First Lady Michelle Obama is touring this writer’s birthplace, South Africa. “[Nelson] Mandela’s legacy in the battle for South African democracy,” wrote one rapt reporter, who followed the FLOTUS around Johannesburg, “defines much of Obama’s visit.” It was only natural that “her next stop” would be “the Apartheid Museum, which chronicles the rise and fall of white rule.”

Apartheid was a contemptible caste system. Forgotten, however, in the recriminations over apartheid are the facts as they are documented in my just-released book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

The Museum of Apartheid Mrs. Obama and the first daughters graced with their presence will have emphasized that, “Everything that goes wrong in the new South Africa is a legacy of apartheid.” Is not the violence in the rest of Africa blamed on colonialism? “It’s a legacy that has gone on for almost forty years,” I write (citing an exacerbated Jim Peron, an American expatriate, whose idealism drove him to decamp to post-apartheid South Africa). “Every time something goes wrong (and that happens constantly), the same litany of excuses is recited. ‘We inherited this problem from the corrupt apartheid regime.'”

There’s one pesky problem with this particular blame-game: South Africa’s flourishing criminal class consists mainly of youngsters who’ve come of age and blossomed under black rule.

What else will the proprietors of the thoroughly Americanized Apartheid Museum fail to divulge? As is chronicled in Chapter 5 of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”: “Had the sainted Mandela ascended to power in the 1960s instead of languishing on Robben Island and in Pollsmoor Prison [Mrs. Obama’s destinations in Cape Town], he would have nationalized the South African economy and banned private enterprise.” That’s what the ANC’s Charter called for in 1955. That’s what South Africa’s black-ruled neighbors to the north did.

Except for Rhodesia before Robert Mugabe, minority-ruled South Africa, with all its problems, offered Africans more than any other country on the Dark Continent.

Patterns of migration have always functioned as clues to social reality. Then as now, “black migration patterns into South Africa far exceeded black migration patterns out of South Africa.” Granted, entering African migrants were not “voting with their feet” for apartheid, but they were certainly voting for law and order and a livelihood.

In the “first twenty three years of apartheid, between 1948 and 1981, the South African economy grew at a rate of 4.5 percent.” Of course, in the famous words attributed to both Disraeli and Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Duly, Marxists put the high-growth rate down to exploitation. However, when “exploitation” was replaced with “liberation”—and Africans broke free of the colonial yoke to gain political independence—they promptly established planned economies, in whose shadow nothing could grow, plunging their respective countries into despair and destitution.

To the liberal West, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere were the faces of black liberation, but both leaders cut a swathe of destruction through the rural economies of their respective countries, Zambia and Tanzania. While South Africa is not quite a one-party state; it is a dominant-party state.

Demographics dictate that Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) will likely never lose an election to one of the country’s tiny, tokenistic opposition parties. One shudders to think what the ANC—now slowly Sovietizing South Africa—would have wrought on the sophisticated, industrialized economy of the country had it been given the opportunity circa 1960.

While black Africa and East Europe circled the drain due to communism, South Africa was experiencing an economic explosion, courtesy of the National Party’s relatively conservative economics. An oasis in the African desert, South Africa’s then gold-backed economy grew at an annual rate of six percent during the 1960s.

In his submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, F. W. de Klerk, who received a Nobel Peace prize for surrendering South Africa to the ANC, corrected the record. The following is excerpted from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” (which cites liberal historian Hermann Giliomee):

Apartheid was not only about white privilege but also about development and redistribution of income from whites to blacks. The economy had grown by an average of 3.5 percent per year under apartheid, the black school population grew by 250 percent in the first twenty-five years of apartheid, and the black share of total personal income had nearly doubled from twenty percent in the mid-1970s to thirty seven percent in 1995, while that of whites declined from seventy one to forty nine percent.” As bad as the Bantu Education system was, it vastly improved black literacy. Twelve years into the Nationalist government’s rule, the rate of literacy among the Bantu of South Africa was already higher than that of any other state in Africa, or that of India.

Indeed, longevity under apartheid attests to the constantly improving (if imperfect) public health and government services for blacks. From the 8.6 million recorded in the 1946 census, the black population rose to 17.4 million in 1974 and 28.3 million by 1991.

From the 1940s to the 1990s, life expectancy for blacks soared from thirty-eight to sixty-one years!Since the dawn of democracy around 1994, life expectancy in South Africa has plummeted by nine years, and unemployment has jumped from nineteen percent in 1994 (before “freedom”) to thirty-one percent in 2003 (after “freedom”), steadily rising until, in 2005, it stood at 38.8 percent.

The Apartheid Museum will make extravagant claims for Mandela’s movement. Air brushed out of a slanted historical presentation is this:

By staving off crime and communism, the apartheid regime, a vast repressive apparatus though it was, saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate.

Michelle Obama will travel to South Africa later this month. The First Lady’s trip coincides with the release of my new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” And not a moment too soon. (Read the Preface on VDARE.COM.) “Into The Cannibal’s Pot” will dispel any myths Michelle Obama is likely to help perpetuate about this writer’s former homeland.

So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture in our history? Simply this: It is essential that we curb the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they’ve gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease.

In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure. In the U.S., a slower, more incremental, but equally detrimental, transformation is underway.

Americans, moreover, should know what I divulge in Chapter 7 (“The Anglo-American-Australian Axis Of Evil”): Washington and Westminster bear considerable responsibility for the “swelling social disorder” in South Africa, having insisted that South Africa pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed.Ironically, America’s founding fathers had attempted to forestall pure democracy by devising a republic. Yet under the wing of the American eagle a dispensation was negotiated in South Africa, the consequence of which is the raw, ripe rule of the mob and its dominant, anointed party.

The time is thus historically ripe to challenge some of the central tenets of a liberal democratic ideology that would bring about the disaster that is post-Apartheid South Africa.Incredibly, the country was scorned by the West and treated as Saddam Hussein was, with boycotts and sanctions when it was governed by a racist white minority. Now that a racist, black-majority government controls the country; that it is as violent as Iraq, Liberia, or the Congo and rapidly becoming another Islamist-friendly, failed African state, it is the toast of the West.

Indeed, world leaders and the liberal lickspittle media seldom speak of the embarrassment that is the democratic South Africa—the crumbling infrastructure of this once First-World country, and the out-of-control crime. Rocker Bono certainly isn’t moved to tears over the (seemingly) systematic extermination of the Afrikaner farmers of South Africa. The cultural cognoscenti in the US are equally silent about the New South Africa’s unparalleled, radical, race-based wealth-distribution policies.

As “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” demonstrates, South Africa’s democratically elected African leaders are even more committed than their political predecessors—apartheid-era Afrikaners—to restructuring society around race. With one distinction:

More people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.

Americans, who take for granted their domestic tranquility, can’t afford to finesse the fate of the dying Christian civilization at the tip of Africa. “Into The Cannibal’s Pot” compels them to stare into “The Heart of Darkness” that is the New South Africa, and by so doing, offers a cautionary tale:In their unqualified paeans to the will of the majority everywhere, Americans must understand that universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom.

As the democratic South Africa (and Iraq) amply demonstrates, political rights don’t secure the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; ink-stained fingers don’t inoculate against blood stains. Extant societal structures that safeguard life and property can always be improved upon. But once these bulwarks against mob rule and mayhem disintegrate, they are seldom restored. A civilized society, ultimately, is one in which the individual can go about the business of life unmolested. If he can’t do that simple thing, of what value is the vote?

The Apartheid-era, traditionally Western legal institutions, however flawed, were preferable to the Rambo Nation’s “rehabilitated” institutions, riven as they are by tribal feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties. America’s intellectual “Idiocracy”—the president and the “Untamed Ids” of the media, liberal, libertarian, and conservative—are egging on revolution in the Middle East. Post-apartheid South Africa should serve to remind this retinue of romantics that stable societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes.

For better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts.

The realities of crime-riddled democratic South Africa are relayed in Chapter 1: “Crime, the Beloved Country.” The title parodies Alan Paton’s poignant tale titled “Cry, the Beloved Country.” That story was to apartheid South Africa what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was to antebellum America.

Chapter 2, “The Kulaks of South Africa Vs. The Xhosa Nostra,” provides a brief, action-packed, history of Boer, Briton and Bantu, before moving on to the ethnocide the FLOTUS won’t mention: Afrikaner farmers are being culled like springbok in a hunting safari.

Chapter 3, “Dispossession is Nine-Tenths of the Law,” explores the legal attack on property known as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). The upshot of such a coercive transfer of private wealth from those who create it to those who consume it is that societal institutions—state and civil—are being hollowed out like husks. Parallels are drawn to American state-enforced “racial favoritism (‘affirmative action’).”

Chapter 4, “Mandela, Mbeki, And Mugabe Sitting In A Baobab Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” analyzes the significance of the unqualified support Jacob Zuma’s predecessors, Mandela and Mbeki, have lent the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe over the decades. “If you want to see the future of South Africa, it might not be a bad idea to look at the present in Zimbabwe.”

The Old South Africa had been governed by Puritans. But as Christianity receded in influence after the 1994 transition, the void left has been filled by Islam. The unintended consequences of bringing the Old South Africa to its political knees, to the detriment of American interests, are covered in Chapter 6, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?”

America, a humane society, ought to take pity on the persecuted descendants of another Protestant patriarchy. However, even if American immigration policy welcomed South African WASPs, which it doesn’t, Afrikaners, in particular, would find it hard to leave, for they are as African as black South Africans. Secession—as American as apple pie—is one of the escape routes suggested in the Conclusion, “Saving South Africans S.O.S.”

South Africa is a microcosm of what America could become, unless it returns to the principles that made it great. If American institutions continue to subordinate their raison d’être to politically dictated egalitarianism, reclaiming them from the deforming clutches of state-enforced tribalism will become harder and harder.

In the interstices of this polemic, the reader will find my story and the story of those I love and had to leave behind. Above all, this tome is a labor of love to my homelands, old and new.

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
June 10

Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) that seeks the establishment of a homeland for the Afrikaners of South Africa, was alone at his homestead over the Easter period, when two farmhands bludgeoned the sixty-nine-year-old separatist to a pulp with pangas and pipes. Based on hearsay ─ and their abiding sympathy for savages ─ news media across the West are insisting that the motive for the murder was a “labor dispute.”

This, the oleaginous officials of the African National Congress (Mandela’s gang) must just love; they share with their admirers in the West a determination to ignore (and perhaps to encourage) the black onslaught against white South African farmers, or Boers (who happen to feed the Continent). Those of us who’ve been studying the systematic, race-based extermination of farming South Africa know too well the telltale signs of a farm murder. Without exception, Mr. Terre’Blanche and all 3149 farmers murdered since “freedom” were slaughtered in ways that would do Shaka Zulu proud. 

The brutality of the racially motivated murders of white farmers in South Africa, and, increasingly, of whites in general, is one aspect of these crimes. Mr. Terre’Blanche was unrecognizable. Two weeks before he was slaughtered, seventeen-year-old Anika Smit was raped, her throat slashed sixteen times and her hands hacked off and removed from the scene.

Both acts of butchery were unremarkable in Mandela’s South Africa.

The dehumanization of the victim ─ Crimen injuria in South African law ─ is another feature of these feral acts. When they were finished with him, Terre’Blanche’s killers pulled down the old man’s pants, exposing his privates. Slain white farmers are often displayed like trophies by their black killers.

Mr. Terre’Blanche was a victim of a farm murder, plain and simple. 

Afrikaner farmers are being exterminated at the genocidal annual rate of 313 per 100,000 inhabitants. Or, in the estimation of Dr. Gregory H. Stanton who heads “Genocide Watch,” “four times as high as is for the rest of the population,” making farming in South Africa the most dangerous occupation in the world. (Miners, by comparison, suffer 27.8 fatalities per 100,000 workers.)

Mr. Terre’Blanche’s killers, who crept up on him in his sleep, were being hailed as heroes by black groups outside the Ventersdorp courthouse in which they appeared (in a part of South Africa now known as the North West Province), and beyond. Just in case her readers forgot who here was on the side of the angels, the Associated Press’ pack animal Michelle Faul gave them a history lesson peppered with politically correct pieties. She wrote:

“Blacks outside the courthouse were singing … songs from the struggle for majority rule that finally came in 1994 after years of state-sponsored violence by the white minority regime and urban guerrilla warfare waged by the African National Congress.”

As Ms. Faul tells it, the white crowd, there to protest (gasp) the slaying of Mr. Terre’Blanche, was singing (horrors) “the apartheid-era anthem in the Afrikaans language.” As hard as it is for stupid Westerners to believe, there was life before black majority rule. The white minority settled the tip of the African continent around the same time Americans settled this one. Like their American coreligionists, the puritans of South Africa built the country currently being dismantled by the black majority. And, lo ─ they had a national life and an anthem: Die Stem

Here’s a verse of that old “hate speech”:

In the golden warmth of summer, In the chill of winter’s air, In the surging life of springtime, In the autumn of despair; When the wedding bells are chiming, Or when those we love depart, Thou dost know us for thy children And dost take us to thy heart. Loudly peals the answering chorus; We are thine, and we shall stand, Be it life or death, to answer Thy call, beloved land.

Die Stem is a paean to God and country, and rather beautiful at that. Western journalists hunt in packs.

The AP is only aping the ANC, according to which the old anthem is unsavory, but not the hit jingle, “Kill The Boer; Kill the Farmer.” For it, says the ANC, does no more than pay homage to the Party’s illustrious history. (Agreed: incitement to murder is a fitting ANC anthem.)

In the “New South Africa,” there is indeed a renewed appreciation for this old slogan, chanted at political rallies and funerals during “The Struggle” (against apartheid). The riff has been revived by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, who stomps around the country calling for Boer scalps at every opportunity. (Malema has lived most of his life under black rule.)

Variants of “Kill the Boer” have hit the social networking site Facebook. At the time Anika was taken, the country had been embroiled in a debate about posts that appeared under the name of Malema. One entry called on “fellow black people” to “take [their] land,” and “rape every trespasser, namely white whores … till the last breath is out. … White kids will be burned, especially those in Pretoria and Vrystaat.”

Anika, an Afrikaner, was from Pretoria.

Popularized by Mandela’s men, and sung by The Man himself, the AP considers an exhortation to kill whites nothing but an “anti-apartheid song.” Liberation lyrics.

Mantras and chants have a mesmerizing, often murderous, power in African life. The West’s malpracticing and mindless media (liberal and, sadly, “conservative” alike) have forgotten this. In its hypnotic hold on the popular imagination, “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer” is not unlike the “Kill them before they kill you” catch phrase that helped excite Hutus to massacre half a million of their Tutsi neighbors, whom they had dehumanized first by dubbing as “inyenzi” (“cockroaches”).

Of course, banning an incitement to murder will do nothing to excise a dark reality embedded deep in the human heart.

©2010 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
April 9

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak arrived in Washington this week to press flesh with the president. In an interview, Mubarak told PBS television that Barack Obama’s speech had shown him that “America is not against Islam.”

The address Mubarak was referring to was delivered by a grandiose Obama in Egypt’s capital, early in June. There, the president prostrated himself before the Muslim world, offering up prolix praise for the religion of peace ─ a tradition that his predecessor established.

Frankly, I got the impression that Mubarak himself was a little wary of Islam ─ this is the Egyptian’s first sojourn to Washington since 2004, after breaking up with Bush. “W” would not stop bugging Mubarak to democratize Egypt. Fortunately, Mubarak was not about to help catapult the Wahhabist Muslim Brotherhood to power, which would be the likely outcome of a democratic election in Egypt.

But I digress.

In that memorable speech, the president also lauded the compendious knowledge spread far and wide by the Al-Azhar and Cairo Universities. Nary a reference was made to “Islam’s bloody borders,” as Samuel P. Huntington put it in “The Clash of Civilizations?”‘. Or, for that matter, to Al-Azhar’s bloody borders. According to Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, officiating as Grand Sheikh for this much-exalted institute of Islamic learning is a chap by the name of Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi. In the tradition of Islamic Enlightenment, Tantawi has given his approval — on strict Islamic grounds, mind you — to suicide bombing.

After mentioning the value and universality of human rights, our self-styled “student of history,” as the president had dubbed himself on the occasion (he also made a point of repeating his middle name a lot) went on to declare that “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles.”

The choice to draw parallels between a country and a faith was a curious one. Was Obama intimating that Islam, like America, was a political system? In that case, we are agreed about the project of Islam.

Still ─ and for all Obama’s heavy hinting to the contrary ─ Islam has no “human rights.” The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect.

While in Egypt, our president did not expiate over Iraq, which he continues to occupy. To compensate, he peppered his oration with the standard canards about colonialism and the Arab world.The received wisdom that the Arabs were (and remain) hapless and helpless victims of the West is false, of course.

In Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923, Efraim and Inari Karsh marshal prodigious scholarship to dispel the shopworn shibboleths Obama regurgitated in Cairo. The two show that “Twentieth-century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.”

Although he didn’t take the liberty of apologizing on behalf of ever-errant white America for the slave trade during another pilgrimage ─ this time to Ghana ─ Obama did tell Anderson Cooper (the “journalist” noted for introducing the country to the practice of tea bagging) that “slavery is a terrible part of the United States’ history and should be taught in a way that connects that past cruelty to current events, such as the genocide in Darfur.”

For the Atlantic slave trade, contemporary Americans and Britons grovel at every opportunity. But as historian Jeremy Black points out in his sprawling survey, The Slave Trade, Europeans were also responsible for bringing about the demise of this despicable practice in Africa.

I wonder: Does Africa’s own Little Lord Fauntleroy seek to rub-in the theme of the white man’s burden, a theme WASPs welcome like wimps? Or is Obama open to educating America about the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert? Or across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. What about the vibrant, indigenous slave trade carried on well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa?

The president might begin changing his own preconceived ideas of events past and present in Africa by reading the words of Brother Keith B. Richburg. Richburg, who is seldom seen on the idiot’s lantern, and whose words are not widely disseminated across the racial tyranny that is America, wrote the following in Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997):

“I feel for [Africa’s] suffering, I empathize with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestors got out, because, now, I am not one of them. In short, thank God that I am an American.”

Given the veritable mirage of lies he conjured in Cairo, blaming the decadence of Arab countries on nefarious Western imperialist intervention in the 19th and 20th centuries ─ B. Hussein’s historical horizons vis-à-vis the Middle East could also do with some broadening.

A good start would be to stop relying on “Lawrence of Arabia’s” homoerotic, ahistoric memoir for the facts.

© By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com & Taki’s Magazine
August 21, 2009

“Hip” is how rapt reporters referred to the iPod the president and first lady gave the Queen of England. Thanks to his fawning friends in the British and American media, Barack Obama got away with giving another foreign dignitary a vulgar gift.

Shades of the reality show “Cribs”…

The MTV series features hip-hop rappers, and other American royalty, showing off their incredibly gaudy homes, CD, DVD, and iPod collections. (If there are any books in the house, these are well hidden.) They then send the loving camera crew packing.

The Obama iPod was no ordinary “small portable digital audio player capable of storing thousands of tracks in a variety of formats, including MP3,” to go by the dictionary. As any teenager would for his crush, the tacky pair had personalized the thing. How do you customize an iPod for an 82-year-old monarch?

Commensurate with the president’s signal solipsism, you ensure that there are plenty images and audio from his inaugural and DNC addresses. The queen will also have to strain to see visuals of her 2007 visit to Washington and Virginia on the minute screen.

I have no idea whether the rare songbook signed by songwriter Richard Rodgers was to her majesty’s liking. Neither do the Obamas, in all likelihood. The queen might have preferred a rare recording of the great cellist Pablo Casals performing at the Kennedy White House. Jacqueline Kennedy was a cultured lady with impeccable taste.

Just in case the queen doesn’t already have these tunes on the silver 6GB iPod mini she purchased in 2005, at the behest of her son, Prince Andrew, the Obamas “loaded” onto their iPod showtunes such as “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot.”

Quipped a characteristically acerbic blogger on the London Telegraph:

“The US president is a dreadful cur, with no appreciation for history or former relationships in the world. Even the dumb American people with grow to detest the very mention of his name. It will take a little while, however, because they have been so dumbed down by the educational system.”

In the spirit of such provincialism (and mindless projection), John Harwood, who’s in the employ of both the CNBC and the New York Times, described Gordon Brown as basking in Obama’s glow, and pronounced the queen “star struck.”

The formidable Elizabeth II “star struck”! The same woman who gave her first impeccably delivered address to the nation at age 13, when World War II broke out—and sans teleprompter! Still in her teens, this great lady—the very epitome of the British character—joined the army, where she served as a truck driver.

Obama swanked to the press that his wife was handling the details of the visit—the same woman who gave a box of 25 DVDs including “ET,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Star Wars,” to Prime Minister Brown, a cheap gift which spoke to the giver’s impoverishment. The DVDs were also region-encoded for North America and could not be played in Britain. Brown gave Obama “a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship.”

Sarah Brown lavished books and ball gowns on the Obama girls. Mrs. Obama reciprocated by giving the Brown boys two lousy, plastic, “matching models of the helicopter which ferries her husband around.” Sneered the Telegraph’s Iain Martin: “While Sarah Brown had spent time choosing gifts for the Obama girls, Michelle had clearly sent an aide to the White House gift shop at the last moment.”

“It didn’t go down well in Britain,” remarked Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England. “I know [Brown’s] a ninny, … but he’s our ninny, and we don’t like to see you slapping him about. That’s our job.”

Before the DVD and gift-shop gaffes, there was the weightier matter of the bust of Winston Churchill. “The valuable bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein had been loaned by the British government to George W. Bush,” wrote syndicated columnist Diana West. “One of President Obama’s first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing”:

“It seems that what we are seeing in the return of the Churchill bust is less a personal vendetta against Churchill the man and more an open breach in the Western continuum out of which a new orientation toward the Third World will become increasingly apparent. Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period.”

The return of the Churchill bronze confirmed the suspicion that Obama was anti-Occident. The habit of giving inappropriate, thoughtless presents─ as he and his family are deluged with wild effusions of love and lavish gifts─ this shows Obama to be, well, a bit of a pig.

George Will once wrote that “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

The ability to mind one’s manners in dealing with others is a reflection of the mettle of a man. Or a woman.

©2009 ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com & Taki’s Magazine
April 3