Apparently the White House switchboard still can't get a line to Israel, but Obama's not the only one with hang-ups on election calls. The media are also taking Netanyahu's re-election badly. Who said this?
Harper Backs Netanyahu's Controversial Israel Victory
And who said this?
"Over a million Arabs take part in Middle East's most democratic elections today"; "The Arabs in Israel are the only Middle East Arab group that practices true democracy"..."Israel is the world's most vibrant democracy."
The first is the reaction of The Globe And Mail, Canada's newspaper of record. The second is Ghanem Nuseibeh, a Palestinian supporter of the Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog. It comes to something when the Palestinians sound less unhinged about Netanyahu's victory than the western media do.
What's "controversial" about the Israeli election result other than that it's not the one The Globe And Mail wanted?
Isn't there anything a wee bit "controversial" about the Palestinian election? Oh, that's right: They haven't held any for a decade or so - Abbas and his fellow Fatah kleptocrats in the West Bank because they want to continue bulking up their Swiss bank accounts with generous Euro-American subsidies, and Hamas in Gaza because they regard democracy as Erdogan in Turkey put it, merely a train you ride until it gets you to where you want to go. Which it did back in 2006.
~A Steyn I-told-you-so moment: America Alone was published in 2006 - and, as I always say with an eye to my Mann vs Steyn legal bills, personally autographed copies are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore. The reason you should buy it is for things like the following:
Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century? Answer: No. Its population will get old before it's got rich...
Lots of experts crank out analyses positing China as the unstoppable hegemon of the 21st century. Yet the real threat is not the strengths of your enemies but their weaknesses. China is a weak power: its demographic and other structural defects are already hobbling its long-term ambitions.
Nine years later, the Chinese are beginning to figure it out:
China must open its doors to up to 100 million young immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia to address the country's aging workforce, according to a researcher with China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC)...
Beijing has no choice but to choose this path, Luo said, adding that this would make China the country with the second-most immigrants in the world behind the United States.
Which would be a profound transformation in a country with no experience of mass immigration. And, unlike the United States, China's demographic woes come with a distinctive wrinkle. From page 30 of America Alone:
Since China introduced its "one child" policy in 1978, the imbalance between the sexes has increased to the point where in today's generation there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. The pioneer generation of that male surplus are now adults. Unless China's planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what's going to happen to those young men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can't get any action are useful for manning the nuttier outposts of the jihad but not for much else.
Nine years later, the SASAC commissars are catching up with Steyn:
China's rapidly aging population, a product of the country's one-child policy, has become one of the government's biggest headaches. While Beijing has eased the national birth control policy in recent years, economic constraints have so far prevented a new baby boom.
The Chinese tradition of preferring boys to girls has also led to a gross gender imbalance in the population, with estimates that 30 million Chinese men will not be able to find a female partner by 2020.
So what's the plan? Those tens of millions of Africans are going to be mostly female?
~If you follow America as the country with "the second-most immigrants in the world", do you then follow America to the next stage? A land with no majority population, only minorities:
The fact is that "no majority" America is here and thriving in 2015. According to the new projections, it is here among children younger than 5, and it is here among all students in the nation's public schools. It will be here for the nation's under-30 population in less than a decade, deepening the transformation that has already come to pockets of many urban cores and large swaths of the nation's coasts and the Southwest.
This Brookings Institute graph spells it out. Next year - 2016 - for the first time since 1776 a majority of America's under-tens will be non-white. By 2026 (or about the length of time from Bush's re-election to now) a majority of America's under-forty population will be non-white.
It might be "thriving", as William H Frey says. But one could also argue that America's current "diversity" model assumes the continued presence of a guilt-ridden white majority. Once there no longer is such a thing it might all get a bit more complicated...
Either way, the mid-21st century won't want for diversity: an Hispanic United States, an Islamized Europe and an African China.
