The varied and complex relations between religion and power can be understood only by means of extensive comparisons, between nations and across time. Who better to demonstrate this than Prof. David Martin, the doyen of the comparative sociology of religion? Martin’s first achievement is to refute “the general theory of secularisation,” which has enjoyed so...
During the last few months in Britain there have been yet more revelations of new Muslim crimes and detailed confirmations of older ones. In 2014 Lutfur Rahman, a Muslim, was elected for a second term as the mayor of Tower Hamlets, a London borough where one third of the population is Muslim. This April a...
On May 22, the Irish people voted by a large majority to permit marriages between two men or two women. Of the two million people who voted—a 60-percent turnout—62 percent supported same-sex “marriage.” It had been a very one-sided contest, with all the major political parties urging their supporters to vote yes. Only 22 years...
The people of Scotland have spoken. Scotland has voted not to secede from the United Kingdom and to remain in her long-standing union with England and Wales. Over two million Scots—more than 55 percent of the 3.6 million who went to the polls—voted against independence. Nearly all the electorate had registered to vote, and there...
Last May, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, two Muslim converts, both Christian apostates, deliberately ran down an off-duty British soldier, Lee Rigby, in their automobile on a main street in the London suburb of Woolwich. In front of eyewitnesses, they then repeatedly stabbed him and tried to behead him with a machete. Their trial and...
In May Pope Francis canonized the 800 martyrs of Otranto, a city in Apulia in Southern Italy, who were slaughtered by the Turkish invaders of 1480. Their invasion across the narrow seas between Albania and Italy was a sequel to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the advance of the Turkish armies up the...
The last major outburst of Muslim terrorism in London was on July 7, 2005, when four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s buses and subway trains. Of late, Londoners had begun to think that they were safe and that these acts of Islamic terror now only happened in such faraway places as Mumbai, Toulouse,...
For many weeks the press in Britain have been obsessed with the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, and it has many months to run. Savile, who died in 2011, aged 84, was a superstar entertainer for the BBC, and his programs attracted millions of viewers. The BBC needed Savile and his huge audiences to justify the...
It is no exaggeration to say that the entire Polish nation was outraged and insulted by President Obama’s clumsy reference in a May 28 speech to “Polish death camps.” Not only did the Poles play no part in setting up and running the Nazi camps where millions of Jews were murdered, but when the killings...
Barcelona is one of the great cities of the Mediterranean, and Barcelona’s most noted architect is Antoni Gaudí i Cornet. It is worth visiting Catalonia and the cities of Barcelona and Reus just to see Gaudí’s work. Eager visitors head for his masterpiece, Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (Holy Family), which the...
The killing of 8 people by a bomb in Oslo, placed by the Norwegian berserker Anders Behring Breivik, followed by his gunning down of a further 69 on the island of Utoya, is a horrible reminder of the potential for evil inherent in human nature. That he deliberately chose to gun down children in Utoya...
In Britain there have been 17 recent prosecutions of gangs of Muslim rapists and child molesters involved in the “on-street grooming” for sex of victims as young as 11 in several towns and cities in northern England. In the most recent case, members of a gang of Muslims from Derby were convicted of rape, false...
The people of England, after very considerable provocation, have lately come to fear England’s Muslims. Britain’s leftists have shifted in the opposite direction. From an entrenched hostility to the mores of their own country and out of sheer perversity, the leftists have intensified their attacks on the Catholic Church, while making a point of defending...
I arrived in Poland just as the television announced the tragic death of President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, Maria, and many of Poland’s military and political leaders in an airplane crash at Smolensk in Russia. A week of mourning followed throughout the entire country. The president had been traveling to Smolensk for a joint commemoration...
The Church of England is made up of three parts: evangelical Protestants, Anglo-Catholics, and liberals. They have long been at war, and soon this war will lead to the final rending of that Church. The Anglo-Catholics will break away when women are ordained bishops, as some already did when the Church of England first ordained...
The decision to release the Libyan terrorist Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi from a Scottish prison has caused much anger in the United States. (Megrahi was convicted for his part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, which killed a total of 270 people.) Indeed, many Americans...
All over Britain and Ireland, including the unpleasing town where I live, which is run by a left-wing junta, there are memorials to those who fought in the International Brigades on the Red Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Even though there are but a few British and Irish survivors of the battles...
While traveling by bus in Chile in January 2008, I drew the attention of two other English-speaking passengers to a graffito, which read: Viva Pinochet Libertad! As people whose sole knowledge of the world came from the left-wing press and broadcasters, they were both shocked and puzzled that Pinochet and liberty could be linked in...
From time to time I go to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the home of what Gladstone called “the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford.” For Catholics it is revered as the home of Cardinal Newman, that most human and subtle of converts, and for Protestants it is the place of the Martyrs Memorial...
Last year in England, we marked the 60th anniversary of the voluntary granting of independence to India and Pakistan; it was also the year in which our military began to leave Iraq. Soon, the last of the British troops will march out of Basra with their band dolefully playing “The World Turned Upside Down.” Iraq...
Paul Lewis, a professor of English at Boston College, is one of America’s most eminent scholars of humor. With this book, he has written another very thoroughly researched study of contemporary American humor, ranging from the “positive humor” and “laughter club” movements that use humor to promote health and efficiency, peace and uplift, to the...
Recently, I returned to dear old Cork after exactly ten years’ absence. What 50 years ago had been a poor town on the periphery of Ireland is now a big, thriving, growing, wealthy city. As I was conveyed from the airport to the city center, I asked the driver, “Anything changed round here recently?” “Immigrants,”...
Turkey is currently negotiating to join the European Union, with the full support of the British government and of U.S. President George W. Bush. If she does join, it will be a disaster for Europe and for Britain. Turkey has 70 million people, nearly all of whom are Muslims and, by European standards, poor. She...
In the 16th century, Spain was the wonder of Europe, with her vast empire in Latin America and the Philippines and her wealthy possessions in the southern Netherlands and Italy. She came close to defeating and ruling England and Holland and, for a time, annexed Portugal with her colonial empire in Africa, Asia, and Brazil. ...
Many people fear that there will be a violent conflict in Britain with the Muslims. They are wrong. Al Qaeda may commit the most appalling atrocities in the United Kingdom, as it has done in New York and Madrid, but the coming struggle will not be a violent one. Most of the Muslims living in...
Social Life and Moral Judgment by Antony Flew New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction; 179 pp., $34.95 Antony Flew is one of Britain’s most lucid analytical philosophers and the most skilled demolisher of the myths of social justice that his country has ever produced. His new book, published in the United States, should prove of great interest...
Robert Grant’s essays range widely across political philosophy, literature, and aesthetics, from Edmund Burke to Václav Havel, from Jane Austen to the fiction of the 1930’s, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy, from Mozart to Rennie Mackintosh. Yet Grant is always knowledgeable, always clear and readable, always interesting. He is able to cover his range of subjects...
The Nilsens have produced an interesting, erudite, and thorough Encyclopedia of 2Oth-Century American Humor with entries ranging from American Indian humor to cartoons, exaggeration, hoaxes, joke patterns, sitcoms, and wit. It is a truly comprehensive and encyclopedic volume with an excellent bibliography, a work that will become a standard reference not just in libraries but...
Everyone in Britain knows that it is just a matter of time before Scotland becomes independent and reverts to medieval chaos. The English Labour Party’s plan of establishing a devolved but subordinate parliament in Edinburgh to be dominated forever by inept Labour MPs recruited from the decaying slums of Glasgow has failed. The secessionist Scottish...
Winnie the Pooh and his friends Piglet, Rabbit, Tigger, Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore live happily in a comfortable bullet-proof home in the New York Public Library and have done so for many years. They have never expressed any desire to return to the Hundred Acre Wood or Pooh-stick bridge or the North Pole, the scenes...
Winnie the Pooh and his friends Piglet, Rabbit, Tigger, Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore live happily in a comfortable bullet-proof home in the New York Public Library and have done so for many years. They have never expressed any desire to return to the Hundred Acre Wood or Pooh-stick bridge or the North Pole, the scenes...
John Major lost the British election in 1997 not because Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party had stolen the Conservatives’ policies but because the Conservatives adopted socialist ones. The last ten years have seen an explosive rise in levels of bureaucratic regulation in Britain, which have particularly hit small business and also professional people, especially those...
“I don’t want to have to carry a handbag all the time” was the way an aggressive British opponent of the compulsory carrying of identity cards (as proposed by several members of the British government) yelled it to me recently. In fairness I should add that this defender of supposed civil liberties was svelte and...
Laser beam surgery has now made it possible to correct many common eye defects caused by irregularities in the shape of the lens of the eve relative to the size of the eyeball. For those with severely impaired eyesight, this means a welcome escape from a serious handicap. However, for children who are only mildly...
Animal rights protesters in Britain have now extended their campaign of sabotage to fishing. Members of the new Campaign for the Abolition of Angling, with its headquarters in Sevenoaks in Kent, have taken to disrupting angling matches by stirring the water with bamboo canes and banging dustbin lids under water to drive the fish away....
Last year I had the agreeable and unusual experience of spending two hours in a packed sports stadium where there was no hooliganism, no violence, and no bad feeling. The good-humored crowd of thousands of men, women, and children, mainly local but with a fair sprinkling of foreigners assembled, enjoyed themselves and dispersed in a...
The news that politically correct groups in the United States are greeting the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America by denouncing the great explorer as an imperialist exploiter has been greeted with incredulity and derision in Europe. After all, had he not discovered America, there would be no tax-fed intelligentsia of progressive Americans to...
The English language is in danger. It is being invaded and infiltrated by the vulgar slang, the horrid jargon, the grammatical errors and the nasal pronunciation of the United States. Such is the nightmare of those crumbling remnants of the British establishment who still prize the affected tones of what was once termed the Oxford...