Islam versus Europe

An African has gone back to Africa. Hopefully the start of a trend that the Asians will pick up on too. In this case the African is Afua Hirsch, former legal blogger for the Guardian, now its West Africa correspondent.

Afua Hirsch always impressed me with the low calibre of her mind. In her blog commentaries on the law (nearly all of them promoting the concept of justiciable human rights) you would often find legal professionals appearing in the comments section and correcting her mistakes. One especially absurd article sticks in my mind. She argued that because the Human Rights Act gave judges the power to reinterpret laws to bring them into conformity with human rights, even if a future government abolished the Human Rights Act judges could effectively just "reinterpret" it back into existence! Lunacy. But lunacy that reveals the contempt for democracy in the minds of the human rights agitators.

Maybe the reason Afua never seemed to acquire a very in-depth knowledge of the law was that she spent all her time obsessing about Africa instead.

That first trip shaped my future in ways I could never have imagined. In the almost two decades that followed, I have moulded all educational and professional decisions into the form of a road that would lead me back to Africa. I devoured African literature, studied African politics, wrote my thesis on African women and political power, worked in development, law and now journalism, all with a focus on Africa. A decade ago, a job with an international development foundation led me to Senegal, where I lived for two years. Then, in February, I moved to west Africa for the second time, now setting up shop in the city of my very first trip to the continent, Accra.

Source: Guardian

One of the things I find most strikingly hypocritical about the Asian and African invaders, and particularly their public representatives, is that their obvious obsession with their own ancestral identity goes hand in hand with the insistence that Europeans must not be allowed any comparable concern with theirs. We must be "post-racial", we are told, while the colonists get to be "hyper-racial".

Afua tries to sell her new job posting as some kind of grand return from a failed Europe to a booming Africa, as well as a moral repudiation of the "racism" of Europe and the invisible "glass ceiling" that keeps her talented self down. Of course the truth about the glass ceiling is the exact opposite. As I mentioned above, her legal commentary was signally incompetent. She had obviously only got the job because she had brown skin.

There is a symmetry to the journey that returnees are making, which speaks volumes about the state of Africa today. Our parents left – exactly 50 years ago in my case – fleeing deteriorating economic conditions and limited opportunities at home. Now their children are forming an exodus from the crisis-ridden eurozone, four years of recession and the dogged perception of inequality and discrimination in the west. "Who needs the glass ceiling when you could be running your own business in one of the world's fastest-growing economies, enjoying the warm weather and surrounded by your own people?" one returnee to Ghana told me. "There is no contest."

But the most important part of the article is the "surrounded by your own people" quote. Apparently it's OK for Africans to want to live in an environment where they will be "surrounded by their own people". When Europeans express a similar urge, however, they are immediately compared to Adolf Hitler. I would imagine that the desire to live among your own kind is a core human instinct, shared by all the world's peoples. But its moral legitimacy is denied to only one set of those peoples: Europeans.

At the rate the Guardian is losing money, it will be defunct within a decade. As one of the prime agitators for the European Genocide, and the leading specialist in Muslim apologetics in the western world, we will be well rid of it. Once Afua no longer has a job as its correspondent, it will be interesting to see whether she heads back to Europe or chooses to stay in "booming" Africa, "surrounded by her own people".