and you thought I went easy on the "genetic perfectionism" guy! :)

well, his shell games are pretty transparent, aren't they? that being said, most people haven't been drilled about what "precision" means in a scientific sense so i thought that it was an appropriate observation since he was harping on that term.

But perhaps the author of the above piece finds the precision of genetic science wanting? That being said, I am a bit confused as to why then his academic interests lay in history, an even more imprecise field, than in physics or mathematics where his passion for precision might be suitably sated.

Ouch! That's going to leave a mark.

I take your point about Americans being indoctrinated into an erroneous ideology on "race" but isn't there also a parallel ideology on culture? The latter is what I blame, in part, for the rash, foolish attack on Iraq.

The latter is what I blame, in part, for the rash, foolish attack on Iraq.

say more.

The latter is what I blame, in part, for the rash, foolish attack on Iraq.

say more

yes, that should be interesting

"say more"

http://www.google.com/search?q=a...e&start=10& sa=N

dobeln, yes, sure. but you know idiotic foreign adventures happened back in the days of yore too. why? yes, some of the justification was based on democraticization. but here in the USofA it seems a lot of it was the old "do something, anything!" urge in the way of 9/11. that's how it felt to me back then (i got caught up in it as well).

i assume bio means the idea that all cultures just paint over what remains at heart a commonish humanity, in other words the moronic neocon idea that every homo saipien is a liberal democrat yearning to be free.

I am not currently a subscriber to TNR, nevertheless this the message that I would post there if I were a subscriber.---

In his primary article Mr. Chowkwanyun made a couple of fleeting references to Francis Galton and Franz Boas, this is appropriate since they are the most influential developers of the opposing Galtonian (Hereditarian/Essentialist) and Boasian (Environmentalist/Cultural-causation) theories pertaining to inter-ethnoracial group differences in mental ability.

The Galtonian theory was promulgated first at the University of London (sometimes it is referred to as the “London school of differential psychology” to contrast it with the Environmentalist American behaviorist school founded by John Watson and B.F. Skinner ). The Galtonian movement included figures such as Karl Pearson, Charles Spearman, Cyril Burt (yes I am aware that years after his death he was accused of faking some of his research--but more recent research has possibly absolved him of this charge and in fact numerous more recent twin studies have shown that the heritability of intelligence as measured in adults is about 70 to 80 % due to genes--which is what Burt originally claimed--thus even if some of Burt’s data were faked subsequent research has now validated his major claim), Philip Vernon, Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck. More recent champions of the Galtonian view have included Arthur Jensen, Thomas Bouchard, J.P. Rushton, Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, and Linda Gottfredson. Many pro-Galtonian articles including a recent 2005 review article “THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY” by Jensen and Rushton can be found at Gottfredson’s (http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/ index.html
) and Rushton’s (http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/ rushton_pubs.htm
) websites. In the field of anthropology, prominent Galtonians have included Carleton Coon, Vincent Sarich, and Henry Harpending. Also many people associated with sociobiology such as William Hamilton, Edward O. Wilson, and Steven Pinker been rather receptive toward the considering the Galtonian viewpoint and this perhaps explains why Boasians such as Lewontin and Gould were so critical of Sociobiology.

Anti-Galtonian Environmentalist views had been espoused by earlier figures such as Léonce Pierre Manouvrier in France and Rudolf Virchow and Adolf Bastian in Germany (actually they were both mentors of Boas), but the man who really turned the world’s intellectual tide against the Galtonian view was the German Jew Franz Boaz. After earning a PhD in Physics at Kiel, Boas soon became interested in primitive peoples (he studied the Eskimos on Baffin Island). Influenced by Virchow and Bastian, Boas convinced himself that cultural differences--but not innate essential differences--were the cause for the vast differences observed between primitive savage peoples and advanced civilized peoples. Boas eventually moved to America and became the most influential anthropologist of the 20th Century. In the post war era, Boasians rapidly came to dominate anthropology and all of the other social sciences. Prominent Boasians include figures such as Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Otto Klineberg, Horace Mann Bond, Ashley Montagu, Sherwood Washburn, Gunnar Myrdal, Gordon Allport, Ned Block, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, Leon Kamin, Claude Steele, Jonathan Marks, Jared Diamond, Richard Nisbett, James Flynn, Abigail Thernstrom, Howard Gardner, and Robert Sternberg.

Mr. Chowkwanyun implied that The Bell Curve was universally denounced by the academic establishment, but actually this is not true. Herrnstein’s and Murray’s views were roundly denounced by the Boasian academic establishment but about fifty of the most prominent professors in the academic disciplines that are actually most closely concerned with the subject (i.e. differential psychology/psychometrics) actually published a statement largely agreeing with the viewpoints of The Bell Curve (a letter published in 1994 Wall Street Journal now available at Gottfredson’s website). Thus it appears that many of the academics who truly are experts on the topic of IQ actually find the Galtonian perspective to be more plausible than the Boasian view.

Ethnic and racial group differences in IQ and socioeconomic status are not limited just to the American white/black issue. Some groups such as East Asians (Han Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese) and Jews when compared to Gentile whites have significantly higher average IQs and SES. Conversely some groups such as Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans have significantly lower average IQs and SES compared to Gentile whites. These empirical facts greatly distress the Boasians who fervently hope for a fantasy utopian world in which all ethnic and racial groups will manage to exhibit the same average IQs and SES. Boasians often extol the virtue of appreciating ethnic diversity but they are inconsistent in that they require people to steadfastly ignore the immense ethnic diversity that exists with regard to IQ. All true Boasians long for the day when all ethnic groups will be represented equally in prestigious positions of business ownership and at elite universities. They of course gloss over the inconvenient fact that this would greatly impinge on the interests of members of high-IQ minority groups (e.g. Jews and East Asians) who often are represented at elite universities and in elite professions at levels 5 to 10 fold higher than their demographic proportion would justify under a true Boasian model of fair equity. Are these Boasian proponents of affirmative action really ready to inform more than 80% of Jews and East Asians that they should curtail their career goals in order to avoid garnering an “unfairly” large proportion of elite job positions? Because in order to be consistent, strict Boasians such as Mr. Chowkwanyun must insist that these elite jobs be evenly distributed amongst all ethnic/racial groups! Is Mr. Chowkwanyun satisfied with the ethnic/racial make-up of his own history department at Penn? Or does his department resemble most departments at elite universities wherein certain high IQ-ethnoracial groups such as Jews and Asians occupy about 30 to 60% of the positions even though their “fair” demographic proportion (according to a truly Boasian sense of fairness) is a fraction about 5 to 10 fold lower. In contrast modern Galtonians do not believe in unfairly discriminating against individuals, instead Galtonians have the attitude that if some ethnic groups are more talented or more intelligent and thus are better suited for certain jobs then it is no problem if they gain a huge proportion of the jobs for which they are well suited.

Several prominent experts on IQ and genetics (John Defries, Robert Plomin, Ian Deary and others) have shown that the same genes that influence variation in IQ also influence variation in academic achievement--particularly on mathematics tests Plomin calls these genes that influence both intelligence and academic prowess the “generalist genes for g” (the scientific notation for the general intelligence factor is “g”). Thus to Galtonians it is no surprise that black American students invariably perform about one standard deviation lower than whites on math exams because of course all social scientists realize that black Americans have IQs that are about one standard deviation lower than white Americans. This of course engenders immense consternation in the Boasian-dominated education and social science establishments which continually demand that the black/white academic achievement gap be closed because according to the Boasian establishment everyone knows the academic achievement gap is entirely due to racism and certainly not due to ethnic genetic diversity.

Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institute and Amy Chua of Yale Law (she is one of Justin Shubow’s professors?) found that conflict and resentment associated with inter-ethnic disparities in wealth and academic achievement are not just limited to the USA but instead are found world wide where ever talented minority groups dominate the elite positions in business and academia (e.g. high castes in India, Jews in Russia, Caucasians in Latin America, Arabs and Indians in Africa, and Indians and in particular ethnic-Han Chinese in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Southeast Asia). As Gottfredson pointed out in her 2005 paper “What if the Hereditarian hypothesis is true”, many victims of genocide and mob violence are actually members of the higher achieving minority group. These higher achieving minority groups probably possess higher innate IQs and are often victimized by the lower IQ majority indigenous group members who resent them because in accordance with popular modern Boasian principles they can not let themselves believe that the higher achieving minority group members (due to their higher innate intelligence) are deserving of their higher proportion of elite positions in business, academia and government; thus the lower-IQ majority group lashes out at the higher achieving group. The higher achieving minority groups then become victims of violence (e.g. white Zimbabwean farmers and Han Chinese business owners in Malaysia and Indonesia) and sometimes even genocide (e.g. Armenians in Turkey, Jews in Axis Europe, Ibo in Nigeria, educated Cambodians during Pol Pot, and recently Tutsis in Rwanda).

As Amy Chua points out in her book World on Fire, in Thailand the rice processing industry and many other major businesses and industries are heavily dominated by ethnic Chinese. The wealthy Chowkwanyun family of Bangkok (the late magnate Chow Chowkwanyun was the founder of Thailand’s largest petroleum company) is perhaps an example of the higher-IQ ethnically Chinese business network which exercises economic domination over the indigenous Thai people. Is Merlin Chowkwanyun possibly the grandson

business network which exercises economic domination over the indigenous Thai people. Is Merlin Chowkwanyun possibly the grandson of Chow Chowkwanyun? If so, does Merlin then feel embarrassed about his arch-capitalist high IQ family mercilessly exploiting the poor indigenous Thai people? From what I can gather from some internet searches, Merlin’s father was born in Bangkok and is a 1977 Caltech graduate in Mathematics and a 1988 computer engineering graduate from Southern Cal. Given that Caltech is one of the most elite Math/Tech schools in the world, I would thus estimate that Caltech math majors have IQs in the range of 145 and above (i.e. over three standard deviations higher than the white mean of IQ 100). Apparently young Merlin Chowkwanyun inherited the family genes for high IQ because he was one of 31 Californians who earned perfect scores on the 1999 statewide Mathematics competition (http://www.mathleague.com/reports/1999_00/ CA5.HTM). Examination of the California state academic achievement math test scores shows that every year ethnically-Chinese students on average perform at a level about 0.8 standard deviation higher than white students (http://star.cde.ca.gov/star2006/index.asp
); thus indicating an average IQ of 112 for the Californian Chinese population (15 points on the IQ scale correspond to a one standard deviation difference on cognitive test results). Of note, regarding the math test that young Merlin Chowkwanyun aced, one can conclude from examining the names of those thirty other ultra-high IQ youths with perfect test scores that about 75% appear to be of Asian or Jewish ethnicity. Of course this is exactly as would be predicted by Galtonian theory. In contrast, Boasian theory ludicrously predicts that if gentile white, black or Hispanic children were raised in Jewish or Asian home environments then they would be just as intelligent as the Jewish and Asian youth because Boasians believe that ethnic and racial differences in IQ are transmitted via cultural differences and not via genetic differences. How many of you people really believe that? In fact during the past couple of decades numerous studies from around the world in the fields of social psychology and psychometrics have found that the home environment (called the shared environment by psychologists) actually has no influence whatsoever on variation in adult IQ when the family genetic transmission effects are accounted for. In addition, and highly damning to the Boasian theory, Weinberg and Scarr actually performed a study in Minnesota in which white, black and half black-half white infants were adopted into upper middle class white homes. When the adoptees were young children there was some evidence that the higher IQ white home environment was possibly raising their IQs; however as the adopted children grew into adulthood the black adoptees’ IQs decreased down to the same low levels as the IQs of other Minnesotan blacks and the black/white mixed race children showed IQs intermediate between the black and white norms; again exactly as would be predicted by Galtonian theory and exactly the opposite of what Boasian theory would predict.

Mr. Chowkwanyun should probably continue to remain ignorant of ethnoracial genetic science and psychometrics because if he ever became at all knowledgeable about human genomics, cognitive neuroscience, and psychometric research then doubtless someone with his high intelligence would very quickly grasp the fact that Jensen and the other modern Galtonians are really on the correct scientific course in their brave efforts to gain a true understanding of our world’s ethnoracial diversity as pertains to differences in mental ability and in socioeconomic status. So please Mr. Chowkwanyun, for your sake, so that you do not have to execute an embarrassing turnaround in your view point, please continue to prevent yourself from ever studying the books and articles of Galtonians such as Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray, Robert Plomin, Ian Deary, and Linda Gottfredson. Far safer and more comforting for you to remain a puerile ignoramus and continue to mindlessly spout tired old Boasian cliches that are politically correct but scientifically nonsensical.

Ironically enough, a couple of years ago also in TNR, Nathan Glazer reviewed a book on the history of racial ideology in America, and let slip some very interesting details.

According to Glazer, a crucial turning point in the American debate was Boas's landmark study demonstrating that the head-shapes of European immigrants dramatically changed within a generation or two following their arrival in America. This persuaded the nay-sayers that "race" (which in those pre-DNA days was defined by head-shape and such) was highly malleable under environmental changes.

Now this is obvious nonsense of course, since head-shape clearly can't change based on geography. But Glazer went on to say that many years later, when people actually looked at Boas's data, it contained rather remarkable "anomalies." Glazer is far too polite to say so, but it seems rather clear that Boas's crucial study was based on conscious or unconcious fraud.

And a few years later, Barzun wrote that big "anti-race" book, arguing that skin color was absolutely determined by diet. Presumably, Swedes and Nubians have rather different paletes.

It really is quite remarkable how much of the scientific foundation of modern American social ideology seems based on the most ridiculous hoaxes and frauds.

I guess we know how the scholars of the Trofim K. Lysenko School of Advanced Biological Science must have felt around 1970 or so...

Razib said: "but here in the USofA it seems a lot of it was the old "do something, anything!" urge in the way of 9/11. that's how it felt to me back then (i got caught up in it as well)."

I agree wholeheartedly with the above statement as a major reason for our "rash, foolish attack on Iraq." Most people in the US (and Europe for that matter) had/have little interest in or knowledge about the sociopolitical and historical circumstances in the Middle East and the nature of Islam/Islamic culture. (I certainly had very little pre-9/11 and only started really trying to get up to speed afterwards). I was living in the US during 9/11 and during the invasion of Afghanistan and there definitely was a strong desire in the air to do something. The reasons for going into Afghanistan were relatively clear, but it seemed like such a small player in the larger, emerging struggle and there was definately a sense that something bigger had to be done, and to the Arabs, since they seemed to be the primary source of Islamic radicalism and terrorism. What that something was was not terribly clear, but eventually I think the ill-conceived decision for the IraqAttaq was taken by our (woefully ill-informed) politicians in the name of short term political expediency (and long term suicide?) to placate this vague feeling that action was needed (I wonder how many in hind sight still really think it was a good idea?) and Iraq seemed to be the natural target as the largest, (seemingly) most powerful Arab nation that was openly hostile to the US (as opposed to one of our so-called allies that doesn't like us, but is happy to pay lip service about mutual friendship in exchange for foreign aid).

I can't really say in hindsight that I am terribly surprised by the decision to take down Saddam and the failure to realize how hard it would be to build a stable Iraq. While American elites lack concrete knowlege about the Islamic world, they are inculcated with Boasian assumptions about the underlying commonality and cultural plasticity of all mankind. This, I believe, leads them to think that American circumstances and structures and ways of doing things (i.e., what they know) can be externally imposed and made to work in different populations and regions with very different histories and circumstances. I have always been suspicious of this sort of reasoning, but, at the time, I was somewhat taken in by it. Just before the IraqAttaq I was working in Germany and shared an office with a British Muslim, with whom I was talking one day about the prospects of the war. I confidently predicted that the war was inevitable once the US had massed an army on the Iraqi border, no matter what concessions Saddam made (I was right) and that it would be hard going for the population of Iraq, but in the end, the US would probably remake it like it had Japan and Germany after WWII and that in the long run Iraqis would be better off (wealthier, greater degree of self determination, and fewer innocent deaths) than if Saddam remained in power (it looks as if I will likely be wrong on this one). Part of this I think stemmed from my own ignorance about the Middle East at the time (though I did have my reservations about Iraqis being as conducive to "Nation Building" as the Germans and Japanese were). However part also stemmed from the fact that at the time I had no idea how incompetent and politically correct (which is basically the same as incompetence) the Bush administration would conduct the rebuilding project. After all, Germany and Japan were only remolded after they had been flattened and their spirit and will to resist completely and brutally crushed. Only then, once the futility of resistence was made apparent, was the US able to rebuild Germany and Japan in a form more conducive to our interests. (I had never assumed that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators and want to do exactly as we told them, but I think it is fair to say that the assumption that Iraq would be rebuilt using the heavy handed methods used in the rebuilding of the Axis nations is what allayed my doubts about the importance the Iraqis active desire to do as the US wanted.) I don't know if this would have worked in Iraq, but I suspect that we shall never know that that Bush's "adventure" will go down as a catastrophy that destabilized the region and likely lead to future conflicts on a much grander scale.

dobeln, Cuchulkhan, Phillyguy - you've said it more clearly than I could. Thank you.

There has been a lot of recent re-analysis of Boas's data, reaching opposite conclusions: some saying it vindicates Boas, some saying he exaggerated his findings. I don't think the possibility of fraud has been examined, though. Back in the 1930s R. A. Fisher and a colleague used analysis of variance on the data and found some components of variance suspiciously low (which is often the case when people are massaging data) but he didn't call Boas on it. The fact that Boas found some change in cephalic indexes between generations is not in itself suspicious, because many other studies show this.

Phillyguy wrote:

Germany and Japan were only remolded after they had been flattened and their spirit and will to resist completely and brutally crushed

Remolded, eh? 1848 is irrelevant? Japan in the Taisho period? No, Angela Merkel is due to Dresden, Shinzo Abe is because of Hiroshima. Sure.

It seemed to me that many Americans, especially the types over-represented on blogs, went insane in 2001 and stayed insane through the spring on 2003. The "erroneous ideology" (mentioned above) may be part of the reason for the the collective insanity of 2001-2003, but the historical models Americans use in understanding the world (such as the US role in 'reforming' post WWII Germany and Japan) played a big role.

Not only were the models inappropriate, they were historically incorrect! I think its great that phillyguy, and others, are reconsidering their 'erroneous ideology', but it would also be great to read up on American history.

Ikram: I have to congratulate you on completely mistating my position. I never said I was at any point in favor of the invasion of Iraq. I was recounting my own subjective impression of the prevailing US political situation at the time.

My prediction above was a response given to a question posed by a British Muslim colleague (who at the time seemed torn between a sense of loyalty to some greater sense of Islamic universalism inculcated into him by strict muslim upbringing and his increasing disenchantment with Islam stemming from the greater appeal to him of the secular Western intellectual environment he had encountered by interaction with non-Muslims at university and as a lawyer as well as revulsion to the increasingly 'radical and jihadist' tendancies of his younger brother, whose tirades, he stated that he could no longer bear to listen to)shortly before the war about what I thought would happen in Iraq. All I said above was that:

1) once the US decided to force Saddam to submit to a full inspection of his activities and Saddam refused, he had signed his own death warrant and that war was inevitable because, once the US went to the expense of putting an army on the Iraqi border in order to force compliance from Saddam, it was irrelevant whether or not he complied because, the US could not afford the loss of prestige and humiliation when Saddam again threw out the inspectors when the army was removed from his border (which he surely would have done) and the expense and loss of political capital would have made a second amassing of force to again force compliance impossible. Hence, once the army was on the border, war was inevitable. I was correct about this; and

2) I said I thought Iraqis would probably be better off in the long-run under a US installed government resulting from a nation-building project than under Saddam Hussein. (Which I now think may turn out to be wrong.) I NEVER STATED that I had been in favor of invading Iraq and installing a new government and I am not reconsidering an 'erroneous ideology' which I never held. I have never favored the invasion of Iraq or a 'nation building' project there because I always thought it would be hard and wasteful (though it has exceeded my expectations on this account) and I never thought that it would make the US better off (which is the criterion by which I judge foreign policy - I don't care at all about the welfare of the Iraqis).

As I mentioned above, I have always had great reservations about the applicablility of Western social structures to other cultures and had great doubts about Iraqis' receptivity to 'nation building.' I had never envisioned an Iraq with a Western-style democracy and society. I assumed that a client state would be erected with a government dependent on the US for support. However, I thought that in addition to "carrots", the US would have applied enough of a "stick" by using some of the 'heavy-handed' methods that were used to break German and Japanese resistance during and immediately after WWII to create a relatively stable, prosperous, and prosperous Iraq (by Middle Eastern terms), which would, of course, require the brutal suppression of Islamist, nationalist, and other sources of resistence inimical to US interests (with the dirty work being done, of course, by the dependent puppet government - as has been done so many times in the past by the US, often with poor long term results once the US decides to stop bearing the cost of proping up the client government).

I have to take issue with your dismissal of the essential nature of the brutal coercion exercised by the US in shaping modern Germany and Japan, as well as the role (backed by the threat of force) played by the US in supervising the writing of Constitutions (particularly in Japan) and reestablishing the legal systems of those countries. It is well established throughout history that killing people en masse and damaging their property, paricularly when they cannot hope to meaningfully retaliate or prevail against you or the consequences of resisting are so dire as not to be worth it, is a very effective way getting them to submit to your will. (The Romans were very good at this, and it has been used effectively ever since.) People without hope are much more maleable than people with hope. (Conversely, using force in insufficient quantity against an enemy, either through lack of capability or will (the latter being the US' problem), so that one's enemy has hope that he can prevail, only emboldens the enemy and increases their will to resist - as the US is currently doing in Iraq.) The Nazi's and the Imperial Japanese government had evolved out of previous German and Japanese social conditions and were not going anywhere without being forcibly removed, the leaders killed, and their respective peoples no longer willing to support them because of the horrendous consequences of doing so. In this sense, Dresden and Hiroshima did play a major role in shaping modern Germany and Japan into forms less inimical to US interests and without them we would not have Angela Merkel or Shinzo Abe today, but instead another Fuehrer or Tojo.

This in no way lessens the role of endogenous social development and national historical occurances in playing a large role too in shaping modern Japan and Germany. In this respect, you are correct that the 1848 revolutions or the Taisho period played a large role in giving us Angela Merkel and Shinzo Abe. A people's/nation's own unique cultural conditions establish an important bedrock on which its civilization and governmental system and policies are built, as well as their receptivity to adopting new ways of doing things and accepting and adapting foreign systems, whether imposed or freely adopted. In effect, the underlying cultural structure, as previously evolved, of German and Japanese was the soil in which these civilizations/nations continued to grow once the US had used external force to prune away National socialism and Japanese Imperialism and attach some external 'support or lattice work' for guidance and it was this underlying 'soil' of the cultural structure that allowed them to continue to grow in a direction that was not inimical to the US or its interests (for the most part), but mutually beneficial, once the 'lattice work' of external US coercion was removed and these nations were left to develop and grow on their own.

My lack of enthusiasm for Bush's Iraq adventure back in 2003 was precisely because I had a gut feeling that the Islamic and Arabic cultural foundations of Iraq (discounting the Kurds), unlike the cultural histories of Germany and Japan, were sufficiently different from those of Japan and Germany that it was unlikely that coercion could ever be removed without causing Iraq to move in a direction opposed to US interests. In short, I never envisioned a high probability of an Iraqi state being remade to such a degree by American nation building attempts that it would in any foreseeable amount time be friendly to the US without going to the expense of proping up a client government. I did, however, think Bush was dumb enough to try to impose and prop up such a government (which does not mean that such a situation would be bad for the welfare of the Iraqi people).

Since 2003, I have become increasingly interested in Islam and the Middle east, and the more I learn about them, the stonger my convictions of the impractibility of remaking Iraq without the exertion of constant and expensive exogenous force become. I don't think it is in the nature of Islamic and Arabic culture on the one hand, and Western Judeo-Christian and post-Christian Secular culture on the other, to find common ground for cooperation and friendship. (Similar to the incompatibility of the capitalist West and the communist Eastern Bloc) They are too different in their core beliefs about the ordering of society and their conceptions of tolerance and interaction between peoples, and the place of distinctions such as believers and unbelievers to be reconcilable with one another. I have little respect or appreciation for religion, least of all for Islam (and the sharia it seeks to spread), which I regard as particularly militant and malignant (by Western standards - and no, I do not intend to make any apologies for Christianity's (which I regards as a silly and contradictory doctrine) bloody history - the main point about Christianity as it is has evolved over the last few centuries is that it is currently a much less dangerous and militant an ideology than Islam currently is). Furthermore, from reading the Koran and many of the Ahadith, as well as commentaries (both hostile and apologetic), I am convinced that Islam differs fundamentally from the major strains of Western culture in that, apart from Sufi Islam, its conception of tolerance (particularly towards unbelieviers) and proper social order and that Islam's textual canon is far less conducive to tolerant and humane interpretations. Basically, I think Bin Laden and the Ayatollahs of Iran have correctly interpreted Islam and are faithful to the example set by the words and deeds their prophet, Muhammad, and not, as many Western intellectuals and politicians assert, perverting Islam to find a meaning that is not there.

This has caused me to move to a position of advocating a disengagement with the Islamic world as far as possible. I am quite happy to let them do as they wish to each other and to live by their own laws in thier own countries. All I wish is for them to sell oil at a reasonable price and I do not bother to them in their part of the world as long as they do not bother me. On the other hand, given the universalist imerative of Islam to expand Sharia, I am stongly opposed to immigration of believing Muslims into Western countries, because, as is amply demonstrated in many Western European countries, once t