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A Path Out of the Trade and Savings Trap by David P. Goldman

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

Except in Africa and South Asia, the world’s population is aging rapidly. Between 2010 and 2050 the proportion of Americans over 65 will nearly double assuming constant fertility and immigration. By 2034 the Social Security Trust Funds will be depleted.1 By that time there will be two Americans over 65 for every five Americans of working age; if the government taxes earnings on a pay-as-you-go model, the burden on working Americans will be insupportable. The average American family has saved only $96,000 for retirement; more pertinent, the median family has saved just $5,000.2

There is another side to America’s inadequate savings rate, and that is a chronic current account deficit. Countries save by exporting more than they import and saving the balance. The economics literature documents the close relationship between rates of aging, savings, and current account balances.3 Older people lend to younger people to fund retirement, and younger people borrow from older people to start families and build enterprises. Countries with a higher proportion of aging people have a greater need for savings, and typically run a current account surplus with countries that have a younger population. The Nobel laureate Robert Mundell is one of the originators of this thesis. Without exports, we cannot save; with a chronic trade deficit, we cannot help but dissave at exactly the point when we require an increase in savings. Thus America is headed towards a catastrophe. Can it be averted?

The answer is affirmative, but it will require radical changes in U.S. economic policy. Trade competition from Asia in high-value-added manufactured goods presents a different kind of challenge than we have dealt with in the past. China and, to a lesser extent, other Asian competitors employ the full resources of state finances to fund capital-intensive manufacturing investment in the way that the West subsidizes basic infrastructure. In addition, China will commit $1 trillion to building infrastructure overseas to support its foreign trade, including exports as well as raw material supplies. The problem is not merely the dumping of artificially cheap goods into American markets, but a state-supported capital investment program that erodes returns for American investors. As a result, investment in the United States seeks capital-light venues such as software and avoids capital-intensive sectors such as chip production. We are being shut out of the global market for high-tech exports. By no means should we emulate China, whose model suffers from massive inefficiencies as well as suppression of political and economic liberty. But we do need to beat China at its own game, at least in some respects. Although America should not subsidize capital investment; it should subsidize fundamental research that leads to entrepreneurial innovation. And it should work with India, Japan, and other countries that want to resist China’s bid for Asian economic dominance to create markets for American high-tech exports.

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A RESPONSE TO SENATE RESOLUTION 118 BY JANET LEVY

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

My response to Diane Feinstein’s call to deny a permit to “Patriot Prayer,” a group she labels as a “hate group:” (See her letter below).

On April 4, 2017, the US Senate passed Senate Resolution 118, “Condemning hate crime and any other form of racism, religious or ethnic bias, discrimination, incitement to violence, or animus targeting a minority in the United States”. The resolution was drafted by a Muslim organization, EmgageUSA (formerly EmergeUSA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). On April 6, 2017, EmgageUSA wrote the following on their Facebook page:

“Thanks to the hard work of Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Susan Collins and Senator Kamala Harris we have achieved the approval of Senate Resolution 118, an anti-hate crimes bill drafted by Emerge-USA. It is days like this that Americans are reminded of this country’s founding principles: equal opportunity, freedom, justice. We are proud to help support the protection of these rights #amoreperfectunion #theamericandream”.

Senate Resolution 118 calls on

“…Federal law enforcement officials, working with State and local officials… to expeditiously investigate all credible reports of hate crimes and incidents and threats against minorities in the United States and to hold the perpetrators of those crimes, incidents, or threats accountable and bring the perpetrators to justice; encourages the Department of Justice and other Federal agencies to work to improve the reporting of hate crimes; and… encourages the development of an interagency task force led by the Attorney General to collaborate on the development of effective strategies and efforts to detect and deter hate crime in order to protect minority communities…”

The resolution refers to hate crimes against Muslims, Jews, African-Americans, Hindus, and Sikhs and was sponsored by Senator Kamala Harris and co-sponsored by Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Susan Collins.

On April 6, almost the exact same text was introduced as House Resolution H.Res. 257, “Condemning hate crime and any other form of racism, religious or ethnic bias, discrimination, incitement to violence, or animus targeting a minority in the United States”. A House Resolution can be reintroduced as legislation.

H.Res. 257 urges

“…the development of an interagency task force led by the Attorney General and bringing together the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Education, the Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to collaborate on the development of effective strategies and efforts to detect and deter hate crime in order to protect minority communities”. The House Resolution was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary on April 6 and from there it was referred to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations on April 21.

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Austin Ruse has an essential book out battling the fake science supporting all of the Left’s agendas. Andrew Harrod

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

‘Science’ is now a cover for the leftist agenda,” writes Austin Ruse in his recent book. Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data fights this agenda’s alchemy that turns fiction into policy.https://stream.org/austin-ruses-new-book-debunks-fake-science/

“Scientists are not priests,” Ruse warns. He sees a danger in way modern people revere some scientists. “Fully trained doctors experimented on Jews in Nazi Germany.” This example shows how many scientists “have held irrational and very unscientific beliefs over the years.” And with “transgenderism” today, “thoroughly respectable doctors are castrating little boys on the pretense that they can turn them into women.”
Pop Science Preachers

Ruse doubts the merits of many pop science preachers. Astronomy star Carl Sagan once spoke about the “long-discredited ‘ontology recapitulates phylogeny’ theory of a nineteenth-century Darwinist named Ernst Haeckel.” “Transgenderism” booster “Bill Nye the Science Guy” is a sketch comedian with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Ruse proves that science’s peer review process is not sacred. The process has missed many papers that later won Nobel Prizes. This process today “has become a way for the leftwing ‘consensus’ to circle the wagons and shoot down any challenge to their agenda.” The website Retraction Watch reports only on scandals in scholarly research.

“Even when there’s not obvious political pressure to skew results, scientists are human beings,” Ruse notes. The “iconic status of ‘science’ in the world today,” as well as the “huge amounts of government money at stake, means that the rewards for dishonesty are enormous.”

He mocks the idea that laymen must obey “science.” “Forgive me, Father-Scientist, up until now I did not believe that a man could become a woman. But now I do. I will do penance and promise to sin no more.”
False Promises

Much of Ruse’s book refutes past false promises behind the Sexual Revolution’s “present-day holocaust of disease and death.” He starts with French Revolutionary thinker Marquis de Sade, the French surrealists’ “Divine Marquis.” He “was a notorious rapist and sadist,” Ruse notes, “charged with drugging, kidnapping, torturing, and raping women.”

“We can’t afford to leave science to the frauds, the fakers, and the Left,” Ruse warns.

Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong combined killed likely over one hundred million. Yet the “Sexual Revolution dwarfs that.” A hundred million abortions worldwide join millions more deaths from Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs).
Science in Service of the Culture of Death

In the US, Ruse examines abortion and Planned Parenthood. “[N]o lie is too big for an organization that was founded as a eugenics project of Margaret Sanger, an out-and-out racist.” The “complicity of the scientific and medical profession in all the lies” is shameful. This recalls the “shame of the medical and scientific community during the Third Reich.” Among other false hopes, “embryonic stem cells have been a disaster, running wild in human bodies … growing skin and hair inside one poor man’s brain.”

Ruse likewise notes the world’s Malthus craze for “population control.” In a “demographic winter” wolves now appear in abandoned German towns. Worldwide billions of dollars have served the “vanishingly small number of women” who want contraception but cannot get it. More pressing issues include clean water, the lack of which could be lethal for over a billion people.

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The Stature of Statues By Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

The stature of statues is determined by the emotional reaction of observers to what the statues represent. Religious statues, political statues, historical statues commemorating events and achievements all symbolically represent people places or things that observers react to. The power of statues like the power of flags is determined by the reaction they arouse in the observer.

When Obama replaced the statue of Winston Churchill with the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. in his office it was a symbolic gesture. Churchill was perceived as a right-wing extremist until Germany declared war on England and it was clear that Neville Chamberlain’s policies of appeasement (leading from behind) emboldened Hitler. In May of 1940 Parliament voted no confidence in Prime Minister Chamberlain and King George VI appointed Churchill prime minister and minister of defense. Churchill was a powerful leader who rallied the English people during WWII and led his country out of a crippling defeat to victory.

Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister who lead the non-violent movement civil rights movement in America, was a powerful leader whose efforts ultimately secured the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Martin Luther King Jr. remained committed to non-violence and civil disobedience as the methods for social reform – his vision was as successful in his time as Churchill’s was in his.

Here is the problem. Neither Churchill nor Martin Luther King Jr. reflected Obama’s vision for America. After eight years in office it is evident that busts of Saul Alinsky, Frank Marshall Davis, and Edward Said would have been the appropriate busts in Obama’s office. But statues are symbolic and the stature of those statues would have exposed Obama’s actual hope for change in America.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008 the entire country was hopeful that race relations in America would improve. Americans hoped the country would realize Martin Luther King’s dream and the country would be one United States of America where children would be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin. We hoped that being an American would be the common denominator that bound us all together in common cause to strengthen and realize the American dream.

Americans ignored the company that Obama kept and substituted their own hopes for change when they voted. Americans ignored Obama’s twenty year affiliation with anti-American anti-white black supremacist Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Americans ignored Obama’s affiliation with anti-white anti-American Black Power Frank Marshall Davis. Americans ignored Obama’s relationship with anti-American pro-Muslim professor Edward Said. Americans ignored Obama’s relationship with anti-white law school professor Derrick Bell. Americans ignored Obama’s relationship to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Americans ignored Obama’s mentor radical socialist Saul Alinsky and Obama’s friendship with black supremacist Louis Farrakhan.

Barack Obama’s hope for change was not what most Americans hoped for. Obama’s radical left-wing liberal hope was to weaken America and change our political structure from democracy to socialism. In eight years Obama deliberately fomented racial divisiveness because divisiveness creates the social chaos required for seismic social change.

Obama followed Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” with the commitment of a religious zealot. He cut his hair, stopped smoking crack, put on a suit, honed his skills as a community organizer and began his career of selling snake oil to America. He was groomed to be the presidential candidate to bring socialism to America.

In Obama’s memoir “Dreams from My Father” Obama actually described Alinsky’s trick/tactic. “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.” p. 94-95

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MY SAY: SELECTIVE OUTRAGE

Posted By on August 19th, 2017

The Neo- Nazis are a loathsome, loutish, hateful group and the President made a dumb statement about “decent people on both sides.”As a result, the media, the left, and the never Trumpsters are out in force. Even many Republican summer soldiers and sunshine patriots are tucking up their petticoats in high dudgeon. So be it.

The right wing groups are amateur bigots- small in number with very limited national influence- none in the academies or the media. The Antifa groups are professional bigots who know how to manipulate and influence the public….and they employ every perceived gripe from every minority to inflame national rhetoric in order to destroy democracy.

The ones that really get my goat are the hypocrites who use Holocaust metaphor and anti-Semitism to denounce the Neo-Nazis. “This is the ideology that killed six-million Jews” screeched a young man recently. Funny, I never heard him denounce Islamic jihad driven genocidal goals. For that matter he supported Obama’s Iran deal which enabled a regime whose open and avowed and averred aim is to destroy Israel and kill six-million Jews. And he thinks that BDS is just an expression of tough love of Israel.

An e-pal J.P. wrote :

“But the bigger issue is the sudden interest in Nazis, when anti-semitism has been on the rise for the last ten years.Why is it that a couple of hundred anti-semites warrants such massive attention from the mainstream press, from the Democrats, and from the left? And from you? Why don’t they (or you) care when millions of college students get together every year for a week-long celebration of anti-semitism? Is the only difference that the college students don’t display the swastika? Or could it possibly be that all the faux-rage is seen as a way of scoring political points against Trump?”

Well said!

rsk

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Muslims Tell Europe: “One Day All This Will Be Ours” by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on August 19th, 2017

The Archbishop of Strasbourg Luc Ravel, nominated by Pope Francis in February, just declared that “Muslim believers know very well that their fertility is such today, that they call it… the Great Replacement. They tell you in a very calm, very positive way: One day all this, all this will be ours…”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán just warned against a “Muslimized Europe”. According to him, “the question of the upcoming decades is whether Europe will continue to belong to Europeans”.

“In the coming 30 years, the number of Africans will grow by more than one billion people. That is twice the population of the entire European Union… The demographic pressure will be enormous. Last year, more than 180,000 people crossed in shabby boats from Libya. And this is just the beginning. According to EU Commissioner Avramopoulos, at this very moment, 3 million migrants are waiting to enter Europe”. — Geert Wilders, MP, The Netherlands, and leader of the Party for Freedom and Democracy (PVV).

This week, yet another Islamic terrorist attack targeted the Spanish city of Barcelona. As it was for many years under Muslim rule, it is, therefore, like Israel, land which many Islamists believe they are entitled to repossess.

At the same time, far from Spain, elementary schools have been closing, shuttered by the state after the number of children dropped to less than 10% of the population. The government is converting these structures into hospices, providing care for the elderly in a country where 40% of the people are 65 or older. That is not a science-fiction novel. That is Japan, the world’s oldest and most sterile nation, where there is a popular expression: “ghost civilization”.

According to Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, by 2040 most of the country’s smaller cities will see a dramatic drop of one-third to one-half of their population. Due to a dramatic demographic decrease, many Japanese councils can no longer operate and have been closed. Restaurants have decreased from 850,000 in 1990 to 350,000 today, pointing to a “drying up of vitality”. Predictions also suggest that in 15 years, Japan will have 20 million empty houses. Is that also the future of Europe?

Among the experts in demography, there is a tendency to call Europe “the new Japan”. Japan, however, is dealing with this demographic catastrophe with its own resources, and banning Muslim immigration to the country.

“Europe is committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson has called “the greatest sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death in the fourteenth century'”, as George Weigel recently noted.

Europe’s Muslims appear to be dreaming of filling this vacuum. The Archbishop of Strasbourg, Luc Ravel, nominated by Pope Francis in February, recently declared that “Muslim believers know very well that their fertility is such today, that they call it … the Great Replacement. They tell you in a very calm, very positive way: ‘One day all this, all this will be ours’ …”.

A new report by the Italian think tank Centro Machiavelli just revealed that if current trends continue, by 2065 first- and second-generation immigrants will exceed 22 million persons, or more than 40% of Italy’s total population. In Germany, as well, 36% of children under the age of five are being born to immigrant parents. In 13 of the 28 EU member countries, more people died than were born last year; without migration, the populations of Germany and Italy are expected to decline by 18% and 16%, respectively.

The impact of demographic free-fall is most visible in what was once called the “new Europe”, the countries of the former Soviet bloc such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, to distinguish these from the so called “old Europe”, France and Germany. Those Eastern countries are now the ones most exposed to the “depopulation bomb”, the devastating collapse in birth rate that the current-events analyst and author Mark Steyn has called “the biggest issue of our time”.

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Confederate Statues Honor Timeless Virtues — Let Them Stay Don’t let extremists on both sides destroy honor and valor, even as they seek to destroy everything else. By Arthur Herman

Posted By on August 19th, 2017

There are times when I wonder if we’re coming to the harsh, bitter end of the American experiment. The weekend of August 12 was one of them.

My wife and I have lived in Charlottesville for the past 14 years, and on Saturday we got to see the sick political culture that’s infected this country for the past couple of decades sweep over our fair city, leaving three dead and many more seriously injured.

Beth and I like to run in the mornings, and that Saturday morning we headed over to the big four-story parking garage at John Paul Jones Arena, which we sometimes use as our running track when it’s raining or it’s very hot and sunny. Usually the garage is completely empty; that Saturday every bay was filled with a Virginia State Police car, with dozens of other police cars and vans parked along the side. Seeing them gave us both an eerie feeling filled with foreboding; I’d felt the same eeriness that Friday night, when white supremacists held their torchlight vigil at the University of Virginia, in a scene reminiscent of Nazi-party rallies in the 1930s.

Yet even with all these policemen in riot gear, no one could control the violence when extremists from the left and extremists from the right battled each other in the streets in Charlottesville — or the national political firestorm it set off. And all this happened because our city council decided in June it could score some liberal points by having the statue of Robert E. Lee removed from a park downtown, and by changing the name from Lee Park to Emancipation Park.

They’re not alone, of course; they’re part of a trend that’s sweeping — or, I prefer to say infecting — the country right now, and not just in the South.

I’ve heard many arguments as to why statues commemorating Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Confederate war heroes should come down in Charlottesville; and not many why they should stay, except from white supremacists who have no honest or rational views on the matter. So maybe it’s time for someone who is a scholar, a historian — a Pulitzer Prize finalist historian, and the New York Times–bestselling author of nine books — and a lifelong Civil War buff to rehearse the reasons why they should remain, and why, if they come down now under violent pressure from the Left, we may be losing a lot more than statues of dead Confederate heroes.

First of all, these are not “Confederate monuments.” They are monuments to the dead, soldiers who fought and often died for the Confederate cause. They were erected years after the Civil War. For example, the bronze Lee statue in Lee Park dates to 1924. It was begun by a French sculptor, completed by an Italian-immigrant artist, and then cast by a company in the Bronx. These monuments were dedicated to memorialize the courage and sacrifice that these Southern men and, in some cases, women (one of the sculptures in Baltimore pulled down earlier this week was dedicated “to the Confederate women of Maryland”) brought to a cause that they believed at the time deserved the same “last full measure of devotion” that their Northern counterparts brought to theirs. Of course, some of those who paid for and erected these statues also believed that cause had been right, not wrong. (I’ll say more about that in a minute.) But in the final analysis, they are monuments to timeless virtues, not to individuals.

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On Charlottesville, Trump, and Anti-Americanism The president made some idiotic remarks, but he knows something the elites overlook. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on August 19th, 2017

Susan Rosenberg was a terrorist in the early 1980s. Like her Weathermen comrades, she would have killed many people had she been a more competent terrorist. She was a fugitive plotting more bombings when she and a co-conspirator were captured in New Jersey, armed to the gills and toting over 700 pounds of dynamite. At her sentencing, she proclaimed, “Long live the armed struggle” against “U.S. imperialism.” Her only regret was that she hadn’t shot it out with the police who arrested her. A federal judge sentenced her to 58 years’ imprisonment.

I know her story well because, when she claimed she was being denied parole unlawfully, I spent over a year as the prosecutor arguing that the court should keep her in the slammer. Finally, the court ruled against her.

So . . . Bill Clinton sprang her.

Her commutation may have outraged most Americans, but it was celebrated by the nation’s “progressive” opinion elites, the same ones who were cool with President Clinton’s release of the FALN terrorists. Granted, Rosenberg didn’t get the hero’s welcome at New York City’s Puerto Rican Day parade received by Oscar Lopez Rivera — the FALN terrorist released by President Obama. The teaching gig the Left arranged for her wasn’t quite as prestigious and long-lived as the ones her fellow Weathermen — and Obama pals — Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn fell into. She’ll never be a t-shirt icon, like Che Guevara or Tupac Shakur. The campaign to pretend she was innocent won’t rival the Alger Hiss fairy tale. There will probably be no statue of her, much less a performing-arts center like the one in Princeton named for Paul Robeson.

But she hates America, so she’ll be remembered fondly in the places where the cultural tune is called. Her books — such as An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country — will continue to be taken oh so seriously. Her Wikipedia entry does not describe her as a terrorist; it says Susan Rosenberg is a “radical political activist, author and advocate for social justice.”

That’s why you got Trump.

It has nothing to do with statues of the dead. It is about the status of the living.

You’re upset over President Trump’s idiotic remarks this week? Oh, right, I need to specify. Not the crackpot bit about General Pershing mass-murdering Muslim prisoners in the Philippines (well explained by David French, here). I mean the one about the “very fine people” in Charlottesville — the supposed “many” who joined neo-Nazis, KKK die-hards, and other white supremacists in a demonstration that could not have been more overtly racist and despicable.

Yeah, I’m upset about that, too.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t notice the anti-fa thugs were out there. It doesn’t mean I don’t see the hard Left’s seditionist shock troops, at war with the country, much like the Weathermen, the Panthers, and the Black Liberation Army back in the day. As we’ve seen many times now (and will, alas, see many times more), the radical Left doesn’t need tiki-torch twits to spur them to arson and mayhem.

This time, though, in Charlottesville, the white supremacists were the instigators. They caused it. They orchestrated this disgusting event, they came ready for the violence they knew they were provoking, and one of them committed a murder.

If the roles were reversed, we wouldn’t want to hear a bunch of imbecilic “there’s blame on both sides” moral equivalence. We’d want the most culpable bunch called out and condemned, by name — and without any irrational hedging about phantom “very fine people” who confederate with sociopaths on the latter’s terms.

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Missouri State Senator: ‘I Hope Trump Is Assassinated’ By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on August 19th, 2017

FEEL THE LOVE??????RSK

On Thursday, a Democratic Missouri state senator posted, and then quickly deleted, a Facebook comment saying she hoped President Donald Trump would be assassinated. Democrats have called for her to resign, but she refused.

“I hope Trump is assassinated!” Maria Chappelle-Nadal, the state senator from University City, said in her comment, as preserved by radio host Mark Reardon.

As a result of Chappelle-Nadal’s comment, the U.S. Secret Service’s St. Louis field office is investigating, and both Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Stephen Webber called on her to resign.

Chappelle-Nadal posted the comment out of frustration with the “trauma and despair” the president has caused with his statements about the events in Charlottesville, Va., the Kansas City Star reported.

“The way I responded this morning was wrong,” Chappelle-Nadal said. “I’m frustrated. Did I mean the statement? No. Am I frustrated? Absolutely. The president is causing damage. He’s causing hate.”

The state senator posted the comment on her personal Facebook page, which is not open to the public. “On my personal Facebook, I put up a statement saying that I really hate Trump. He’s causing trauma and nightmares. That was my original post,” Chappelle-Nadal added. Her assassination comment came later down in the thread.

“It was wrong for me to post that,” she said. “But I am not going to shy away from the damage this president is causing.”

Chappelle-Nadal recalled the three-year anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a city she represents in the state senate. She also noted the NAACP’s travel advisory for Missouri, which warns that civil rights would not be respected in the state.

“There are people who are afraid of going out in the streets,” she said. “It’s worse than even Ferguson.” She blamed such a climate on the president. His comments this weekend “make it easier for racists to be racists.”

Missouri State Senate Minority Leader Gina Walsh (D) condemned Chappelle-Nadal’s comment. “Promoting, supporting or suggesting violence against anyone, especially our elected leaders, is never acceptable,” Walsh said. “There is too much rancor and hate in today’s political discourse, and Sen. Chappelle-Nadal should be ashamed of herself for adding her voice to this toxic environment.”

Sen. McCaskill agreed. “I condemn it. It’s outrageous. And she should resign,” she said in a statement. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Peter Smith Onward, Christian Soldiers!

Posted By on August 19th, 2017

Islam denies the divinity of Christ while venerating a warlord of decidedly unsavoury disposition. That many Christian leaders prefer to swap warm and cuddly platitudes with representatives of a creed bent on their subjugation would make St Paul’s jaw drop.

I was reading an interesting article (The Future of Christianity) by Anglican priest and regular Quadrant contributor Michael Giffin, who stopped me in my tracks by saying the Bible is silent about the Islamic threat. He added that he was proud that “for the most part, the Church has remained consistently silent about the supposed Islamic threat and stuck to preaching the Gospel of Christ.”

Now I admit to wanting the Christian churches to be more muscular when it comes to Islam. First, what do I mean by being more muscular? Well there is a middle course between Pope John Paul II kissing the Koran, as he did, and poking imams in the eye with a burnt stick. It’s a question of balance. To my mind a proper balance is not struck when Christian Church leaders make overtures towards Islam. Interfaith dialogue is misconceived, in my view, when the other side is committed to taking over.

It is no accident that where Islam predominates Christianity and Christians are driven out. Christ was not a doormat and neither should be those whose job it is carry his message. And it is a grave mistake to think the Bible is silent on the Islamic issue. Christ was quite clear about false prophets arising. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”(Matthew 7:15-16)

How much clearer could He have been? St Paul was pretty clear as well in his letter to the Galatians:

…there are some who are confusing you to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven [even, I add, the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed in a cave] should proclaim to you a different gospel contrary to what we have proclaimed, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!

This should be instructive and alerting for those Christians who have ears to hear. St Paul bears reiterating: Let those who proclaim a gospel contrary to the gospel of Christ be accursed. Not invited, you will notice, to morning tea by the Archbishop of Canterbury to discuss matters of common faith. There is no faith in common. Islam denies the divinity of Christ and places a man of unsavoury disposition above Him in the pecking order. It is just not tenable to sit down with these people as purveyors of a false gospel.

Nor is it tenable to ignore them and remain silent when the faith to which they owe allegiance is responsible for the persecution of Christians. Whether Edmund Burke said it or not, it is surely true that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. I cannot see that Christian churches are right to simply stand by and allow the propagation of hateful scripture to go directly unanswered and unchallenged.

If a number of Popes in history had not taken up the cudgels it is doubtful that Christianity would have survived the militaristic onslaught of Islam. The fight isn’t over until both sides disengage. The other side have not disengaged.