Anti-Judaism in Britain is at an all-time high:

A study published today shows the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has almost tripled in 10 years, with more than half the attacks last year taking place in London.

The findings prompted the report’s authors to warn of a “wave of hatred” against Jews.

The number of incidents increased to 594 last year, up by 31 per cent on the previous year.

Violent assaults soared to 112, up by more than a third on 2005. …

• An Orthodox Jew punched in the face and almost pushed off a Tube platform by an Arab man who screamed: “Get back to Stamford Hill, I want to kill you all”

• A Jewish man walking to synagogue with his two young sons suffered a broken leg after being punched and kicked by a white man shouting “f***ing Jew”

• Seventy incidents of desecration and damage to synagogues, cemeteries, Jewish schools and private homes with attacks including swastikas daubed on walls

• Savage assault of a 12-year-old Jewish girl Jasmine Kranat, who was beaten unconscious on a north London bus by two teenage girls who asked her first if she was Jewish.

Here is the USA, the number of anti-Semitic incidents actually declined, though slightly, in 2006 from the year before. But 2004 saw the highest number of anti-Jewish incidents since 1994.

I essayed five days ago on “True religion and speech control,” in which I posited that Western Leftist dogma is in fact religious dogma, just a deity-less kind. Leftism is a form of True Religion, a political absolutism. As I explained then, Leftism claims the authority to define whose speech, and what kind of speech, is permissible in society, and will punish those who transgress. Leftism holds that it possesses Absolute Truth which may be denied or defied only at peril. More at the post, because here I turn attention to another religious characteristic of True Religious Leftism: it is apocalyptic like all True Religions are.

Writing in TCS Daily, Glenn Reynolds ponders the mainstreaming of personal-survival kits, now available at Costco and other mainline stores. “The kind of survival-oriented disaster preparedness thinking that once flourished in subcultures like Soldier of Fortune seems to be going mainstream. And why is that?”

Perhaps without really meaning to, Glenn uncovers one of the prominent religious aspects of the contemporary Left in America and the rest of the West: the world is about to end.

Back in the 1990s, it was the Soldier of Fortune crowd that was preparing for some sort of apocalyptic scenario. Back then, the Democrats were in power, and much of the apocalypticism we heard was from the right. Now, with the Republicans in power over the past six years, the apocalypticism has shifted leftward. A quick perusal of Amazon demonstrates this: Where once people on the right were worried about the shock troops of the socialist New World Order or the breakup of America into racial enclaves, now it seems like it’s mostly lefties worrying about self-reliance in the face of collapsing unsustainable technology, and the dangers of suburban extinction in the face of high oil prices. As with some of the righty books from the 1990s, there’s a curious push-pull here: Though these are warnings of catastrophes to come, there’s a sense that to some extent those catastrophes involve society getting what it deserves for its sinful ways, perhaps coupled with an opportunity for purification in the wake of the crisis — with the virtuously prepared having the upper hand, of course.

Ultimately, the wicked will be punished and the virtuous will be saved. That’s mainline True Religion stuff. How interesting that the Left, which shuns traditional religion of the Western types, uses religious templates to frame its tenets.

Update: Strategy Page cites Mark Steyn’s new book, America Alone, in which Steyn observes,

“The end of the world’s nighness isn’t something you’d want to set your watch by. ”

Steyn provides a collection of the dire predictions made by “Chicken Little’s eminent successors.”

Steyn’s list includes:

— 1968, in “The Population Bomb,” distinguished scientist Paul Ehrlich declared, “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

— 1972, in “The Limits to Growth,” the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.

— 1976, Lowell Ponte published a huge bestseller called “The Cooling: Has the New Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive?”

— 1977, Jimmy Carter confidently predicted that “we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

None of this happened, of course. The doomsayers are wrongsayers. (Ironically, Steyn’s book is subtitled, The End of the World as We Know It. But he means politically rather than apocalyptically.)

I’ve posted a number of times about the crisis of the declining birth rates in Europe. Now we learn that Germany’s birth rate has declined precipitously in just one year. But that’s not all - it’s deaths have increased.

Official figures show that the number of births fell by a further 2.8% last year. Meanwhile, the mortality rate rose by 1.5% compared with 2004.

The birth rate is exceptionally low in the former East Germany, where the city of Chemnitz is thought to have the lowest birth rate in the world.

Economists say Europe’s population decline threatens to damage economic growth for decades.

The data from Germany’s Office for Federal Statistics show there were 686,000 births last year - half as many as in the early 1960s.

It’s astonishing that Europe in general seems to be deliberately committing suicide. What can account for it?

I wrote a long time ago that the churches have turned Jesus into a metrosexual.

Now the United Methodist News Service asks, “Are churches ‘too feminized’ for men?”

Author David Murrow says a typical guy feels as comfortable in church as Tom Sawyer in Aunt Polly’s parlor.

“He must watch his language, mind his manners and be extra polite,” Murrow writes in his popular 2005 book, Why Men Hate Going to Church. That’s because the altar flowers and felt banners, mostly female Sunday school teachers and blue-haired ladies playing the organ, all make church feel like a “woman’s thing.” And unless a man enjoys serving on a committee or passing out bulletins, he may feel there’s not much for him to do, so he steers clear.

Today’s contemporary worship services aren’t much better: Their soft praise-and-worship songs and emphasis on relational needs are better suited to the needs of women than men, says Murrow… .

… most Christians today see their faith more in terms of “having an unconditional love relationship” with Jesus, he said.

“And if that’s the punch line of the Gospel, then you’re going to have a lot more women than men taking you up on your offer, because women are interested in a personal relationship with a man who loves you unconditionally. Men, generally, are not.”

Nope, especially not when the church presents us with a girly-Jesus like this:

In the previous four parts of “The Forever Jihad” (all found here),” I wrote about Islamism’s strategic goals, the distinction between Islamism and jihadism, asked whether suicide bombers are the new high priests of Islam, and explored where the riots in France last fall fit in to Islamic expansionism.

As a short review, here are the four goals of Islamism.

1. Expel America’s armed forces from Saudi Arabia, emplace Islamist regimes and sociopolitical order there and expel all non-Muslims of any sort,

2. Emplace Islamism in the other countries of the Persian Gulf,

3. Then reclaim Islamic rule of all lands that were ever under Islamic control and emplace Islamism there,

4. Convert the rest of the world to Islamism.

The distinction I drew between Islamists and jihadists is that while all jihadists are Islamists, not all Islamists are jihadists. Yesterday Dan Darling at Winds of Change pointed out that “al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s most [recent] statement … that included yet another denunciation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s” - Islamism Central, they - “participation in Egyptian politics.” Islamists are willing to achieve their goals without violence, although they don’t shrink from violence per se in achieving their goals. Pacifists they are not. Jihadists, on the other hand, reply almost exclusively on violence and make it their primary, if not only tool.

While jihadism is more lethal now, Islamism is more pernicious and more dangerous to the West in the long term. It’s important to remember that Islamism and jihadism are two sides of the same coin. They are each examples of extreme Islamic triumphalism. In addressing the riots last fall, I observed,

But Islamism is like a fog that enfolds itself within and around, over and through a society. Western countries have a long tradition of religious freedom, but this freedom is predicated on the presumption that religious freedom will not threaten the political nature and autonomy of the state. This is true even in Europe, where the “separation of church and state” took a very long time and no little blood to be gained. It is not complete there, of course; France is still officially a Catholic country, for example. But on the whole, Europe’s countries do not rely on religion to order their polity or the political orientations of their citizens.

The entry of large Muslim populations into this system, whether entry by immigration or conversion, is a deep challenge to Westernism’s survival. It simply remains to be seen whether Islam itself can be politically pluralist in countries where it holds sway. Islamism, of course, does not even pretend to pluralism.

Now comes Mark Steyn’s invaluable essay in The New Criterion, “It’s the demography, stupid.” He answers my question rather forthrightly up front:

Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.

This is a grim forecast, no doubt. Steyn’s arguments are daunting to rebut. Without excerpting them at length, he basically points out the demographic doomsday looming over Europe. Baldly put: ethnic Europeans are not having enough children. For 100 men and women (we no longer really say “husbands and wives,” do we?) of Europe to replace themselves in the next generation, they need to give birth to 105 children. That’s 2.1 children per woman. But they’re not.

Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent.

Europe’s socialist economy is ungodly expensive to maintain and no one, no one, there is willing to cut back on the governmental or government-mandated financial entitlements that have grown up since the end of World War II. Steyn is no Nostradamus about Europe; many others have pointed out the demographic bombs awaiting Europe. “Bombs” plural I say because the decline of the birth rate at the low end of the age scale always means that the populations gets grayer at the high end. As I pointed out almost three years ago, demography is a double-sprung trap. Right now the median age of Americans is in the mid-30s, with most of Europe a little higher. But American adults are barely replacing themselves while Europeans are not, so by mid-century our median age will rise a tick and the Europeans’ will rocket by 15 years to the low 50s.

So who is going to pay for all those luscious European retirement benefits, especially since right now more than half of men across Europe stop working between age 55-65? And there’s a financial paradox to be faced even if European governments and elites suddenly decided to encourage birthin’ more babies:

They need more births, but that takes women out of the work force - and for longer than it does here, because of Europe’s generally very generous labor-welfare rules. But taking women from the work force also decreases the tax revenue the state needs to continue propping up its welfare system.

Let us assume for argument’s sake that the welfare-near-crisis states achieved a substantial jump in birth rates starting next year. They will probably go broke sooner than they will now because it will be basically 20 years before next year’s babies become taxpayers and for those two decades they simply increase the welfare load by using government-provided services.

Can Europe bail water faster than the gunwales will go awash? I don’t think so, but I hope I’m wrong.

Guess who the gap filler is. Steyn again:

Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent. …

Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)—or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Consider Israel. I wrote about its demographic challenge as a beginning blogger in April 2002 in “The Palestinian population bomb” (all figures from 2002):

There are six million Israelis. Only 4.8 million are Jewish. Fifteen percent of Israel’s citizens are Muslim Arabs, 900,000 people. They are Israeli Palestinians. They are, or are descended from, persons who did not become refugee in Israel’s war for independence in 1947-1948. (The other five percent of Israelis are neither Muslim nor Jewish.)

There are more than three million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Right now there are four million Muslims in Israel/West Bank/Gaza. Jews outnumber them by a mere 800,000. At current growth rates of each, in 14 years the ratio will be reversed: 6.7 million Muslims and 6 million Jews. …

The only effective thing that Israel can do, militarily, is create conditions that force the Palestinians to abandon violence so that socio-political agreements may be reached. But even if this happens, the Muslim population bomb will keep ticking.

Maybe these data compelled Ariel Sharon to make the breathtaking concessions to the Palestinians.

So there is an enormous, if not actually massive, population shift going on between Europe and its southern and easter littorals. Except it’s not “between,” it’s one way. While the commentati lament the lack of economic integration of European societies for the North African and Middle Eastern immigrants, not altogether without justification, they may want to consider the population pressures that impel such large numbers of Muslims to move there. The Middle East itself is not exactly a land of brimming opportunity.

Europe long ago shed its Christian heritage. Church attendance in western Europe is generally less than 10 percent, often much less. I remember getting an email from a Norwegian pastor a few years ago in which he said that Sunday services were practically deserted; no one came to church except for weddings or funerals. When I lived in Germany in the mid-1980s, attendance was just under five percent. The result is not that for ethnic Europeans another religion has supplanted Christianity but that nothing has. Christian dynamism has been ejected from European society and has been replaced with . . . nihilism.

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.

… We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end.

The result? Steyn again:

[T]he political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path… .

Into this demographic and religious vacuum has stepped political Islam. Islam has in the last 35 years or so become deeply expansionist in general, not just in its Islamist fringe. While giving only lip service to the idea of economic integration into their countries, the Europeans, except the British, have shunned the idea of socio-cultural-political integration of the masses of Muslim immigrants. The second and third generations of the first wave of immigrants on the 1960s have basically renounced the whole integrationist enterprise altogther. New immigrants now need have no expectation or even use for integration; there are ready-made Muslim ghettoes awaiting them across the continent, bought and paid for by the socialist, entitlement-as-an-entitlement governments and societies who need their labor more than their integration.

But the Europe-dwelling Muslims won’t accept nihilism. It may be true that last fall’s rioters were not rebelling from a very Muslim basis - this time. But the disenfranchised, immigrant populations of Europe are where Islamist evangelists are having their greatest successes, especially among those who have run afoul of the law. They offer order, structure and discipline to strangers living in a strange land, and for certain Old Europe is no longer offering any of them. Unlike Old European churches, mosques promise righteousness can be attained in this world and heaven in the next.

Mark Steyn writes that,

… the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

For all the concern and countermeasures that jihadism commands for us now, it is non-violent Islamism that poses the greatest threat to the survival of the West as the West. Europe has simply abandoned the playing field. America is still on it, but only barely.

In England self-described atheist Simon Heffer writes, “Stop apologising for being Christian,” noting that even the very liberal archbishop of Centerbury, Rowan Williams, has belatedly urged the Church’s members to stand up for Christmas. Notes Heffer, “[I]t was a rare instance in our lifetimes of the Church of England actually standing up for something, and actually being right.”

Heffer then dissects the anti-Christmas, hence anti-Christian, movement of the Left.

[T]he offence [non-Christians] are alleged to take about it is, instead, taken on their behalf by politically motivated wreckers, who do so without actually asking Muslims, or Jews, or atheists, whether they mind this sort of prejudice being promulgated in their names. And, sadly, they seem to be encouraged in this offensive behaviour by the cowardice of politicians.

Then the real key analysis:

The modern Left exercises a militant anti-Christianity not so much because of a cultural cringe in the face of immigrant minorities, but because of its general wish to dismantle history. Once you have erased Christianity, you have erased (or at least made appear irrelevant) much of the past 1,400 years. “Modernisation” in all its political forms is about the tabula rasa, and there are few ways of creating one of those so effective as the destruction of the traditional faith.

Exactly so. Read the whole thing.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw (or is he a former foreign sec.?) writes in The Times to, “Have a little faith in the ‘C’ word.”

But I have just noticed — alas, for the first time — that the card I sent out in my capacity as Foreign Secretary has the anodyne, non-Christmas message of “Season’s Greetings”. And I was horrified to learn from an American friend that in the circles in which she, at least, moves it is considered not the done thing to wish people one does not know well “Merry Christmas”, still less to send out “Christmas” cards saying so.

It’s mad, in my opinion.

Indeed, but there are some signs that the madness is receding. Yesterday I drove to middle Tennessee’s largest mall, not to shop for the holidays Christmas but to look for new shoes. No luck, so before leaving I walked into Sears to check on another article I was thinking of buying. Four attendants were standing near the entrance. As I walked by one of them cheerily wished me Merry Christmas, which I cheerily returned. Oh, in Nashville this week the city council passed an ordinance making the legal designation of the city’s Christmas tree to be, well, “Christmas tree,” not “holiday tree,” as the Mayor Bill Purcell kept calling it. However, at mid-month the mayor had no problem taking part in a civil ceremony to light Nashville’s official Hanukkah menorah. The Tennessean reported (no link),

In what many in the Jewish community hope will become an annual tradition, Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell took part this week in an official ceremony to light a Hanukkah menorah. “Hanukkah is a time for celebration, but it’s also a time for rededication,” Purcell told a small crowd in his office at the Metro Courthouse …

Wait, Bill! Be consistent - that’ not a “menorah,” it’s a “holiday candlestick.”

The Judicial Council of the United Methodist Church is the equivalent of the denomination’s Supreme Court. It has upheld a ruling that revoked the pastoral credentials of the Rev. Beth Stroud of Philadelphia. The lower-panel ruling had revoked the credentials because Stroud was practicing lesbian.

A panel from the nation’s third largest denomination decided in December that Stroud’s practice of a lesbian partnership was incompatible with Christian teachings. The decision was overturned by the Northeast Jurisdiction Committee on Appeals.

The Judicial Council backed the original decision and ruled yesterday that the appeals committee “erred in reversing and setting aside the verdict and penalty from Rev. Stroud’s trial.” …

She said she came out in 2003 because she felt held back in her faith by not sharing the complete truth about her life.

A complaint was filed against her last year.

The full text of the Judicial Council’s decision is here.

In other UMC and homosexuality news, a Virginia pastor was placed on involuntary leave of absence (that is, deprived of a pastoral appointment) earlier this year by Bishop Charlene P. Kammerer of the Virginia Conference of the UMC because the pastor refused to accept into local-church membership a man who “impenitently” was practicing homosexual relations. The pastor had counseled the would-be member on membership issues for two months before a complaint was raised against the pastor by an associate pastor of the church.

The bishop directed the pastor to receive the applicant into membership. The pastor refused, after which the Virginia Annual Conference (i.e., annual convention of minitsers and lay members) voted to place him on involuntary leave of absence at the bishop’s request.

This decision was reversed by the Judicial Council, which ruled that “the pastor in charge of a United Methodist church or charge is solely responsible for making the determination of a person’s readiness to receive the vows of membership.”