This piece on the Library of Law and Liberty blog is an excellent look at Molenbeek, Belgium (the center of Islamic terrorism in Europe) and the prevailing ideology there and throughout Europe that has made the continent so vulnerable to Islamism:

A striking thing about the immigration debate before the massacres of November 13 was the almost complete absence of references, at least by the “respectable” politicians, to the national interest of the various countries. The debate was couched in Kantian moral terms….Europe has nothing equivalent to national interest, and if it did, it would have no way of acting on it. A kind of bloodless universalism has rushed in to fill the vacuum, whose consequences are now visible to all. The first thing President Hollande tried to do after the attacks was close the borders; he now talks (understandably, of course) of national security. He talks also of defeating ISIS militarily, but France, along with all of the other European countries, has run down its armed forces in the name of the social security that paid for at least some of the terrorists.

In the Salisbury Review:

‘British Muslims report big rise in Islamophobia’ said the headlines of an article in the Guardian for 12 November. From the headline, I thought I would read that there had been an increase in the number of vicious attacks on Muslims qua Muslims, or at least of acts of physical desecration.

Not a bit of it. What I read instead were things like the following, taken from a survey of Muslim opinion:

More than two-thirds of Muslims told the survey that they
had heard anti-Islamic comments by politicians, and half
thought that politicians condoned Islamophobic acts.

Dalrymple responds briefly in City Journal (h/t Yakimi) to several statements made about the Paris attacks – by politicians, but also by Bono and the Guardian:

One has to pity—a little—politicians obliged to react publicly to events such as those on November 13 in Paris. They can’t pass over them in silence: but what can they say that does not sound banal, hollow, and obvious? They can only get it wrong, not right.

I once asked Dalrymple if he was familiar with the extraordinary photoessay on Detroit by two French photographers, and he replied, “Yes, and I found it very profound.” He references it in this review, in Quadrant Online (h/t George T.), of a French novel on the city, near which he recently travelled to a conference:

My request that I should visit Detroit was greeted by the conference organisers much as if I had gone to the manager of the hotel and asked him for the keys to the rooftop so that I could throw myself off. In the event, I went straight back to Detroit airport without having visited the city, and have had to content myself since with the irresistibly titillating photojournalism (abandoned mansions, feral dogs roaming the deserted and crumbling streets) that appears from time to time in British and French newspapers and magazines. “See what America has come to!”—the Schadenfreude is unmistakable. The misfortunes of others, especially of the rich and powerful, are the greatest balm known to the human soul.

On Pajamas Media Dalrymple looks at a recent study on knee replacement surgery vs. non-surgical procedures, and for once the results are clear (in favor of the surgery).

A hat tip to reader George for alerting us to Dalrymple’s new contributions to Quadrant Online. His first piece for the publication was this September account of his visit to a Paris exhibition on one of his favorite targets, Le Corbusier:

People, especially in France, have long been cowed into veneration by decades of propaganda to the effect that Le Corbusier was a great, possibly the greatest, architect, and that any revulsion from, let along mockery of, his work would reveal their own lack of understanding. It is certainly true that Le Corbusier was a master: but a master of propaganda and self-promotion in a credulous age, not a master of architecture.

….

Corbusier’s ideas, all of them gimcrack and third-rate, have struggled with good taste and common sense, and triumphed in the struggle.

Finding value in their integrity and accomplishment, Dalrymple praises one of his late publishers, Tom Rosenthal, and the painters L.S. Lowry and William Turner, in New English Review:

The evening light glints red upon the chimney (which belches thick black smoke) and on the chimneys of one row of the houses, suffusing even this superficially grim scene with a refulgent beauty. And in the street is a man, a lone figure, in a blue cloth cap, carrying a small ladder, on the side of the street opposite him standing a bucket. One presumes he is a window-cleaner, which in itself suggests something moving: that the inhabitants of these tiny houses, by today’s standards very poor, took a pride in keeping their houses clean despite the constant outpouring of thick black smoke above them. And indeed in those days women of the working class would regularly scrub the doorsteps of their houses, to demonstrate their cleanliness. Poverty is not itself inimical to a proper pride and self-respect.

Dalrymple notes that in the last year more than 100 papers have been retracted due to falsified peer review:

Because of super-specialization, the authors of papers themselves are nowadays often asked to suggest referees for peer review of their own work, but this, of course, leaves an opening for the practice of fraud. In a modern variant on Gogol’s Dead Souls, some scientists have been caught sending their papers for peer review to non-existent reviewers, complete with a curriculum vitae and an e-mail address…There are even companies in China, apparently, that will help scientists to manufacture bogus peer reviews. A new twist would be for the rivals of those scientists to pay for bad reviews. Everything is possible in this crooked world of ours.