Go here.

See it, hear about it.

Never forget it.

In a recent post on attempts by Jews to ‘remove Christmas from the public square’, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line – one of our favourite blogs – quoted the historian John Steele Gordon as saying: ‘It has always seemed to me that it was not Jews but atheists (a religion of its own in that it is a belief system that is untestable) who have led the charge against public celebrations of Christmas as an “establishment of religion”.’

It is with the parenthetical assertion about atheism that we join issue. Atheism is not ‘a belief system’  - it is the absence of belief in the supernatural. The statement ‘God does not exist’ is not provable, but that does not make it a religious statement, a statement of faith. God’s non-existence does not impinge on any aspect of an atheist’s life or thought. It is not just that God is not watching or does not care. He is not there, at all, ever. The Christian deity lying in a manger, the miracle of the oil in the Hannukah candles, the flying Santa Claus are all  in the same category of idea: incredible, imaginary, supernatural. If an atheist wants such religious symbols to be banned, he or she is showing an irrational superstitious belief in their power, and deserves ridicule.

If some atheists object to any display of fairy folk, or God folk, or magic objects – provided worship of them is not required – it is not because their non-belief is offended, but because they decide to put on a show of being offended in order to make political points, to flex their political muscle. Such atheists are almost certain to be on the Left. I would guess that the Jews who object to nativity displays in public places at Christmas are also politically motivated, and that they too are on the Left. I cannot see how the deification of a Jewish boy should cause religious offense to those who do not believe it. Other people’s irrationality is their own business. Religious offense-taking is the hall-mark of leftist victim politics – and is invariably fraudulent.

C. Gee  December 29, 2009

Anti-Jewish feeling, speech, and action is intensifying in Britain.

It’s understandable, of course, after what Jews have been doing in that country: killing and maiming with bombs in London underground trains and a bus, leaving a car with a bomb in it on a busy street in the middle of the capital, driving a van full of explosive into an airport – doctors doing this, mark you, people ostensibly dedicated to saving lives! Oh, and much more: terrorist conspiracies; raping, beating up, murdering on the streets; evading deportation and becoming a huge drain on the tax-payer; demanding that their own religious law replace the law of the land; insisting that their polygamous marriages be recognized; building their houses of worship in every town and city and broadcasting their calls to prayer every few hours; setting up religious schools that teach hatred of Christians and sedition against their host country; establishing academic departments and even whole colleges in the great universities in order to promote their never-ending campaign to convert the whole world to their religion; turning areas of London and other cities into no-go areas within which they carry out the traditional honor killings of their wives and daughters without fear of interference from the British police —

The list could go on and on …

A noisy, demanding, aggressive, cruel, useless, ungrateful, parasitical lot, those British Jews!

What did you say? It’s not the Jews doing all that? Oh, who is it then?

The Muslims? Really?

Then why are the Jews being reviled?

The following is from an article in the Wall Street Journal, by Robin Shepherd (who was dismissed from his job at the Royal Institute of International Affairs – Chatham House, as it’s called – for being pro-Israel):

Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.

The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide.” The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.

In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper’s flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group’s virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a “Protocols of Zion”-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.

Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain.

Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark documentary, “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby,” on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.

The makers of the documentary—top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors’ own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power.

It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.

“The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza,” they wrote. “We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it ’strives to protect innocent life.’ This remark was not intended satirically.”

Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.

If you think this all sounds familiar, you’d be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”—another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.

But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.

It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. …

Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment’s reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.

Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4’s widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby’s “seditious behavior,” its “disgusting attack on British democracy,” “the hand of global Zionism at work,” and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: “We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out.”

If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.

Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel’s defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.

Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel—already a small and diminishing group in Britain—will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the “Lobby.”

Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.

In fact, the Jews of Britain, as a group, are a rather flaccid lot. They seldom protest when they have every reason to do so, and if they raise objections to anything they do it as timidly as mice. They don’t firmly contradict the lies put out constantly and insistently about Israel by the BBC and big daily newspapers such as the Guardian and the Independent. Their community activity consists of quietly raising money for charities, not all of them exclusively Jewish. They are anxious to show that they are loyal subjects of Her Majesty, and Israel is their lesser concern. Some stupid British Jews have been so anxious to show that Israel means nothing to them – or how much they intensely hate it –  that they have striven to bring about academic and commercial boycotts of that small beleaguered land.

England was the first country in Europe to expel all its Jews in 1290. A few hundred were allowed back by Oliver Cromwell after 1656, and some thousands more after the restoration of the monarchy. In the late 1930s King George VI – the present queen’s father – objected to allowing Jewish refugees from Germany into Britain, calling them the scum of the earth.

Needlesss to say, Jews have made an enormous contribution to Britain, most notably in science, medicine, commerce, literature, and even occasionally in sport (as demonstrated in the film Chariots of Fire). In return Britain has not officially persecuted them in the last four hundred years or so as other European countries have done in the name of Christian love.

But now there is such a rising tide of hatred against them in Britain that they would be best advised to leave. They should emulate the Jews of France, who are emigrating in their thousands. They should not linger anywhere in Eurabia.

Better to risk another genocidal attempt against them, this time by Iranian nuclear attack, in Israel, the one country where they can defend themselves – which is precisely why most of the world wants to destroy it, of course.

It happened many times in the history of Europe that a state drove out the Jews, then regretted doing so when it found itself the poorer, and so invited them back again. Now voices are raised about the sad plight of Berlin since its Jews were ‘driven out’, never to return.

We may hear the sound of bitter laughter from the ghosts of European Jewry (though not apparently from stupider Jews living in Germany now) as we read this, by Paul Belien of the Hudson Institute:

Thilo Sarrazin, a Bundesbank director who criticized Turkish and Arab immigrants in a recent interview, has been punished by his employer and may lose his job. Apart from receiving threats by Islamist extremists, he may also be taken to court by the German authorities on charges of “incitement to racial hatred.” For many Germans, however, Mr. Sarrazin, who until last May was Finance Minister in the regional government of the state of Berlin for the Social-Democrat SPD, is a hero.

Last week Axel Weber, the president of the Bundesbank, Germany’s equivalent of the FED, needed body guards on an official visit to Istanbul. Normally, the head of the German central bank never travels with body guards, but life at the Bundesbank has changed since two weeks ago. Lettre International, a German cultural magazine based in Berlin, published an interview with Thilo Sarrazin, in which the Bundesbank director criticized the unwillingness of Turkish and Arab immigrants to assimilate into German society. The interview provoked the anger of these very immigrants. Immigrant groups accuse Mr. Sarrazin of espousing the “racist views of the far right.”

His boss, Mr. Weber, however, does not want to become the target of angry Muslims. He has apologized to everyone who might feel offended by the “discriminatory comments” of the Bundesbank official. In fact, the Bundesbank issued a statement, distancing itself in the strongest terms from the interview. It also demoted Sarrazin; he may even be fired altogether.

In the Lettre International interview, Sarrazin talked about the economic and cultural situation in his hometown of Berlin. He argued that Berlin has been unable to recover the cultural and economic status and prestige it had before the Second World War. Even its contemporary population figure of 3.2 million is lower than the pre-war 4 million. Sarrazin says that Berlin’s dynamics were broken when the city lost its Jews: the Jewish elite were driven out and instead the city acquired a Turkish and Arab underclass.

“The large scale disappearance of the Jews could never be compensated,” Sarrazin said. “Thirty percent of physicians and lawyers, eighty percent of all theatre directors in Berlin in 1933 were of Jewish origin. Commerce and banking were also largely Jewish. All this has vanished; it was also a considerable intellectual loss. Sixty to seventy percent of the extermination and expulsion of the Jews in the German speaking countries affected Berlin and Vienna.”

Sarrazin argued that during the Cold War, ambitious and dynamic people moved away from the highly-subsidized West Berlin while left-wing activists and drop-outs took their place. Meanwhile a Turkish and Arab underclass was imported, which also lives mostly off government subsidies without making economic contributions to the city.

“Berlin has a bigger problem than elsewhere of an underclass that does not take part in the normal economic cycle. Many Arabs and Turks in this city, whose numbers have grown as a result of wrong policies, have no productive function except selling fruit and vegetables,” Sarrazin said. The plight of his home town makes him very bitter. He lashed out at what he called policies that were “too plebeian” instead of elitist. “Anyone who can do something and strives for something with us is welcome. The rest should go elsewhere,” Sarrazin told Lettre International. The Turks, however, “are conquering Germany in the same way that the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: through their high birthrate. […] I do not need to acknowledge anyone who lives off the state, rejects this country, does not take proper care of the education of his children and keeps producing little girls in headscarves.”

Since the publication of the interview, Sarrazin has received threats from Islamists. The Social-Democratic SPD Party has started a procedure to oust him from its ranks. He has also been criticized by the Central Council of German Jews, whose General-Secretary Stephan Kramer compared his comments about Turkish and Arab immigrants to the “opinions of Göring, Goebbels and Hitler.” The Berlin prosecutor is currently examining whether Mr. Sarrazin can be prosecuted for the crime of “racial incitement.”

An opinion poll indicated, however, that 51 percent of the Germans agree with what Mr. Sarrazin said. Conservative newspapers, such as Die Welt, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the mass circulation Bild have come to his defense, arguing that he has merely stated uncomfortable facts. Prominent Germans, such as former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the writers Henryk Broder and Ralph Giordano, have also spoken out in support of the Bundesbank official.

Helmut Schmidt, the nonagenarian former leader of the Social-Democrat SPD, said that the presence of seven million immigrants in Germany are proof “of a wrong development for which the political class [of the past 15 years] is responsible.” It would have been better, Mr. Schmidt told the weekly magazine Focus, that those who refuse to integrate into German society “had been left outside.” He added that “The further inflow of people from Eastern Anatolia or Black Africa will not solve the problem [of Germany’s ageing population], but will only create an enormous new problem.”

Ralph Giordano said that Sarrazin’s analysis was “right on the mark.” Henryk Broder stated that he “does not even go far enough.” Since both Messrs. Giordano and Broder are Jewish, their support for Mr. Sarrazin has earned them severe criticism from the Central Council of German Jews, whose Mr. Kramer derisively called both men “Jewish intellectuals.”

On October 14th, Jasper von Altenbockum, an editorialist of the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote in his paper that Mr. Sarrazin’s frank remarks were proof of his great “civil courage.” “Civil courage is more than just courage. It is also a service to the state, whose legal constitutions and social achievements are worth defending.” Mr. Altenbockum criticized those who accuse Sarrazin of acting irresponsibly and foolishly. “In a civil society it is not considered foolish to risk one’s own existence when one defends the civil society and its freedoms and security. What is foolish is for the civil society to punish those who act this way.”

In contemporary Europe, leading a life surrounded by body guards has become normal for people such as Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who criticizes the Islamization of his native land, and Kurt Westergaard, a Danish cartoonist who made a drawing depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Thilo Sarrazin has now joined their ranks.

From the Telegraph:

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver. The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth. The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past. Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: “This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad’s background explains a lot about him. “Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith. By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society.”

A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that “jian” ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. “He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had,” said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. “Sabourjian is well known Jewish name in Iran.”

Does not compute …

Does not compute …

Does not compute …

A. C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, writes in his book Against All Gods (Oberon Books, London, 2007):

It is time to reverse the prevailing notion that religious commitment is intrinsically deserving of respect, and that it should be handled with kid gloves and protected by custom and in some cases law against criticism and ridicule. It is time to refuse to tiptoe around people who claim respect, consideration, special treatment, or any other kind of immunity, on the grounds that they have a religious faith, as if having faith were a privilege-endowing virtue, as if it were noble to believe in unsupported claims and ancient superstitions. It is neither. Faith is a commitment to belief contrary to evidence and reason… [T]o believe something in the face of evidence and against reason – to believe something by faith – is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect.

He further asserts that ‘it is the business of all religious doctrines to keep their votaries in a state of intellectual infancy’, and that ‘inculcating [any one of] the various competing falsehoods of the major [or minor, for that matter] faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal’.

With these opinions we agree.

But we are not  sure that he is right when he  declares in the same book that religion is on the decline, and ‘as a factor in public and international affairs it is having what might be its last – characteristically bloody – fling’.

If he is alluding to the jihad being waged by Islam on the rest of the world – as he surely is – it is certainly bloody. But whether it will prove to be religion’s last act on the world stage, or  fail in its aim to spread Islam as the predominant faith and only system of law on earth, is uncertain. A belief that mankind as a whole is continually progressing towards an ever more reason-directed future, can only be held on faith. Grayling seems to have that belief, that faith. But we do not.

With the spread of Islam through Europe, and the election of Obama in America, there is a double threat  to individual liberty, and so to the triumph of reason; because reason can flourish, create, and persuade, only where individuals are free.

The founding myth of the monotheistic faith that evolved into Judaism, is the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which Abraham sacrifices to his god not his son but an animal. The story is often interpreted as an hortatory tale about having to obey God. But that is not its significance.

Its essential message is that the God of Abraham, the one and only God, does not require human sacrifice.

The idea of a god who did not want human beings sacrificed to him was a great leap forward for mankind. The other gods of ancient times were all given human flesh to eat and human blood to drink. The huge statue of the god Moloch was a hollow bronze image, a human body with a bull’s head, in which his worshippers, the Canaanites, made a fire and heated the metal until it glowed red-hot, and then they fed their first-born babies into the furnace through the gaping mouth.

Such gods, it was believed, needed propitiation with human flesh and blood, suffering and death, so that they’d allow the tribe to survive and prosper.

The Chaldees, whose god Ba’al was the counterpart of Moloch, similarly sacrificed living people. It was from them that Abraham and his tribe broke away, both in a physical-geographical sense, and in a moral-religious sense.

One of the four main reasons why Jews faithful to their religion could not possibly accept Christianity was because Christ was held by Christians to be a human sacrifice. No idea could be further from Judaism (and would certainly have been absent from the mind of an orthodox Jew like Jesus of Nazareth). The other reasons were: God cannot be incarnate; God is One, and cannot be Three as Christianity holds its triune divinity to be; and Judaism requires obedience to the Law. The Jews were set free physically when they left Egypt where they had been slaves, and became a free civilization when they were granted and accepted the law – traditionally fifty days after the accomplishment of the exodus. Law protects and guarantees freedom. Freedom is only possible in practice under the rule of law.

St Paul, the author of the Christian religion, was willing and eager to abandon the Law. The Catholic Church did not after all do this, and accepted Judaism’s moral law though not its rituals.

As a people, the Jews’ first great gift to humanity was the idea that God, an abstract being, was a moral authority who required people to treat each other justly, and did not himself require them to suffer or die for him.

When the center of their religion, the Temple, was destroyed by the Romans in the first century CE, and they were exiled from Jerusalem and dispersed from their land, the Jews clung to their religion, adapting such rituals as it was possible for them to observe in the absence of a Temple and a priesthood; and their faith held them together for two millennia as a people though they were physically scattered through the world.

With the coming of the Enlightenment in Europe, and then the Age of Science, belief in the supernatural began to die in the Western world generally. But the Jews still needed to adhere to their religious tradition. Only since the land of Israel has been restored to them, has the Jews’ need for religion as a kind of abstract glue to hold them together become less compelling.

It is true that orthodox Jews still observe the religion as it has long been observed. But orthodoxy has spawned a crowd of rivals, some of which have become such broad churches that traditional Judaism is hardly discernible in them. Rabbis (male and female) in Reform synagogues now call God ‘he or she’, and even speak of a plurality of gods. What is left of Judaism there? And if the answer is nothing, does it matter? For ever-increasing numbers (even in America), all religions have passed their use-by date.

If the State of Israel were again to be destroyed – a tragedy that looks all too possible now – would the religion revive to bind the Jews together again?

Just possibly, but much more probably not. The only thing that could and should bind the Jews together in this age is loyalty to their peoplehood in the light of their history. But that is a nationalist kind of idea, and nationalism is despised by the loudest intellectuals of our time. Many of those loud voices are Jewish voices. Treasonously they decry Zionism – the nationalism of the Jews – and raise moral objections to the existence of the Jewish state. If the State of Israel is destroyed, brought to political extinction, can the Jews continue to exist, either as a religion or as a people?

Jillian Becker  June 3, 2009

Christians in Islamic states are being continually and ruthlessly persecuted and slaughtered.  Heads of the various Christian churches, Western Governments, the big political parties, and the mainstream media are pretending it’s not happening.

Click on the video (from David Horowitz’s Freedom Center) to learn how bad it is. 

Meanwhile, because European governments and political parties are refusing to acknowledge that there is any threat to the survival of their indigenous cultures as Muslim numbers grow by birth and conversion, neo-Nazi parties are gaining support among the electorates. Angry voices are calling for the forceful expulsion of Muslims. There is reason to fear outbreaks of Muslim and anti-Muslim violence this summer in many parts of Europe. The stench of genocidal hatred is in the air.

What should be attacked are not Muslims but the ideology of Islam. Not people, but ideas. The fight should not be with clubs, fists, boots and guns, but with words. Islam should be argued against, rationally, strongly, persistently in every public forum, actual and electronic, that our civilization has at its disposal.

Yet the UN is trying to stop all criticism of that cruel, intolerant, oppressive, murderous creed.

Furthermore, it’s hard to argue against the nonsense Mohammed taught without also pointing out that all other religious belief  is equally absurd. True, Judaism and Christianity do not preach moral evil as Islam does.  But Christianity has practiced it (both the Catholic and Protestant branches have burnt their heretics), and besides, any insistence on irrational belief is corrupting.

But as the Taliban take over Pakistan and its nuclear arms; as Ahmadinejad prepares his nuclear bombs to destroy the Jewish state; as the Sunni fanatics of Hamas gain support from the Shias of Iran (as well as from Obama’s administration); as Hizbollah takes control of Lebanon; as Turkey turns Islamist; as Somalia ferments jihad on the high seas; as terrorists train under Somali and Pakistani jihadis in camps scattered through the US; as Christians are slaughtered in Indonesia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan; it would seem clearer than ever that the  human race would be better off without religion. 

We enjoy reading Mike Adams, and see eye-to-eye with him on many political issues.

Where we do not agree with him – as with the otherwise admirable Ann Coulter – is on religion.

Well, we’re atheist conservatives and they are Christians, so that’s no surprise.

Today in an article in Townhall titled ‘Liberty and Tyranny’ – well worth reading in full – Mike Adams criticizes statism, progressivism, and the left’s ideal of equality. We share his views on them. Then he comes to the question of ‘rights’.

He asks ‘a serious question: If rights are not bestowed by a Creator, then under what conditions do they exist? In other words, who bestows them?’

The answer is nobody unless the state. A right can only be granted in law. Because we do not believe in a supernatural lawmaker, a Creator of our universe and us, we do not accept the idea of ‘human rights’ at all, or of ‘natural rights’.

We prefer to say that we human beings are – or ought to be – FREE to do whatever we choose provided we break no laws. Law sets limits on our freedom, and should do so rationally and equally.

Nobody’s ‘right’ whether in sentiment or law should ever impose an obligation on another person, except the obligation of restraint. Whoever it was who said, ‘the freedom of your fist ends where my nose begins,’ expressed it perfectly. A list of rights according to Franklin Roosevelt – as quoted by Adams – includes: a right to a useful and remunerative job and a wage adequate to provide food and clothing and recreation; a farmer’s right sell his produce for enough to give him a decent living; everyone’s right to a home, medical care, pensions, education and more. It is an endorsement of the Marxist notion: ‘to each according to his need’. Those who hold to that creed believe that a man should receive in exchange for something he sells – his labor, an artifact, or whatever he offers – the payment that he wants.

But our wants are limitless, while the value of what we have to sell is not.

Only the free market can determine value. A buyer will pay as much as the thing he is buying is worth to him. The more buyers who want the thing on offer, the higher the price will be.

The only alternative to economic freedom is distribution by tyrannical government. A government that arbitrarily distributes the wealth of the people is by definition a tyranny.

You can never have liberty and equality. The choice is between freedom and equality. (By which we mean economic equality: equality before the law is essential to freedom.)

In freedom, if an individual wants to earn more, he can do so by providing more and better goods and services. That is to say, we assess our needs for ourselves and work as well as we can to get the money to pay for them: which could be summed up as ‘from each according to his need’.

Will we get as much as we want? That will depend on our individual ability.

So we reverse the Marxist tag ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need,’ and make ours, ‘from each according to his need and to each according to his ability.’

The market will decide the reward. All we can do is our best. We have no ‘right’ to demand handouts from others on the grounds that we ‘need’ what they have.

To put it another way, socialism is theft.

You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media which long since stopped reporting truthfully from the Middle East, but Christians there, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, are suffering severe persecution by  ’the religion of peace’.  Many seek asylum in Israel. 

This month Pope Benedict is to visit what both Christians and Jews call the Holy Land. Denis Maceoin, in an article that first appeared in the Catholic Herald, has some advice for him.

An urgent matter on the pope’s agenda must surely be the plight of Christians in the West Bank and Gaza. Harassed by militant Islamic groups, the Christian population there has been dwindling. In 1990, Christians made up 60% of the population in Bethlehem; today, a mere 19 years later, they number just 20% and that figure is shrinking rapidly. Christians in the Palestinian territories have fallen in numbers from 15% of the population in 1950 to less than 1% today. Calls have been made for their extinction, and attacks are regularly made on institutions and individual Christians. More and more Christians pack their bags and flee. In Israel, their numbers have risen from 34,000 in 1948 to more than 140,000 today. If the pope does not speak out and make this an issue of international concern, the bombings, the beatings and the intimidation will continue, and before very long the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem will be left to the tender mercies of Islamic Jihad.