French fantasy public intellectual and neo-fascist Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala is seeking office. Like any world view that can’t grasp genuine pluralism of thought, instead of trying to debate and argue with him, the instinct is to bar them legally. Since strengthening the democratic instinct of the society isn’t a high priority, the idea of making certain types of politics unlawful isn’t that much of a leap.

French officials are trying to ban the rabid anti-Zionist and Jew-hating comedian Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala from fielding candidates in the country’s June regional elections. The comic has been fined at least five times for using terms such as “memorial pornography” when referring to Jews, and he faces a trial this week for inciting hatred against Jews.

Dieudonne’s political partner is Alain Soral, formerly associated with Jean Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front, which has preached anti-Semitic views and Holocaust denial.

The comedian's political activity has alarmed officials, and Claude Gueant, chief of staff for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, told listeners on two French radio programs that Dieudonne should not be allowed to be active in political campaigns.

Dieudonne responded by calling Gueant "a good little soldier of the Zionist lobby.” His political partner Soral added, “It's scandalous. What he said and where he said it - on a [Jewish] radio station for one community - shows that the highest levels of the state take their orders from the Zionist lobby in France."

Dieudonne, who is 43 years old and was once an anti-racist, has been involved in European Union elections as a candidate or head of a party since 1997.

During one recent performance, with Le Pen in the audience, he invited a Holocaust denier to join him on stage in honor of his 80th birthday. Several weeks earlier, Dieudonne presented the Holocaust denier, academic Robert Faurisson, with a "prize for maladaption and impertinence” that was presented by an assistant dressed in a concentration camp uniform with a yellow star.

It always seems to need a new idol to stick pins in.

Hurriyet, Turkey
Dick Cheney's Torture Logic is 'Deeply Offensive'

"The reason U.S. policy is so important to us is that our own struggle to rein in heinous practices in Turkey is directly related to the standards set in Washington. … Cheney’s logic is that of the Spanish Inquisition. It is deeply offensive."

The systematic and widespread nature of torture in Turkey puts nearly anyone at risk of being tortured, Amnesty International said today as it released its report Turkey: An end to torture and impunity is overdue!.

Amnesty International today concluded that the geographic spread of torture allegations, the range of potential victims and the number of testimonies the organization received, point to torture being systematic and widespread in Turkey. This, despite the European Union a year ago identifying the fight against torture as a priority for Turkey.

At least 209 children were tortured in 1998. Most of the reported cases of tortured children were detained on charges of such crimes as "theft." However, as is known, torture is a widespread practice in detentions for political charges.

Those raving, frothing Republican types (at National Geographic) have it all wrong!

Nonetheless the piper must be paid, the incantation must be read, the recitations of the ways in which comrade Stalin loves us must be said before the trial can go on:

"[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward," said Mike Lockwood, a solar terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. (Get the facts about global warming.)

He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call "preemptive denial" of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.

It’s what Europeans do best. Better than chiding other westerners about not being as “culturally European” in the trivial matters of culture as they are – cuisine, urbanism, work ways, and the like, as though those pet peeves was the only remaining features of a culture that one is permitted to defend in a miasma of post-modern emptiness.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article published in the UK’s The First Post notes:

Take anti-Semitism in Europe. The sensitivity and guilt Europeans feel about the Holocaust is comparable to the sensitivity and guilt that Americans feel towards black Americans. A decade or two ago, it was unthinkable for Jews to be slandered openly and be targeted for no other reason than their Jewishness.

Today, in the name of Islam, synagogues are vandalised. There are open denials of the Holocaust. There is an active network of Muslim organisations lobbying to curtail or even get rid of Israel. There are incidents of Jews being harassed, beaten, even killed. All this is met with grim silence and rationalisations that it's not really anti-Semitic but anti-Israel. Can you imagine anything like this happening today in America to black people and it being met with silence?

It is this state of affairs that makes Christopher Caldwell's book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration and the West (Allen Lane, £17.99), which opens with the sentence, "Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind," a chilling read.

[ ... ]

Caldwell discusses this theme in an interesting light: he does not overlook the Europeans who feel that Islam is a danger to European values but asks, "How can you fight for something you cannot define?" And this is Europe's problem - insecurity about who we are, what our various flags mean, why, with every turn, we spend less and less on the military.

And barbarism embraced as something requiring understanding.

Socialists Are Fools But Not All Fools Are Socialists

It has become fashionable to present reports on piracy that are wrapped in a tranquilizer. It is suggested that the solution of the problem is in Somalia. Save Somalia (throw money at it?) and all will be hanky-dory. One is tempted to suspect that the popularity of the mantra has to do with the trick of attaching an otherwise threateningly soluble problem to a precondition that cannot be met. The benefit is that, succumbing to the West’s luxurious self-doubts, a good reason is given to persist in doing the unreasonable. Thereafter it becomes easy to desist from solving the solvable.

I rarely recommend or review books here, but will in the general interest point one out from time to time, especially free and timely e-books, which are a boon to the light traveler, outdoor loafer, or both. Coming across such things is often all it takes to spark ones’ interest, often with a tangentially related title or subject, so here we are...

This week, I recommend Sam Vaknin’s The Belgian Curtain, Europe after Communism. He muses freely on the Europe’s futile internal tugs of war, EU, NATO, and provides an accessible overview of the contrasts between eastern and western Europe in the political “concept of self” that generally dominate those cultural spaces.

A sample:

Though the EU is the new and aspiring members' biggest trading partner and foreign investor - it has, to borrow from Henry Kissinger, no "single phone number". While France is enmeshed in its Byzantine machinations, Spain and Britain are trying to obstruct the ominous re-emergence of French-German dominance.

By catering to popular aversion of America's policies, Germany's beleaguered Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, is attempting to score points domestically even as the German economy is imploding.

The euro-Atlantic structures never looked worse. The European Union is both disunited and losing its European character. NATO has long been a dysfunctional alliance in search of a purpose. For a while, Balkan skirmishes provided it with a new lease on life. But now the Euro-Atlantic alliance has become the Euro-Atlantic divide.

The only clear, consistent and cohesive voice is America's. The new members of NATO are trying to demonstrate their allegiance - nay, obsequiousness - to the sole identifiable leader of the free world. France's bid at European helmsmanship failed because both it and Russia are biased in favor of the current regime in Iraq. French and Russian firms have signed more than 1700 commercial contracts with Saddam's murderous clique while their British and American competitors were excluded by the policies of their governments.

The Politburo here at ¡No Pasarán! has unanimously resolved to make a special offer for Denis Boyles: we’ll flog anything you write to our adoring proletariat if you add an umlaut, dropped vowels, and improbably accents to your last name.

Not only does it make one heck of a marketing gimmick, it seems quite oddly to seem less “anglo-saxon-ness” while appearing brutally teutonic to at least a few chicks, and also strangely more pangalactically European, yet somehow inferring “globalness” by stroking the euro-chicken. Thanks a bunch, mijnheer Dnis’ Böylės. Just watching the confusion in trying to pronounce it makes one so feels oneself cosmopolitan!

Sir, we here at ¡N-P! are determined to make you better known than Häagen-Dazs. We'll install a dipthong at a later date.

As if there was a way to grade them...

Anticipating the revolutionary wave of people agreeing with them, roving bands of masked anti-capitalist paranoiacs roved the streets of DC in and around last weekend’s IMF leaders’ meeting.

As they are wont to do, they destroy property, something they believe should be the “peoples’“ property, but like whatever. They chose to vandalize a pair of ATM machines, even though the proletariat trying to withdraw from ‘the man’ the pittance of their blood, sweat, and tears. Oddly enough they hit up Amalgamated Bank, a.k.a. “Labor’s Bank” or as the banking choice of the non-profit political profiteers of the activism racket, which statistically makes it the favorite bank of the Suffering Sisters of Sappho.

Anyone who thinks that there is a “big book of international law” somewhere before which they can kneel is naively craving an international autocracy. Not only is it the furthest thing one could have from even permitting any sort of “diversity” and removes whatever control individuals have over their lives, the same adolescent minds invoking these imaginary controls of people and societies usually also get worked up because they think that there is a “hate crime” law somewhere in that mythical legal tome where the personalities and proponents of opinions or lifestyles that THEY hate can be prosecuted. Trying to reach so deep as to control people’s souls, they even want to make crimes of emotions and thoughts that they can’t abide. Nonetheless you have to complement them on their diaphanous (fair trade) scarves and admire them for being ‘progressives’.

Maybe it isn’t news because it isn’t a pretzel.

From our bulging “imagine if this happened to Bush” file: Obama bumps his head in public. It is NOT considered a news item by aggregators, even when it’s on the wires.