Cav > Books: africa‎ (48)

"Before we deep dive into it, let me share with you what I did and bdidn’t do. The primary source of data for this book is the seven years of research I did between 2016-2023. I conducted interviews with over a hundred people in London, San Francisco, New Zealand, Hungary, Germany, Portugal, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. In the beginning, these were very ordinary interviews as I didn’t have any knowledge of dating cultures – I was in the dark.
However, as I started to gain more and more awareness, these interviews got a lot deeper and more personal. For this reason, whenever people shared their experiences with me, I promised them anonymity. Consequently, following best practice in qualitative social science research, all the names of those whose stories I tell are pseudonyms.
To expand my reach beyond those cities, my assistant, Maria Nosyk, did an outstanding job helping me. She gathered information from all around the world through several Facebook groups. She collected hundreds of quality responses – many of which you will find throughout the book. Without her dedication, this book would not be where it is today. Huge thanks to Maria and everyone who contributed with their valuable feedback!"

"This rare, silvery metal is an essential component to almost every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today. It is also used in a wide array of emerging low-carbon innovations that are critical to the achievement of climate sustainability goals. The Katanga region in the southeastern corner of the Congo holds more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.
The region is also brimming with other valuable metals, including copper, iron, zinc, tin, nickel, manganese, germanium, tantalum, tungsten, uranium, gold, silver, and lithium. The deposits were always there, resting dormant for eons before foreign economies made the dirt valuable. Industrial innovations sparked demand for one metal after another, and somehow they all happened to be in Katanga."

"...across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains. The titanic companies that sell products containing Congolese cobalt are worth trillions, yet the people who dig their cobalt out of the ground eke out a base existence characterized by extreme poverty and immense suffering. They exist at the edge of human life in an environment that is treated like a toxic dumping ground by foreign mining companies. Millions of trees have been clear-cut, dozens of villages razed, rivers and air polluted, and arable land destroyed. Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo."

"...What has happened here must not be seen. There can be no record or evidence, only the haunting memories of those who stood at this place where hope was lost. My guide urges me to stay at the periphery; the situation is too unpredictable. From the fringes, it is difficult to see the details of the accident. The craterous landscape is obscured by a leaden haze that refuses the entry of light. Distant hills appear only as the vague silhouette of a lumbering beast.
I move closer to investigate, treading carefully into the boiling crowd. I catch sight of a body in the dirt. It is a child, lying motionless within a storm of dust and despair. I try to make out the features of his face, but they elude me. Around the lifeless body, the ocher gravel has been stained in dark shades of red, like burnt umber or rusted metal. Until this moment, I thought that the ground in the Congo took its vermillion hue from the copper in the dirt, but now I cannot help but wonder whether the earth here is red because of all the blood that has spilled upon it...
...That is the lasting image I take from the Congo—the heart of Africa reduced to the bloodstained corpse of a child, who died solely because he was digging for cobalt..."

"From the early 1500s until the end of the slave trade in 1866, one-fourth of the 12.5 million slaves stolen from Africa and shipped across the Atlantic would depart from Loango Bay."

"...My Bosniak driver believed the ethnic conflict in his country was horrific and exceptional, but he was only partly right: it was horrific—but utterly unexceptional. Collectively, ethnic conflicts around the world, from Bosnia to Sri Lanka, have killed more than ten million people since World War II.
Many Americans reflexively tune out news of these conflicts. In the words of one satirist, it’s just the “unspellables” killing the “unpronounceables”—peoples too distant or inexplicable to pay attention to. But as Americans, we need to pay attention, not just for the sake of the millions around the world suffering from ethnic division, but for our own sake. We must deepen our understanding of what it takes for diverse ethnic groups to get along and share a country, for America is rapidly becoming vastly more multiethnic..."

"...Thus, as the United States has veered from melting pot to multiculturalism, there has been little serious discussion about how similar course changes have worked out in other countries. The reality is that both the melting pot and multiculturalist models have been tried many times in history. In some cases, societies have shifted from one to the other. It’s worth examining how it has worked out for them; perhaps we can distill some useful lessons from their experiences. That is what this book endeavors to accomplish."

"After considering the terrible consequences of ethnic divisions in countries like Bosnia and Sri Lanka, it is disheartening to see Americans advance the same types of policies and rhetoric that promoted and toxified those divisions. America has a regrettable past of racial and ethnic discrimination, but if the examples in this book teach anything, it is that the solution to past segregation is not even more segregation. The answer to past racial discrimination is not even more racial discrimination. Two African countries demonstrate this best.
While it was a British protectorate, Botswana endured extensive white racism. Yet it managed to recover quickly to become one of the developing world’s outstanding success stories. It achieved this not with compensatory preferences and racial payback but by completely eliminating racial and ethnic distinctions and by fostering botho, the Batswana version of asabiyah. It also followed the melting pot model, which has repeatedly demonstrated its effectiveness since the time of ancient Rome.
In proportional terms, Rwanda’s genocide stands out as one of the worst racist crimes of all time. Although the genocide occurred only a few decades ago, Rwanda has managed to recover spectacularly from it. Like Botswana, Rwanda accomplished this by “erasing race” and adopting the melting pot model. Rather than instituting ethnic preferences like affirmative action, it outlawed racial and ethnic distinctions altogether. Rather than dividing people into groups, it has sought to unify them with institutions like umuganda. Rather than brooding on past injustices, it has cultivated the shared asabiyah lauded by Ibn Khaldun.
The path taken by Botswana and Rwanda lies open to America. It starts with resolute and unwavering commitments to principles like those made by Israel Zangwill in The Melting Pot and by the children in Rwanda’s Nyange school:
There are no groups. We are all Americans."

"...Yet how best to exploit these possibilities? The following chapters offer a guide on how to become and act like a dictator, based on examples taken from some of the best in the business. If you follow the advice contained in this book, you will be well on the road to becoming a notable authoritarian."

"...I headed home and started typing. What has resulted is, I hope, not one story, but three. The first is my own tale of being kidnapped. The second is the wider story of the Somali pirates, whose activities I had originally gone to Somalia report on. And the third is the story of Somalia itself, and why it has fallen into such a state of anarchy that such outlaws can thrive in the first place.
This book does not claim to be an exhaustive account of either Somalia’s piracy or its politics. It is intended more as a snapshot of what remains a complex, disputed and ever-changing picture. This is partly due to the ongoing difficulties of reporting on the ground. Somalia remains as dangerous for foreigners as ever, and pirates, like most people in organised crime, do not generally welcome scrutiny of their activities.
I have also focused on those parts of the country of which I have some direct experience; inevitably, this means ignoring others. This book does not for example, discuss the rather happier picture in Somaliland, the breakaway region of north-west Somalia that has now been largely peaceful for two decades, and which wants its independence recognised by the outside world. Nor, contrary to the practice of many outsiders who write books on Africa, is this a book that tries to highlight the ‘good side’ – the virtues, decency, and courage-under-fire of the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants. Instead, it is about the villainous minority, the bandits, crooks and warlords who have so often enjoyed the upper hand in recent years. On which note, I should point out that for legal reasons, the names of a few of the people I have come across have been changed."

"There was, however, one important difference between the pyrates of old and the pirates of new. Whereas the storybook buccaneers of my youth would steal a ship’s treasure and make its crew walk the plank, today it was the opposite way around. Somali pirates weren’t really interested in the ship’s cargo. A 50,000-tonne consignment of cement or mineral ore was impossible to ship ashore in their small launches, never mind to find buyers for. Instead, they were after the ship’s crew, whom they would take as hostages for ransom. That effectively made the pirates professional kidnappers rather than robbers, and, for obvious reasons, therefore a risky interview prospect.
Our aim was to try to meet one, and tell the story from his point of view. That point of view might be, though, that a pair of Western journalists would make far better hostages than a few Filipino deckhands..."

"My brother and I against my father. My father’s household against that of my uncle’s. My father and uncle’s households against the rest of the clan. The clan against other clans. And our nation against the world."

"...'Mazungu… Mazunguuu,' came the bloodcurdling screams. 'Give us money.' They were all standing up and paddling like men possessed. The nearest guy had a huge machete attached to his waist. 'Jesus Christ. What the hell am I doing here?' I muttered to myself.
For the past half hour I had been paddling as though my life depended on it. As though? It did depend on it. I was praying they would give up the chase, but it was no good. Despite my best efforts they were catching up.
All of my senses were strained to the limit. I couldn't have felt more alive and in the moment – the rhythmic sound of my paddle pulling hard and clean in the water, the heavy, pungent aroma of steaming vegetation, the feel of my heart pounding, and the sweat dripping off my nose. The fear was rapidly growing within me, demanding an answer to the age-old question: fight or flight?"

"During my journey I'd come to understand that the amount of trouble I encountered was directly proportional to the size of the village. Give me a humble, hardworking fishing village any day. In the smaller places, people were generally far too busy trying to feed their kids to worry about the bald white bloke and his fat wallet. But the bigger the place became, the more chance there was of encountering madmen hell-bent on making my life a misery. Kasongo was a very big village.
Not long before, when the dawn mist still lingered over the water, I had tried to sneak past without attracting attention, hugging the opposite bank.
But just when I thought I'd got by safely, I came upon a group of men lingering by the riverside just ahead of me. It quickly became apparent that they weren't in the mood to make a new friend. They burst into life with a suddenness and a ferocious intensity that made me wince.
I'd known I was in trouble almost immediately. It wasn't unusual for people to shout for money from the banks, but my gut instinct, which I had come to love and cherish, told me that this time it was different. These guys were more hostile and aggressive than normal, and they'd made no bones about what they were after. They wanted my money or my life. I tried to introduce myself in my usual polite way but they didn't give me a chance.
They just ran into the water and tried to grab my canoe, some of their faces screwed up in pure hatred. It was time to put the power on and get the hell out of there.
Within seconds, I heard the cry 'Mazungu' – 'white man' – screamed and repeated along both banks at an alarming rate. It was disconcerting, to say the least. I felt like a wandering wolf that had inadvertently strolled into a farming community and was being hunted down. I had to go faster..."

"At 4,703 km long, the Congo is Africa's second longest river after the Nile and the eighth longest on the planet. Its flow rate is the second most powerful in the world after the Amazon, discharging 42,000 m of water per second. It's also the deepest river in the world, reaching depths of 230 m. It rises in the highlands of North Eastern Zambia at an elevation of 1,756 m and at a distance of about 692 km from the Indian Ocean. Its course then takes the form of a gigantic counter clockwise arc, with numerous rapids and waterfalls along the way. It flows through savannah, swamp and dense tropical rainforest, crossing the equator twice before finally draining into the Atlantic Ocean at the village of Banana. Such is the force of the river at the coast that fresh water can be found as far as 200 km out to sea."

"The moral of these stories for me is this: if in doubt when facing unsavoury characters, stick your hand out and smile, but look strong, stare unblinkingly deep into their eyes and give them the mother of all handshakes. This, combined with a 'mess with me and I'll rip your head off' look in your eyes, should give you a fighting chance. Eventually somebody's got to back down – and hopefully it won't have to be you..."

"It is the era that followed Europe’s decolonization that this book chiefly explores, although the tendency towards authoritarian rule can only be properly understood in the context of what went before. The colonial retreat came about as a result of the rise of nationalist movements in the 1950s and ’60s, and the realization that attitudes towards imperialism had changed forever. Suddenly indigenous rulers were in control of the precious resources that had previously been in the hands of London, Madrid, Lisbon and Paris. Most were unprepared for governance. The nations they inherited were coarsely mapped European constructs, with borders that took little account of age-old tribal rivalries. Families were left separated by the draftsmen’s blunt pencil. Hostile people were thrown together and told to sort out their differences at the ballot box. The newly empowered leaders chose to advance the interests of their own tribes above the rest. Gems and precious metals were used to reward the loyal and silence the foes. Leaders clung to power for fear that their rivals would corner Africa’s resources and impose their own way of life. Maintaining dominance of a single clan or family mattered above all else. In the tiny oil-rich state of Equatorial Guinea, the Nguema family began a dynasty that has ruled since the Spanish relinquished control in 1968."

"...Uranium will always be with us. Once dug up, it can never be reburied.
In this rock we can see the best and the worst of mankind: the capacity for scientific progress and political genius; the capacity for nihilism, exploitation, and terror. We must find a way to make peace with it. Our continuing relationship with uranium, as well as our future as a civilization, will depend on our capacity to resist mirroring that grim and never-ceasing instability that lies within the most powerful tool the earth has to give."

"...His picture was brandished on demonstrations in the 1960s across the world along with Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. His life and the independence that he sought for the Congo made him a pivotal figure of the 20th century. Lumumba’s life marked out some of the key post-war fault lines in the second half of the 20th century; how the Cold War would be fought in Africa and the nature of the independence granted to huge swaths of the globe after 1945. For those fighting in liberation struggles, Lumumba became a figure of resistance to the imperial division of the world."

"...Finally death came. On 17 January Lumumba was flown to Elisabethville with two fellow prisoners Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito. Already beaten and tortured he was dragged by Katangan forces commanded by a Belgian, to Villa Brouwe. Here he was tortured again, as Tshombe decided how to kill him. Later in the evening they were thrown into a military vehicle and driven to a nearby wood. A Belgian officer assembled and commanded three firing squads, while another Belgian organised the execution site. Patrice Lumumba and his two comrades, Mpolo and Okito, were shot one after the other. Tshombe was present. Then Gerard Soete, a Belgian police officer, unearthed the bodies from their shallow grave, chopped each body into pieces and then dissolved them with canisters of acid. When there was no more acid remaining the body parts were burnt. The bloody deed was done and independence had finally been broken.
The Belgian government’s investigation into the assassination of Lumumba in 2001 reported that ‘the Belgian government deemed a speedy independence necessary in order to protect Belgian interests’."

"...Upon hearing any mention of slavery, the mind of the average person in Britain or America turns unbidden, and as a matter of course, to the Atlantic slave trade, by means of which many black Africans were transported from their native continent to America and the islands of the Caribbean. For most of us, this is simply what slavery was; the historic mistreatment and exploitation of black people. It is widely accepted that anybody talking or writing about slavery must adopt this peculiar world-view and ensure that the central focus remains firmly upon black Africans. When we see a book in a library or bookshop called The Slave Trade, we have no doubt that when we open it, we shall be seeing graphic descriptions of the horrors of the so-called ‘Middle Passage’, which saw millions of men, women and children transported across the Atlantic Ocean in atrocious conditions. It is that grammatical feature, the definite article, which indicates what we are to expect. The word ‘the’ gives the game away..."

"To understand the subject of this book, which is of course slavery, properly it will be necessary to bear in mind that across the world slavery has been an accepted and unremarkable institution for thousands of years. It has been widely practised throughout the whole of human history, right up to the present day. According to the United Nations, there are currently somewhere in the region of 25 million slaves in the world (UN News, 2019). It is notable that even in the earliest mentions of slavery, dating back 4,000 years, there is no suggestion of novelty about the practice, which indicates that by the time people began recording their history in permanent form, slavery was already a long-established tradition. It is clear that almost without exception, early civilizations regarded slavery as simply a convenient way of ordering societies which were, in the main, hierarchical..."

"As late as the Norman Conquest in 1066, a tenth of the people in England were slaves and even 600 years later, slavers were routinely raiding the shores of the British Isles. This aspect of the country’s history has, in effect, been airbrushed away. A similar process has taken place in other European countries, where it is now felt tactful to avoid discussing slavery for fear of inflaming old divisions within the European Union and inciting racism against newcomers, many of whom are Muslim. It might help to set both the Atlantic slave trade and also the trade which saw Europeans being transported to Africa over the centuries in their proper perspective, if we look at the overall picture of slavery in history and examine its origins."

"It was in the Roman Empire that slavery reached such vast numbers as to dwarf the Atlantic slave trade and allow us to see it in its proper perspective. In the early years of the Roman Empire there were perhaps 10,000,000 slaves at any one time, which was between one-fifth and one-sixth of the entire population (D’Arms & Kopf, 1980). The same source suggests that more than half a million new slaves would have been needed every single year. If these numbers are accurate, and they are taken from the proceedings from an academic conference on Roman commerce, then the implications are startling. In the city of Rome alone, there were, during the reign of Trajan, an estimated 400,000 slaves, a third of the city’s population (Davison, 1992).
A quick calculation reveals something which may come as a shock to many readers. It has been estimated that in the three and a half centuries after Columbus first reached the Caribbean, between 8,000,000 and 11,500,000 black slaves were transported across the Atlantic Ocean before the end of this particular trade (Everett, 1997). This figure is sometimes adduced as evidence of the uniquely awful nature of the triangular trade; over 10,000,000 people snatched from their homes and carried off into involuntary servitude.
Let us now compare this with the situation at the time of the Roman Empire. The life expectancy of a slave in the Roman Empire was quite astonishingly low. Males could expect, on average, to live to the age of 17.2 years and females 17.9 (Harper, 1972). By way of comparison, the life expectancy of a slave on an American plantation in 1850 was 36 (Fogel & Engerman, 1974). Because life expectancy for Roman slaves was so low, it meant that the only way that a constant population could be maintained was not by relying upon natural increase, but rather by constantly seizing new land and capturing those living there. For this reason, it has been suggested that around half a million new slaves would need to have been seized every year (D’Arms & Kopf, 1980). This would amount to 12,500,000 people in just 25 years. The figure for the slaves transported in the course of the Atlantic slave trade indicate that this number were taken from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean in 350 years. In short, the Roman slave trade in Europe and the Middle East was probably more than ten times as extensive as that which was carried out across the Atlantic, between Africa and the New World..."

"We have in this book looked at slavery as it has been practised in many countries. It was observed in the Introduction that there is a common feeling that people in Britain should feel exceptionally ashamed of their country’s association with the slave trade and that this ties in with attempts to ‘decolonize’ the curricula of schools and universities. It is very interesting in this connection to examine the record of other countries and their own dealings with slavery and the slave trade. Just to remind readers, Britain and America led the world in abolishing the slave trade. Both countries made the importation of, or international trade in, slaves illegal in 1807. As soon as the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, Britain sent warships to West Africa to enforce this ban. The ownership of slaves lingered on in the British Empire until 1833 and in the United States for another 30 years after that. Since Britain is today constantly invited to feel guilty for taking so long to abandon the trade in and ownership of slaves, it is curious to see how long it took some other countries; countries which have escaped censure on these grounds.
We have looked in detail at the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in the slave trade. This was not ended by law until 1908, a century after the British halted the practice. In Morocco, slavery was not abolished until 1922 and slaves in Kuwait had to wait until 1949 to be freed. Astonishingly, it was to be 1961 before Saudi Arabia reluctantly freed all the slaves in the country, but it was by no means the last country in the world to do so. We saw earlier in this chapter that Oman was very enthusiastic about slavery, especially in Zanzibar. It was 1970 when slavery was finally brought to an end there. There was still one country which showed a marked reluctance to put an end to slavery and the slave trade and this was the African country of Mauritania, a Muslim state. In 1976, they became the last country in the world to accept that slavery was morally wrong and to abolish it. One cannot help but wonder why there have never been demands for the Muslim countries who hung onto slavery and the slave trade for so much longer than Britain, to admit their own culpability and perhaps issue some kind of mea culpa. After all, their own prosperity was founded upon the slave trade every bit as much as was that of Britain..."

"We have in this book traced the institution of slavery from ancient times, in various parts of the world, and found that it is the nearest thing to a universal custom or practice. Almost all cultures, on every continent, found the idea of human beings being owned and traded as commodities to be perfectly normal and acceptable. This was the case in Europe as in Africa, Asia as in the Americas. Slavery in Europe was found to be far more extensive and cruel than that associated with what we have now come to term ‘the’ slave trade; the transportation of black African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean to North America and the islands of the Caribbean. This leaves us with something of a conundrum or puzzle. Why is it that today any mention of slavery is automatically assumed to be a question of racial exploitation of black people by white Europeans or Americans?"

"The first question to ask about Saudi Arabia is not when will its government collapse, but why is it still here? Only if we understand how an absolute monarchy survived into the twenty- first century can we reasonably assess how long it will continue. A second question to ask is: Does Saudi Arabia still matter to a world awash in shale oil—and, if it does, how might the West best encourage positive change without compromising Saudi stability? To answer these two questions, the framework of Vision or Mirage is divided into five parts each dealing with one of the pillars of Saudi stability. They are: “Creating a New Nation,” “Managing Succession,” “Balancing Stakeholders,” “Delivering Competent Government,” and “Meeting New Challenges.”

"Several factors offer a possible foundation from which Saudi Arabia might evolve into a more liberal rather than a more repressive country. Unlike every other Arab nation, the kingdom’s indigenous institutions were not uprooted and modernized by colonial administrators. Saudi institutions have evolved organically, producing a long-established government with deep local roots and widespread popular legitimacy. It remains the only nation with a recognizable version of the classic Islamic constitutional order in which religious scholars counterbalanced executive authority. Compared with other Arab countries, its judiciary is relatively independent. 14 Saudi Arabia’s military is firmly under civilian control; its fledging, appointed parliament is an established, if weak, part of the political system; it has a large number of Western-educated English speaking technocrats, the world’s most profitable oil company, and the funds to pay some of the world’s best consultants to help devise coherent development plans.
Ultimately, the kingdom is passing through a disruptive and potentially destabilizing period of transition, the outcome of which remains very uncertain. What is clear is that in responding to Saudi reforms, the West faces a dilemma. It cannot ignore the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the detention of political activists or the war in Yemen—yet it should not let these events overshadow the genuine improvements taking place. The success of these reform efforts is very much in our interest, since Saudi Arabia’s political stability, economic development and social liberalization are intertwined; each supportive of and dependent on the others.
We in Western democracies cannot influence how Saudi Arabia evolves unless we are involved in the process. It remains important to set boundaries of behavior that must not be crossed again and encourage compromise solutions to Saudi disputes with Yemen and Qatar. It is equally important to recognize the limitations of outside efforts to accelerate reform. Intimidating or humiliating Saudi Arabia with public shaming and economic sanctions is unlikely to modify the behavior of a people who believe themselves the founders of a great religion and know themselves to be vital to global prosperity. In fact, a shunned or frightened monarchy is one that is more likely to discontinue reform and seek autocratic allies. Ostracizing Saudi Arabia only makes reform more difficult and instability more likely. Encouraging Saudi Arabia’s political evolution towards a more accountable, less coercive government will require positive, practical engagement with its monarchy; including firm, sustained support for courts dedicated to the rule of law, universities promoting academic freedom, uncensored media outlets, empowered representative bodies, and independent civic organizations.
These efforts will certainly be more successful if they push with the grain of Saudi culture and history rather than against it..."

"...What is striking about this tortuous struggle to reinterpret Muslim scripture is that none of these intelligent and well-meaning men and women reformers can live with the idea of rejecting altogether the troublesome parts of scripture.
Thus, in their hands, Allah becomes a God of ambiguity rather than of clarity. From an articulate transmitter of Allah’s Word, Muhammad is turned into someone who left behind an incoherent muddle of rules. Ironically, this was the position of the Christian and Jewish critics who first heard Muhammad. They found that he stole whole passages from the Old and New Testaments and Jewish scriptures and reshaped them into a contradictory muddle that he claimed to be original. This vision of Muhammad is not at all what the reformers seek. According to them, Muhammad was good; he sought to liberate women, for example, but his words were turned and twisted and now must further be twisted and turned in order to create a semblance of tolerance and equity.
Fundamentalists do not take kindly to these attempts to reshape the Holy Quran into a modern document; to them, this is a clear degradation of God and Muhammad. And here, I believe, the fundamentalists win, because they are not suffering from what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. The fundamentalists’ God is all-powerful; he dictated the Quran, and we must live as the Prophet did.
This is a stance that is clear. It’s the Westernized theologians who are trapped in confusion, because they want to maintain that the Prophet Muhammad was a perfect human being whose example should be followed, that the Quran is perfect scripture, and that all of its key injunctions —kill the infidels, ambush them, take their property, convert them by force; kill homosexuals and adulterers; condemn Jews; treat women as chattel—are mysterious errors of translation..."

"...To be blunt, their efforts to assist Muslims and other minorities are futile because, by postponing or at best prolonging the process of their transition to modernity—by creating the illusion that one can hold on to tribal norms and at the same time become a successful citizen—the proponents of multiculturalism lock subsequent generations born in the West into a no-man’s-land of moral values. What comes packaged in a compassionate language of acceptance is really a cruel form of racism. And it is all the more cruel because it is expressed in sugary words of virtue..."
"...Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.
In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse..."

"Europe’s long tradition of Christian and pseudo-scientific anti-Semitism was taken to its logical conclusion by Hitler and the Nazis, with the willing help of many other Europeans who participated in his program of Jewish annihilation. The evil of this “Final Solution” was exposed after the defeat of the Third Reich and combatted thereafter by the reeducation of ordinary Germans, the memorialization of the Holocaust, and the stigmatization or prohibition of neo-Nazi groups. As a result, by the end of the twentieth century most civilized people in the West believed that European anti-Semitism was a thing of the past.
But it is not. It has mutated into something new: Arab Islamic anti-Semitism has replaced European anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semites have borrowed a few tricks from the Nazis. They employ propaganda tools, such as the counterfeit Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that were developed by the Nazis. However, they also have something that the Nazis did not have: a world religion that is growing faster than any other religion, a warrior faith that is espoused by over one and a half billion people. Hitler had Mein Kampf and the might of the German Wehrmacht; today’s anti-Semites, like the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Osama bin Laden, have a holy book, a far greater demographic power, and a good chance of getting their hands on a nuclear weapon..."

"So this, in a nutshell, was my Enlightenment: free inquiry, universal education, individual freedom, the outlawing of private violence, and the protection of individual property rights. It did not take me long to see that the very novelty of these concepts made me treat them with much more respect than many of the people living around me in the Netherlands, who took them entirely for granted..."

"It is not a trivial thing to know that, even in the West, if you criticize or even analyze a particular religion you may require protection for the rest of your life, that if you speak out about Islam you may start a riot or a massive international campaign, and that perhaps you yourself will become a target, stalked, ostracized, even murdered. It is an unpleasant option. Most people, consciously or not, seek to avoid it. Fear has an effect.
Thus slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, people begin to get used to not saying certain things, or they say them but certainly won’t write them. The thin fingers of self-censorship begin to tighten around individual minds, then groups of people, then around ideas themselves and their expression. When free speech crumbles in this way, when Westerners refrain from criticizing or questioning certain practices, certain aspects of Islam, they abandon those Muslims who seek to question them too. They also abandon their own values. Once they have done that, their society is lost..."

"...All are followers of the Prophet, and their social customs are consequently much the same as those of any other Mohammedan race, though with a good admixture of savagedom..."