timeimmortal

Kevin Myers crime? Well, as a man who spent some years living in Africa, he had the temerity to speak what he knew to be true about the problems on that troubled continent, and he did so in print:

When I went to Ethiopia* just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect).

I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even “racist” accusations about African male culpability.

This follows from an earlier article that he penned, in which he noted still more problems:

The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this.

…

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.

They are now — one way or another — virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

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How much Morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.

For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

And for saying as much, all of it good common sense, Mr. Myers could potentially be jailed…without benefit of trial. In Ireland, which is supposedly a free and democratic nation.

On the one hand, I expected some uproar in Ireland over my piece about Ethiopia on July 10. But there really wasn’t any. On the other, I didn’t expect an attempt to jail me by a state-sponsored body. Yet Denise Charlton, of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, has urged An Garda Siochana to investigate me under a special law, by which I could be tried and imprisoned for two years without even the benefit of a jury.

Oh, Denise, Denise, you silly, silly little girl: have you nothing better to do with your time and talents than to try to get someone jailed for saying something you dislike? So there we are. The apparatchiks of the equality industry merely have to contemplate the sector of their psyche wherein their self-righteous emotions reside: and if these are sufficiently overwrought, they decide that a hate-crime has been committed.

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So, “a lot of Africans” are “all very offended”, are they? All of them? The poor dears. Well, if the countries on whose behalf they get so easily offended are so bloody marvellous — Sudan? Rwanda? Zimbabwe? Sierre Leone? Congo? Somalia? Eritrea? Etcetera? — why aren’t they enjoying themselves back home?

Just so.

The above are not easy words to read; I personally doubt that Mr. Myers intended for them to be easy to read. The reality of Africa — and even of the outcomes of the various aid monies that flow in to that troubled continent — is not an easy truth to hear, and I doubt there is any way to put it to paper in a palatable manner, save to gloss over the really nasty bits in favour of heart-wrenching stories about babies with bloated bellies.

And make no mistake: starvation, especially of infants, is a damnable tragedy. But nothing is really being done about this by simply pouring more money into the various countries that make up Africa — in the end, what is achieved is that governments are propped up which have no business being in power in the first place. The cycle of injustice is thus free to continue.

Positive developments do occasionally occur in Africa, admittedly, but one notes that many of these are intrinsically linked with foreign missions that see Westerners come in to Africa (once more) to take an active role in e.g. the construction of bridges and water systems.

But now, apparently, a man stands to be jailed in Ireland for saying as much.

* a quick note, for those who will attempt to lay blame for all this at the feet of the colonial escapades of e.g. Britain and France: Ethiopia was never a colony.

I remember still the article that moved irregular correspondent Nicholas to first comment on the site here — it centered on a young girl from Ireland who was seeking the right to obtain an abortion in England. Apparently, her unborn baby had been diagnosed with a rare genetic condition that would not allow it to survive more than a few days once born.

Such things make for heated discussions, and there is no way to deny that such issues are, to say the least, charged. At the same time, though, one issue that doesn’t always make its way into the discussion (thus rendering such discussions “less than accurate”) is the issue of how often doctors, and other medical professionals, make mistakes — how often, basically, is a diagnosis made incorrectly?

Grace and I recently declined an elective diagnostic procedure concerning her pregnancy. The name of the procedure eludes me at the moment, but basically it’s a passive test for indicators that might point to our baby having certain genetic conditions, e.g. . The problem with the test, though, is that its false positive rate is absurdly high — 50% or so, if I remember the literature correctly. Hardly a…reliable indicator, and yet I would guess that more than a few babies have ended up being aborted in Edmonton on the sole basis of that single positive outcome.

Now, obviously, the condition that the young Irish girl’s baby was diagnosed with is more severe than Down’s. But does the reader remember what I said above? Yes, the diagnosis was grave…but one wonders if the question was ever asked concerning whether the diagnosis was accurate.

When Leeann Phelan was told her unborn baby had an incurable brain abnormality, she faced an agonising decision.

Doctors said he would be stillborn or severely disabled and advised her to have an abortion.

But Miss Phelan and her partner Stephen Crane stoutly refused and carried on with the pregnancy.

Now at six months old, tests have proven that little Jayden was wrongly diagnosed and is a fit and healthy little boy.

Due to pregnancy complications he had to be induced 13 weeks early, and bravely fought for life.

At 23 weeks, he was one week short of the current abortion limit of 24 weeks, which was set with the received medical wisdom that babies born that premature do not survive.

If there’s one thing that holds true in regard to children, and then especially infants, it is that they often seem — through no direct intent of their own other than the normal will of all human beings to live, thrive, and be loved — intent on spitting in the face of received wisdom and the knowledge of their elders. Little Jayden Phelan not only emerged from the womb in defiance of a diagnosis that mandated a grim fate for him, but he did so at a point in his development that most doctors say affords the infant no real chance of survival…and he lived.

The kid has spirit, to say the least. And his story makes one wonder: it is obvious that many babies have been aborted because doctors told the mother that their child had any of a host of abnormalities or defects. How many of those diagnosis were incorrect? How many babies died needlessly?

Phelan and Crane deserve more than a little bit of praise, methinks, for bravely sticking it out in the face of received medical wisdom, and for choosing the life of their child over their personal convenience. It is hard to bring a disabled child into the world, harder still to face the prospect that one’s child might be dead at the moment of its birth…and it takes real courage to face such things.

Such courage is often in short supply these days, and it is good that Phelan and Crane not only had it, but had it to spare, and passed it on to their son.

So it appears that, at a cost of $5 million taxpayer dollars, Quebec has determined that the Islamic hijab is “no real threat to Quebec values,” despite acknowledging that it sometimes “signifies submission and oppression, pure and simple.”

Meanwhile, over in Ireland, people are a bit more sane:

If Muslim men are so keen on seeing their headscarf introduced into Irish society, they should wear it as well as their women. Let them cover up, too.

Otherwise there must be no place for the hijab in civic life here. Not in banks, hospitals or libraries, not in the guards or civil service and most definitely not in schools.

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Here’s what banning the headscarf is about: the State demonstrating our belief in gender equality. It’s about removing a symbol of repression and submission. Showing we don’t condone marks of separation — either between men and women, Muslim and Christian, or native born and immigrant.

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Today the hijab which covers the hair and shoulders, tomorrow the niqab or full-face veil, the day after the burqa hiding everything from tip to toe — described as a mobile prison by women obliged to wear it.

You can bet your bottom dollar Islam will complain about discrimination. That’s fine, we allow freedom of protest unlike many Islamic counties. But it is not discriminatory to ban the hijab in a country that is culturally Christian.

Conclusion: don’t move to Quebec. Move to Ireland.

If you didn’t give up beer/alcohol for Lent, O Reader, have a pint for me! And someone pinch me! I totally forgot to wear green today.

Also, I don’t care if it means I am white — Guinness really does taste better across the Pond.

Because it’s cool.

Blind Irishman gets his sight restored when doctors insert his son’s tooth into his eye.

I’m not making that up, either.

Here…details:

The technique, pioneered in Italy in the 1960s, involves creating a support for an artificial cornea from the patient’s own tooth and the surrounding bone.

The procedure used on McNichol involved his son Robert, 23, donating a tooth, its root and part of the jaw.

McNichol’s right eye socket was rebuilt, part of the tooth inserted and a lens inserted in a hole drilled in the tooth.

Who thinks this stuff up? I mean, seriously…who looks at the eyes and the teeth and thinks “Hey, we might be able to do something if we combine these things?” Just amazing.

My thoughts and prayers go out this day to the victims of the terrorist attacks in London — I pray that God’s merciful salvation will see the many dead received into His arms, and that the Holy Spirit will guide and aid the healing of the wounded.

In the aftermath of these terrorist attacks, there will probably be a lot of commentary (again and again, flogging the dead horse again…) about the “root causes” of Terrorism, and I think that most of this commentary will eventually devolve into scathing condemnations of three things:

a) George Bush
b) The “Zionist” entity and Israel
c) the “quagmire” in Iraq

And none of it will even come close to the truth.

The root cause of terror, this terror, isn’t a desire to promote a political cause, nor is it a method of protest against oppression. Not in the case of al-Qaeda. Their “root cause” is much simpler than economic disenfranchisement or neo-Marxist “liberation”. They seek to kill the infidel…which would be us. Mark Steyn weighs in with a timely quote from a couple years back, when some French ships were the target of terror attacks. It appears the terrorists were hoping to take out an American ship, but the French boats worked too…they were all infidels. Here’s the relevant excerpt, for people too lazy to click on the link:

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On which subject, the Independent’s Robert Fisk thinks the Aussies were targeted for a more specific reason—blowback for being too cosy with the Great Satan: “The French have already paid a price for their initial support for Mr Bush. The killing of 11 French submarine technicians in Karachi has been followed by the suicide attack on the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen. Now, it seems, it is the turn of Australia….” And don’t worry, there are plenty of others who’ll be getting theirs any day now. Just in case al-Qa’eda had missed one or two, Fisk helpfully provides a useful list of legitimate targets: “Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon…”. Blessings be upon you, Mister Robert, we had entirely forgot to add “Kill the Irish” to our “To Do” list.

I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added “initial” to that French “support for Mr Bush”. The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their foreign minister, M. Vedrine, was deploring American “simplisme” on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam’s best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, “We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.”

No problem. They are all infidels.

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(c) Copyright Mark Steyn, 2005, all rights reserved.

And even as I see that there are some people already weighing in with “root cause” commentary that pretty much follows the above predictions (see here, here, here, here, and here for starters…and then here for some laughable CIA paranoia), I’d just like to say that I hope the British government will show itself to be above such hypocrisy and address the real causes — the terrorists themselves, and the war they have declared against the infidel.

Because really, this “root cause” bleeding-heart talk is all pretty hypocritical, if you get right down to it.

Think about it…if al-Qaida or Hamas is justified in blowing up a bus in England or a restaurant in Tel Aviv because they perceive that the western Zionist oppressors are killing innocent Iraqis or Palestinians without cause and are driving the Islamic faith to ruin, then why isn’t some anti-abortion activist justified in blowing up an abortion clinic because s/he perceives that the pro-abortion oppressors are killing innocent unborn children without cause and are driving the moral fabric of society to ruin? Whether it’s a bus or an abortion clinic, it’s terrorism and it’s murder to blow it to pieces and kill people in doing so, so if you’re going to legitimize one and not the other then you’re committing a hypocrisy.

And if now you’re thinking “hah, now at least you’re admitting that Christians commit acts of terror too when they blow up clinics”, then I think you should read one of the recent articles at relapsedcatholic, and then the article that the author, Kathy Shaidle, links to from there. That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t blood on the hands of some of those who claim to be Christian…but it IS to say that in many cases, the amount of blood is probably far less than many of my more liberal-minded acquaintances would prefer to see on the hands of members of a faith system they hate with almost irrational passion.

It’s both funny and tragic to me, and Mark Steyn has again commented on this (although sadly it appears that the relevant article is no longer linked from his page), that many of the same people who speak out against violence against women, oppression of women, violence against homosexuals, and discrimination against minority religions (i.e. “non-Christian” religions in the West), and who speak out in support of corruption-free elections and a vague concept of “freedom”, do so only in the West, in their own nations. On the global stage, many of these self-same people would be willing to plant themselves in the camp of fanatical theocrats and dictators who force women to wear burqas, who believe that the removal of the clitoris is the rite of passage into womanhood, who behead homosexuals — or toss them off rooftops, as the Taliban were fond of doing — and whose electoral process makes a mockery of concepts like democracy and “freedom”, all in the name of opposition to the even greater world threat: America. Saddam Hussein can execute and gas his own people, the Sudanese government can slaughter and rape Christians willy-nilly for the crime of not converting to Islam, and the “socially liberal” champions of individual rights here in the West are often the first to criticize America, Austrailia, and even Britain when they decide to go toe-to-toe against a dictator like that…or, come to think of it, when a Christian tries to peacefully convert them by handing them a pamphlet. If the Sudanese government stopped at pamphlets, there’d be a few thousand more Christian human beings alive today, and a few less trees. As sad as it is, for some people, the trees are the more important item.

And us conservatives are the scary ones, eh?

Well, so be it…consider yourself officially chilled to the bone.