Who Won the Cold War?

Remind me again, which side won the Cold War between the Communist East and the Liberal Democratic West? Let's see, the official version is that the Liberal Democrats won the economic war, thus bringing the USSR to its knees, but it is becoming more apparent every day that the Communists won the war of ideas and that victory is now bringing Liberal Democracy to its knees in Western Europe.

Social democratic Europe is turning into the Soviet Union.

The long, relentless, one-step-at-a-time march of socialist ideas first through the hearts and minds, and then through the institutions, of Western Europeans has brought the European Union to the point where economic survival now requires the surrender of national sovereignty and responsible government in Europe.

Janet Daley, of the Daily Telegraph, has an illuminating and unusually honest assessment of the events which took place in Europe last week. Her blog post, entitled "This was the week that European democracy died," looks at the latest twist in the long drawn out train wreck that is the European Union:

Democracy went down in a blaze of glory last week. Both the German Bundestag and our own House of Commons put up one hell of a fight against the dying of the light. Maybe history will record that fact in an elegy on the demise of the great 18th-century experiment in government by the people: they were eloquent to the end. Because at the end, eloquence was all they had.

Trying to hold back the resurgence of oligarchy – the final dismantling of democratic responsibility in the governing of Europe – has been looking pretty hopeless for a long time. That eruption of excellent rhetoric and faultless argument which sprang to the defence of the rights of the governed (and in Germany’s case, of constitutional legality) made the loss seem all the more tragic, but no less inevitable.

So this is where we are. The agreed EU “stability union” triumphantly paraded before the media in Brussels will have the power to approve or disapprove budgets of countries in the eurozone – that is, to vet and police them – before they are submitted to the elected parliaments of those countries. In other words, parliaments which are directly mandated by, and answerable to, their own populations will not control the most essential functions of government: decisions on taxation and spending. Even without the ultimate institutions of economic and political union, which still elude the EU, actual power over fiscal policy will be taken from the hands of national leaders. And if, as a voter, you cannot influence your prospective government’s tax and spending policies, what exactly are you voting for?

Britain being outside the eurozone, we will not have to present our fiscal arrangements for authorisation before submitting them to the scrutiny of our legislators (and their constituents). But since our own economic recovery relies so heavily on the stability of the euro, we find ourselves (or at least, George Osborne has found himself) enthusiastically supporting this rape of democratic principle in countries which regard their freedom and self-determination as precious in much the same way, remarkably enough, that free-born Englishmen do.

The implications of what has happened will take some time to sink in. But eventually it will become clear that what has happened is that a centralized, EU bureaucracy has become sovereign, just as socialist theory says it should. And the reason why it should is the ineptness of old-fashioned, liberal-democratic governments to do the job. Capitalism (neo-liberalism) has failed; where have we heard that before? And so, therefore, democracy must give way to socialist central planning.

This is being put forward as a "solution"! In the year of our Lord 2011! Surely, as Daley wisely points out, the purported solution itself is a bigger problem than the problem it was brought forward to solve.

And among those hapless, soon-to-be-disenfranchised peoples, hatreds have been awakened that the EU was, ironically, designed to bury. The Greeks hugely resent what they consider to be the implicitly racist contempt of the Germans: the political opposition in Athens on both Left and Right rejects the idea of being “bailed out” of a crisis (with all the compliance that entails) that they believe to have been caused by the artificial constraints of euro membership rather than by national character flaws. Even their moderate spokesmen are beginning to characterise Germany’s economic impositions as a revival of its wartime attempt at conquest.

When Angela Merkel warned last week about the possible end of the blessedly long post-war peace in Europe, she meant that the failure of the euro (and thus of the EU project) would precipitate economic chaos and possibly lead to war. But she and her colleagues seem oblivious to the resurgence of hostility that is being brought about by every move closer to “successful” European integration.

Indeed, it is often quite eerie how the statements and mannerisms of EU officials, seemingly so dedicated to being the precise opposite of earlier, infamous generations, end up echoing (or parodying) the more memorable moments of the war-torn 20th century. When the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, proclaimed, “I am pleased to stand before you this morning and confirm that Europe is closer to resolving its financial and economic crisis… We are showing that we can unite in the most difficult of times”, I half expected him to wave a piece of paper in the air and proclaim economic stability in our time. . . .

Far from being an antidote to the ideological delusions of the past century, a trans-national superstate is the same sort of utopian, unnatural, ahistorical folly that earlier generations attempted to foist on the recalcitrant populations of Europe. Its doctrine of “co-operation” is simply coercion by another name. It relies on unswerving belief and enforced conformity, just like all the “year zero” political movements that ended in totalitarianism and terror in the past. The one hope is that the great mass of the people, unlike most of their political leaders, seem to understand all this quite clearly. It remains to be seen whether they will have to go out on the streets to make their case.

Only bureaucrats, academics and Marxists believe that there can exist a bureaucracy that serves no political master, that is, a professional cadre of technical experts dedicated only to solving all problems. It is a vision of politics as consisting of nothing but mathematical problems requiring only expert mathematicians to manage all the issues efficiently. What a dream: the benign rule of the technocrat!

The European super-state will fall apart much more quickly than the USSR did because the leaders of the EU likely will not have the stomach for murdering tens of millions of people. So it will not take anything like 70 years for the whole thing to collapse. In truth, the USSR only lasted a few decades, if that, before it lost all credibility. But its fall was a long, drawn out affair mainly because of the violence used to sustain it.

We can expect no such resort to violence from EU leaders because they, unlike those deceived by Lenin and Stalin, are not true believers in Utopia. Today's leaders believe in Utopia because all "right-thinking people" do and when the riots come they will acts more like the befuddled generals of the USSR in those last chaotic days than like the disciplined cadres of true believers who could slaughter millions with a good conscience in the name of making a better world.

Geert Wilders Acquited! Good News for Freedom of Speech in Europe

Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician on trial for criticizing Islam as a totalitarian ideology bent on world dominion, has miraculously been acquited by an Amsterdam court!

I have previously blogged about this trial and Wilders' fight for free speech in the Netherlands and the West generally. The first link gives the transcript of his closing remarks at the trial:

European Freedom on Trial

Defending Free Speech Against the Hard Left and Islam

Geert Wilders' Speech in Rome: Facing the Potential Fall of the West without Giving Up Hope

The Voice of Freedom in Europe: Will It Be Silenced Forever?

German Reporter Claims Jesus Taught Violent Jihad in Wilders Interview

Geert Wilders' Speech at Ground Zero on 9/11

Robert Sibley on Geert Wilders and Freedom

Rick Moran at American Thinker describes the victory and the Muslim response. Unsurprisingly, they will continue the lawfare by going to the United Nations. They do not believe that European nations should have the sovereign right to make their own laws because they ultimately do no recognize any law but Shariah.

Predictably, some Muslims groups were outraged:

Minorities groups said they would now take the case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, arguing the ruling meant the Netherlands had failed to protect ethnic minorities from discrimination.

"The acquittal means that the right of minorities to remain free of hate speech has been breached. We are going to claim our rights at the U.N.," said Mohamed Rabbae of the National Council for Moroccans.

No doubt they will get a sympathetic hearing at the UN with the anti-Semites, anti-Western, anti-Christian representatives becoming enraged at the result of the court case.

But what can they do to the Netherlands? Not much, which means their efforts will be for PR purposes and nothing more.

Note that they, like Marxists, have become adept at utilizing the rhetoric of rights and multiculturalism,(in which they do not believe), against their Western enemies. Posing as persecuted minorities they try to stamp out all criticism of Islam and restrict free speech for their own totalitarian purposes. They have not embraced Western ideals of free speech and tolerance; they scorn such ideals even as they use them against us in order to undermine those ideals and eventually stamp them out.

No country in the world dominated by Shariah law has religious freedom, freedom of speech or individual liberty (especially in the case of women). Any Muslim who wishes to live under Western law and according to the Western political philosophy of limited government, separation of church and state, etc. is welcome in the West. But a significant minority of Muslims - largely supported by Saudi oil money - are anti-Western and seek to overthrow the West and impose Shariah. They are enemies and must be resisted.

Geert Wilders has been persecuted by the Left in his country because he insists on standing up to the latter group, while having no problem with the former group. He claims that Islam is a totalitarian ideology and history is on his side. The only debatable point is whether a given Muslim group is willing to give up Islamic ideology and adapt to the ideals of the West or not. When you see honor killings, anti-Semitism, and support for radical organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas, and creeping Shariah, you know which kind of Muslim group you are dealing with.

The entire Western world owes Geert Wilders a debt of gratitude for having the courage to stand up to thugs and totalitarians who want to sell out liberty for peace.

Do You Really Want to Be More Like Europe?

It is generally acknowledged (except by White House message minders wary of electoral prospects) that the direction Barack Obama is taking the United States is toward becoming more like Europe in a myriad of ways. He would have Americans stop clinging to their guns and religion, expand the welfare state, raise taxes, accept slow economic growth and high unemployment as permanent, make marriage a pale shadow of the institution it was a few decades ago, and further implement the culture of death through the expansion of abortion and euthanasia.

Western academics are extremely romantic and naive about the European welfare state. They constantly invoke it as the prime example of "social justice" in the world today. They think a culture in the midst of committing demographic suicide is a model to be emulated.

My question is: "why would anyone want to imitate Europe?" Europe is a dithering, sick, old man and more like the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century than like the dynamic engine of enterprise and scientific advance it was at the end of the 18th century.

Victor Davis Hanson, at Real Clear Politics, invites us to give our heads a shake and see Europe for what it really is:

The European Union, like the 19th-century Congress of Vienna, can point to one achievement -- a general absence of war in Western Europe for more than 60 years. Otherwise, almost all its socialist promises of an equality of result are imploding before their eyes.

The higher taxes go, the more people cheat on them, the less revenue comes in. There are sometimes two prices in Italy (and often elsewhere in Europe) -- the official price that includes a high value-added tax that the unwary pay, and the negotiated, under-the-table, tax-free discount that the haggling shopper obtains.

Europe is essentially defenseless, as governments further trim defense budgets to keep shrinking spread-the-wealth entitlements alive. The French and British -- the continent's two premier military powers -- have been trying for nearly three months to defeat Muammar Gadhafi's ragtag nation of less than 7 million, itself rent by civil war. The ancestors (sic) of Wellington and Napoleon so far seem no match for Gadhafi or the Taliban. Both nations will soon be leaving Afghanistan in frustration.

Subsidized wind and solar power have not led to much of an increase in European electricity supplies, but they helped to make power bills soar. Highly taxed gas runs about $10 a gallon, ensuring tiny cars and dependence on mass transit. Central planners love the resulting state-subsidized, high-density European apartment living without garages, back yards or third bedrooms. Yet the recent Japanese tsunami and accompanying nuclear contamination have reminded European governments that their similarly fragile models of highly urbanized, highly concentrated living make them equally vulnerable to such disasters.

Popular culture may praise the use of the subway and train. But about every minute or two, some government grandee in a motorized entourage rushes through traffic as an escort of horn-blaring police forces traffic off to the side. A European technocratic class in limousines that runs government bureaus and international organizations -- for example, disgraced former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn -- lives like 18th-century aristocrats at Versailles as they mouth socialist platitudes.

Read it all here.

How about maybe waiting a decade or so and watching to see if there still is a Euro before jumping on the European bandwagon? My bet is that that will sound like a good idea to the majority of Americans on voting day in November 2012.

European Freedom on Trial

Here are Geert Wilders' closing remarks at his free speech trial in Amsterdam. I include them here as a matter of historical record and out of respect for one of the few political figures in Europe who is willing to speak the truth in an age of lazy lies.

Geert Wilders lives under constant police protection. One of his close associates was murdered by Islamic radicals; another is in exile in America. You would think that every Dutch official who was committed to freedom and justice would be on his side. Yet, the liberal elites of the Netherlands persecute him and seek to take away what little still freedom has. His political party won the third highest number of votes in the last election, but these elites despise ordinary voters and care nothing for democracy.

Geert Wilders is not perfect. He is a political liberal who greatly respects Christianity even though he is not a believer himself. There is an honorable tradition of such political leaders in the West; Thomas Jefferson comes to mind. But unlike those who dominate European politics today, Wilders is not anti-Christian and he does not see Christianity as something that must be eradicated in order for hedonistic individualism in the form of the sexual revolution to reign unchallenged. He does not worship the spirit of the age, which is also called the spirit of the generation of '68. He is no cultural Marxist and he believes that tradition, family, limited government, free speech, individual freedom and the rule of law are precious goods and the fruit of the Christian West. Leaders like Geert Wilders are the kind of political leaders who should be running Europe, not on trial.

Mister President, members of the Court,

I am here because of what I have said. I am here for having spoken. I have spoken, I speak and I shall continue to speak. Many have kept silent, but not Pim Fortuyn, not Theo Van Gogh, and not I.

I am obliged to speak. For the Netherlands is under threat of Islam. As I have argued many times, Islam is chiefly an ideology. An ideology of hatred, of destruction, of conquest. It is my strong conviction that Islam is a threat to Western values, to freedom of speech, to the equality of men and women, of heterosexuals and homosexuals, of believers and unbelievers.

All over the world we can see how freedom is fleeing from Islam. Day by day we see our freedoms dwindle.

Islam is opposed to freedom. Renowned scholars of Islam from all parts of the world agree on this. My witness experts subscribe to my view. There are more Islam scholars whom the court did not allow me to call upon to testify. All agree with my statements, they show that I speak the truth. That truth is on trial today.

We must live in the truth, said the dissidents under Communist rule, because the truth will set us free. Truth and freedom are inextricably connected. We must speak the truth because otherwise we shall lose our freedom.

That is why I have spoken, why I speak and why I shall continue to speak.

The statements for which I am being tried are statements which I made in my function as a politician participating in the public debate in our society. My statements were not aimed at individuals, but at Islam and the process of islamization. That is why the Public Prosecutor has concluded that I should be acquitted.

Mister President, members of the Court,

I am acting within a long tradition which I wish to honour. I am risking my life in defence of freedom in the Netherlands. Of all our achievements freedom is the most precious and the most vulnerable. Many have given their lives for freedom. We have been reminded of that in the commemorations of the month of May. But the struggle for freedom is much older.

Every day the armoured cars drive me past the statue of Johan de Witt at the Hofvijver in The Hague. De Witt wrote the “Manifesto of True Freedom” and he paid for freedom with his life. Every day I go to my office through the Binnenhof where Johan van Oldenbarneveldt was beheaded after a political trial. Leaning on his stick the elderly Oldenbarneveldt addressed his last words to his people. He said: “I have acted honourably and piously as a good patriot.” Those words are also mine.

I do not wish to betray the trust of the 1.5 million voters of my party. I do not wish to betray my country. Inspired by Johan van Oldenbarneveldt and Johan de Witt I wish to be a politician who serves the truth end hence defends the freedom of the Dutch provinces and of the Dutch people. I wish to be honest, I wish to act with honesty and that is why I wish to protect my native land against Islam. Silence is treason.

That is why I have spoken, why I speak and why I shall continue to speak.

Freedom and truth. I pay the price every day. Day and night I have to be protected against people who want to kill me. I am not complaining about it; it has been my own decision to speak. However, those who threaten me and other critics of Islam are not being tried here today. I am being tried. And about that I do complain.

I consider this trial to be a political trial. The values of D66 [a Dutch leftist liberal party] and NRC Handelsblad [a Dutch leftist liberal party] will never be brought before a judge in this country. One of the complainants clearly indicated that his intentions are political. Even questions I have asked in parliament and cooperation with the SGP are being brought as allegations against me by Mr Rabbae of GroenLinks [the leftist Dutch Green Party]. Those on the Left like to tamper with the separation of powers. When they cannot win politically because the Dutch people have discerned their sinister agenda, they try to win through the courts.

Whatever your verdict may be, that is the bitter conclusion of this trial.

This trial is also surrealistic. I am being compared with the Hutu murderers in Rwanda and with Mladic. Only a few minutes ago some here have doubted my mental health. I have been called a new Hitler. I wonder whether those who call me such names will also be sued, and if not, whether the Court will also order prosecution. Probably not. And that is just as well. Because freedom of speech applies also to my opponents.

My right to a fair trial has been violated. The order of the Amsterdam Court to prosecute me was not just a decision but a condemning verdict by judges who condemned me even before the actual trial had begun.

Mister President, members of the Court, you must now decide whether freedom still has a home in the Netherlands

Franz Kafka said: “one sees the sun slowly set, yet one is surprised when it suddenly becomes dark.” Mister President, members of the Court, do not let the lights go out in the Netherlands.

Acquit me: Put an end to this Kafkaesque situation.

Acquit me. Political freedom requires that citizens and their elected representatives are allowed to voice opinions that are held in society.

Acquit me, for if I am convicted, you convict the freedom of opinion and expression of millions of Dutchmen.

Acquit me. I do not incite to hatred. I do not incite to discrimination. But I defend the character, the identity, the culture and the freedom of the Netherlands. That is the truth. That is why I am here. That is why I speak. That is why, like Luther before the Imperial Diet at Worms, I say: “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

That is why I have spoken, why I speak and why I shall continue to speak.

Mister President, members of the Court, though I stand here alone, my voice is the voice of many. This trial is not about me. It is about something much greater. Freedom of expression is the life source of our Western civilisation.

Do not let that source go dry just to cosy up to a totalitarian ideology. “Freedom,” said the American President Dwight Eisenhower, “has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed – else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.”

Mister President, members of the Court, you have a great responsibility. Do not cut freedom in the Netherlands from its roots, our freedom of expression. Acquit me. Choose freedom.

I have spoken, I speak, and it is my duty – I cannot do otherwise – to continue to speak.

Thank you.

The lights are indeed going out all over Europe. The alliance of leftist anarchists and Islamic radicals is squeezing true political liberalism in a crushing vice. Pray that this trial will end in victory for freedom and justice, not just for the sake of Geert Wilders but for the sake of Europe.

Defending Free Speech Against the Hard Left and Islam

Geert Wilders is fighting for freedom in Europe and there are two fronts: one is political Islam and the other is the hard Left. He is not a far right or fascist; he is one of the few true liberals left in politics in Europe.

He has an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled: "European Free Speech Under Attack" and this is how it begins:

""The lights are going out all over Europe," British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey famously remarked on the eve of World War I. I am reminded of those words whenever I read about Europeans being dragged into court for so-called hate-speech crimes.

Recently, Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society, had to stand trial in Copenhagen because he had criticized Islam. Mr. Hedegaard was acquitted, but only on the technicality that he had not known that his words, expressed in a private conversation, were being taped. Last week in Vienna, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian human-rights activist, was fined €480 for calling the Islamic prophet Muhammad a pedophile because he had consummated his marriage to a nine-year old girl. Meanwhile, my own trial in Amsterdam is dragging on, consuming valuable time that I would rather spend in parliament representing my million-and-a-half voters.

How can all this be possible in supposedly liberal Europe? The Dutch penal code states that anyone who either "publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in any way that incites hatred against a group or people" or "in any way that insults a group of people because of their race, their religion or belief, their hetero- or homosexual inclination or their physical, psychological or mental handicap, will be punished."

Early in 2008, a number of leftist and Islamic organizations took me to court, claiming that by expressing my views on Islam I had deliberately "insulted" and "incited hatred" against Muslims. I argued then, as I will again in my forthcoming book, that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology aiming for world domination."

This opinion of his - that Islam is a totalitarian political system disguised as a religion - is certainly an extreme opinion. But it is a reasonable point of view with a lot of actual evidence in its favor. It is not based on fantasy but on horrible violent acts and the historical record. What ought to upset every freedom-loving person is that both Islam and the hard Left both want to shut him down, silence him and prevent an open debate.

Every time the supposed "religion of peace" reacts to some provocation like the burning of a Koran or the publication of a cartoon by murdering, burning and raping, it simply adds support to Wilders' point. And every time he is hauled into court by left wing elitists or receives death threats from outraged Muslims he is proven to be right.

The world thought that the Fall of the Berlin Wall was the end of totalitarianism in Europe. How naive those who thought that look now. Wilders writes:

"My trial is a political trial. It is tragic that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, political trials in Europe were not cast onto the ash heap of history. Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has previously referred to the European Union as the "EUSSR." One of his arguments is that in the EU, as in the former USSR, there is no freedom of speech."

Just as the Greeks were conquered militarily by Rome and yet conquered Rome in language, culture and ideas, so the ideas of Marxism are slowly but surely taking over Western Europe and pushing the ideals of liberty to the curb. The secularist, ruling elites hate Christianity so much that even Communism and Islam - the two greatest threats to European culture in history - do not scare them. Their blind, irrational hatred of reason, science, freedom and the Christianity that created these cultural goods drive them to destroy Europe's freedom in the name of Secularism, Scientism and Socialism.

In the 1930s, two left-wing groups, the Marxists and the Nazis, fought each other but united against the liberal Weimar Republic. Both the International Socialist (the Communists) and the National Socialists (the Nazis) wanted power. But the both hated liberalism and Christianity so much that they united against liberal democracy. History has a way of repeating itself until we learn from it.

Geert Wilders is not right about everything. I disagree with him on some issues. But he is a hero and he is courageous. Those who would kill or silence him reveal themselves to be enemies of mankind in so doing.

Read it all here.

The War of Obliteration against Israel May Have Already Begun

Wednesday's bombing of a bus stop in Jerusalem marks a new and ominous stage in the Arab war against Israel. Caroline Glick has some depressing but possibly accurate analysis in The Jerusalem Post in a column entitled: "Understanding the Third Terror War."

What are we to make of the fact that no one has taken credit for Wednesday's bombing in Jerusalem?

Wednesday's bombing was not a stand-alone event. It was part and parcel of the new Palestinian terror war that is just coming into view. As Israel considers how to contend with the emerging onslaught, it is important to notice how it differs from its predecessors. . .

Like its two predecessors which began in 1987 and 2000, the new terror war's primary purpose is not to murder Jews. Killing is just an added perk. The new war's primary purpose is to weaken Israel politically in order to bring about its eventual collapse. . .

Fatah is in the midst of a global campaign to build international support for a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence in September. From Israel's perspective, the campaign is threatening for two reasons. First, a unilaterally declared Palestinian state will be in a de facto state of war with Israel. Second, if the Palestinians secure international recognition for their "state" in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the move will place 500,000 Jews who live in these areas in the international crosshairs.

Much of the discussion about this goal has centered on whether or not US President Barack Obama will veto a UN Security Council resolution endorsing such a declaration. And based on Obama's behavior to date, the Palestinians have good reason to believe that he may support their move. But in truth, the discussion about how the US will respond to the planned Palestinian declaration is largely beside the point. The point of the threatened declaration is not to get a UN Security Council resolution supporting it. The point is to get the EU to enact further sanctions against Israel.

And this brings us back to the new policy of not taking credit for attacks on Israel, and to the decision to launch a new terror war in general. On the face of it, at such a sensitive time for the Palestinians diplomatically, it would seem that they would want to keep their traditional good cop-Fatah, bad cop-Hamas routine going and have Hamas take the credit for the recent attacks. Indeed, it would seem that the Palestinians would want to hold off on attacks altogether until after they declare independence.

The fact that Fatah and Hamas have neither waited until after September to attack nor sought to differentiate themselves from one another as the attacks coalesce into a new terror campaign indicates strongly that the Palestinians no longer feel they need to pretend to oppose terror to maintain European support for their war against Israel.

The Palestinians assess that Europe is swiftly moving towards the point where it no longer needs to pretend to be fair to Israel. The British, French and German votes in favor of the Palestinians' anti-Israel UN Security Council resolution last month were the latest sign that the key European governments have adopted openly hostile policies towards Israel.

More importantly, these policies are not the consequence of Palestinian lobbying efforts and so Israel cannot hope to change them through counter-lobbying efforts. Europe's abandonment of even the guise of fairness towards Israel is the product of domestic political realities in Europe itself. Between the rapidly expanding political power of Europe's Muslim communities and the virulently anti-Israel positions nearly universally adopted by the European media, European governments are compelled to adopt ever more hostile positions towards Israel to appease their Israel-hating publics and Muslim communities.

Take British Prime Minister David Cameron for example. When Cameron called Gaza "an open air prison" last year, it wasn't because he had just spoken to Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas. And he certainly wasn't acting out of conviction. Cameron surely knew that his statement was an utter lie. And he also surely knew that Hamas is a jihadist terror group that shares the ideology of its fellow Muslim Brotherhood spin-off al Qaida.

But for Cameron, far more important than Gaza's relative prosperity and Hamas's genocidal goals was the fact that in the last British elections, the UK's Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC-UK) successfully ousted six members of parliament who expressed support for Israel.

The Palestinians recognize that they don't need to pretend to be good to get Europe to support them. After the people of Europe have been brainwashed by their media and intimidated by the Muslim communities, they have developed a Pavlovian response regarding Israel whereby every mention of Israel makes them hate it more. It doesn't matter if the story is about the massacre of Israeli children or the bombing of synagogues and nursery schools. They know that Israel is the guilty party and expect their governments to punish it.

What the Palestinian silence on who committed what atrocity tells us is that in this new terror war, the Palestinians believe they cannot lose. With Europe in tow, Fatah and Hamas feel free to combine their forces and advance both militarily and politically."

If Glick is right it means that we have reached a tipping point in a process that has been going on since the oil crisis of the 1970s when the Arab nations began to pressure Europe to bow to their demand to de-legitimize Israel. Europe has lived in fear of the Arab oil powers ever since and the left-wing intellectual elite has chosen the path of appeasement in apparent ignorance of the fact that this path has no end.

Obama will likely be defeated in 2012, so there is a window for a decisive war to destroy Israel in the next two years before a Republican, pro-Israel president is sworn in. From the Muslin perspective, both Arab and Persian, other key factors include the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The US is not cultivating new friends or defending old ones in the Middle East right now and this self-imposed weakness is increasing the chances of all-out war to destroy Israel. If Europe sides with Muslims, Israeli nuclear is balanced by Iranian nuclear weapons and the US is slow, dithering and indecisive, then Israel will stand alone in this fight.

And if Israel falls, God help Europe.

Liberal Media Successfully Resurrects European Anti-Semitism

Daniel Halper in The Weekly Standard points us to a shocking story in the Jerusalem Post describing a recent study done in Europe by a think-tank associated with Germany's Social Democratic Party. The story is entitled: "47% of Germans Think Israel is Exterminating Palestinians" and the summary says: "Study shows a strong presence of “anti-Semitism that is linked with Israel and is hidden behind criticism of Israel" in Europe."

Here are some excerpts:

"Dr. Beate Küpper, a researcher from the University of Bielefeld who co-authored the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s study along with her colleagues Andreas Zick and Andreas Hoevermann, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that the study showed a strong presence of “anti-Semitism that is linked with Israel and is hidden behind criticism of Israel, and is not neutral.” . . .

She termed the outbreak of Jew-hatred in Germany “remarkable” because there were widespread Holocaust remembrance and education events in Germany.

The study – “Intolerance, Prejudice, Discrimination: A European Report” –questioned roughly 1,000 people in each of the selected EU countries. . . .

Asked to respond to the statement that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians,” 47.7 percent of the study’s participants in Germany expressed agreement – the highest number in Western Europe.

The statement is a typical question used to probe attitudes about equating Israel with the Nazi campaign to exterminate European Jewry.

The US State Department defines the comparison as an expression of modern anti- Semitism, as does the European Union. . .

The statement “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews” met with 35.6% affirmation in Germany, while 35.9% of British respondents were in agreement. In the Netherlands, 41.1% favored the assertion, as did 55.2% in Poland, 45.6% in Hungary and 48.8% in Portugal. France declined to participate.

The researchers also asked whether “Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era.”

Almost half the Germans questioned responded in the affirmative; the country’s 48.9% result was the highest among the Western European countries. The Netherlands provided the lowest percentage, with 17.2% affirming that Jews were trying to exploit the Nazi era. The number for Poland was 72.2%, and Hungary reached 68.1%. France reached 32.3%, England 21.8%, Portugal 52.2% and Italy 40.2%."

Read it all here.

I noticed this story after writing my last post, but this is clearly the toxic result of the widespread, growing, and extreme bias against Israel displayed by the liberal media over the past number of years. They should be proud of their work: they have revived what WW II stamped out. European anti-Semitism rises again as a result of stoking the ancient prejudice and hatred of Jews under the guise of being anti-Zionist, anti-Israel and pro-Arab. The Left should be pleased with the preparatory work it is doing to get Europe ready to acquiesce to its coming Islamic masters. The transition should be seamless and painless.

Let's Laugh at Europe!

I know blogging has been slow lately but my excuse is iron-clad; I've been playing with my 6 month old granddaughter this past week before she takes her parents off to Europe for the next few months. Priorities.

I think I should start a weekly feature on this blog called "Let's Laugh at Europe." A shortage of material would not be the problem. Ed West at his blog on the Daily Telegraph site has this snippet from the on-going war between EU bureaucrats and nature.

Did you know that male drivers in the United States are 77 per cent more likely to die in car crash than females?

That men, aged 16-23, are four times more likely than the population as a whole to have a crash?

Or that men in their early 20s driving a motorbike after midnight are 45,000 times more likely than the population as a whole to die in an accident?

Insurance is the business of risk assessment, and taking into account the factors that cause risk. This includes age, sex, profession and lifestyle; if you smoke, for example, or travel to dangerous countries, your life insurance is going to be higher. Because either you bear the extra risk and pay the extra cost, or everyone does, which makes no sense either to non-smokers or to the company itself, which wants to offer competitive rates. In this sense life insurance is no different to the way we all discriminate and stereotype individuals as a form of social shorthand; we might cross the road when a group of young men appear, because statistically they are the most likely to attack us. It would be absurd if we did the same to avoid octogenarians or people in wheelchairs, just to be “undiscriminating”.

The same goes for car insurance, which assesses risk based on age and sex, as well as other factors, such as where you live. The simple fact is that, measured by the most important category – safety – women are far, far better drivers than men. Biology almost certainly plays a significant part; perhaps the same hormones that drive a higher proportion of men to become company directors also drive a higher proportion of them to act like morons behind the wheel.

Alas, human nature has fallen foul of the European Court of Justice, which seems to be in competition with the European Court of Human Rights to become the most loathed foreign court in British life. According to the Telegraph:

Lower insurance premiums for women unfair, European court rules

Insurance companies have been banned from selling cheaper premiums to motorists based on gender in a landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Using differences between men and women as a risk factor in setting premiums for car and medical insurance and pension schemes breaches EU rules on equality, declared European judges.

The verdict – which applies from December 21 2012 – will force changes in the current standard practice across Europe of basing insurance rates on statistics about differing life expectancies or road accident records of the sexes.

It is hilarious the way that these folks talk about all "discrimination" as a bad thing. They are so undiscriminating.

Feminists, I take it, are confused about whether to rejoice or complain about this ruling. The purists, I suppose, will get their checkbooks out and take the financial hit without complaint in order to rack up another victory for "equality." Others may wonder why feminism, if it is such a great thing, finds it necessary to be so petty and stupid.

Ah . . . Europe! They are like dragon-slayers who, having exterminated all the real ones, now have to practice their art on squashing ants and spiders.

A story like this seems somehow incomplete without some "Israel connection." Is there any way Zionism might be responsible for auto insurance discrimination? I don't see it right away, but such an angle might be the only way to make this story more absurd . . . so it is a virtual certainty that somewhere in Brussels some petty EU bureaucrat is thinking about this issue.

Multiculturalism and Moral Relativism

European leaders (Merkel, Cameron, Sarkozy) are finally beginning to say out loud what everybody has known for years but were afraid to say in public: the Western idea of multiculturalism has failed. It promised peace and harmony; it has produced hate and suspicion. It promised enlightened interaction between equals; it has produced ghettos. It promised respect for the other; it has produced racism.

Western culture suffered a horrendous blow to its self-confidence and its convictions in the debacle that was the 40 years war in Europe (1914-1945). The supposedly scientific, advanced nations of Western Europe fell upon each other with a barbarism, ferocity and nihilistic bloodlust that convinced much of the European intellectual elite that its own civilization - its religion, its moral ideals, its political institutions and its philosophical foundations - were all a thin veneer of superficial window-dressing covering up rapacity, greed, racism and the will to power, which were the fundamental realities of life.

There was a certain undeniable plausibility to this cynicism because the philosophical, religious, moral and cultural foundations of Europe had been rotting for centuries. Since the 14th century and the rise of nominalism, the worldview of Christian Europe had been declining. From the rise of Cartesian philosophy with its attempt to find new foundations in the autonomous self to the rise of a mechanistic technology that eschews the search for wisdom in its haste to obtain power over nature to the hubris of the Enlightenment with its call to set aside the wisdom of the past and trust man's unaided Reason, (always with a capital R), Europe attempted to rebuild its civilization on a humanistic and materialistic foundation.

So when the postmodern philosophers criticize the Enlightenment worship of Reason, they are right. But because they believed that the Enlightenment was somehow a legitimate or even inevitable development of the Greco-Roman and Christian civilizations which preceded it, the entirely of Western civilization, including Christianity, was implicated along with the Enlightenment.

A multude of diverse voices have warned that a wrong turn was taken at the dawn of the modern age and that the rejection of Christian worldview of the Medieval world must lead to disaster. They included Lewis and Tolkien, Dawson and Butterfield, von Balthasar and Milbank, Elliot and Kirk, Chesterton and Belloc, Newman and MacIntyre, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They have been largely ignored by the elites of our society.

Europe is dying of old age because she has cut herself off from her Medieval Christian roots. The failure of modernity is not the failure of Western civilization; it is the failure of the Modern rebellion against the Christian West.

Relativism is the standpoint of all civilizations in their dotage. It is not new, nor is it unique to the West. It is the standard default position of any civilization which has cut itself off from its roots from which alone can come renewal. Moral and cultural relativism lies behind the failed policy of multiculturalism and behind that lies moral and cultural rot.

Since the 1960s cultural Marxism has marched through the institutions of the West trumpeting moral relativism, multiculturalism and a self-loathing that is difficult to watch and painful to endure. This is marketed as the sophisticated views of a self-confident culture but the object of the confidence of these confidence men is as ephemeral and unreal as the snake oil they would have hawked in earlier times.

The equivalent of the ancient Sophists hated by Socrates have taken over our universities and taught our young people the slogans and political correctness needed to rise in this kind of decaying society. They exist because those who lead us intellectually have failed us. Modernity is dead as an idea even though the institutions it created live on for a time until the bills come due and fiddler demands his pay.

Multiculturalism is the rotten fruit. Moral relativism is the disease. The tree is Western civilization. How long before the axe is taken to a tree that no longer bears good fruit?

What is Going On in Europe?

From CNA news comes this astonishing story: "New EU School Calendar Omits Christian Holidays."

A 2011-2012 school calendar published by the European Union has omitted Christian holidays, while continuing to note important Jewish and Muslim celebrations.

The European Union has printed three million copies of the calendar which will be distributed free-of-charge to students who request them.

Former French politician and government minister, Christine Boutin, wrote in her blog Jan. 11 that the calendar leaves out Christianity, “the religion practiced or recognized as forming the cultural assembly of our ‘old’ continent.”

Boutin is a consultant for the Pontifical Council for the Family, as well as president of the Christian Democratic Party in France. She went on to lament that Christianity has “fallen into the limbo of collective ignorance.”

While Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter are missing from the calendar's pages, days commemorating “Sikh Baisakhi-Day, the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, the Muslim holiday Aid-el-Kebir,” remain in place,” Boutin continued.

The Christian Democratic Party in France called the omissions “unacceptable” and has filed a petition asking that the calendars not be distributed as printed, but that students be given versions that include Christian holidays.

Read it all here.

What on earth is going on in the EU? What twisted kind of self-loathing causes people to hate their own history and culture so much that they go to such ridiculous lengths to be offensive? Have all the adults left the building? Is the ground being laid for the open persecution of European Christians? I can't even formulate the words to analyze what is going on here in a way that makes sense of it. It is so bizarre as to be beyond rational comprehension. Anyone care to take a crack at a reasoned explanation for such behavior?

Suicide by Atheism: Christianity as the Basis of European Civilization

George Weigel has a worthwhile article in The National Review comparing recent speeches by Herbert von Rompuy and Pope Benedict XVI on the basis of European civilization. It is called "A Tale of Two Europes: Looking for Transcendence."

Weigel notes that in 2003-04 the debate over the preamble to the European constitution resulted in the omission of any mention of the Biblical or Christian tradition in defining the basis of European civilization:

In 2003–04, as the preamble to the European constitutional treaty that eventually came a cropper was being fiercely debated, the burning question was whether the Christian (or, more broadly, Biblical) sources of contemporary European commitments to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law could be acknowledged. The final answer was “No,” as the preamble cited classical civilization, the Enlightenment, and modern thought as the bases of the civil and tolerant Europe the constitutional treaty was to govern.

Weigel describes the shallowness of Van Rompuy's vision of the basis of Europe's shared civilization and quotes his speech at length:

But it was Van Rompuy’s flaccid attempt to define the ethical sources of the new Europe’s identity that rang most hollow:

Alongside diversity — and diversity is certainly a strength of our societies — we still need, in each of our societies, a sense of unity, of belonging together. This sense of unity can lie in shared values; or in a language, a shared history, a will to live together. . . . And this will springs above all from the stories we tell each other.

Think of the ancient Greeks: The stories of Homer created bonds through the centuries. They have us spell-bound tonight. It can be the stories of war and peace, or Olympic exploits or saint-like sacrifice, of a prison stormed or a Wall which came down.

Such stories do what a treatise on “values” cannot achieve: They embody “virtues” in an understandable way, virtues shown by men and women in real situations. Courage, respect, responsibility, tolerance, a sense of the common good.

To keep such European virtues alive, to transmit their age-old qualities to our children and grandchildren, that will be one of the great challenges for the future.

Here is the post-modern theory of the triumph of “narrative” run so far amok that it becomes self-parody. Putting aside the question of whether, on present demographic trends, there will be all that many “children and grandchildren” to whom to tell stories of Attic courage, or the figure-skating gold medals of Sonja Henie, or the fall of the Bastille, or the breaching of the Berlin Wall, Van Rompuy’s European Story Hour is just that: a disconnected conglomeration of “narratives” telling no one compelling tale. Or if there is a tale here, it is, pace the Thane of Cawdor, a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Weigel then describes Benedict's vision as given in his speech:

But according to the broad-gauged Benedict XVI, the voice of the God of Jews and Christians is not the only voice to which a revitalized Europe needs to attend, even if He is, to vary the medievals, the First Voice. To be sure, as the pope said, “Europe must open itself to God, must come to meet him without fear and work with his grace for that human dignity which was discerned in her best traditions.” But Europe must also reclaim the fullness of the riches of her civilizational patrimony: “not only the Biblical . . . but also the classical, the medieval, and the modern, the matrix from which the great philosophical, literary, cultural, and social masterpieces of Europe were born.” Thus “the Europe of science and technology, the Europe of civilization and culture, must be at the same time a Europe open to transcendence and fraternity with other continents, and open to the living and true God, starting with the living and true man.”

The openness to the transcendent, to God is the beginning of true wisdom. Belief in God has formed the basis of the greatest achievements of Europe: the rule of law, limited government, human dignity, freedom, free speech, freedom of religion and free enterprise. Yes, Europe needed some prodding from the Enlightenment to open up to greater political freedom but in doing so - in abolishing slavery for example - Europe was able to act in accordance with deep and abiding truths already found in Christianity. It was not necessary to jettison Christian faith in order to enhance the dignity of the human person; it was only necessary to jettison Christian faith in order to descend into a Brave New World.

Christianity was and is the basis of European civilization and the current rejection of Christianity by Europe is an act of wanton self-destruction. It is suicide by atheism.

Islam as a Mirror to the West

Here is a perspective on Islam in Europe from Alexandr Vondra, foreign minister of the Czech Republic, who is unusually blunt in his assessment of the potential danger to Europe from militant Islam. He does not mouth the usual platitudes about how Islam is a religion of peace and only a few marginal, insane terrorists distort the good reputation of Islam. He argues that the West has an important role to play in the internal struggle within Islam between radicals and moderates for the soul of Islam and for power.

His article in the Middle East Quarterly is entitled: "Radical Islam Poses a Major Challenge to Europe." Here is an excerpt:

"The role of Islam in Europe is crucial for Europe's future security and prosperity. On one hand, there are millions of Muslims who have become an integral part of European societies and who contribute to the continent's social and cultural diversity, but, on the other hand, there is a growing sentiment in the Muslim world, including Muslim communities in Europe, that is generally hostile to Western interests and values. I think we all find it most disturbing that, in recent years, these radical trends seem to be gaining strength.

The activities of radical Islam's followers and sympathizers in Europe pose a major challenge to our continent today. The challenge is not only the obvious physical threat these fundamentalist groups represent but rather the fact that the radical currents within Islam question virtually every single tenet of European society today and Western society in general.

At this point, you probably expect a common political disclaimer that is almost obligatory whenever anybody says anything about Islam these days—perhaps a few words about a great and generally peaceful religion that has little to do with a small number of thugs and terrorists. Well, I will not avoid such words completely, but allow me to rephrase it a little bit: I still believe that the majority of Muslims prefer peaceful means to terrorism and coexistence to war. But, unfortunately, the facts supporting these views are increasingly hard to find, not only with every new attack against values and interests that are perceived to be Western, but also increasingly with every new anti-Western statement from major Muslim opinion leaders, both within and outside Europe, many of whom have so far been viewed as moderate."

So what happens if the radicals win control of Islam?

If the militants in the end crush the moderate forces in the Muslim world, the West must be ready.

First of all, we should abandon the self-destructive debates about whether the West's policies in the Middle East are a legitimate raison d'être for radical Islam. Such debates are simply wrong. Radical Islamists challenge practically everything that our society claims to stand for, no matter what the Western policies were or are. These challenges include the concept of universal human rights and freedom of speech. That, however, does not discourage radical Muslims from using these basic principles against the West whenever they find it suitable.

The radicals, for instance, do not even theoretically admit that non-Muslims are entitled to the same rights as Muslims. Yet, simultaneously, they ferociously argue for human rights whenever the authorities might apply any pressure against them. In such a way, they corrupt the whole system and blur the difference between victim and perpetrator.

The same applies to freedom of speech: Everyone here remembers the upheaval surrounding the Danish cartoons. It seemed that virtually everybody in the Islamic universe who held any imaginable grudge against the West hopped on the bandwagon and joined often violent protests. Does it not surprise that the cartoons insulted those who have themselves depicted and drawn far worse attacks against our own values?

These days, the West does not seem quite ready to face the threat of radical Islam. The self-criticism and the tendency to blame ourselves for evil deeds of others are weakening us. The unity of the West we saw after the cowardly murder of some three thousand civilians on 9-11 has disintegrated.

What is the answer? How can the West get ready to face the threat of Islam?

The same could be said about our traditional system of values, our Western spirit, and our Western identity. Some have attempted to replace our original set of Judeo-Christian values with a fuzzy and amorphous moral mixture that would have all of humanity join in some kind of a brave new world as one global happy family. Theoretically, this could work nicely if everybody truly joined in, but, in practice, such a plan seems to be failing. Our partners in other parts of the world cherry-pick some of the benefits of the Western system while at the same time criticizing it for corruption and hypocrisy. As we became more open, other forces in the world began to identify themselves in opposition to us.

And then he writes an arresting sentence containing this striking image:

From this point of view, the threat represented by radical Islam provides us with a useful mirror. It might, after all, help us grasp the seriousness of our situation and the challenges we face.

Perhaps what he means is something like this: Islam is a threat to Europe but the more serious threat is the moral rot and the secularism that corrupts and weakens us. The threat from Islam forces us to behold our own visage in the mirror and what we see ought to frighten us far more than terrorists ever could.

Even Angela Merkel Knows Multiculturalism is a Failure

Here is a story from the BBC announcing that, finally, the German Chancellor is facing the reality that European multiculturalism is a failure. Remember, this is not a "far-right politician" speaking, but a mainstream pillar of the EU.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel: "lmmigrants should learn to speak German." Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

She said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate - including learning German.

The comments come amid rising anti-immigration feeling in Germany. A recent survey suggested more than 30% of people believed the country was "overrun by foreigners".

The study - by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think-tank - also showed that roughly the same number thought that some 16 million of Germany's immigrants or people with foreign origins had come to the country for its social benefits.

Mrs Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on Saturday that at "the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country."

She added: "We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone', but this isn't reality." "And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."

Read the rest here. (The BBC has a video as well as a partial transcript.)

So the geniuses who invented the liberal idea of multiculturalism are finally starting to admit that it is a disaster. Perhaps now one of them will actually come up with a solution. But don't hold your breath.

The Fate of Europe Hangs in the Balance: Wilders, Free Speech and Islamic Political Power in Europe

Geert Wilders is on trial in the Netherlands for daring to criticize Islam. But the trial is not going well for the leftist, ruling elite. The prosecutors are recommending to the judge that the charges be dropped. Reuters reports:

Prosecutors asked a Dutch court on Friday to acquit anti-immigration lawmaker Geert Wilders of charges of inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims.

The new Dutch minority government, made up of the Liberals and Christian Democrats which took office on Thursday, is reliant on support from Wilders' anti-Islam Freedom Party.

Prosecutors, who had already called on the court to drop a charge that Wilders insulted Muslims by comparing Islam to Nazism, said his comments were aimed at Islam and not Muslims as a group. They said he had the right as a politician to make statements about perceived problems in society.

"Wilders does not often refer to Muslims, but Islam. Criticism of a religion is not punishable," prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman said.

They added that, although several statements by Wilders incited discrimination against Muslims, they could not be adjudged as criminal since he made them as a politician in the context of a public debate.

Well, that sounds like common sense. So why did Wilders end up in court in the first place? Why don't we let someone who ought to know explain the answer to that question? Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a former Dutch parliamentarian and a fugitive from Jihad who now lives in the United States. She writes in an article entitled: "In Holland, Free Speech on Trial:"

How is it possible that a mature European liberal democracy is prosecuting an elected member of parliament for his political opinions on the most pressing issue of the day—namely, Islamic fundamentalism? There are three main reasons.

First, there is the matter of traditional politicians' discomfort with Mr. Wilders. Historically, the Netherlands has insisted on the idea of "consensus." Though on paper this means compromise, in practice it has meant conformity of thought and a refusal to rock the boat on controversial issues.

No issue has tested this comfortable consensus more than the ascent of Islam, first presented by immigrants from Morocco and Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s, and then by asylum-seekers and refugees from various Muslim countries beginning in the 1990s. Most elites responded by preaching "tolerance." Give Muslim immigrants benefits and wait until they voluntarily integrate, their argument goes. Even if that process would take generations—even when it became apparent that some Muslims practiced female genital mutilation and honor killings, and imams openly urged their congregations to reject Dutch culture and law—citizens were not to criticize Islam.

A growing segment of the population—including Mr. Wilders and me, when I was a member of parliament from 2003 to 2006—doubted this facile and dangerous idea of "tolerance." This upset politicians, professors, journalists and other opinion-makers who tried to make us untouchables.

There were exceptions: Brave people in media, business and even in the military supported me politically, often behind the scenes. Still, I eventually left the country due to a combination of frustration with the campaign of ostracism and the extreme threats I faced from Islamists who wanted to kill me. Mr. Wilders, however, endured.

The second reason Mr. Wilders is on trial is the electoral power of Muslims in the Netherlands' four major cities. During local elections in March 2006, Muslim immigrants for the first time acted as an unofficial power bloc that could make or break a major Dutch party.

The supposed victims of Dutch discrimination were now a force to reckon with. Thus, major parties including Labor and the Christian Democrats—dominant since World War II—now support policies like increased immigration from Muslim countries and welfare benefits for Muslim voters. And they turn a blind eye to the implementation of informal Shariah law, particularly concerning the treatment of women.

Third, there are the efforts of countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference to silence the European debate about Islam. One strategy used by the 57 OIC countries is to treat Muslim immigrants to Europe as satellite communities by establishing Muslim cultural organizations, mosques and Islamic centers, and by insisting on dual citizenship. Their other strategy is to pressure international organizations and the European Union to adopt resolutions to punish anyone who engages in "hate speech" against religion. The bill used to prosecute Mr. Wilders is the national version of what OIC diplomats peddle at the U.N. and EU.

The implications of this trial are enormous. In the short term, it could bring the simmering tensions between Holland's approximately one million Muslims and the 1.4 million voters who elected Mr. Wilders to a boil. The Netherlands has seen its share of Islamist violence before and could well see violent confrontations again.

On a more fundamental level, this trial—even if Mr. Wilders wins—could silence the brave critics of radical Islam. The West is in a war of ideas against political Islam. If free speech is not protected in Europe, we're already losing.

All three of these reasons are hugely important, but I just want to point out that number two might well mark a watershed. This is the first time I have read that that Muslims have actually used the political clout derived from their tendency to congregate in sections of major European cities to become a voting block to push their agenda. I have read plenty of predictions that this is bound to happen sooner or later, but it marks a significant new phase in the Islamization of Europe.

The Totalitarian Face of Socialist Europe

Christina Odone of the Daily Telegraph has an alarming bit of news from Europe, where the unelected, unaccountable, EU bureaucracy continues to screw down the coffin of culture of death ensuring that the last traces of Europe's Christian heritage are eradicated so that nothing will be left to stand in the way of the soft totalitarianism of equality and security. In a post entitled, "Euro-socialists want to shut down hospitals opposed to abortion and euthanasia. It's time to stop them," she writes

Socialists at the Council of Europe (yes, the same entity that brought you the European Convention on Human Rights) have been very busy lately. A Ms Carina Hagg of the Swedish Socialist Group and Ms Christine McCafferty of the UK Socialist Group are scheming to name and shame conscientious objectors in the medical profession who refuse to carry out abortions, hand out birth control devices or engage in euthanasia. McCafferty even suggests that European governments should set up a register of those who will not cut their conscience to suit the fashion of secular socialists.

Conscience, once regarded as a positive asset, is seen by today’s Euro-socialists as a bigot’s charter to block abortion, birth control and euthanasia. Conscientious objection may be a universal human right under international law, but the right to medical intervention – even when it is to end life rather than sustain it – trumps faith every time.

This is dogma, and it is deadly. Conscientious objectors are not fanatics who want to force their religious views down others’ throats: their principled stands often protect the vulnerable, from the octagenarian to the unborn child.

Do you want to live in a world where a doctor cannot refuse to administer the lethal drug to the elderly patient whose gimlet-eyed heirs want out of the way? Where a doctor cannot refuse to terminate the healthy young married woman’s pregnancy, although she makes it clear the baby comes at an inconvenient moment in her career? Yet this is the new world, amoral and irresponsible, that Ms McCafferty seeks to impose on us.

Read the rest here.

Remember the good old days of tolerance? Those were the days when Christians ran Europe and socialists were underground. These people make the medieval Inquisition look like a bunch of inefficient bunglers.

They seem to be bent on implementing all the worst features of the old Soviet Union in the name of an knee-jerk, ignorant, anti-Americanism. These days the way you show your hatred of the West is by being anti-American, for Western values have yet to be pushed underground there. And to think that Obama's dream is to make America more like Europe!

Will America Go the Way of Greece?

This story in the New York Times about the state of railroads in Greece is like a scene right out of Atlas Shrugged. Having recently read that novel and now reading today's New York Times is an unsettling experience.

Losses at Hellenic Railways, however, continue to mount — at the rate of 3 million euros ($3.8 million) a day. Its total debt has increased to $13 billion, or about 5 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product.

In spite of about $3.2 billion of investment since 1997, outside of the main route between Athens and Thessaloniki, the network seems in many respects patchwork and at times chaotic.

Earlier this month, for example, a trip from Athens to Diakopto, a seaside town on the northern coast of the Peloponnese, took more than four hours. The journey required train passengers to complete a second leg by transferring to an overcrowded bus that was delayed for an hour. The result was a near riot as enraged passengers hurled abuse at overwhelmed train officials.

The same trip by car would take less than two hours.

So the railway is a sinkhole for public money, but it is also disgracefully inefficient. Does the union care?

“It is crazy,” said Nikolaos Kioutsoukis, the union chief for the railway. “It’s not surprising that people prefer to go by car.”

Even he accepts that train travel in Greece is not financially viable on many routes. He blames low prices, misguided investment and political meddling for the railway’s poor condition, and says the government should make new investments to modernize the network. He opposes privatization and says that if jobs and benefits are threatened, the union will strike.

He admits the problem but threatens to undermine any attempt to fix the problem. This is unbelievable. He apparently thinks the EU owes him and his membership a living and he does not care that the system is on the brink of collapse. This is the socialist mentality on display for all to see.

Haris Tsiokas, the general secretary for the Greek Transport Ministry, contends that the government’s plan to close at least 35 loss-making routes and cut 2,500 jobs (1,000 via mandatory retirement, with the rest being moved to other government jobs) will make Hellenic Railways attractive to foreign investors. But he concedes that the pressure is building for the railway, which, for now at least, does not have access to debt markets.

Now, as a condition of Greece’s financial rescue, the International Monetary Fund is demanding that a solution be found. The fund and the European Union, which also chipped in to provide the bailout, are requiring that the debt of Hellenic Railways, as well as the off-balance-sheet obligations of other state-owned enterprises, be counted toward Greece’s official debt — which Greece has agreed to do.

Analysts estimate the total to be around $33.6 billion, a sum that would add another 11 percentage points to Greece’s current debt level of about 120 percent of gross domestic product. It would also surely raise questions for many investors about the government’s ability to repay ever-increasing amounts as the overall economy contracts.

The problem here is that the government is not running a railroad. It is running a ponzi scheme that is on the verge of collapse.

Until now, Greece has been able to use its rail system as a means to support employment while not adding to its official debt number.

“This was an accounting trick, another good way for the government to hide its debt,” said John C. Mourmouris, a former chief executive of the railway who is now an economics professor here. “But a company with 100 million euros in revenue can no longer borrow 1 billion euros a year.”

Read it all here. If the NYT says it is this bad, the reality is likely worse.

Greece is just the worst case in Europe (so far as we know now), but it is by no means atypical of the European social democratic welfare state and there are several other countries close behind Greece such as Portugal, Spain and Italy.

When you consider that Obama and the leftists of the Democratic Party are trying their level best to transform America into a European-style, social democracy, it is a wonder that the American public is not more up in arms that it is. The Tea Party movement is a sign that America is rejecting the leftist agenda, but it is a tribute to how powerful the Marxists true believers are in America that any Democrat at all is projected to hang on to his or her seat in November.

However, Rasmussen Polls is now saying that the Republicans are projected to have 44 seats in the Senate after the November elections with the Democrats projected to have 49 with 7 more as toss ups. If the Republicans run the table on the toss-ups, they could have control of the Senate after November. This is still a long-shot but much less of a long-shot than it was 3 months ago. The House, where more Democratic seats are in play, is likely going to go Republican and the Senate is on the edge. If the slide of America into Greek-style socialism is to be halted, the November elections are absolutely crucial.

This Blog is Medieval

In the minds of many contemporary "progressives" the word "medieval" has become an insult to hurl against anything that is barbaric and "insufficiently progressive." Tim Collard protests against this trend to defame the Medieval era in post called: "What is Medieval about Stoning People to Death?"

I was pleased to hear today that Sakineh Ashtiani, an Iranian lady convicted of adultery by one of that hellhole’s kangaroo courts, will not now be stoned to death, though it is still possible that she will be judicially murdered in some other way. (My reading of the Koran is that the Prophet demanded that four male Muslim witnesses had actually seen the act in progress before an adultery charge could be proved; but who am I, a benighted Anglican, to comment?)

Thanks are also due to prominent figures around the world who spoke up for Mrs Ashtiani, including our own William Hague. I don’t want to qualify my praise by carping, but I do take issue with Mr Hague’s choice of language. In condemning the proposed execution, he called death by stoning a “medieval punishment”. Following Mr Liam Fox’s dismissal of Afghanistan as “a broken 13th-century society”, one begins to wonder just what the new government has against the period.

As one who has enjoyed a lifetime love affair with the Middle Ages, I am pained by this. There really wasn’t a lot of stoning going on in medieval Europe.

This is a good point. As Collard goes on to note, it is not that the people of Medieval Europe were angels; there was violence in those centuries. But compared to the Dark Ages that preceded them and the modern era, the violence was not as extreme. There was law and order, peace, trade, the rise of universities, the beginnings of constitutional monarchy, the great synthesis of Aristotle (representing science and reason) and Augustine (representing Biblical revelation and Christian theism) into a unified and intellectually brilliant worldview.

Language matters. The way we speak is important. Even the term "The Middle Ages" (which I try to avoid in favor of "Christian Europe" or "Medieval Europe") was invented in the Enlightenment to describe the period between the "Dark Ages" and their own supposedly "enlightened" time (as they "modestly" saw it). They undoubtedly would have liked to label the entire period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance as "The Dark Ages" because of the influence of Christianity on Europe in that period, but that was a stretch even for the rebellious imaginations of the 18th century French Philosophes. The truth is that the period of the conversion of Europe was its true "Enlightenment" and the period of atheism and humanism in modernity that stems from the "Enlightenment" is an increasingly dark era of nihilism. The 20th century was the darkest, most violent and most fanatical of any century in Western civilization going back to the Roman Empire. The culture of death characterizes Enlightenment Europe, not Medieval Europe.

So I think we should stop allowing the use of the term "Medieval" as an insult or as a symbol of barbarism and backwardness to go unchallenged. The Postmodernists have made a good start on turning the term "modern" into an insult. Maybe we should build on that and start saying things like: "Stalin that dirty rotten murderer and arch-modernist . . . " or "The regime in Iran has adopted most of the worst of modern fascist techniques of repression." We can follow up by really ticking off the progressives by saying: "If only they could be more Medieval."

But hey, it would make a lot more more sense than calling the stoning of women "medieval" when it is done by a theocracy that lives in the 7th century desert and hates Christendom.

Holocaust Guilt and the Pathological European Hatred for Israel

In a very perceptive article in The Weekly Standard, "Why Europe Loathes Israel," Benjamin Weinthal, attempts to get to grips with the puzzling question of why Europe has come to hate Israel so much since the 1970s. Sure, the Arab oil embargo in the 70s terrified Europe's leaders into falling into line with the Arab narrative that the land of Israel is Muslim land (because it was once upon a time conquered by Muslim armies) and that Israel is an oppressor just by virtue of presuming to exist.

But there surely were other policy alternatives. The US did not change sides and Europe could have relied on American military and economic might to shield it from Arab anger. So, we are left with a pair of interrelated questions. First, why did Europe capitulate so cravenly to Arab pressure and blackmail? and, second, why has this anti-Israel attitude become so pervasive in European thought and culture to the point where the number of Israel's defenders in Europe has shrunk almost to the vanishing point? In other hands, why did the change occur and why was it so drastic?

I think Weinthal is correct in seeking a deeper reason and that he is on to something important in divining holocaust guilt as a major factor in the psychology of European anti-Zionism.

The widespread condemnation Europeans have expressed toward Israel after its commandos boarded the so-called peace flotilla on May 31 - and used force only when threatened with death - signals a desire to turn every Israeli action of self-defense into absolution for the crimes of the Holocaust.

While the European Union and the UN Human Rights Council somehow managed to contain their displeasure over brutal human rights violations in Libya, Iran, Turkey, China, and Russia, both organizations reacted in their standard Pavlovian way to Israel's justified measures of self-defense aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara.

The UN Human Rights Council – chaired by none other than Muammar Qaddafi’s government – issued a resolution condemning Israel. Meanwhile, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom blasted Israel's "disproportionate" response, and their handmaidens in the European media turned Israel into a punching bag.

The Europeans' vicious attacks on Israel are animated less by the Jewish state's foreign policy than by Europe's ongoing fixation on the Holocaust. What else could explain the presence of posters equating Israel with Nazi Germany at pro-Hamas demonstrations in Vienna? According to one recent German university study, 45.7 percent of the European respondents supported the contention that "Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians."

In their eyes, apparently, maintaining a naval blockade against a government sworn to destroy you – while providing the unfortunate people living under that government with tens of thousands of tons of supplies and humanitarian aid – now equates to looting and butchering six million people.

Here Weinthal shows that the irrationality of the pattern of condemning Israel for "conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians" needs explanation and he proposes that every action of Israeli self-defense is seized upon as mitigating the guilt Europe feels for the Holocaust. Whenever Israel does something aggressive, it proves that Jews, given the chance, will demonstrate that they are far from innocent.

Of course, nothing Israel has ever done can even begin to compare to the crimes of the Shoah. But to help alleviate their feelings of guilt, Europeans delegitimize Israel, ignore modern anti-Semitism, and portray Muslims – who number over one billion and whom no one seeks to eradicate from the earth – as the new persecuted Jews of Europe.

Israel's measures against the phony peace flotilla also provided Europeans an opportunity to demonstrate their hypocrisy when it comes to Jews flexing some muscle. Many of these same Europeans, after all, have attempted to shift at least some blame to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust for their own suffering, arguing that the Jews allowed themselves to be carted off to extermination camps without resistance.

That helps explain the crude theory of Ekkehart Krippendorff, a Berlin Free University professor in the 1990s, who wrote in the left-liberal Tagesszeitung, "Imagine if no German Jews had followed orders to assemble at the designated collection points for group transports - a few dozen, a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, the Germans could have dragged individually from their homes and loaded on trucks; but hundreds of thousands? Or imagine that the colonies of hundreds and thousands on the way to the train stations had simply sat down, we call them 'sit-down' strikes today."

There are many ways to blame Jews for their own misfortunes and Europeans, who are engaged in a flight from history and consumed with self-hatred, avail themselves of all the ways they can think of to do so.

Europeans also vent pathological guilt about the Shoah by elevating Jewish conduct to a higher standard because of it. The standard European posture toward Israel is to present Auschwitz as a cynical form of cognitive and behavioral therapy. This particular European view has caught on with Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who recently told the New York Times that the Israelis are uniquely positioned to be reminded about the "the dangers and inhumanity of ghettoes [such] as the one we currently witness in occupied Gaza."

The equation of Gaza with the Warsaw ghetto is perhaps the most prevalent analogy used by Europeans in their attempts to shake off guilt about the Holocaust. . . . The shoddy one-sided accounts of the flotilla raid with which Europeans have comforted themselves, and the continual denial of any Jewish right to self-defense, reveal that many Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.

I think that last sentence gets to the heart of the matter.

Read the rest here.

Why Christian Culture is Good for Homosexuals

Bruce Bawer is a homosexual who wrote one of the first books warning of the possible take-over of Europe by Islam, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (Anchor, 2007) and Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (Anchor, 2010). It is ironic that he is raising the alarm about Islam given that he moved from the US to Europe because it was supposedly more tolerant!

In a recent blog post entitled, "I’ve Become an Enemy of the People for Speaking the Truth About Islam," he writes:

When it comes to the right to speak one’s mind about Islam, the record of the last few years makes it clear which direction the West is moving in. In France and Italy, Oriana Fallaci is put on trial for disparaging Islam. In Canada, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are hauled before “human rights commission” tribunals for criticizing Islam in print. In Australia, an Islamic organization sues two pastors for “vilification of Muslims.” In Britain, a Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested on charges of hate speech for having written negatively about Islam, and the Archbishop of Canterbury proposes that Parliament pass stronger laws against such speech acts. And in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, the head of the Freedom Party, which performed so well in the June 9 general elections that Wilders may end up in the governing coalition, still faces trial for having made a film about the Koranic foundations of terrorism.

Then there’s Norway, where I live, and where the last few days have seen yet another dark development. By way of background, permit me to begin by quoting myself. On pages 230-31 of my book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom I sum up the more alarming aspects of Norway’s Discrimination Law, passed in 2005:

It forbids “harassment on the grounds of ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, skin color, language, religion, or beliefs,” and, in turn, defines harassment as “actions, omissions, or utterances [my emphasis] that have the effect or are intended to have the effect of being insulting, intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating.”

In other words, it’s illegal just to say certain things.

Defendants may be accused not only by the individuals whom they’ve supposedly offended but also by semiofficial organs such as the Anti-Racist Center and the Center against Ethnic Discrimination (both of which helped formulate the law, and both of which exist less to oppose real racism and discrimination than to oppose political incorrectness generally) or by the government’s Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud.

Which means that a handful of far-left organizations have been given enormous power to silence those they disagree with.

Violations of the law by individuals are punishable by fine; violations by individuals in concert with at least two other persons (such as a writer conspiring with an editor and publisher, perhaps?) can be punished by up to three years’ imprisonment — this in a country where murderers often get off with less. Moreover, the burden of proof is on the accused: you’re guilty until proven innocent.

And this in a supposedly free country.

Read the rest here.

It is true that Christianity regards homosexual behavior as sinful, just as Islam does. But Christianity also believes that all people are created in the image of God and have value just by virtue of being human. Therefore, Christianity makes room for tolerating many things that it regards as morally wrong and it allows for homosexuals to live without persecution.

Most of the confrontation currently going on between homosexual activists and Christian Churches is not about whether or not Christianity is willing to tolerate people whose lifestyle it disagrees with; rather, it is about homosexuals demanding that Christians change their religion and openly give approval to something they regard as abhorrent. If homosexuals would just leave Christians alone to worship and bring up their children according to their own religious views and if everyone agreed to tolerate the existence of those with whom they disagreed it would be possible for homosexuals to enjoy freedom and tolerance in majority Christian countries as has been the case all along.

But if homosexuals join the hard Left in trying to eliminate Christianity, then all they are doing is tearing down the edifice upon which toleration and respect is built. Once the West is on its knees before Islam, does any thinking person doubt that homosexuals will experience persecution, the likes of which they have never experienced in Western history? At what period of history, pray tell, would a rational homosexual rather have lived in Muslim dominated countries rather than Christian dominated ones?

Homosexuals would be better off, in terms of their rational self-interest, to stop aiding attempts to promote multiculturalism, political correctness and the marginalization of Christianity in the West. A Christianity which respects its traditions and Scriptures enough to maintain its traditional moral stance on sexuality is an alive tradition that can provide a foundation for a relatively just society. But a Christianity that succumbs to political correctness, Marxism and multiculturalism (as well as Western self-hatred), can provide no bulwark against the Ayatollahs and Sharia law.