Dear Pericles,

Thank you so much for expressing far more eloquently my exact thoughts when reading the tome.

I have just yesterday gently chided a relative who use to send me Jihad Watch materia byl asking him how many Templar Knight cells they had in Melbourne.

But it is a serious question as to how much a more strident approach might drive these leanings underground. One hopes that Boaz may well have been tempered by his discussions here. 

The target of my anger is still our venal politicians and shock jocks who have driven and amplified these fears within our communities.

I would hope there might be a moment of reflection by them all. A moment of shame however might be too much to wish for.

The leading question is, of course, were his actions derived from "self-transcending" motives or "self-assertive" motives?

This from Arthur Keostler in "The Ghost in the Machine",

"....the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed "ad majorem gloriam Dei" out of self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or for political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal....[self-transcendence] is derived from primitive identification instead of mature social integration; it entails the partial surrender of personal responsibility and produces the quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group psychology. the egotism of the social holon feeds on the altruism of its members..."

A large part of his opus is plagiarized from Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.
Don't think I'll bother reading it.

Jay,
The Celts got their name from the ancient Greeks when they were passing that way. Their language is derived from ancient India, or thereabouts, like the rest of the Indo-European languages. The probability is that they originated from somewhere north of the Himalayas. The languages of the Celts have no relationship to the Basque language. There is no doubt that the Celts were in Iberia but they were also in what is today Switzerland also modern day France and a lot of other places. The main La Tene culture is considered to be Celtic.
We are a glorious mixture and 'white', as in light, is a mixture of all colours.

Dear Poirot,

While I do enjoy Arthur K you must forgive me but I'm struggling a little notion that 'self transcendence' can be derived from 'quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group psychology'. I will get there I hope.

There is a lot of finger pointing and defensive rhetoric from the Right at the moment but at least Christopher Hitchens manages to do it with a little style.

"One way of phrasing the question is this: Do the extreme jihadists and their most virulent opponents really have a symbiotic relationship? In tapes and sermons from mosques in London and Hamburg, you may find whole manifestos about the need to keep women as chattel, to eradicate the disease of homosexuality, to thwart the Jewish design over international finance, and other fantasies of the Third Reich mentality. Pushed to its logical or pathological conclusion, this would involve something that Europeans and Americans have never seen before: a conflict between different forms of fascism in order to see which assault on multi-ethnic democracy was the most effective."

A "large part", Is Mise?

>>A large part of his opus is plagiarized from Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. Don't think I'll bother reading it.<<

Did you actually read the Unabomber's manifesto?

Breivik copied only a dozen or so passages from Kaczynski’s document.

The Unabomber's screed contained around 34,000 words - somewhere in the region of fifty or sixty pages - on the topic of the evils of modern technology and the industrial society.

Breivik wrote over 700,000 words, on the topic of bringing about the end of Islam, by force.

Why are you reluctant to read it? What are you afraid of finding?

What are you hiding from?

Pericles,
"What are you hiding from?"

Boredom.