An unexpected take in the International Herald Tribune subsidiary of the New York Times.
Geert Wilders, the Netherlands' notorious right-wing extremist who is currently standing trial in an Amsterdam court accused of inciting racial hatred
Trial currently stopped due to a ruling of judicial misbehaviour -- or perhaps malfeasance, I'm not sure of the technical term which means the judges blew it. It remains to be seen whether there will be a new trial, or if they're going to throw their hands up and go home for a nice ginever with the spouse or significant other.
By their definition, just about everyone at the Burg is a 'notorious right-wing extremist'. I'm comfortably certain that's not an error in the definition ...
-- has emerged as the main power broker in an unsteady coalition that has finally been put together, after months of negotiations, between the Christian Democrat and Liberal-Conservative parties. Wilders' party, the Freedom Party, will provide parliamentary support for the coalition.
A pretty conventional screed, thus far...
Wilders is also is the subject of a best-selling new book by the Dutch academic Meindert Fennema, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."
Interesting that it's a best seller. Even more interesting to see how influential it is, following the trial cock-up.
As Fennema puts it, the Netherlands will very soon have two foreign ministers: an official one, sitting in the cabinet and following the establishment line of Euro-Atlantic moderation; and an unofficial one, Wilders, who says that there can be no moderate Islam and that any belief to the contrary will likely imperil Western civilization.
Although Wilders is careful to note there are plenty of moderate Muslims, and he has no beef with them. It's not quite, "Hate the sin, love the sinner," but the man did start out as a Social Democrat, after all.
But Wilders is not solely a Dutch phenomenon. His words chime with a wider set of concerns that pervade contemporary European politics: the problem of integrating Europe's large minority of Muslim citizens, the fears of workers who see their wages undercut by inflows of cheap labor, and concern that Western values are giving way to self-loathing and ethical relativism.
Fennema has laid out his analysis of the situation in the Netherlands. The great mistake of the Dutch political class, he says, has been to declare Wilders an Islamophobic racist and to dismiss his views as abhorrent and outside the confines of acceptable political discourse. In attempting to silence Wilders, first politically and now through the courts, the Dutch liberal elite has evaded the thorny question of how to respond to these concerns.
Fennema portrays Wilders as really no more than a republican with a bee in his bonnet about Islam.
There's the new insight we've been waiting for. The question becomes how many of the book's many readers will be persuaded, and how that will change the national -- and international -- conversation. Also, what a Dutch academic means by the term republican, compared to what we in America believe it to mean.
He thinks liberal leftists are terrified of him because, in the name of multiculturalism, they have repudiated their own sense of national identity.
Isn't that part of the requirement for being a multi-culturalist? Almost by definition, a multi-culti favors a world view rather than a national one and sees him/herself as a 'citizen of the world', to borrow a phrase.
I used to be a citizen of the world. But then I outgrew it.
As Fennema put it, they have no answer to Rousseau's famous criticism of those "supposed cosmopolitans" who "boast of loving everyone so that they might have the right to love no one."
In an interview for this article, Fennema argued that what we are seeing today is no less than the collapse of social democracy as it was established in the Netherlands after the World War II. In Fennema's analysis, the answer to the Wilders riddle lies in the collapse of the corporatist bargain. The old business establishment no longer holds the reins of a de-industrialized neoliberal economy. Power now lies in services and in finance rather than in old-fashioned manufacturing.
Those now in control of the economy, a younger generation of newly rich entrepreneurs and financiers, no longer respect the social pact of past decades and chafe at the values so cherished by the 1968 New Left.
Mr. Fennema is an interesting character in his own right. After the excitements of the Sixty-eighters, he left the elitist New Left for the more down-to-earth Communist Party, as he saw them. Then in the 1980s he had an epiphany, publicly recanting his left-wing past.
Chris J. Bickerton is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam.
#1
Fennema has made so many wrong choices in his own past (e.g. joining the communist party, the party of Stalin and 30 million murdered innocents) that I would question anything he has to say on the subject.
Posted by: Mike Ramsey ||
10/23/2010 8:19 Comments ||
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#2
"Western values are giving way to self-loathing and ethical relativism. "
Giving way? That train left the station decades ago in Europe. And its now riding high in the Obama administration.
#3
'Republican' can have a very different meaning in Europe.
In civil war Spain, 'Republicans' were idealistic and violent communists, in a no-quarter massacre fight with the fascists that depopulated large chunks of the country.
This was referred to with some wit in the novel "For Whom The Bell Tolls", when the hot Spanish girl finds out the American's father was (an American) Republican (who, when caught up in the Teapot Dome or similar scandal, committed suicide, instead of being dragged before congress to testify.)
She assumes that American Republicans were like Spanish Republicans, and asks him whether his father committed suicide to evade being tortured by his enemies. He ponders for a while, then answers "yes".
#2
Peggy Noonan's Fri column in WSJ: This election is about one man, Barack Obama, who fairly or not represents the following: the status quo, Washington, leftism, Nancy Pelosi, Fannie and Freddie, and deficits in trillions, not billions.
Everyone who votes is going to be pretty much voting yay or nay on all of that. And nothing can change that story line now.
#3
I strongly disagree with Noonan. It is essential that this hopefully smashing defeat will be seen as an utter rejection of leftist ideas, not personalities.
Conservatives should do everything in their power to show this as a complete and unequivocal rejection of socialized medicine, big and intrusive, nanny state government, and in total, the Keynsian economics, social planning, coercive, perverse and corrupt everything of the left.
[MEMRI] Reporter: "The religious school, known as madrasa in the local language of these parts, is defined by Pak law as a place where religious knowledge is imparted, and where students receive board and lodging. In this they differ from the study chambers within the mosques, found in almost every one of Pakistain's mosques, about which there are no precise statistics.
"Pakistain is considered to be one of the Islamic countries with the largest number of religious schools -- with an estimated 20,000 religious schools in the country's four provinces.
"The Jamia Haqqania in the city of Akora Khattak, in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa region, is one of the most renowned Pak schools. Tens of thousands of Afghan students studied at this school, and many of them later joined the resistance to the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. They assumed prominent positions in the so-called Afghan mujahideen groups and the Afghan Taliban movement. These include Maulvi Yunis Khalis and Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani -- who has the same name as this school -- and last but not least, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban movement. Some people consider Maulvi Sami-ul-Haqq to be the spiritual father of the Afghan Taliban movement."
Sami ul-Haq: "Osama Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, and Their Ilk... Studied in Europe; The Policies and Tyranny of the West Are What Gave Rise To Them"
Samu-ul-Haqq, head of Jamia Haqqania: "Thousands of ulama have graduated from here, and none have been jugged for violent acts or involvement in suicide kabooms. It is U.S. policy that has produced terrorists. Among the 40 most wanted people worldwide, you will not find a single religious scholar. They are all engineers, geographers, or doctors.
"Take, for example, Osama bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, and their ilk. Most of them studied in Europe. The policies and tyranny of the West are what gave rise to them. None of them graduated from religious schools. They just want to cast a slur on these schools.
"I suggest that they shut down the Oxford and Cambridge universities instead, because it is from them that people like this emerge." [...]
Sami ul-Haq: "Religious Scholars Must Engage in Politics In Order To Preserve the Country's Identity"
"A common mistake is to separate politics and religion. Islam is a comprehensive religion, which encompasses everything. It doesn't separate religion and politics. That is a Western concept. According to the West, the best politician is the one who is best at lying and deceiving. This runs counter to our teachings.
"The hadith says: 'The Prophets of the Israelites guided them.' Therefore, as religious scholars, we must engage in politics to implement religion. Religious scholars must engage in politics in order to preserve the country's identity. We do not impose religion upon any human being. What we want is to reform the regime through the parliament, and to implement justice and the shari'a." [...]
Posted by: Fred ||
10/23/2010 00:00 ||
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[MEMRI] "The Islamization that has been forced upon the Gazoo Strip -- the suppression of social, cultural, and press freedoms that do not suit Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason's view[s] -- is an egregious deed that must be opposed. It is the reenactment, under a religious guise, of the experience of [other] totalitarian regimes and dictatorships.
"Under a barbaric and inhumane siege, which constitutes a crime against humanity to which all of the world powers are party, Hamas is exacerbating the people's suffering by investigating casual meetings [between friends] and attempting to change 100-year-old habits. [Customs of] marriage, dating, and gender-mixing are a matter of social, circumstantial, and status-related conventions, in which the law should not interfere. When married or engaged couples are forced to carry marriage licenses in their pockets, out of fear that some armed [policeman] might burst in on one of their dates and inquire into [the nature of] their relationship, it is a frightening deterioration in the Paleostinians' values and lifestyle, which certainly did not exist [previously]. When a [policeman on a] motorcycle pursues a family car in which a woman is sitting beside a man whose arm is resting on the back of her seat, arrests [the family] and takes them to the police [station] -- it is a stupid patrol [that is detrimental] to people's lives. When a brother and sister are jugged on their way home at night because they do not have identification cards on them to prove 'their legitimate relationship,' it is expressly Taliban-like behavior.
"We are talking about a long series of deeds, from the indirect coercion of female students to wear a hijab (without administrative memos or written orders), to the persecution [of girls] in restaurants and cafes, to the ban on smoking hookahs and 'searches' for immoral pictures on private computers.
"The Taliban's technical capabilities did not enable it to [do] what Hamas's technical capabilities enable it [to do] today. Hamas -- which developed a lot of these capabilities, with impressive ingenuity, in the field of rocket production and in order to use modern technology to prevent infiltration [of Gazoo] by Israel -- is now exploiting many of these [capabilities] in order to place restrictions on Gazook society and monitor it with repulsive patriarchalism. Why does Hamas do this when it is clear that it will [ultimately] harm it and provoke criticism against it? How can one understand their preference to enforce Islamization rather than rehabilitate Gazoo after the war...?
"There are two [possible] explanations for the Taliban-like steps Hamas has taken in the social sphere. The first is the erosion in Hamas of the moderate thinking characteristic of the Mohammedan Brotherhood, which has been replaced by radical Salafist thinking...
"The second [explanation] comprises several issues. The conditions of siege and confrontation to which the movement was subjected following its victory in the elections; the ongoing hiatus in 'resistance' after the barbaric Israeli war; the emergence of corruption among some of its bigwigs; and the favoritism that accompanies any rise to power -- all these led to increased criticism towards Hamas from the smaller and more bad turban groups [in Gazoo], as well as from [extremists] within [the movement itself], who accused it of straying from 'Islamic practice by failing to establish the regime of Allah on earth.' [Hamas] responded by intensifying the Islamization of society, in order to prove that it is more Islamist [than its critics] and more committed to its [Islamist] slogans."
Posted by: Fred ||
10/23/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Conveniently left out is the Islamists' logistic and ideological support.
When one sups with the Devil, expect him to end up a roommate.
#2
A roommate who steals your beer, trashes your CDs and DVDs, hits on your girlfriend, chisels on the rent, invites low lifes to hang out and smoke drugs, and pisses off the landlord so much that he keeps the security deposit.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Reporter: "The religious school, known as madrasa in the local language of these parts, is defined by Pak law as a place where religious knowledge is imparted, and where students receive board and lodging. In this they differ from the study chambers within the mosques, found in almost every one of Pakistain's mosques, about which there are no precise statistics.
