Euro-parliament Funkadelic

John Rosenthal has an article in the Weekly Standard on EUtopia’s War on the GWOT. Think of it as their own little Passive-Aggressive Jihad against their own population.

One curious feature of the SWIFTboating of using the SWIFT financial clearinghouse to monitor terrorism funding, was that a salve was sought in the proposal to negotiate an interim agreement. So servile are these governments, that they made a conscious effort to employ the very “revolutionaries” that the Islamists would castrate first:

While the German government had consented to negotiations on the agreement in July 2009, it is notable that when the completed agreement was approved by the European Council four months later, Germany abstained. As the council decision required unanimity, a German “no” would have killed the agreement then and there. But rather than bearing the onus of having torpedoed a crucial transatlantic security arrangement, the German government by its abstention simply handed off the issue to “Dany the Red,” Werner Langen, and the other “putschists” in the European parliament.

Never mind the fact that these comfortable fantasists are carrying on as if they were Paraguayan peasants, you can predict that they’ve “gone straight” with some schtick about preserving the privacy of their own terrorists, and possibly the privacy of some innocent EUvian citizens as well, even if their own governments treat them like children.

In the spirit of reinforcing the individual autonomy and free will though they seem to have no problem with sweeping up the innocent with the guilty when it comes to taking some data-hostagetaker’s word about the taxpayers he’s informing on:

Two years earlier, the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, had purchased data stolen from the Liechtenstein-based LGT Bank. The purchase led to, among other things, a televised police raid on the home of Klaus Zumwinkel, one of Germany’s best-known business executives and now its most famous tax evader. Not only did the BND pay the data thief the equivalent of $5.5 million. According to reports in the German media, it also furnished him with a new identity. One can only conclude that in the eyes of both of Germany’s leading political parties, it is good and righteous for Germany to violate a bank client’s expectation of confidentiality in the name of combating tax evasion and topping up the coffers of the German treasury, but it is bad and evil for the United States to do the same in the name of combating terrorism and saving lives.

The BND, you’ll recall, was the same failed spook outfit that was so on the take and badly infiltrated by East Germany’s Stasi that the rest of civilization had virtually no reason to let them see your phonebook.

In fact, there is likely no way of knowing how many of their own citizens the bad actors in the BND betrayed, let alone the dead in East Germany who were revealed to be western intelligence sources. Then, like now, getting in the spirit of pretending it isn’t happening includes the same kind of negligence with the safety and well-being of their own citizens. As were the motives for doing it: markets, the infantile notion that appeasement will succeed, and to a certain degree, a shared outlook founded on having the same imaginary ideological enemies.

Well, if telephone or Internet users in Germany experience the “threatening feeling of being observed,” it is likely because they really are being observed. German law enforcement authorities are able to employ wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance with an ease that would make their American counterparts green with envy. In 2007, nearly 1 million phone calls were monitored by police in Berlin alone. Over 1,000 Berlin residents were the targets of wiretaps. A 2003 study conducted by Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law found that wiretaps are used by law enforcement authorities some 30 times more frequently in Germany than in the United States.

Which is fine, unless a potential terrorist feels like he or she is being made uncomfortable.

Frankly, it would be funny, if only THEY got killed, but there’s a reason the name of The Hamburg Cell is so widely known.