He also, as a sort of parallel, suggests that in the event of Islamist terrorism getting much worse, it is possible that the outcome could be extermination of Islam. He seems to be advocating such (in the hypothetical situation), which I cannot agree with. A more charitable reading of his piece would be that he is emphasizing that it could happen, which is a reasonable point – one I made myself at the beginning of time (November 2004):
At the end of the day, like any other immigrant group, Muslims in Europe live on the sufferance of the majority population. The Muslims would trigger genocidal violence against themselves long before they could become a serious threat to the host populations.
If I’m reading him right, he’s saying that if everyone understood that, there would be less hysteria on both sides of the argument. However, if that is what he meant, he expressed himself quite poorly.
On the question of sovereign default, it is true that there is no moral neccessity for any government to pay it’s debts. If lenders wanted their money back, they shouldn’t have lent to a body that can properly change its mind by popular vote. I’ve said that before.
