Mary Riddell is a spiteful, intellectally lazy Observer journalist, an egalitarian activist and, apparently, a believer in the dead Marxist, Stephen J Gould.  Today she has taken it upon herself to write a hate piece about Leeds University professor, Frank Ellis.

Ellis, you will recall, took it upon himself - not for the first time - to do what Drew Fraser did Down Under and inform the British public about racial differentials.  He is a doughty fighter, and has done the same public service in respect to the social effects of The Lawrence Inquiry.  His specialism is Russian and Slavonic Studies, upon which he has the soundest view imaginable - though one hardly likely to endear itself to Ms Riddell.

In her bitch-piece today she is, no doubt, reacting to Ellis’s success in getting his views across.  He knows perfectly well, of course, that the white population is thirsty for such insights and, too, that his notoriety on the Establishment Left is a threat to him professionally and personally.  He is, like Prof Fraser, a brave man for whom the collective cost of silence is greater than any cost to him of speaking out.  He has my admiration and, I don’t doubt, that of many others with no website on which to express it.  I admire his cheek, too.  Last week, Ms Riddell reports, he sent the Observer an “an email offering a resumé of his views and asking what we would pay him”.  He must have done it deliciously anticipating the mortification that would ensue among all those so fearful-progressive Observer folk.

As to Ms Riddell and her piece today, I am struck by the venom and dishonesty of the language, by the very personal ill-will she feels for Professor Ellis, and by the laziness with which she condemns his thesis.  Coming so soon after our experience of critical-rationalism in motion, it is another instance of the curiously bankrupt, pro race replacement position.  The enemy has its venom, its ommissions and distortions and its censorship.  But it has no arguments.

The Observer calls Ellis a bigot in the headline, and it doesn’t get any better.  From Ellis’s article in the Leeds Student, which started the furore, Riddell quotes:

he refers approvingly to ‘research’ claiming an average IQ of 70 for sub-Saharan Africans, a figure ‘close to, or within the range of mental retardation’. How is it possible, he wonders, for a people with ‘such a low IQ to achieve ... a technologically sophisticated civilisation’?

But in the next paragraph she claims to have met Arthur Jensen who “argues that a 15 per cent IQ gap between black and white people is genetically ordained.”  Seemingly, she is unaware of white mean IQ.  She is certainly unaware of a heck of a lot because the very next line reads, “His theories, demolished by mainstream peers, such as Stephen Jay Gould, are hateful.”  What does she know about “his mainstream peers” that I don’t?  Where is the mainstream evidence that a century of psychometric research has been misguided since it does not measure intelligence - and if it does, it doesn’t mean anything?  Who in the mainstream still thinks Gould was right, or doing anything other than protecting his Marxist politics (that’s mainstream - the radical right will have a more honest, “ethnic” assessment)?

Riddell, of course, offers no factual rebuttal of Ellis’s statement, since there is none.

She opened her attack with the words:-

Whatever happened to the rabid right? Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, is so disturbed by its strange death that he has pleaded for a play challenging liberal orthodoxy. Demolishing multiculturalism could, he thinks, be the ideal topic for this cage-rattler. Be careful what you wish for.

But towards the end of the piece she writes, “The aggressive right may not be taking curtain calls at the National Theatre, but it is thriving”.  And this is what really frightens the left.  They have no sustainable argument, none whatever, with which to rebut the slowly rising right.  They are simply reactionary, and caught on the horns of the free speech dilemma: do we liberals suppress them.  Or do we honour our impeccable sense of justice and liberty, and let them be seen in all their vileness by as many good people as possible?

The problem with the latter - as she knows darned well - is that for some unconscionably backward reason the good people might actually want to hear some hard truths spoken fearlessly.  African IQ, black crime and hyper-sexualisation, the nature of Islam ... it’s not that people disdain such things.  The left does.  Never for one moment did it, or the Conservative right, have the confidence to put Multiculturalism to the vote.  It imposed racial change on us purely out of its own emotional needs.  It has been totalitarian.

And it is totalitarianism that carries the day for Riddell.

... just occasionally, the backlash against repression goes too far. Then what passes for freedom is simply cowardice and humouring the unspeakable is a mark not of courage, but of fear.

Ellis often cites the film that could, he jokes, never have a black equivalent, White Men Can’t Jump.  Nor can they easily be pushed. There is no clause in Ellis’s contract to say he may not bring his organisation into disrepute. That leaves the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which requires public bodies to give due regard to the need ‘to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups’.

Leeds University will not want this row to drag on. Administrators may, even now, be looking for evidence of potential non-compliance with the law. I hope they find it.

In fact, what Ellis wrote (in Amren) about white men jumping was this:-

What, I wonder, would be the reaction of the equal opportunity commissars to a film with the title No Black Society has Ever Produced a Written Language or Mathematics?

It is considered politically incorrect to say so, but were one to take the ‘white’ and the ‘male’ out of science and technology, one would have no science, just witchcraft, third world squalor, misery and mega-incompetence.

The real world is creeping up on Riddell and her type, like Carl Jung’s shadow.  In fact, there are a pair of shadows.  If the radical right doesn’t extinguish the little liberal flame, the Third World will.  Either way, it will be extinguished.