This is a cross-post by Edmund Standing
The white liberal is an unhealthy type of creature that you will undoubtedly have encountered, if not in real life, certainly via the media. By ‘liberal’, I do not mean simply someone who has a generally liberal outlook, in the sense of a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, nor do I mean liberals in the sense of the classical liberals of the conservative tradition. By ‘white liberal’, I mean a white Western individual who is likely to come from a middle class background and have a university education, considers him or herself to be both ‘left-wing’ and socially ‘liberal’, and almost certainly reads The Guardian or The Independent. White liberals espouse an artificial and pretentious form of ‘egalitarianism’, a patronising and hypocritical approach to ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures, and – in a re-hash of the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ – devote themselves to a delusional Messianism in which they seek to ‘save the world’ through protesting against war (in real terms, protesting against non-white people having a chance at freedom and democracy), Israel (the one truly liberal society in the Middle East), globalisation (thereby opposing the one great vehicle by which poorer nations can develop), and so on, while making themselves feel and look ‘good’ by flaunting their pious support for campaigns to end poverty in the Third World (which will do no such thing, as Dambisa Moyo, Stephen Pollard, Marian L. Tupy, and others rightly point out ), and boasting about how ‘progressive’ they are by showing ‘solidarity’ with genocidal Islamists in Gaza.



Let’s Think Again
This is a guest-post by Chris Blackburn
With the current impetuous on finding some sort of anti-thesis to war in Afghanistan and elsewhere. There has been a whole host of buzzwords and maxims coming from the media and international community of talking heads.
We all agree that since 9/11 there has been one strategic blunder after the other: from the war in Iraq to illegal renditions of terrorist suspects to Guantanamo Bay. It is clear that war is failing to help meet our strategic objectives, people are growing disillusioned, but there is an alternative answer to what is becoming the fashionable in-phrase within the conflict averse diplomatic community and apologists of radical Islamism which is less war war, more jaw jaw.