human rights

The Jewish Pendulum

[article still being drafted]

Palestine's ancient origins

Neighbours Israel and Palestine share long overlapping convoluted histories dating back to the ancient Canaanites, Egyptians, Hittites and Hebrews. Successive wars and empires saw control and power in the region change many times and also the territorial divisions by the conquerors. Might has ruled and been the recurring theme shaping the borders, not unlike other places of human occupation world over.
http://www.palestinehistory.com/history/brief/brief.htm#02

The Palestinian people are an Arabic-speaking ethnic group of mainly Muslim faith, which have been found to be closely related to Jews and represent modern "descendants of a core population that lived in this Asia Minor area since prehistoric times. The first widespread use of "Palestinian" as an endonym to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by the local Arabic-speaking population of Palestine began prior to the outbreak of World War I, and the first demand for national independence was issued by the Syrian-Palestinian Congress on 21 September 1921.

Jewish history of persecution

Jewish history is ancient, emanating from the nearby Fertile Crescent and Canaan and a legacy of migration throughout what was once Asia Minor including Palestine. Since the Roman Empire, Jews have been persecuted, enslaved or forced to flee tyranny. Jews became scattered throughout the Roman Empire which included now Europe, becoming a homeless 'diaspora' (a displaced population sharing a common identity) connected by creed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_history#The_diaspora

From the 16th Century until World War 1, the Ottoman Turks of Asia Minor ruled Palestine.
http://www.palestinehistory.com/history/brief/brief.htm#02

Out of Europe's French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the new wealth of the Industrial Revolution and the colonialism that it fed, by the 19th Century nationalism was sweeping Europe and saw the emergence of 'new imperialism' driven mainly by Britain, France and Germany. "The period is distinguished by an unprecedented pursuit of what has been termed "empire for empire's sake," aggressive competition for overseas territorial acquisitions and the emergence in some colonizing countries of doctrines of racial superiority which purported to explain the unfitness of backward peoples for self-government." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Imperialism

In this nationalistic fervour, Jews, being distinguishable from European cultures (notably by religion, customs, appearance, and work ethic) were not seen as part of the nationalistic ideals and so continued to be outcast. In the face of continuing persecution, the Jewish diaspora increasingly sought a homeland and became more galvanised as an ethnic group.

In 1894, Jewish persecution in Europe culminated in the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French Jewish army captain was falsely convicted of spying for Germany. It became an inciteful anti-Jewish incident where many chanted "Death to the Jews!" This was symptomatic of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment across Europe which saw the emergence of Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist and Jew. At this time Herzl grew to believe that anti-Semitism could not be defeated or cured, only avoided, and that the only way to avoid it was the establishment of a Jewish state, the tenet for political Zionism.

In Der Judenstaat, Herzl wrote:
“The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl

Jewish desire for a homeland

In 1897 the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland deciding to establish a national home for Jews in Palestine. Argentina was another proposition, but in 1906 a subsequent Zionist congress returned to the idea that a Jewish homeland should be in Palestine. By 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, Jews in Palestine had steadily increased from 12,000 in 1845 to 85,000.

During the course of World War I (The Great War) commencing in 1915, with the Ottoman Turks of Asia Minor ruling Palestine and it sided with the German central powers. Since this alliance threatened Britain's communications with India via the Suez Canal, besides other strategic interests of the allies, Britain promised the Arabs the independence of Arab lands under Ottoman rule in return for Arab support against Turkey.

In an controversial exchange of letters between British High Commissioner Henry McMahon and Arabian Shareef Husein ibn Ali of Mecca (known as the ), the Arabs were assured that their assistance would be rewarded by an Arab empire encompassing the entire span between Egypt and Persia, but according to the British version, only west of "Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo" since the British considered the area "to be purely Arab". The Arabs had a different account of the verbal early honourary promises made by McMahon that included Palestine.

Later during the Great War in November 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration to a British Zionist leader from the foreign secretary Arthur J. Balfour promising him the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
With the help of the Arab Revolt against the Turks, the British defeated the Ottoman forces in the region in 1917-18. Lord Balfour stated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 that the Allies were committed to Zionism and had no intention of honoring their promises to the Arabs.

Eighty-five years later, in a 2002 interview with The New Statesman, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past. .. ..The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis - again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement

After WWI, under the 'Palestine Mandate', Britain occupied and administered the Palestine region, which was formalised by the League of Nations in June 1922, continuing until 1948.

Palestine during the next twenty five years came under direct British rule in order to give effect to the Balfour Declaration with the aim of establishing Palestine as the national home of the Jewish people. The mandate was effectively a self-imposed sovereignty by the British over the conquered territory of Palestine. The mandate was a legal and administrative instrument supposed to be achieved without prejudicing the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_Palestine

The area of the Mandate was originally 118,000 km2. In 1921, Britain took the 91,000 km2 east of the Jordan River, and created Trans-Jordan (later the Arab country of Jordan) as a new Arab protectorate. In 1923, Britain ceded the Golan Heights (another 1,176 km2 of the Palestine Mandate) to the French Mandate of Syria. The total remaining area of the Mandate for Palestine, after these land deductions, was just under 26,000 km2. The balance of the Mandate, the inhabited part of Palestine, and only the part west of the Jordan, was just 14,000 km2.

Racial violence between Palestinians and Jews grew and culminated with the 1920-21 Arab riots as a consequence of the wave of Jewish immigration and the problematic British administration. Following the ongoing racial tension and an investigation into the riots, the British Government issued an official manifesto, referred to as the White Paper of 1922.
The White Paper stated that Britain stood by the principles of the Balfour Declaration to facilitate a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but did not support a separate nation as a Jewish National Home, only a continuation of the community within the larger Palestine region.
The White Paper stated:
"it is contemplated that the status of all citizens of Palestine in the eyes of the law shall be Palestinian, and it has never been intended that they, or any section of them, should possess any other juridical status."

This made British rule of Palestine contradictory and unworkable. Then in July 1922 the British partitioned the area of the Palestine Mandate by excluding the area east of the Jordan River from Jewish settlement. That land, 76% of the original Palestine Mandate land, was renamed Transjordan and was given to the Emir Abdullah to rule.
The 'Arab uprising' of 1936-1939 was followed by the 1939 White Paper that imposed severe restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. A limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the five-year period 1940-1944 and it effectively reversed teh principle of the Balfour Declaration.

During World War II, the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany was unprecedented in the Holocaust involving the genocide of approximately six million European Jews under a programme of systematic state-sponsored extermination. Many Jews desperately fled Europe during the war and went to the United States. Many also went to Palestine, despite the British immigration limits there. By 1945 Britain was still limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine.

Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry

After WWII, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry was set up jointly between Britain and the United States to review the policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine, especially in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, and to consider the future government of Palestine.

The Committee recommended the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe into Palestine. It also recommended that Palestine remain a mandated territory, that facilities be put in place to ensure Jewish migration and that the 1940 Land Act which banned Jews from purchasing land in 95% of Palestine be rescinded.

It recommended the following principles :

I. That Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine.

II. That Palestine shall be neither a Jewish state nor an Arab state.

III. That the form of government ultimately to be established, shall, under international guarantees, fully protect and preserve the interests in the Holy Land of Christendom and of the Moslem and Jewish faiths.

Thus Palestine must ultimately become a state which guards the rights and interests of Moslems, Jews and Christians alike; and accords to the inhabitants, as a whole, the fullest measure of self-government, consistent with the three paramount principles set forth above.

The effect of the Committee’s findings was that the US refused to recognise most of its findings except for supporting the 100,000 refugee intake, which threatened to provoke an Arab uprising. A compromise was reached and from October 1946 1,500 Jews were allowed into Palestine every month.

1947 UN Partition of Palestine

In 1947 Britain decided to transfer the Palestine problem it had created to the United Nations. On 29th November that year, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine or United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) Future Government of Palestine was adopted. The resolution recommended the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and the partition of the territory into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area being under special international protection, administered by the United Nations.

The resolution also contained a plan for an economic union between the proposed states, and a plan for the protection of religious and minority rights. The resolution sought to address the conflicting objectives and claims to the Mandate territory of two competing nationalist movements, Zionism (Jewish nationalism) and Arab nationalism, as well as to resolve the plight of Jews displaced as a result of the Holocaust.

The resolution called for the withdrawal of British forces and termination of the Mandate by 1 August 1948, and establishment of the new independent states by 1 October 1948. A transitional period under United Nations auspices was to begin with the adoption of the resolution, and lasting until the establishment of the two states.

The proposed plan was accepted by the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, through the Jewish Agency. However, the plan was rejected by leaders of the Arab community.

The passing of the UN resolution marked the start of the 1948 civil war in Palestine.

With no plan for a smooth transition of authority to a new administration, Britain announced its intention to unilaterally withdraw from Palestine by 15 May 1948. During their withdrawal, the British refused to hand over territory or authority to any successor. On the day before Britain was to complete its withdrawal, (i.e. 14 May 1948) the Jewish community in Palestine published a Declaration of Independence as the State of Israel, and five Arab armies crossed into the former Mandate as the start of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

And so we have the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continuing to today, sixty odd years and three generations later.

The Victorian government is further pushing multiculturalism and secularism!


The Victorian Parliament is conducting a review of exemptions to Victoria’s Equal Opportunity law. This rises out of the introduction of the Victorian Human Rights and Responsibilities Charter in 2006.

The State Government is reviewing the exceptions and exemptions of its equal opportunity legislation so that it is in line with the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, which has been operating for more than 18 months under the Equal Opportunity Act.

In June, a landmark study undertaken by the Australian National University found job applicants with foreign sounding names faced greater hurdles in the job market than those with Anglo names (the exception was Italians applying for jobs in Melbourne). Employees could be penalised for giving preference to long-term Australian citizens over new-arrivals. Rather than “racism” it could be that foreigners may have less English skills, overseas experience and qualifications, and cultural differences?

At present, a church or independent school can make exceptions based on a person's religious beliefs, sexuality or marital circumstances. Catholic Church wants their right to exercise discrimination of this kind to continue, the church equating any change to the law as a "threat to religious freedoms".

Many churches, religious leaders, parents and private schools vowing to defend discrimination based on faith.

Under the 53 exceptions and exemptions to the Equal Opportunity Act, a religious organisation can insist on staff sharing its belief. The parliamentary committee's options paper floats a controversial change that would make it more difficult for religious groups and schools to discriminate against people for "non-core" or “internal” roles — those not directly relating to worship or the teaching of faith, such as pastors and religious education teachers. But religious groups are fiercely rejecting the idea of core and non-core roles – all have a part in the ethos and practices! Churches and Christian organisations should have the right to employ people who support their ethos, ideals and give preference to people who live lifestyles in accordance their spiritual beliefs and practices. The weakness of the bill lies in the tension between the general rule and the exception: "justifiable discrimination".

The Australian Christian Lobby began a campaign against the review with a website called

ACL is opposed to a bill/charter of rights because it transfers law-making powers from democratically elected parliament to an unaccountable judiciary. Parliament is a forum for debating alternative perspectives. It is representative and democratic, whereas Courts are a much more limited forum.
A charter of rights means judges can declare laws ‘incompatible’ with their own interpretation of human rights. The vagueness of bills or charters of rights give judges open-ended interpretive scope to determine what particular rights entail and when they should be restricted.

In the UK and parts of the USA the Catholic Church has moved out of adoption services altogether because submitting to equal opportunity regulations for adoption, including the requirement to adopt out of same-sex couples, would have violated their conscience.

Australia's most prominent public figure opposed to a bill of rights is former NSW Labor premier, Bob Carr, but he is now drawing strong support from many quarters. If Attorney-General Robert McClelland is allowed to proceed, Kevin Rudd will find himself engulfed in a culture war over power, rights and values, with unusual dividing lines.

Human rights can conflict with each other. The right to privacy can impinge upon the right of a community to live in safety. Equal opportunity rights in employment can conflict with the need of a faith community and others to employ a people who share beliefs and a common culture.

How does one balance the right to life with the right to self-defence? How does one balance the right to avoid detention without conviction with the view of every Australian government that, on rare occasions, detention without conviction is essential for public security?

It is time to ask what this means for society if extra rights are invested in the causes surrounding feminism, asylum seekers, gays, national security suspects, law breakers and secularism, whilst long standing rights and services of groups such as Christians are withdrawn or overridden.

Our Brumby government, with support from the Greens, will make Christian institutions just another minority faith group along with Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and thus create a more secular society. This is a push to further multiculturalism - a denial of our Christian cultural origins! This is an audacious push to quash religious freedom in Victoria.

More evidence of Howard-Government incompetence

More evidence of Howard-Government incompetence

">Evidence presented to the Clarke Commission affirms that ASIO had NO information related to UK attempted Glasgow Airport attack or any "terrorist plot" in Australia.

One wonders where the fear, paranoia, and loathing that incarcerated Haneef for 26 days originated - AFP? Immigration? Cabinet? PM? An abusive exploitation of Australia's Anti-Terrorism legislation, hastily forced through Parliament by the Howard administration. Leaks, rumours, and inuendoes from then-Immigration Minister Andrews, AFP Chief Keelty, and other government and law enforcement officials.

Was ASIO not consulted? Were ASIO's views discounted, discredited? We invade Iraq based on ASIO's assessment and ignore ASIO's advice when it doesn't satisfy political needs?

What kind of a country is Australia becoming?

Judy Bamberger,
O'Connor ACT

" id="AsioSubmission">Appendix: Excerpt from ASIO's submission to the Clarke inquiry into the case of Dr Mohamed Haneef

"ASIO conducted an intelligence investigation in relation to Dr Haneef and provided analytical support to the AFP. ASIO did not detain or question Dr Haneef. ASIO was not involved in the decisions to arrest, charge, prosecute or release Dr Haneef. Beyond providing advice that it did not have sufficient grounds to issue an adverse security assessment in respect of Dr Haneef, ASIO was not involved in the decisions to cancel Dr Haneef's Australian visa or to issue a criminal justice certificate.

"In conducting its intelligence investigation, ASIO considered whether Dr Haneef posed a threat to security and provided advice across government on this issue. ASIO participated in whole-of-government meetings in relation to Dr Haneef. ASIO's consistent advice was that, based on available information, ASIO did not assess Dr Haneef as a threat to security and did not have grounds to issue an adverse security assessment. In the early days of the investigation, ASIO nevertheless considered further investigation of Dr Haneef was warranted.

"In written advice to the [Howard] government and various agencies on July 11, 2007, ASIO reported that while it continued to progress its inquiries, it did not have information to indicate Dr Haneef had any involvement in or foreknowledge of the UK terror acts [on June 30 at Glasgow airport]. Nor was there any information to indicate Dr Haneef was undertaking planning for a terrorist attack in Australia or overseas. ASIO issued several threat assessments concerning the potential threat to security posed by Dr Haneef. Those assessments consistently indicated there was [nothing] indicating any specific, credible terrorist threat in Australia linked to the UK attacks. ASIO also provided written submissions to then attorney-general, the hon. Philip Ruddock …

Cited in of 2 Aug 08 by Alan Ramsey in the Sydney Morning Herald

THE CULTURE OF XENOPHILIA AND ITS ORIGINS How Love of the Stranger is Killing Us

The argument that self-destructive hospitality to third world immigrants issues from a self-loathing for Western civilization is commonplace. In his Closing of the American Mind Alan Bloom described how European nihilism became rooted in American colleges giving birth to cultural relativism and a contempt for western values that is now manifest in multiculturalism and mass immigration from “non-traditional” quarters. Canon has been re-cast to reflect Western guilt--- everywhere courses are designed to induce shame rather than pride in our forefathers so that we may become self-flagellating penitents willing to regard high immigration from aggrieved cultures as redress for our past crimes. But surely there is another half to the equation. That Anglo-European suicide emerges not out of hatred turned inward but love turned outward---a perverse love for strangers that exceeds or replaces the love that is due to one’s own. Novelist Jean Raspail’s description of pro-immigrationists bears closer scrutiny, with equal emphasis placed on the last segment of his quotation. They are, he said, “righteous in their loathing of anything and everything that smacks of present day Western society, and boundless in their love of what might destroy it.” That kind of love can be found by a selective interpretation of scriptures, and in a political movement born in the nineteenth century that shook the twentieth and still permeates thought today. The open-borders mentality rife in Britain, North America and Australia is largely the unhappy confluence of two philosophical traditions, Judeo-Christianity and socialism. The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) is one of the most famous and influential of the New Testament. In showing that a Samaritan could recognize a stricken Jew not as a member of a hostile culture but rather as a human being needing assistance, Christ established that a “neighbour” is anyone who needs our help. And both Matthew 22:39 and Leviticus 19:18 instruct us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. And who is the “neighbour” we are to love? According to Christian ethicist Dana Wilbanks, it is often the stranger. “In fact, right at the centre of Christian faithfulness is the challenge and the opportunity to love the stranger as ourselves, to love the stranger as God loves the stranger, to love the stranger as one with whom Jesus explicitly identifies.” Kathleen Tomlin, the Director for the (Catholic) Office for Social Justice asked, “How do you love your neighbour, and also describe them as illegal?” She argued that the common good can’t be defined by national borders and that a sense of solidarity is required to understand the predicament of immigrants. Curiously, she didn’t speak of any solidarity with resident American workers whose jobs are displaced by immigrants. According to Harvard economist Dr. George Borgias American-born workers lose $152 billion annually from the job displacement and wage depression caused by immigration. Couldn’t they, one might ask, use some of the boundless Christian love earmarked for aliens who knowingly break the law upon entry but whose plight makes better news copy than the plight of the hard-working low-income American whose job he they threaten? Tomlin’s attitude was better captured by someone on an Internet forum out of London, Ontario who contested my Hardian arguments for population stabilization and zero-net immigration for Canada. “Closing borders is morally the same as refusing help to a dying person. It is quite literally putting the concerns of oneself and one’s ‘nation’ above the concerns of others based on the human concept of country. Remember here, that terms like country, nation, race and the like are just words that we have made up. People are people and we are all part of the human race…Choosing to ignore a cry for help makes me a barbarian and a heartless worm. Morality should be, and needs to be, based on Love…I do not have the right not to love everyone equally, ever.” (Londoncommons.net Feb.5/07) Historically American Jews have taken an even more strident stand for large immigration intakes, particularly from outside traditional Northern European sources, for both reasons both strategic and theological. Strategically it was thought that safety lay in diversity, that is, a culturally homogeneous society dominated by Anglo-Saxons would pose more of a threat than one fragmented by immigration from a variety of countries. In fact a multicultural state that sanctioned ethnocentrism by constituent subcultures would allow them to flourish as a separatist force and employ a “divide and conquer” strategy on the rest by entering into clever coalitions with other minorities. More favourable to immigration to America than any other religious or ethnic group, Jews have taken a leadership role in changing the Northern European tilt of US immigration. The American Jewish Committee boasts that “from its founding the AJC has been a strong voice in support of immigration, participating actively in many of the major immigration debates of our time, opposing reductions in the flows of immigrants…” For the Jewish lobby then, mass immigration is a wrecking ball that they can swing to shatter the ethnic homogeneity of Anglo-European America, and from the rubble of cultural balkanization emerge a power-broker. What is interesting is that while the Jewish prescription for Anglo-European America is more cultural pluralism and disintegration, its prescription for Israel continues to be for a racist, apartheid state theocratic state guided by Judaism with a Jewish-only immigration policy! The theological underpinnings for their agenda of burying Nordic Christian America under a demographic avalanche are found of course in the Old Testament. As Jews were once “strangers in the land of Egypt’, strangers are to be valued and welcomed. “You shall love the foreigner as you love yourself, for you were once aliens in Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33-34) Hospitality to strangers, without any distinction made between legal and illegal strangers, is a consistent Biblical theme. “When a foreigner resides with you he shall be to you as the citizen among you.” (Leviticus 19:33-34) “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.” (Hebrews 13:2) Rabbi Morris Allen of Mendola Hts., Minnesota incarnates these injunctions by complaining that classifying immigrant workers as “guests” would send out the message that they weren’t “family”. Such is love for the outsider in this logical continuum that a stranger not only becomes a neighbour , then a guest, but a member of immediate family. In this moral universe everyone residing in the country or hoping to, by hook or by crook, is deserving of equal consideration. Just get your foot in the door and you get a full Club membership. Does this formidable scriptural litany constitute the last word on the Judeo-Christian position toward immigration policy? Or can it be informed by an alternative interpretation? Since our obligations to our “neighbour”, who is said to be equated with “the stranger”, seems to be the linchpin of Christian rationale for out-of-control immigration, let’s examine the meaning of “neighbour”, as in “love thy neighbour as thy self” (Leviticus 19:18) The term surely doesn’t suggest universality since not everyone is my neighbour and not everyone is near me. Given that Judaism is a tribal religion,“neigbhour” must refer to fellow Jews. It is a an injunction to practice national solidarity as evidenced by an examination of the entire verse. “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one ‘Your People’, but love your neighbour as yourself. I can take the lead.” “Your People” does not obviously mean all of humanity. “Neighbour” cannot be linked to “stranger”. Returning to the parable of the Good Samaritan, cursory research would dispute the interpretation that many Christians give to scriptural commands to love strangers. The notion that someone in Darfur is as much my “neighbour” as someone in Winnipeg, Manitoba or the man down the street who lost his family in a house fire is not illustrated by Luke 10. For a Samaritan who was intensely disliked by Israelites was not, in our sense, a foreigner. John 4:7-22 clearly defines Samaritans as a religious group, albeit corrupt, ritually impure and sexually permissive. None the less they believed in One God, One Prophet (Moses), The Torah, and in the Day of Judgment. They were not a regional or ethnic group. They were not black. They did not speak Chinese or Swahili. In fact they spoke a dialect of western Aramaic largely peculiar to Palestine, much like the Jews. The common ancestry of both Jews and Samaritans have been established by modern genetic studies. Therefore to use the Good Samaritan as an example of a foreigner, of the “stranger” whom we must love unreservedly and take him in, is a poor example. He was not a foreigner, and he was not really a stranger. He was the neighbour who we don’t like but whom Christ said to care about as much as ourselves. (Matthew 22:39) But should we care about him as much as we do our own family? In a burning building full of children, do we bypass our own children to rescue other children first? 1st Timothy 5:8 trumps Luke and Matthew. “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” In other words, you take care of your family first. You love your own first. Then your neighbour. Then your community. Then your nation. Then humanity. And in deference to Paul Watson, apportion some of your love to the animal kingdom, whose habitat is being destroyed by the mass immigration policies favoured by anthropocentric Jews and Christians. There is a hierarchy of affection. Only God applies Love evenly, for only God can. Man has never, and can never, in Burke’s words, “love mankind all in one piece”. Love of family, love of country, love of those like ourselves is what comes natural, it is what we are, and social psychology and socio-biology is continuing to re-enforce Burkean insight and the wisdom of 1Timothy 5:8. In the last century and a half another bold challenge was mounted to re-order our natural affinities. Christian universalism and the rootless cosmopolitanism that was world Jewry found a rival in Marxism. In 1848 Karl Marx told the workers of the world to unite. Incredibly that call is still heard today, albeit among sometimes obscure factions. The Socialist Party of Tampa Bay declared in its 2007 platform, “working people have no country, but rather an international bond based on class.” A canvass of similar groups across Anglo-America would not necessarily reveal such blatant indifference to national interests, but nevertheless take up open immigration and refugee positions and support blanket amnesty for illegal aliens. Socialist writer Tom Lewis explains “Socialists are internationalists. Whereas nationalists believe that the world is divided primarily into different nationalities, socialists consider class to be the primary divide. For socialists, class struggle---not national identity—is the motor of history. And capitalism creates an international working class that must fight back against an international capitalist class.” What is critical to the understanding of the Marxist attitude to nationalism is that it takes an entirely pragmatic approach. Marx drew a distinction between good and bad nationalism. “The nationalism of the workers belonging to an oppressor nation binds them to their rulers and only does harm to themselves, while the nationalism of an oppressed nation can lead them to fight back against these rulers.” Thus Marx favoured Irish nationalism, but not English. He opposed the national movements of the Southern Slavs, but supported the Indian rebellion against the British. Lenin warned that “workers who place political unity with their ‘own’ bourgeoisie above the complete unity of the proletariat of all the nations, are acting against their own interests.” To do so, to fall victim to nationalist affections, was to evidence “false consciousness”, an inability to recognize those interests, interpreted of course by party cadres. Australian political scientist Frank Salter had this to say about the socialist attitude to nationalism. “The Left, as it has evolved over the course of the previous century, looks down on the ordinary people with their inarticulate parochialisms as if they were members of another species…since they care nothing for the preservation of national communities. Ethnies are considered irrelevant to the welfare of people in general. It would be understandable to Martians to be so detached from particular loyalties. But it is disturbing to humans doing so, especially humans who identify with the Left.” Such is the European Left’s identification with the Other at the expense of the resident national that, in the name of anti-racism, it was possible for left-wing novelist Umberto Eco to declare his hope that Europe would be swamped by Africans and third world emigrants just so to “demoralize” racists. And such is the identification of the AFL-CIO with 13 million illegal immigrants as potential recruits that it supports amnesty and essentially a corporate welfare program that reduces wages for the lowest of American workers. A scheme which advocates call “liberalism” but American workers call an invasion. The Canadian Labour Congress (Edgar Bergen) and its social-democratic parliamentary arm, the NDP (Charlie McCarthy), sing the same tune. Crocodile tears are shed for “undocumented” workers who allegedly make great contributions to the economy, according to their hire-a-left-wing-think-tank. But Statistics Canada’s conclusions are the same as those of Dr. Borgias are for American workers. The British Trade Union Congress tried to put one over on the public with a September 2007 report cooked up by the left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research that maintained that amnesty for illegal immigrants would net the Treasury 1 billion pounds annually. More careful analysis revealed that amnesty would cost British taxpayers up to 1.8 billion pounds a year. This Marxist legacy of international solidarity to the disavowal of national loyalties persists to the present sometimes in unalloyed form but more often as one strand in a synthesis of muddled xenophilia with Christian and environmental thought. The latter mutation is expressed in the Canadian argument that since global warming is a global problem requiring global cooperation, to obtain this cooperation we must not send out unfriendly messages of “fear” by closing our borders, but drop them instead. Presumably a radically downward adjustment in consumption habits and greener technology will compensate for all the extra millions who would swarm in. Instead of “workers of the world unite” the Greens offer us a new rallying cry: “More and more people, consuming less and less.” But just as Christian thought is not monolithic, neither is social democratic thought. Arguably the most famous and independent socialist intellectual of the English speaking world, George Orwell, once remarked that “in all countries, the poor are more national than the rich.” Bukharin was wrong. For the working class, national identity was just as important as class identity. And now finally, after their constituents have been battered by one of the greatest migratory waves in history, that saw the United States for example import the equivalent of three New Jerseys in the 1990s alone (25 million people), maverick social-democratic and socialist leaders in the tradition of Victor Berger, or Jack London or Canada’s J. S. Woodsworth are staking out a claim for national, as opposed to international, solidarity. The Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders, has begun to make some noise about the disaster that is the illegal immigration invasion in the United States. His voting record in reducing chain migration, fighting amnesty and unnecessary visas rates B-, B- and A+ respectively from Americans for Better Immigration. Former Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt now admits that immigration under his administration was excessive and damaging to Germany. In a book published in 1982 he confessed that “with idealistic intentions, born out of our experiences with the Third Reich, we brought in far too many foreigners.” Dutch Socialist leader Jan Marijnissen is strongly opposed to the practice of importing East European workers to undermine the position of Dutch workers. East Europeans are hired as “independent contractors” to circumvent labour law. Marijnissen wrote “It is unacceptable that employers pay foreign workers 3 euros per hour and have them live in chicken coops as if they were in competition in the 19th century of Dickens. The unfair competition and displacement of Dutch workers and small business is intolerable. Therefore we shouldn’t open the borders further, but set limits instead.” Former Labor Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, also argued for the acknowledgement of limits. Along with fellow Labor MP Barry Cohen he has joined Australia’s leading environmentalists Dr. Tim Flannery and Dr. Ian Lowe in exposing the myth of Australia as being a big empty land begging to filled up with people. “Our rivers, our soils, our vegetation, won’t allow that to happen without enormous cost to us and those who follow us.” He calls for severe immigration cut-backs and a population policy. As impending economic and environmental upheavals threaten to multiply the some 30 million global migrants currently in transit, immigration and the ecological, economic and cultural stress it will place on the countries of destination re-iterate the questions raised earlier. To whom are we morally obligated? Whom can we be reasonably expected to love? To be brutally candid and blunt, those who are similar to ourselves. Biologist Richard Dawkins has maintained that humans were predisposed to make clear demarcations between “in-group” and “out-group” from the beginning, and social psychologists concur that this discriminating perception is inherent. The need to associate with others like ourselves is an immutable feature of human nature and so ethnic identity refuses to die. It is interesting that despite so much multicultural propaganda, a British poll found that 31% of the population still confessed to being racially prejudiced, while another study showed that most Britons harboured feelings of suspicion toward outsiders. Frank Salter in his On Genetic Interests has made a strong case for a genetic basis for this kind of ethnic, national and racial favouritism. Irenaus Eibi-Eibesfeldt and Pierre van den Berghe have shown that the more ethnically diverse populations are, the more resistant they are to redistributive policies. A Harvard Institute study in 2000 confirmed this conclusion when it found that U. S. states that were more ethnically fragmented than average spent less on social services. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam explained why. “The more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others. Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some areas, lower investment in public goods.” It must be concluded that if this indeed is our nature, then two thousand years of Christianity and seventy years of communism with its attempt to create “the new man” should have taught us that it is futile to construct policy that runs counter to it. We are what we are. We are not made to love all of humanity, at least not in equal measure. We are made to love family and those we recognize as an extension of family. Those who share common history, values, genes or locality. For most of us, the choice to defend our own citizens rather than the outsiders who would undercut them is determined by our natural predispositions. It is a wonder to us that our leaders, politicians and human rights advocates are apparently not made of the same stuff. For them, immigration policy is purely a foreign aid project. Their love is trained outward, on distant shores, while the love from the nations that nurtured them goes unrequited and betrayed. Tim Murray Quadra Island, BC Sept. 21/07

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