Saturday, April 16, 2011

Camp of the Saints: Saturday Update

Pantelleria: boatload of refugees #1

I mentioned last night that the Italian government had declared the migrant crisis to be over. The Italians said the interdiction efforts undertaken in cooperation with Tunisia had been effective, and the flow of boats had stopped.

This assertion seemed somewhat premature and over-optimistic, and the events of the past twenty-four hours have borne that out. It seems the lull was in fact due to stormy weather.

According to ANSAmed:

Landings Resume in Lampedusa, Boat Arriving

Lampedusa (agrigento), April 15 — After a brief hiatus due to bad weather, migrants have again begun to land on the island of Lampedusa.

One boat carrying 46 Tunisians, three of them women, was rescued last night by a patrol boat belonging to the Italian Financial Guard. One of the migrants, who were transferred on to the Yellow Flames boat, was pulled out of the water alive after going overboard.

A further boat carrying around 300 refugees from Libya has already been sighted in the Strait of Sicily.

The culture-enrichers who are already resident on the island — fed and housed at the expense of the Italian taxpayer — are staging protests against the possibility of repatriation:

The island’s first aid reception centre, where the Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa is expected to arrive today, was the setting yesterday for protests by around a hundred immigrants against the repatriations that have begun in recent days, following an agreement signed with the Tunisian government.

The Italian authorities are relocating migrants to various places on the mainland. The relocated groups are said to be small — perhaps in an attempt to forestall the violent demonstrations that tend to erupt spontaneously whenever a high enough density of cultural enrichment is reached.

According to AGI:
200 Tunisians to be Distributed Throughout Lombardy

Milan — Around 200 migrants from Lampedusa arrived at a Red Cross centre in Bresso in the Milan hinterland. Regional security chief, Romano La Russa, speaking this morning at an election meeting, explained: “We have found them accommodation.

They will be distributed in all the provinces, but not in Milan, in groups of 15-20 at most. They will be looked after by third sector associations. They are not refugees, but immigrants and are mainly from Tunisia. However, other immigrants may arrive in Milan and Lombardy on their own initiative, destined for other regions. In any case, there is absolutely no danger of tent cities.

Temporary residence permits — the kind that the rest of the EU objects so vehemently to — are now being issued for Tunisians at a camp in Sicily:

Temporary Permits for 700 Tunisians at Trapani’s Tent City

(AGI) Trapani — Temporary permits to stay in Italy are being released to around 700 migrants housed at Kinisia’s tent city.

The operation began this morning at the reception centre near Trapani. Gathered in small groups, the migrants will be transferred from Kinisia reception centre for asylum seekers, to Salinagrande, where the permits will be issued. They will return to the Kinisia again later.

Finally, and most significantly, Italy seem to be poking France in the eye yet again. By issuing temporary residence permits to residents of the camp at Ventimiglia — hard on the French border — the Italian authorities are inviting a mass attempt by the Tunisians in the camp to storm the cordon the French have established at the border, and try to break through.

At least that’s the way I read it. Here’s the story:

First Permits to Stay Given to Migrants in Ventimiglia

(AGI) Ventimiglia — The Ventimiglia (Imperia) Police has started to hand out the first permits to stay for humanitarian reasons. They have been given to Tunisian refugees who disembarked on Lampedusa during the last few weeks. The distribution will continue all day tomorrw and a little group of migrants is now standing in front of the Via Aprosio barracks. A little highlight: to reporters asking for interviews or photographs, the migrants request 3 or 5 Euros to let them photograph them holding their permits or to tell their story. Together with their permits to stay, the migrants are given a permit to travel which is the equivalent of our passport but apparently the French authorities are still refusing to recognise it.

It will be interesting to see how the French respond.

That’s the wrap-up for today. The crisis hasn’t exactly taken the weekend off, but the number of news stories is certainly lower.


Hat tips: Insubria and C. Cantoni.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

"the violent demonstrations that tend to erupt spontaneously whenever a high enough density of cultural enrichment is reached."

Heh.

Says it all.

AP

trencherbone said...

France has had enough http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13109631

Hesperado said...

As I've conceded my previously erroneous assumption that most of the boat people are "brown" rather than black Africans -- due to the copious photographic evidence Baron has been putting up -- a thought occurred to me.

I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable of the history, sociology and anthropology of North Africa to offer any conclusions; but what I can propose is an interesting hypothetical exercise pointing in the direction of facts necessary for certain conclusions.

To wit:

Imagine, hypothetically, the (alas) rare circumstance of an advising body of history professors -- all of them politically INcorrect (one specializing in Graeco-Roman history, another in Middle Eastern and North African history, and a third in the interactions between Islam and the West).

Imagine these professors are advising an enterprising grad student who is soliciting their advice and suggestions on how to develop his dissertation.

You see, this student had early in his college career become intrigued by the French description of North Africa as L'Afrique Blanche: "White Africa".

Being politically INcorrect himself, his curiosity about that term led him along a long path of independent research during which his reliable nose could distinguish between the odors of PC MC revisionism, and a genuine historical phenomenon between the lines that, heretofore, had not been sufficiently explicated by any historical studies as far as he knew.

As the student clarified in his mind his dissertation topic, it became reflected in its provisional title:

How White Africa became Black and White.

[continued next post]

Hesperado said...

[continued]

As he explained to the unusually open-minded trio of history professors, what his title means in a nutshell is that North Africa had been (predominantly) "white" for at least 2,500 years, if not longer -- near the beginning of that time due mainly to Graeco-Macedonian and then Roman conquest and colonization. Certainly, a Berber presence perdured there, augmented perhaps with smatterings of black Africans here and there, but in terms of a superior culture civilizing that area, and in terms of the most influential and industrious participants of that civilizing process, the region was most appropriately "white". The French phrase -- L'Afrique Blanche -- thus did not indicate, as PC MC historians liked to think, of some kind of arrogant arrogation by European Colonialists who superimposed their whiteness upon an indigenous culture; but rather reflected the reality of the situation.

However, a massive lacuna intervened and imposed itself upon this sociocultural phenomenon: the conquest of the region by Muslims in the 7th century, and its continuing Muslim occupation for a good thousand years, broken only partially by European Colonialism which, regrettably, did not expunge Muslims from the region, but only attempted to tame them in order to wrest some degree of civilization here and there.

Thus, explains the student to the increasingly intrigued professors, what really occurred, millennially, was a process of three phases:

1) a classical White Africa in ancient, pre-Islamic centuries

2) a rude interregnum of Islamic control lasting approximately 1,000 years from the 7th to the 17th centuries.

3) a relatively brief (300 years, nothing to sneeze at) period during which European Colonialists attempted to "re-whiten" L'Afrique Blanche (but did so, regrettably, without realizing that it had to expunge Muslims completely for it to be successful)

3) and then -- after the West, with PC MC tears of shame exacerbated by post-WW2 exhaustion, dismantled its own Colonial hegemony over the region -- a resumption of Islamic control in the latter half of the 20th century to the present.

Now we get to the crux of my long comment here:

It was during that 1,000-year reign of Islamic control, during which Muslims engaged in a massive and far-flung campaign of enslaving black Africans to the south -- bringing them by the millions to White Africa and off to the Middle East, to Islamic Spain, to Persia, to India, and later to SE Europe and by the 15th century Ottoman territories further into European lands -- that L'Afrique Blanche became, to put it incorrectly, "nigrified".

I.e., just as the reason the American South had so many blacks for so many decades (and then after WW2 and Civil Rights, migrating to Northern states in unprecedented numbers) was solely the fact of slavery, having imported them from black Africa (after, of course, purchasing them from Arab and Black Muslim slave traders), so too, summarized the student to the professors, we see so many black Africans in "White Africa" -- especially in light of the recent waves of boat people crossing the Mediterranean -- because Muslim enslavers brought them there over the centuries.

Baron Bodissey said...

Hesperado --

I won’t argue with your historical account, since my knowledge of the period in North Africa is negligible.

However, almost all the black faces you see in these photos are not from North Africa. A lot of the passengers in these boats, whether blanc or noir, come via Libya, where many thousands of sub-Saharan Africans have been penned up by the Qadafi regime for years, or even decades. Up until recently Gheddafi charged the EU protection money to keep the blacks out, and now that the Europeans have betrayed him, he has let his charges loose, as he always promised he would.

If you read the articles, you’ll find that a lot of the latest arrivals originated in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Chad, and other black African states, and that their penultimate point of departure was Libya.

Once the Libyans release them, they make their way to the big camps just inside Tunisia. Then they get on the boats if they can.

In Hoc Signo Vinces† said...

In hoc signo vinces†

Most of the video images I have viewed show what look like Arab/Africans, while the still images show mostly Black Africans maybe the still images are easier to control to fit the narrative of an African humanitarian disaster.

Will the push of islam further into Sub-Saharan Africa not create a barrier to Northwards land migration by Africans from the South.

Hesperado said...

Baron,

For your counter-thesis to my hypothesis to be cogent, at least two facts would have to be proven:

1) that these black boat people reflect blacks who have been moving into Kaddafi Libya over the past few years (or decades), but not before he was in power.

2) that the black boat people from other Muslim countries of the region (Tunisia, Morocco, etc.) also were similarly recent arrivals there. (Or are the only black boat people streaming out of Libya?)

These two, if proven, would still by themselves not definitively refute my hypothesis, since there could still be (and have been for some 1200 years) a relatively high demographic of black Africans in North Africa due mainly to Muslim enslavement and subsequent transportation of the slaves up north (perhaps also augmented -- but in much smaller numbers comparatively -- by black African converts to Islam during those centuries).

What your two points would do, if proven, is demonstrate that these particular black boat people by themselves are not necessarily supportive of my hypothesis.

Baron Bodissey said...

Hesperado --

I’m not attempting to prove or disprove anything. And I couldn’t do it, anyway, even if I wanted to.

All I can do is report on the news stories I read — and I have read literally hundreds on this topic over the last few years.

They agree on a number of things:

1. Over the last decade or so a lot of people have crossed the Sahara into Libya from further south, trying to get into Europe (they also travel by boat through the Strait of Gibraltar, but that’s a separate issue).

2. The Khedafi regime has been holding them, creating a bottleneck in Libya.

3. The EU has been supplying “aid” so that Libya can house the migrants in wretched conditions in camps.

4. Gadafi has been quite public in his insistence that the Europeans must keep paying, otherwise their worst nightmare will come true, and the black Africans will swarm into Europe.

5. When the uprising began, the Colonel warned the Europeans to stay out of it, or he would release the refugees to their boats.

6. When NATO started bombing, he announced that the migrants would start coming.

7. The migrants then started arriving. The boats were identified by the news services as originating from Libya, but their passengers were said to be mainly from further south.

This is the sum of what I have learned. The only things it “proves” are:

1. I read news stories.

2. I retain a lot of what I read, and then

3. I summarize it here.

You can make of it what you will. However, it has no effect whatsoever on your thesis. It just gives us more information about where those black faces in the boats may be coming from.

Rusty said...

Hesperado,

I can give you a few quotes that may help to answer your question about the presence of the descendents of slaves (or lack thereof) in North America.

From Dominic Moore's Three Empires on the Nile (p.22):

In the early 1820's ...British Explorers...found the caravan routes of the western Sudan "lined on either side by human remains," with the ground around the wells covered with whitened bones and the desiccated corpses of children. "They were only blacks", their Arab guides explained...
...at Asyut, two Coptic monks prepared the eunuchs prized by Muslim potentates as gifts and harem guardians. Caucasian eunuchs were left with partial and occasionally functional genitals, but Africans were believed to have a higher libido that necessitated total excision. The monks cut off the entire genitalia at the abdomen and cauterized the wound with boiling butter.

In Egypt, some 80 percent of slaves were female. The average slave survived ten to twelve years, dying in her midtwenties... Forcibly converted to Islam, she was kept in isolation from the smaller male slave population, with any unwanted infants who beat the odds deliberately neglected by her master. If she became pregnant by him, the child was born a free muslim. [end quote]

Thomas Sowell's essay the Real History of Slavery (in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals) explains that the crude castrations were done outside of Cairo (and presumably why they used Coptic monks) because islamic law forbids it. He also notes that the majority died as a result.
On page 156 he states the following:
Despite the larger total numbers of slaves sent from Africa to the Islamic world over the centuries, the surviving African population in these countries was much less than the tens of millions in the Western Hemisphere. In addition to higher mortality rates of slaves en route to North African and Middle Eastern countries, the survival and reproduction rate of Africans there were much less than in the United States. While slaves in the antebellum South lived in families, even though they lacked official legal sanction for their marriages, both marriage and casual sex among slaves were suppressed in the Islamic world and, among the relatively small numbers of children born to African Slaves there, the mortality rate was so high that few lived to adulthood.
...the European women who were domestic slaves or concubines were in no position to leave behind European offspring raised in a European culture. The children born to them, fathered by North African or Middle Eastern slave owners, were absorbed both biologically and culturally into the Islamic world. By the late eighteenth century, visitors were commenting on the lighter complexions of the inhabitants of Algiers. [end quote]

Rusty said...

Excuse the beginning of the last post. I meant to say North Africa, not North America

Hesperado said...

Baron,

I didn't intend to say that you were attempting to disprove my hypothesis. I was simply laying out what conditions would have to be met for your reply to my hypothesis to disprove one aspect of it -- namely, that these swarms of black boat people streaming northward across the Mediterranean are not due to a millennial nigrification of North Africa chiefly due to Islamic slavery, but rather reflect a very recent (years, decade or two) demographic process.

When I described your post as a "counter-thesis" I meant its ostensible form with respect to that aforementioned aspect of my hypothesis, and was not referring to your intentions.

(And, of course, both aspects could be true: many of the black boat people could derive from those recent immigrants to North Africa, while many of them could derive from communities of black ghettos long ago established in the Maghreb.)

Hesperado said...

Rusty,

Thanks for the added information. Unfortunately, nothing is mentioned of the other parts of North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria); perhaps Sowell goes into that in his book.

Sowell wrote:

Thomas Sowell's essay the Real History of Slavery (in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals) explains that the crude castrations were done outside of Cairo (and presumably why they used Coptic monks) because islamic law forbids it.

Do you know if Sowell provides documentation proving his assertion about Islamic law there?

Rusty said...

Hesperado,

I put "outside of Cairo" because I was tying it in to the previous quote from Three Empires on the Nile (about the British efforts to end slavery in the Ottoman Empire - i.e. battles of Khartoum and Omdurman) where the author mentions the city of Asyut which was the end point on the slave march out of Darfur, before the slaves were shipped up the Nile to Cairo. Sowell actually said "Because castration was forbidden by Islamic law, the operations tended to be performed -usually crudely- in the hinterlands, before the slave caravans reached places under the effective control of the Ottoman Empire." His source for this is a book called "The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa" by R.W. Beachey (Harper & Row 1976 pp. 51-52). Apparently eunuchs were so valuable that it was worth having a large portion of them die as a reult the operation.

As for the other countries of North Africa, the part about the population being notably lighter (as a result of the offspring of Muslim owners and white slaves) was in Algeria. His source for this was the book "Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary and Italy, 1500-1800" by Robert C. Davis (Palgrave McMillan 2003, p. 25) which is about the white slave trade across North Africa.

Hesperado said...

Rusty,

"His source for this is a book called "The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa" by R.W. Beachey (Harper & Row 1976 pp. 51-52)."

I wonder what R.W. Beachey's source was,then, for the claim about Islamic law. After grievously repeated disappointments in this, that and the other writing about Islam, I have become accustomed to insufficient citations for claims.

I found two of his books on Google Books. Even though one cannot read more than snippets of them (without purchasing them), Google does provide the function of searching for terms within the books, although apparently they won't show those parts that aren't part of the snippets.

I found at least volume 1 of The slave trade of eastern Africa as well as another book by him, A Collection of documents on the slave trade of eastern Africa, and searches for key terms such as

"Islamic law", "Koran" ("Quran" and "Qur'an" yielded zero results), "sharia", all yielded paltry results -- like 5 At best, usually 2 or 3. ("hadith/hadiths/ahadith" yielded zero results.)

It strikes me that his books are not so much about Muslims and Islamic culture but about documenting Western perceptions (and Western "meddling") at the time (politicians, archeologists, journalists, Colonial administrators, etc.) of what was going on. Thus, a claim about "Islamic law" might well have come out of the mouth of a Western observer at the time (18th or 19th or early 20th century), not from the Fiqh and Ahadith that are the actual primary sources for Islamic law (further complicated by regional rulings in this, that or the other Muslim sultanate or regime in this, that or the other African area).

For example, another book by him, A history of East Africa, 1592-1902, is described at Google Books as:

"...based on Foreign Office archives, parliamentary papers, and much use is made of the (now inaccessible) Zanzibar archives."

I doubt he is literate in the requisite languages, including Arabic along with other African dialects.

Hesperado said...

Rusty,

"As for the other countries of North Africa, the part about the population being notably lighter (as a result of the offspring of Muslim owners and white slaves) was in Algeria. His source for this was the book "Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary and Italy, 1500-1800" by Robert C. Davis"

Yes, that's another whole complex phenomenon, opposite to my hypothesis of Islamic "nigrification" of North Africa, but actually introducing white European slave populations into North Africa --though somehow I doubt they mingled (let alone participated) in society, but were rather kept in prison-like conditions, not even amounting sociologically to ghettos.

One the pieces of the puzzle of my hypothesis, however, is that North Africa for a good millennium prior to the career of Mohammed (roughly 500 B.C. to the 7th century A.D.) had already become "white" in the respect I already described in my very first post on this ubject -- a "blanchification", so to speak, not due to slavery, but to Graeco-Macedonian then Roman (both pagan Roman then Christian Roman) transplantation there involving a mixture of conquest, colonization, and emigration. Nearly all of the urban centers and some outlying areas of the Middle East and North Africa were thriving cultures of Western civilization during that "Ecumenic Age" (as Eric Voegelin has termed the approximate millennium 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. give or take a century).

Islamic invasions beginning in the 7th century utterly and horribly devastated that civilization (not to mention all the other less civilized cultures and subcultures, e.g., the Berbers), and it has been ruined ever since, with only a relatively brief, and exceedingly incomplete, respite during Western Colonialism in the area from the 18th century to the mid-20th century.

Rusty said...

Hesperado,

The answer to the question of castration coould possibly be found in the article called "The Hideous Trade. Economic Aspects of the'Manufacture'and Sale of Eunuchs" by Jan Hogendorn.

Unfortunately I can't access more than the first page, but he quotes a Hunwick 1992:21, where he gets the following quote:

The unpleasant nature of the operation was recognized in Islamic law; according to the Prophet,
"Whoever kills a slave, him will we kill. Whoever cuts off the nose of a slave, his nose will we cut
off; and whoever castrates a slave, him also shall we castrate".

Where Hunwick got this, I'm not sure. However, on page 63 of the book "Eunuchs and sacred boundaries in Islamic society" by Shaun Elizabeth Marmon (found in google books), she also states that "the act of castration was and is forbidden under Islamic law" and mentions Al-Subki (his book is her source) and Abu Hanifa, who says that castration "is a prohibited act."

Hesperado said...

Rusty,

Thanks for the additional information. Unfortunately, it shows how complex the production of a definitive Anti-Islam Manual will be. Imagine the hours it would take just to nail down that one sub-sub-sub-sub-topic of the Islamic legality of slave castration, not to mention a whole array of other directly and indirectly related issues, some even more difficult to verify with sufficiently massive documentation. It can be done; it's not like we would be plumbing the mysteries of the Origins of the Universe or something. The facts are out there -- they are just far-flung; massively disorganized; probably often obfuscated by various forms of taqiyya and clueless dhimmitude; often hidden in dusty out-of-print journals or books; and often mired in a welter of difficult languages and dialects.

Were there only a handful of such topics required, this could be conceivably done by a handful of volunteers. But there are thousands of topics and sub-topics, and sub-sub-sub-sub-topics. It would be silly to expect this to be done right (the only way) without a) professional academics and grad students helping out, and b) paying them good salaries for spending the time and labor for doing so.

And this isn't even considering how difficult it would be to get such a project off the ground in the first place, and then coming to some kind of consensus about how it should be modeled and organized and constituted.

Of one thing I am absolutely convinced: The production of such a Manual should be the top priority of the anti-Islam movement now. #1. Because pro-Islam propaganda continues to bewitch most of the West, and I see few signs of that diminishing significantly anytime soon.