#3
I predicted that once the British press took an interest in Mr. Malloch Brown, he would not last long as a minister. I could not have believed that he would so quickly provide his critics with so much ammunition.
Hey! There's plenty of shell casings to reload after Lord Brown's done emptying a full clip into his foot.
Last week, the Italian interior minister, Giuliano Amato, hosted a conference in Rome on Islam and Integration. Italy, one of Europes southern border states, has 1 million Muslims out of a population of 58 million people. Illegal immigrants arrive in Italy in huge numbers. According to a recent survey, the country could count almost 7 million Muslims by the end of the next decade.
The Italians, however, have a way of dealing with illegal immigrants. They regularly transform them into legal residents by granting them official papers. Since 1988 Italy has organized six amnesties for illegal aliens the last one in 2006, when 500,000 people were given permission to stay. Most of them leave Italy shortly afterward. Since Italy belongs to the European Union and since the EU adheres to the principle of the free movement of persons, an amnesty gives immigrants the right to freely enter all EU member states. Italy allows the immigrants in so that they move out, to EU nations with more generous welfare systems.
Mr. Amato, a former prime minister of Italy as well as the former vice president of the EUs Constitutional Convention, boasts that his country has few problems with Muslims. They are well integrated in Italian society, he told the conference. The Socialist politician downplayed phenomena such as violence toward women by Muslim immigrants. Mr. Amato said wife beating is also customary among indigenous Italians in Sicily a comment which infuriated Sicilian politicians.
One of those attending last weeks conference was the Dutch integration minister, Ella Vogelaar. Like Italy, the Netherlands has a population of about 1 million Muslims (of a total 16.5 million people). Upon her return home, Mrs. Vogelaar gave an interview to Trouw, a Dutch Protestant newspaper. She said that Muslim immigrants must feel appreciated. According to the minister, the Dutch have to help Islam take root in the Netherlands.
Mrs. Vogelaar, a member of the Dutch Labor Party, told Trouw that the Netherlands, while so far a country of Judeo-Christian traditions, is gradually becoming a Judeo-Christiano-Islamic society. She clearly considers this process beneficial, although, she added, it may still take a couple of centuries before it is fully achieved. Mrs. Vogelaar is saying nothing new. Every visitor to major West European cities can see that the continents urban areas are rapidly turning Islamic a dramatic process, which, if not stopped, will take only decades, not centuries, to achieve.
Mrs. Vogelaar's dishonesty lies in her feigned appreciation for the Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch society, to which she would now add a third religious component. The Dutch Socialists played a prominent role in transforming the Netherlands into a radically secularist society, from which God is absent and where people who are reluctant to perform same-sex marriages cannot find jobs in the civil service.
The Dutch Labor Party did everything in its power to undermine Judeo-Christian religions, but it is today the vehicle of the most radical Islamization. This has nothing to do with appreciation for yet another religion, but rather with the fact that, like secularism, Islamism is an enemy of Judeo-Christian values.
The European left appreciates Islamism not because it is a religion, but because it is a totalitarian political ideology. The Dutch Labor Party is catering to Islamist extremists even to the point of silencing party members like the Muslim apostate Ehsan Jami.
The same hypocrisy is displayed by Mr. Amato. He says that Europe will benefit from what religious Muslims can offer. However, Mr. Amato was the vice president of the European Convention, which vetoed any reference to God in the preamble to the EU Constitution. Sadly, there are more politicians like Mr. Amato and Mrs. Vogelaar. Take Patrick Janssens, the Socialist mayor of Antwerp, a city just south of the Dutch border. His administration sacks civil servants who warn about a takeover of Antwerps mosques by Islamist groups, and has them replaced by members of these very Islamist groups. Last week, Mr. Janssens welcomed international homosexual activists to Antwerp, which he likes to style the gay capital of Europe.
Does it make sense to cater simultaneously to radical homosexuals and Islamists? It does not, unless Europe's Christian heritage is your enemy.
Meanwhile, a German appeals court convicted a man for calling abortion murder. Klaus Günter Annen, a father of two, runs a Web site where he asks people to pray for doctors planning an abortion murder. On a separate Web page he lists German gynecologists who perform abortions. Last Thursday, the Oberlandesgericht in Karlsruhe stated that since abortionists do nothing illegal, no one is allowed not even in an indirect way to call them murderers.
It is often argued that Adolf Hitler was only able to grab power in Germany in 1933 because freedom and democracy were already dead. Soon, the secularist totalitarianism in contemporary Europe will be replaced by an Islamist totalitarianism. The Islamists will not need to kill freedom and democracy. The latter have already been murdered.
This piece was originally published in The Washington Times on July 18, 2007 .
Posted by: anonymous5089 ||
07/19/2007 16:29 ||
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#1
a Judeo-Christiano-Islamic society
Ain't no such thing. There are only Islamic societies with Christian and Jewish dhimmis. Anything else is merely a prototypical stage of the foregoing.
#2
Last Thursday, the Oberlandesgericht in Karlsruhe stated that since abortionists do nothing illegal, no one is allowed not even in an indirect way to call them murderers.
Don't give the Dems any ideas. I have no doubt this would follow close on the heels of any enacting of more "hate crimes" legislation.
Someone at the CBC gave Avi Lewis a new TV show and surprise, surprise he's using the gig to rant against the United States. Bet you didn't see that one coming.
On the Map with Avi Lewis is billed as "no-rules, full-contact opinionated news analysis." That is to say, it is the news of the world filtered through the mind of Avi Lewis and a CBC board room full of like-minded left-wing 20- and 30-something production assistants. It is kind of like watching old reruns of counterSpin, except without the screaming in-studio "debates."
I don't want to generalize too snarkily about the show. I have only seen a few episodes of the many that have been broadcast this year. Plus, Avi Lewis isn't that bad a guy. His one identifiable vice his smug left-wing ideology is one he shares with 99% of CBC staffers (and 90% of Toronto media types for that matter). What I've seen on his show isn't any worse than your average airing of, say, The Current.
Still, it is worth checking out this particularly awful segment from June that is now making the rounds of the blogosphere. The clip features Lewis interviewing Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Netherlands' answer to Canada's Irshad Manji.
Ali, as many will know from her recent best-selling book, grew up in a traditional Muslim family in Somalia, where she endured all the horrible physical rituals associated with such an upbringing. She came to the Netherlands as a refugee, denounced Islam as a retrograde religion, joined a conservative political party, and eventually made her way to the right-wing (or, as Avi calls it, "arch-conservative") American Enterprise institute.
That's a pretty interesting bio. But mostly, Lewis just wants to ask her how she could possibly think the United States is a decent place. When she talks about how awful it is to live in a Muslim land where the Koran is the state constitution, women have no rights, gays are persecuted and religious heresy is a deadly offense, Lewis rants about how American evangelicals are just as bad (as evidence, he cites the fact that some abortion doctors have been killed.)
A propos of nothing, Lewis also lectures Ali that getting ahead in the United States is imposisble unless you're "staggeringly rich and well-connected." (When Ali argues otherwise, Lewis says he's getting "upset" and asks where Ali learned all these "American clichés.")
Lewis is also visibly agitated when Ali refuses to agree with his proposition that "Islamophobia" is a huge problem. Ali also rejects his particularly Canadian obsession with the inconveniences some Muslims face thanks to no-fly lists. She has endured far worse than "no-fly" lists and so has no patience for his whining.
"You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom ... I haven't," says Ali at the end. Lewis ends the interview there. One hopes the words humbled him.
Posted by: ryuge ||
07/19/2007 08:19 ||
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#1
Given that Avi Lewis would be nothing without his wealthy, well-connected father and obnoxious leftard wife he is in no position to criticize an American class system. Canada's is stifling.
#3
I believe George Soros is an immigrant. He made it big. Google him up, sometime. What a butthead.
He's a caricature of how the left thinks of capitalists. But he doesn't get much ink because he funds the left and they don't want it generally known.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
07/19/2007 11:10 Comments ||
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#4
fwiw, Hirsi Ali is not an equivalent of Irshad Manji. The former is no longer a believing Muslim; the latter is.
Also, the AEI isn't arch conservative. It is only barely conservative.
#1
We routinely speak of failed governments and failed societies overseas. So what are we doing about "failed" Muslim communities here? The best housekeeping starts at home.
#2
Bush has possibly lost his mind.
First, he wanted to ramrod anmesty through the Congress against the will of the people, then he takes off his shoes and kisses the ass of Islam while Islam supports terrorism around the world, then he reconnoiters with the presidents of Mexico and Canada re the Norte American Union, once again, against the will of the American voters.
I would observe that in my life no politician has ever fallen so far so fast, except the democrats have actually pasted him in mid flight.
Americans, we must find men and women who reflect our moral standards and have the personal honor to be trusted to govern without corruption or deception. Join such political groups if and when you can, and ask questions and demand answers. But be sure to vote, and vote against the democrat/socialist/anti-war/pro-tax/elite party.
#3
You're assuming that a) the trade agreement *is* a North American Union and that b) the American people share your assessment of it.
The former is a considerable overstatement IMO and the latter is unproven.
Where I will agree with you is that the inevitable changes that accompany our involvement in a global economy also raise important questions about how to preserve our values and legal system. The EU is where it is in part because they failed to discuss those questions. We should not make the same mistake.
And until we do have that discussion I don't think the "will of the American voters" is clearly formed. Illegal immigration is a related issue, but not the whole of it by any means.
#4
The American electorate will never have that discussion. TPTB & the MSM will never allow it, while most of the electorate lacks the attention span necessary to inform themselves in other ways. At least the "will of the voters" is consulted now & then, for what it's worth.
Delphi: your comments go in hilite, not blockquote. Thx. AoS.
Bill Bennett touched upon this story briefly this morning on his radio show. In 1979 5 Americans taken from the U.S. Embassy were taken as hostages. For 444 days, the U.S. Media covered it on TV every night for the entire period. I used to watch the reports from Ted Koppel. The Iranians used them for propaganda purposes. It cost a president re-election and the lives of a number of military staff during a rescue attempt. Niteline ran this this as this as their top story on their evening show for the duration.
Bill used this as a example of the hypocrisy in the U.S. Media and others who purport to worry about Human Rights. Where is the outrage? These are Americans. One of Bill's co-workers stated that the difference between these people being held against their will, is that there are only 2 instead of 5. Actually according to this story, there are 4 in all. How often do you see this story even mentioned in the newspaper..radio...television? Curiously, I can't remember hearing this from any of the presidential candidates on either side of the aisle.
(New York, July 18, 2007) The Iranian government should cancel the scheduled July 18 broadcast of the confessions of two detained Iranian-Americans, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch expressed concern that Iranian authorities have used coercive means to compel Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh to make statements that may be later used to incriminate them in court.
On July 16, 2007, Iranian television announced that Channel One would broadcast the confessions of Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh at 9:45 p.m. on July 18 and July 19. The authorities have held them in largely incommunicado detention for more than two months, preventing lawyers and family members from visiting them. They have only been permitted brief phone calls to family members.
Public confessions of this kind are a shameful tactic used by oppressive governments around the world, said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. Its a way for governments to intimidate critical voices into silence and flaunt their disregard for fundamental rights.
Iranian television on July 16 ran an advertisement for a program, In the Name of Democracy, that showed Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh speaking about velvet revolutions. Canadian-Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, whom the authorities arrested in April 2006 and released after four months of detention once he had confessed that his scholarly work had contributed to the planning of a velvet revolution, is also featured in the video.
Iran has accused Esfandiari, head of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and Tajbakhsh, a consultant for the Open Society Institute, of spying, planning the soft overthrow of the government, and acting against national security.
Esfandiari, 67, has been in Tehrans Evin prison since May 8, 2007, when officials at the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence summoned her for questioning and then arrested her without warrant. Several days later, authorities arrested Tajbakhsh and detained him at Evin prison. Both have been held in solitary confinement.
Esfandiaris lawyer, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, says that authorities have not allowed her to meet with her client or to examine her case files. Ebadi also said that Esfandiaris health was deteriorating as a result of the harsh conditions in prison.
International human rights law protects detained persons from mistreatment, including making forced confessions. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a party, protects the right of every person [n]ot to be compelled to testify against himself or to confess guilt. It is unlawful for authorities to use coercive means to obtain incriminating statements. Broadcasting such statements is a form of degrading treatment prohibited by international law.
Two other Iranian-Americans, Parnaz Azima and Ali Shakeri, are also currently facing similar charges of acting against national security. Like Esfandiari, both were in Iran for family reasons.
Authorities have detained Shakeri in Evin prison since May, around the same time that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh were arrested. Shakeri serves on the Community Advisory Board of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine. He also belongs to a group that advocates for a secular and democratic Iran.
Parnaz Azima, a reporter for the US-funded Radio Farda, is not currently in custody, but authorities have confiscated her passport and have barred her from leaving the country. She is currently out on a 510 million Toman (approximately US$540,000) bail.
Posted by: Delphi ||
07/19/2007 09:00 ||
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#1
It cost a president re-election and the lives of a number of military staff during a rescue attempt. Niteline ran this this as this as their top story on their evening show for the duration.
The press is ignoring this now because it might weaken the cut-and-run caucus.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
07/19/2007 15:27 Comments ||
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Posted by: ryuge ||
07/19/2007 00:47 ||
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#1
The Russian message, especially to Europe, is actually as follows: While you are busy talking about sanctions, without causing yourselves harm, we are implementing them and paying a price for it. The reason for Russia's position is that it is truly afraid of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. It is therefore not surprising that Iran has reacted so furiously to Moscow's position and has already voiced threats of revenge, as can be seen from the press clippings of the Middle East Media Research Institute: "It has stabbed us in the back," said Mohammed Nabi Rudaki, of the Iranian parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, while an editorial newspaper of Aftabi Yezdi said, "One cannot expect more from the KGB spies," referring of course to the former KGB colonel, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The only "price" that Russia's paying is for its own stupidity. Did Putinor anyone else for that matterreally think that Beslan was a one-off? Iran and the MME (Muslim Middle East) have hundreds of Beslans planned for anyone idiotic enough to ignore their threat. Russia's withholding of the Iranian nuclear fuel is merely a glimmering of self-preservation.
#4
"You would think that an Iran armed w/ nukes makes Mother Russia less secure."
Analogous to China and North Korea. Both are tigers by the tail.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/19/2007 6:00 Comments ||
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#5
Muslims rape Russian schoolgirls and the Russian government gives Muslims money and weapons. So no different than Western governments. Russia is now "normal".
#8
Even with Russian fuel, there is a bit of doubt about how well the Bushehr plant will work.
This plant has been under construction for 4 decades and probably has a mixed match set of parts (and even the best Russian nuclear plants aren't that great).
Russia may be delaying the opening because they don't want the world to know how crappy their work is.
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.
