Another Waster of his Talents:

Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, writes in the Daily Telegraph about one of the London Bombers:

He was born in Yorkshire in 1983... He was not poor; his father, an immigrant from Pakistan, had built up a successful takeaway food business, selling fish and chips and driving a Mercedes. He was not uneducated, assuming you regard a degree in sports science from Leeds Metropolitan University as education. Nor, I suspect, would he have failed the "cricket test" famously devised by Lord Tebbit as a test of cultural assimilation. An uncle says he was "proud to be British"...

I am afraid that many people - and not all of them supporters of the British National Party - will also see him as a proof that Enoch Powell was right when he seemed to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" in his notorious speech of 1968. When, as happened last year, the editor of the impeccably liberal magazine Prospect asks whether open borders pose a threat to an open society, the rehabilitation of Powellism starts to look like a real possibility.

And yet this is to misunderstand what we are up against. For the crisis we face has nothing to do with the kind of innate racial incompatibilities Powell believed in. The saloon bar response - "Send them back and the seal the borders" - is not merely impractical; it completely misses the point.

Well, of course, Powell couldn't possibly have been right, because that would mean that ... all of us respectable folks who ostracized him and his ideas were wrong!

The settlement of Western Europe by Muslims is now an irreversible phenomenon; moreover, it seems bound to continue more or less inexorably, whether legally or illegally.

Except that Finland has very few immigrants. Why not? Because the Finns decided they wouldn't let them in! But in most of the rest of Europe, the prescient people, like Powell, were denounced by the nice people, like Ferguson, and driven out of influence.

The most obvious response to the London Bombings is: "First, do no more harm." Stop letting in more people from Muslim countries. But men like Ferguson will work hard to keep us oblivious to the obvious. As George Orwell said:

"We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer