:
(a) Christmas trees and decorations are banned in Saudi Arabia;
(b) Christmas trees and decorations are banned in Britain's Jobcentres.

The extremes that other religions go to preserve their cultural
heritage is only matched in Christianity by its extreme death-wish."
December 21, 2004, Times Online


"Now the Christophobes are on the rampage again. The heirs of the Puritans and Communists have declared war on Christmas. But this time it is by stealth and guilt-tripping."
December 21, 2004, Times Online


"Once Christmas has been supplanted by a spiritually vacuous post-Christian orgy of consumption, the next phase of the war is to ban it altogether. Simply turn it, as Birmingham famously did, into a generic "Winterval" to make it equally meaningless to everyone."
December 21, 2004, Times Online


"No, the real Christophobes are the self-loathing, guilt-ridden politically-correct liberal elite, driven by anti-Christian bigotry and a ruthless determination to destroy their own heritage and replace it with "the other"."
December 21, 2004, Times Online


"The liberal Left need to ask themselves what they hope to achieve by giving such uncritical support to Islamic extremism. They may believe, in their naivety, that they are helping to combat Islamophobia, which is indeed a real problem. But instead they are encouraging it."
August 11, 2004, Times Online


"But winning arguments with reason, rather than rabid denunciation, is
difficult. Too difficult, too often, for too much of the Left."
February 13, 2003, Times Online


"One of the most powerful psychological foundations of political correctness is liberal guilt. Many in the West from middle-class backgrounds suffer a usually unspoken guilt about their unearned privilege, which in turn can lead to an under-current of self-loathing in their views. Men often feel guilty about being men, and whites often feel guilty about being white, even though these are innate characteristics they can do little about."
The Retreat of Reason, page 19


"The West's refusal to confront contemporary Islamic slavery is a reflection of the inability of PC thinking to engage a non-PC reality."
The Retreat of Reason, page 25


"The politically correct have a particular problem with crime. Their instinct is to support the criminal rather the [sic] victim of their crime, because criminals tend to be more socially disadvantaged…"
The Retreat of Reason, page 63


"Many of the politically-correct left - including the Guardian, the Independent, most of the BBC… - have chosen to champion those who are deliberately trying to murder innocent civilians."
The Retreat of Reason, page 11


"Many on the left in Britain supported the Ayatollah of Iran's call to murder Salman Rushdie for insulting Islam…"
The Retreat of Reason, page 50


"After a few days, the coverage of the terrorist attack was obliterated by saturation coverage of the accidental police killing…The reason was simply that the terrorist attacks, although a far more important story, didn't fit the politically correct agenda."
The Retreat of Reason, page 10


"The rise of political correctness represents an assault on both
reason and liberal democracy."
The Retreat of Reason, page 5


"A country that has long prided itself on its freedom of speech has been reduced by political correctness to a country where, despite endemic levels of violent crime, police spend time investigating and arresting leading writers and broadcasters for what they write and
say."
The Retreat of Reason, page 51

2 comments:

Julia Riber Pitt said...

It seems to me that the "war on terrorism" is an ideological battleground for the USA. Our government and media has created this new enemy (since the USA needed a new one after the USSR fell in order to remain the world's "hero") to fight, saying that the "terrorists" hate America because of our way of life and not what we've done to them. I think this will go on for a long while...

Cain said...

Well I think its a complex situation, and one that Browne seems to have simplified in the same way many on the American right do. Terrorism is always complex, even if you can put aside the morality of the issue and simply debate the facts (something only academia and the military seem capable of currently).

However, I do agree that certain sectors of the US political system did seem to be actively searching for an enemy. I don't think it was done to keep the world's favour though, but for more internal reasons. War keeps social progress, especially less exciting issues such as reproductive rights, economic justice, universal healthcare and similar off the topics of discussion. Having an existential threat keeps people preoccupied with the threat, because those things are seen as lesser needs.

It just so happens that these lesser needs coincide with what some of the Republican base, namely the Religious Right, Wall Street and closet racists, really want to see never happen.

There was a paper...I'm struggling to remember who it was by, but they were fairly well known Neocon cheerleaders...I think it was Bill Kristol and David Brooks....anyway, the paper was advocating a militarization of society for precisely these sort of reasons. I'll see if I can track it down or something.