Theodore Dalrymple returns to City Journal with another article chronicling the latest outward expression of the growing Islamization of Britain, as 100,000 people demonstrated in London in support of jihad against Israel.
The crowd was chanting for a “free” Palestine, which meant, in the circumstances, a Palestine ruled by a hardline Islamist movement—a government that would be to freedom in any recognizable sense what fire is to libraries.
Over at The Epoch Times, the dubious doctor questions the recent hysteria over the proliferation of bedbugs in Paris, and considers a possible answer as to what is behind this disturbing news story.
Paris and the whole of France are now infested with bedbugs—so, at least, the media tell us. But so mistrustful of the media have I become that I can’t help but wonder whether the whole story isn’t what the French call a coup monté—that is to say, a put-up job.
In this week’s Takimag column, our favorite doctor revisits the outlandish case of Sam Bankman-Fried, as he wonders how someone with such a ‘privileged’ upbringing and overpriced education could have written so much nonsense.
The character of Sam Bankman-Fried continues to intrigue, not so much because it is remarkable in itself, but because he managed to inveigle so much money out of so many people who were supposedly sophisticated and hard-nosed.
The concerned doctor comments on the repugnant and contemptible pro-Hamas celebrations that have taken place in London after the Islamic terror group’s mass murder of Israeli civilians.
The latest example of the attraction of mass genocidal cruelty, not merely to the perpetrators but to the hearts and minds of large numbers of people, is more than usually chilling. As ever, the barbarians are within the gates. France has just banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations on its soil, and Britain is likely to follow suit.
In his weekly Takimag article, the good doctor recounts browsing in a bookstore at Charles de Gaulle Airport and seeing yet more signs of Western cultural decline all around him.
How easily I am irritated these days, or rather, how prepared I am to see the signs of degeneration, decline, and collapse! Having time to spare at the airport, I went to the bookstore. I suppose I should have been grateful that there still was one, so far has the book fallen in importance in the mental lives even of educated people.
Back at Quadrant, the dissenting doctor derides two absurd proposals from the land of the free and the home of the brave. The higher they rise, the steeper they fall…
The freedom that many people now cherish above all is the freedom from the consequences of their own actions, while other people are only too eager to take on the role of guardian and protector of the weak and supposedly incapacitated—which is to say, a large proportion of the population.
Over at Quadrant, Dr. Dalrymple tears apart arguments in favor of ‘positive’ racial discrimination in response to yet another woke, leftist article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Medical journals these days have become megaphones for the wokest of opinions. Contrary ideas are expressed about as often as paeans of praise to capitalism were published in Pravda. It is this that gives the medical reader the impression that he is living in neo-totalitarian times.
Over at City Journal, the skeptical doctor writes about the dire financial situation that the city of Birmingham has found itself in to illustrate the increasing incompetence and corruption of the British public sector.
Nothing better illustrates the servitude of the British people to their government than the bankruptcy of the city of Birmingham. The city council has announced that it will be able from now on to provide only the most basic and urgent of services, which it had previously done with indifferent efficiency in any case.
Our erudite doctor picks up an old book on Turkey before his visit to the country and considers some of the incredible changes that it has gone through since the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Children don’t collect stamps any longer because such stamps will soon be as obsolete as horses and carts, and screens are more interesting to them. This is a great shame, I think, because the collection of stamps necessarily opened their minds to the existence of the world outside their own country, even if it did not lead to profound knowledge.