Arab Autumn?

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The Arab Spring, eighteen months on.  Has a passion for freedom of speech, separation of religion and State, and the 'free marketplace of ideas' seized the Arab world?  Two weeks ago a Coptic Christian living in California,  in no way affiliated with any U.S. government entity, published a comically low-quality 13-minute film trailer ridiculing Mohammed and Islam.  The Arab world's reaction?

In Egypt:

In Lebanon:

In Kuwait:

In Palestine:

In Tunisia:

In Yemen:

What about the Muslim world generally?

Were you Assimilable?

'The Mortar of Assimilation--And the One Element that Just Won't Mix'

(standing is an Irishman)
Puck Magazine, June 1889

A great many people today can look at this map...

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...and conclude, 'This can only spell good things for America.'

Why?

'Anglo-America absorbed millions of alien immigrants in the 19th century, then went on to become the biggest superpower in world history!'

As it happens, both these statements are true. It is also true that after metal helmets replaced leather ones, the number of soldiers' head injuries increased. So did America become a huge superpower because, or in spite of, these aliens? Or a little of both?

And if these waves of 19th c. foreigners did make her stronger, can the same be said of the millions streaming in yearly now?

The question is by no means flip.  Many of the arguments used by immigration restrictionists in 2012 are identical to those used a hundred years ago.  It's a case of Chicken Little, says our open-border contingent--'Your predecessors said the sky would fall; it didn't, and this time it won't either.'

Who's right?

Why, just look at this mosaic:

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A propositional nation, n'est-ce pas?

Sweet Little Lies

'Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.'

--Honore de Balzac  
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Two hundred thirty years ago, Thomas Jefferson opined:  

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

Today, Euro America (like Euro South Africa) has pushed aside such ideas.  We are sure that God the Universe has created us all equal, as we go out of our way to tell each other at every opportunity.

But do we believe it?  Talk is cheap. When a man's actions don't back up his words, we call him mistaken--or a hypocrite.

'Black and White are equal in every important way,' proclaim a great number of Euro-Americans today. We here at Those Who Can See are not so sure that they really believe it.  We argue, on the contrary, that progressive white Americans are in the habit of treating Afros as if they were slightly mentally retarded.  And that Blacks themselves often seem to agree. 


What is our evidence?