Obama's stirring words to D-Day veterans ("You could have hid in the hedgerows or waited behind the seawall") come with… (faint) apology for WWII!

I am happy to say that I attended the 65th commemoration of the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach.

Of the four speeches made at the American cemetery near Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy on June 6, 2009, the speech by Nicolas Sarkozy was by far the most moving (I do not remember hearing any French president lay out the facts of the war and of the nations involved as well as of the landings so precisely before) — I defy anybody to listen to it without tearing up. (Well, at least the first part commemorating the 1940s, which was outstanding and second to none; the second and final part, devoted to today's world, goes on to celebrate the UN, to take on this generation's greatest challenge — global warming — and to seemingly take potshots at the Bush doctrine.)

A quoi pensaient-ils ces jeunes soldats le regard fixé sur la mince bande noire de la côte qui émergeait peu à peu de la brume ?

A leur vie si courte ? Aux baisers que leurs mères déposaient tendrement sur leur front quand ils étaient enfants ? Aux larmes retenues de leurs pères quand ils étaient partis ? A celles qui les attendaient de l’autre côté de la mer ?

A quoi pensaient-ils ces jeunes soldats dont le destin avait mis entre les mains le sort de tant de peuples, sinon qu’à 20 ans il est bien tôt pour mourir ?

Leur silence était comme une prière.

By all means, see the whole discours (at least the part directly devoted to la Seconde Guerre Mondiale).

The best speech was by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who switched back and forth between French to English and who seemed to be giving a reply to today's pacifists. At Juno, he said:

Never dismiss these things [freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law] as mere abstractions. They are the very foundation upon which our lives of peace and prosperity are built. They are the very lives to which all of our fellow human beings aspire. And it is only when these values are in peril, when we have to defend them, that we can truly understand their worth. As our soldiers did here on these beaches 65 years ago.

The speech by Gordon Brown was also rather good (the most notable part of it being malheureusement when Omaha Beach was rechristened (03:55) Obama Beach — you can't hear it in the video (see below, at 0:20), but it was the whispers that started throughout the audience that got the British Prime Minister to realize his mistake.)

So intense was the allied cooperation that when Winston Churchill regularly asked to see strategists planning D-Day he never knew until he arrived at 10 Downing Street whether the officer would be British, Canadian, or American.

The worst speech, I can confirm without undue partisanship, was by the Apologizer-in-Chief, who was flying in from Dresden (where, the Germans tell us — or, rather, where they tell themselves [as it is not something they want publicized abroad] — that Obama did not disappoint).

Echoing Dresden (very faintly), Obama did not seem to apologize for the Allies' strategy and actions in World War II in Normandy, offhand — except that: he found it necessary to mention that the "nations that joined together to defeat Hitler's Reich were not perfect" and that they "had made their share of mistakes". Obama went on to speak of "a battle of competing interests" and "a competing vision of humanity" as well as the "sheer improbability of this victory" and so on, while seemingly (haughtily?) denying anybody the right to call the conflict the "good" war. But the bottom line is that — yes — Obama did manage to apologize — however faintly — to the Germans for the actions of the WWII Allies.

Always putting himself in the middle of things, moreover, he had to mention every single family member who (somehow or other) was involved in the war: there was his "grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who arrived on this beach" (six weeks after D-Day), there was his "great uncle" (who "was part of the first American division to reach and liberate a Nazi concentration camp"), there was his "grand-mother" (who "did her part as an inspector" in Kansas), etc…

This may not seem like a big deal, although notice that none of the other speakers spoke of the parts any of their family members played during the war. Also, if this was a one-time deal it would indeed seem harmless, but the point is that Obama always — in all of his speeches — seems to have to put himself at the center of attention.

Worse was to come: America's most outstanding orator™, the inspirer of hope© and the bringer of change©, went on to address the veterans (does the commander-in-chief have no knowledge of military affairs, of the military way of life, of honor and brotherhood?! does he have no empathy with military men, retired or otherwise?!) saying that — wouldn't you know it? — they could have behaved dishonorably (although that is probably not a word someone like Barack "It's always been up to us" Obama would use…)

You could have done what Hitler believed you would do when you arrived here. In the face of a merciless assault from these cliffs, you could have idled the boats offshore. Amid a barrage of tracer bullets that lit the night sky, you could have stayed in those planes. You could have hid in the hedgerows or waited behind the seawall. You could have done only what was necessary to ensure your own survival. But that's not what you did. That's not the story you told on D-Day.

So, as we see — of course — the orator extraordinaire goes on to conclude (08:45) that — of course — the "veterans of the landing" did not behave dishonorably. Au contraire. But still — even if you don't take offense over language used like this at a ceremony for the dead at a military cemetery and even if you don't find fault with oratory that is less than compelling — you should take notice that the (surprizing?) fact that the troops did not behave dishonorably somehow, seems, for this child of the pacifist 1960s, to be the main reason "why we still remember what happened on D-Day."



Compare Obama's talk with Stephen Harper's (previous) speech, in which the Canadian PM not only spoke of the "iron will of those troops, the careful planning of their commanders, and the unwavering support of their fellow citizens back home" (as well as Europe's other dicatorship, "the tyranny of communism"), but also (nudge, nudge) of the "triumph of good over evil":

The Allied troops from our four great nations who crossed the Channel to launch the liberation of Europe and rescue civilization from the darkness of fascism had no uncertainty about their purpose or duty. In the words of Captain Jack Fawcett of the First Canadian Scottish battalion, Scottish regiment, “We were so intent of getting to the beach that even if the engines had stopped or broken down, sheer willpower would have driven the craft ashore.”

Eschewing references to global warming (as he passed to the present day), Stephen Harper went on to remind us to

think of the courageous men and women of our enduring alliance who serve shoulder to shoulder in Afghanistan to bring light and hope to a people who have long known only darkness and despair. And we remember that our peace and prosperity have come not only with a price but also with an obligation to do what we can to share our good fortune with others, including those elsewhere who to this day endure violence, oppression and privation.

So let us resolve today, on behalf of our honoured veterans, on behalf of those young people so full of hope for a safer, better world, on behalf of the heroic souls who came to liberate these shores to never forget, to never surrender, to never waver in our determination to defend freedom, to advance democracy, and to seek justice for all people.

Compare Obama's talk also with Ronald Reagan's 1984 oration at the Pointe du Hoc (starting at 05:05, merci à Stu):

You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief. It was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead, or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

…Something else helped the men of D-day; their rock-hard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer, he told them: "Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we're about to do."

…Today, as forty years ago, our armies are here for only one purpose: to protect and defend democracy. The only territories we hold are memorials like this one and graveyards where our heroes rest.

But the bottom line, of course, is that — beyond the fact that their orations were more stirring than the One's — neither Harper nor (25 years earlier) Reagan (nor Brown nor Sarkozy) managed to apologize (however faintly) for the actions of those who, during World War II, fought against the Nazi juggernaut.

And what does it tell us about the man — the American leader and the world leader — that he felt it necessary to apologize during a military ceremony?


You cannot see (or feel) it, but the entire ground shook every time a cannon fired one of its salvos in the 21-gun salute… And then there was the flyover…



On the way back to Caen in a convoy of special buses, incidentally, I sat next to two Frenchmen discussing the event, the younger one of them (who looked like a very self-confident graduate of les grandes écoles) saying with a wry smile that France has been trying to take the D-Day commemorations down a notch or two for the past few years, notably this year, and that one (main) reason (if not the main reason) for the entire exercise — you would expect it to be a secondary reason, non? — is to keep America well-anchored as a friend…


It ain't a joke — unfortunately…

Update: WWII hero and D-Day survivor Arthur Seltzer relives his harrowing experience on that tragic day (merci à Arnaud)

Update 2: Smitty says he gets the impression that

Obama didn't really care about D-Day, what it means or what was accomplished. Like it's so boring, it was sixty-five years ago, with all these tottering old white guys in their VFW hats and the whole thing is so European.

Update 3: A reader of NP writes that he was watching a bit of the ceremony on television and has to

admit that I couldn’t make it to the end of Obama’s speech. It was glaringly obvious that he didn’t really have anything to say on the occasion and what he did have to say, as you point out, was all faintly apologetic. I thought it was also bizarre how he spoke of the “sheer improbability” of the victory of the Allies. By June 1944, the victory of the Allies was totally probable and the Normandy invasion made it virtually certain. The guy just knows nothing. Every word that comes out of his mouth falsifies history, even inadvertently.

And Just How Many WAS it That it Took to Pull off a Beer-Hall Putsch? Hm?

1.3% of the general population in France supporting an Anti “Zionist” list is still rather sick. That means that 1 in 76 adults is looking for vengeance against a class of people to salve their empty little lives. In Europe, what that has always meant traditionally, is that you are the “political type”.

Still Healing their Inner Pétain

Al Jazeera sur Seine runs the story of an unemployed man who’s arrested for driving without a license in a distant suburb of Ba-reez, mostly because he’s so afraid of his neighbors that he doesn’t want to walk the streets.

They filed it under “Africa”.

Oddly enough, even though the man was not in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, they also deigned to call what the man went through as torture.

Prognosticus

What a difficult day it must be for the left across Europe. How many more stars and planets, in their own fevered minds, must be aligned in order to strike the decisive blow against free markets? PES boss Martin Schulz sums it up:

However the Socialists expressed deep disappointment. Martin Schulz, head of the socialist group, said it was a "very bitter evening" for the party and that they "had hoped for a better result."

Ahead of the vote, the Socialists had been trying to position the centre-right as possessing a failed ideology that led to the economic crisis. They had been hoping for around 200 seats.

It seems as though only yesterday the pan-left's hopes and dreams where that of anger and outrage to be directed at financial bosses with attendant benefits to be harvested by evermore clamoring from the electorate for a hyper-increased role for government:

Police are preparing for a "summer of rage" as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

As predicted on these pages, right idea - wrong target:

If the reporting is correct the police may be right in theory but wrong in practice. The riots/demonstrations to-date in Europe have been directed at government and the governmental failure to properly address the economic situation. If/when the "summer of rage" pops off it will be directed at government and the collective failure of leadership across the board.

Exhibit A.

Update: Looks like early views from the left should leave the more rational and logical among us with even more satisfaction, they just do not get it. The fears listed in this post are the end result of governmental policies and actions. The left has a true and chronic problem which goes to the core of their faith, the claim that more governmentalism will cure (insert topic here). Voters see through this ruse and know it for the sham it is. An acknowledgement by the left that more government is not the answer is simply heresy amongst the faithful. Again, good news for the rational and logical among us.

Time to gin up the "quick wins" and "good news stories"

Anyone who has spent time basking in the dull luminance of the "brilliant" types attracted to governmental work will not be surprised by the following prognostication hitting the skids:

The White House says America's employment picture is worse than the Obama administration had anticipated just a few months ago. The somber admission follows the latest jobless report showing the highest unemployment rate the United States has seen in more than 25 years.

These are the very same now proclaiming rosy economic corners being turned in late 2009, early 2010? Being set to control inflation in short order should it debut? Sure...

And to Think the EU Believes Itself a Wellspring of Humanism

It takes a lot of ignorance about the world, and about human nature – to be held in high regard in Europe.



Remember Mister Wong is your servant! And since many of the French imagine that all Asians admire their culture, it really isn’t culturally condescending in the least... After all, look at all those tourists!

Those EP Elections

No doubt an interesting shake-up will be taking place across the EU installing a different sort of parliament in Bruxelles. One can listen on-line to marathon results from Iain Dale and/or check out the EP's official results site:

Words to be on the look-out for

With today rounding out the elections for the European Parliament, a few words to be on the look-out for from both turfed out/failed candidates as well as the media:

- fear
- extremists
- far-right
- concerned

Strange things happen when individual citizens are actually given a say in the process via the ballot.

Caring and Cuddly and all that

Government: not “clever enough” to run your own life

A mother is taking her fight to the European Court of Human Rights after she was forbidden from seeing her three-year-old daughter because she is not “clever enough” to look after her.


The woman, who for legal reasons can be identified only by her first name, Rachel, has been told by a family court that her daughter will be placed with adoptive parents within the next three months, and she will then be barred from further contact.

The adoption is going ahead despite the declaration by a psychiatrist that Rachel, 24, has no learning difficulties and “good literacy and numeracy and [that] her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range”.

Her daughter, K, was born prematurely and officials felt Rachel lacked the intelligence to cope with her complex medical needs Baby K was released from hospital into care and is currently with a foster family. Her health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day medical care.

The Ingénue

Culturally speaking it is rather hard to top the music video produced by the Beastie Boys for the song "Sabotage". Lily Allen comes closer than anyone since with "Not Fair":



Brills...

As Lily is a staunch supporter of the Labour party, the song could be considered a metaphorical "Ode to Gordon" from the electorate.

Many Men Will Count the Hours…

The story of D-Day.

A Very Continental Brain-death

When you see a Dieudonné, or an Alain Soral, or anyone else admored by the delusional as a rising ”public intellectual” in Europe, do you really know what motivates them?

Volume, volume, volume!

They get off on thinking that they shock, but want to be considered brave. Or thoughtful. Or a signpost of the future. On the last part, they’re probably right, because in as stagnant and isolated a culture as the one they live in, what will be has always been. The cake of soap ask us to behold the mysterious intellectual suicide of Alain Soral

Perosnally I don’t think it’s a mystery. He’s a under-the-radar-Marxist totalitarian who backs any dangerous and violent fad, pretends he’s some kind of muscular white Green Hornet type, but plays the victim whenever his attention-starved ego requires it. He’s even pretended to be beaten up, faking an assault on himself (somehow). As for his publicity hound butt-buddy:

In this epic moment occurs around Dieudonné, if, if you remember, the very man who once excited blacks everywhere he could that France did not repent for its’ crimes during slavery. An act that today extends his audience by getting him on his pet peeves anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, in the name of "anti-communatarianism." It’s lame, but it's basic electoral arithmetic. Le bon Dieudo, has gotten in so deep with the morons, that he can argue that our ministers are nothing less than Mossad agents.

You're wrong Dieudo. These are in fact agents of alien powers who are spreading their inter-galactic conflict.

That’s it. That’s the height of their arguments, and yet they want to guide the future of 60 million well softened-up minds.



The Future according to these loons

Of one of the other « Liste Anti-Hebe » people:

According to Yahia Gouasmi, (and I quote), "Zionism is in the process of educating your children. You have to put more control over your children. It is currently directing at its’ will whatever they want , wherever they want it, even how one must vote. Zionism divides the home. Behind every divorce, I tell you, there is a Zionist behind it. Behind every thing that divides man, there a Zionism. This is what we believe. And we will demonstrate. For us, Zionism is evil. "

There you have it. That just about explains everything. Even meteor showers, bad weather, and Herpes. You are not responsible for your failed marriage, it was the miracle them, the same miracle “them” that have been the pin-cushion of Europe’s stupid, yet “educated” mass for centuries.

Many Men Will Count the Hours…

…as they live the Longest Day…

La Baf's Anti-EU Sketch on the Home Page of L'Express

The La Baf sketch claiming it's useless to go vote in the June 7 elections for the European Union is on the home page of lexpress.fr…

"Chateaubriand or nothing" said Hugo. Obviously the Current Powers Chose Nothing.

In a desperate and futile bid to be relevant, we find the likes of Dominique de Villepin saying on one hand that “Europe is the future of the world” (for no clear reason,) but that it is inadequate as a system. Nonetheless he says the only trying one is permitted to say these ddays, that the only solution to that problem is “more Europe,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

It’s an injunction I’ve always found rather amusing, since there is a general refusal to broach the subject of WHAT that Europe, which more of is the only answer given to a statement of rumination over what governance should look like, what an individuals’ right are.

About all of which, Jean-Gilles Malliarakis writes:

Until then everything is fine. It would have liked it to stop there. For the rest of the text [de Villepin’s article] falls into storms and delirium.

Going on point attention to a huge ‘Eurocracy’ and the opacity not only of the institutional workings but the “don’t worry, be happy” notion that the constitution will just work itself out without much public scrutiny. One wonders what “more of that” is meant to solve, or whether it CAN solve anything.

"A good constitution is the work of time." Against those who scoff at the opacity, impotence, or the servility of the parliament in Strasbourg emphasize that during the last legislative term 2004-2009, it has endorsed 71% of draft guidelines of the Committee Brussels accepted by the Council of Heads of State and Government. He is currently the only obstacle to extending the dull Barroso. Of course, it could do better, but others are far worse.

The outlook for the article signed by M. de Villepin to be grandiose. Believing that the world of tomorrow will be crushed by what he calls the "dream, a duopoly Sino-American economic where the workshop of the world super-investor would agree with the hyper-consumer debt across the Atlantic." Because, "he says, the" silence of the [Europe] also encourages the logic blocks, as with Russia to restore its former sphere of influence. " Etc. etc..

In this way, as a good fan of the conquered Leipzig and Waterloo, he sees a dream Europe, completely expanded, including Russia, Turkey, of course, and even North Africa. Note that, of course, the former French North Africa seems to form a cohesive whole, from Tunis to Casablanca "as we said back in 1957. That is how he describes it: "Without prejudging the outcome of negotiations for accession, Turkey would have to join, as well as Russia and countries of the Maghreb, this pan-European alliance enlarged profits policies could be shared without leading to political integration, reserved for hard core that would remain the Union. "

Sounding like little more than treating these participant states as colonial investment outposts, one wonders what makes a man megalomaniacal enough to believe that this kind of cartel arrangement is to evolve into some kind of great light of the future to inspire the world – while all the same being to shy to indicate that it has any beliefs in anything to promote.

We are thus in the presence of a Franco-centric feature: Mr. de Villepin think Russia or North Africa from Paris, without taking into account the views of interested parties. Without doubt the son of a diplomat, "he says love alone. In 1943, Mussolini was planning to expand in Europe to Egypt. Decently, Villepin could not do less. Noblesse oblige, as they say in Galouzeau

He goes on to observe a number of things that the argument of the Social Model is often employed when there is a pregnant pause, and an elite politician having long since thought he or she has already purchased the public’s trust, and can’t seem to find anything else to say. So true. The lack of relevance seems to disturb dear Ovid, in that the European elections are amounting to a platform for people to shout-out about their special interests, as we’ve seen with our soup chicken from Sweden trying her hand at transnational politics, who is standing astride the world shouting “you got peanut butter in my chocolate!”, and otherwise elevating “the grand project” to a level of pointlessness, but one which represents the limits of seriousness that the population can tolerate: Nut additives are one thing, but genuine constitutional rights (not just a list of financial entitlements) are another, too painful a thing to discuss for fear of disagreement.

Which misses the point precisely: representative government’s purpose is to resolve differences amicably, to suppress or avoid the appearance of disagreement over difficult matters. “More Europe” is beginning to look in effect like a call for more Vicodin.

More News of Stellar Treatment from France's Health Care System

Today I had an interesting conversation with a French doctor who is now a director of a retirement home. Two people died on the same day this week, one of whom had donated his body to science, the other who insisted on being buried in a traditional tomb. At the very last minute, she says, she worried (about her not-so-smart employees), decided to double-check, and saw that the bodies had been switched and were headed for the wrong destinations.

• Everyday Meetings with Common Europeans

Not a big deal (except if the surviving members of the traditional-minded man had had the coffin opened at the last moment), and, to tell the truth, rather funny…

More to the point: While visiting her husband's parents' home in the French countryside several years ago (before the introduction of the Euro and of cel phones), the husband fell through a window pane (he was building a tree house for the kids) and cut his leg open to the bone.

Immediately they jumped (well, she did; he seems to have been a bit slower) into the car and drove to the hospital. Upon arriving at the emergency room, bleeding and with his bone visible, he was whisked in front of everybody.

So far, so good. The woman then asked to use the phone to tell the parents that all would be well. Do you have any francs, she was asked. No, came the (edgy) answer, with her husband's leg open and bleeding profusely, the doctor had not really thought of taking her handbag with her. Her demand for permission to (briefly) use the hospital phone was denied! And so, she says, she had to go around the waiting room begging for money to use the pay phone.

The nurse also demanded to see… her husband's social security card. Somewhat edgily (again), the woman replied that she hadn't really had the time either to think of taking the social security card with them when they had to rush to the hospital and that — for all that she knew — they (the couple) had left them in Paris. That's when the nurses started making derogatory remarks about Parigots (slang for Parisians) and how they ought to stay home and not come out and bother people en province…

But: apart from that, everybody always receives stellar treatment (five stars, I tell you) in Europe's health care…

But then their own Idolatry Failed Them

On the eve of his whirlwind trip to the Middle East and Europe, President Barack Obama gave exclusive interviews to two European television broadcasters: Britain’s BBC and France’s iTELE.

The choice of the BBC is self-explanatory. But iTELE? Why not France Télévisions, the publicly funded French equivalent of the BBC? Or the privately owned TF1, France’s longtime market leader in prime-time news broadcasting?

Elsewhere, John Rosenthal turns his eye to the shallow stupidity of the French press, and a near-failure digital-only startup called i>tété (a digital-terrestrial news outfit whose website tends to crash rather too often,) and the fact that they managed to land an interview with the US president. How do you swing that when you only have a 0,8% share of a small and isolated media market? Play to the king’s whores. The obvious reason I>tété landed the interview was due to the sobbing Bush hater who conducted it.

Perhaps it has something to do with the interviewer, iTELE’s White House correspondent Laurence Haïm (that’s Laurence Haïm, not Laura Haïm, as Jeff Zeleny of the ever linguistically challenged New York Times calls her). For if French journalists in general have abandoned any pretense to objectivity while reporting on American politics in recent years — as has been extensively documented on blogs like No Pasarán or my Transatlantic Intelligencer — Laurence Haïm’s preferences are even more transparent than most.

[ ... ]

“You can, I think, see the fanaticism of these people here,” Haïm says, referring to the merrily celebrating Bush supporters behind her. “You see the screen, you see the Fox News channel, you see the American flag, you see these people. George W. Bush is going, then, to become president again for four years.” And then, after remarking on her mounting emotions, she repeats the phrase punctuated by convulsive sobs.

Also worth noting in the “land of great global wisdom” where Haïm hails from, that in trying to “cheekily” use English in her blog’s subtitle, that she unselfconsciously mimics the complete incongruity of a Engrish. Nonsensically subtitled “The Blog Made in Obama,” she no doubt thinks herself brilliant and wired in to the world, when in reality the preoccupation of nearly the whole of the news media subculture is with the the Arab world, the US, but primarily the attitude of the domestic commentary about their own relationship with US and Arab cultures. It is a far more isolate global outlook than you find in the American and British press, but one dare not mention it for fear of besmirching the public’s dignity.

As for the president himself, he seems to find anything polite he can to play along with Haïm’s vapidity.

“What do you love about France, if I may ask?”
“Well, let’s see … we’ve got the food, we’ve got Paris, we’ve got the south of France, Provence, the wine.”
Elsewhere, on the topic of relations with the “Muslim world,” Ms. Haïm reminds the president that during the electoral campaign he had told her that he wanted to convene a “Muslim summit.” The idea will undoubtedly be of interest to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, whose 57 member states already convene every three years in an “Islamic summit.”
Ms. Haïm does, however, manage to ask at least one seemingly tough question.
“Do you speak French?”
“My French is terrible.”

So instead of asking him any real questions, Haïm is just doing the French thing and looking for ways in which anyone significant, and the rest of the world, can somehow honor them merely for being who they are – scrath the surface and there it is, the ultimate form of identity politics: a delusional nationalism offered at the expense of asking any sort of real questions in the kind of interview that could make or break a talking-head’s career.

Yes We Can! America Can Get Health Care Like They Enjoy It in Canada and Europe

Want to know exactly what's at stake when it comes to health care debate in Washington, D.C?

Shona TV Spot - "Survived" - kewego
TV spot from Patients United Now highlighting Shona's Story.

No doubt they will be Unquestionably Called “Fine Words”

Obama’s speech in Cairo will be declared an uncritical success. The only way that the press would find the awkward message a failure is by merely reporting it without much commentary. That’s just the way they are with the left. BBC filleted if for the tips that they prefer, and to be sure Al-Jazeera will do the same, but one thing they will never ever say is the obvious: it will be a flop with the potential audiences that matter.

To begin with, it will appeal greatly to the same passive mass in the Arab and Muslim world that tacitly oppose Jihad, but don’t say so. There is no evidence to suggest that they will treat this clumsy sort of “community outreach” the same way.

In spite of the fact that the Iranian leadership released a vengeful statement to undercut any potential rise in America’s popularity in Iran, they do that with a lot of things. To the BBC though, a press release like that is news that fits the bill and the editorial line – the construction of Obama as the brave and serious statesman that he really isn’t. To be sure, he isn’t a bad manager, but the passion held for him is growing to be limited the strange lionizing images in caps and t-shirts being sold by street vendors.

Now that their favorite American is actually presenting himself to the larger world, there might be shreds here and there of content to satisfy the hype created by the world press, and they have no choice but to run with it, else they prove their biased reporting biased. This maljournalisme, they must do to sustain their credibility with an audience whom they promised so much.

Otherwise there are still fragments of a vulgar narrative to be found in his speech, fragments of the scattered previous “international statements” which did more to confirm though apology the years of specious over-the-top howlings that the United States, which is not a religion, was somehow waging war with a religion, even though those targeting American civilians at every opportunity were fighting a religious war with the rest of humanity.

The tone of the reconciliatory message Barack Obama is trying to transmit to the proponent will look like little more than pandering, because unlike the message George Bush repeated as a proponent of human rights (one which the press in their own “humanism” tried to undercut at the expense of humanity,) it’s hard to tell if Obama, trapped in a complex of his own electors, would do anything for human rights beyond symbolism, maintaining appearances, and writing the occasional check. Obama’s entire administration is taking forever to form itself seriously and one wonders if it capable of strategic thinking at all.

Oddly enough, it doesn’t take long to find that the talking heads and the press worldwide find that their egos and ids simply love an incapacitated and ineffectual White House that can do little more than purvey an image that pleases them. The very reason it didn’t take long for them to go from passive-aggressive but vivid irrational haters of America to be in near permanent thrall of Obama is that it was a very short intellectual leap. They finally got the globally incapable (read: stupid, naïve, with a narrow political view) president they accuse us of having so long as it’s not a leftist, and they need to promote him as fast as they can dance to try and keep him there.

So a forgettable and awkward speech full of pandering to a imagined frame of culture has to be raised in profile, just as his roundabout apologies confirm to an mendacious accusatory terror-supporting subculture their world view. To our own rather silent tacitly terror-supporting subculture in the cultural elite and the press, this must be to confirm their delusions about America, and try to fix for them a place of influence in the world. The best that we can hope for is that those collaborationists to the lefty elite in our own society are undermined by hearing what they want to, permitting the White House in future to at least do something effectual.

Malicious Foe Confronts an Ignorant Victim

Employing “tolerance” as a subtext on an authority structure and population not intimately familiar with what the bounds of rights really are in a tolerant society, we find a great many sad struggles, a tugging and pulling among individuals in the face of an intellectual environment not equipped or sophisticated enough to manage it. From the Netherlands as an example we find an elbowing out of a population by visitors who appear to come from another century using the tools of a modern society that intends to structure legal fairness as a hammer, and a majority giving up on its’ tenets to buy a little peace:

Chris Ripke is a well-known artist in the city. His studio is near a mosque in Insuindestraat. Shocked in 2004 by the murder of director Theo Van Gogh by an Dutch Islamist, Chris decided to paint an angel on wall of his studio and the biblical commandment "Gij zult niet doden," thou shalt not kill. His neighbors at the mosque found the words "offensive," and called the mayor of Rotterdam at the time, the liberal Ivo Opstelten. The mayor ordered the police to erase the painting, because it was "racist." Wim Nottroth, a television journalist, camped out on the spot in protest.

Though the title would seem overreaching in an article entitled “Eurabia Has A Capital: Rotterdam”, there are among the portraits being painted in it some telling signs that the native western Europeans are being put upon directly, and in a way that skirts the limits of what they will permit without signaling to themselves a need to act.

The fact that Eurabia has arrived in Rotterdam has been demonstrated by an episode in April at the Zuidplein Theatre, one of the most prestigious in the city, a modernist theater proud of "representing the cultural diversity of Rotterdam." It is located in the southern part of the city, and receives funding from the municipality, headed by a Muslim, the son of the imam Ahmed Aboutaleb. Three weeks ago, the Zuidplein Theatre allowed an entire balcony to be reserved for women only, in the name of sharia. This is not happening in Pakistan or in Saudi Arabia, but in the city from which the Founding Fathers set out for the United States. It was from here that the Puritans disembarked in the Speedwell, which they later exchanged for the Mayflower. This is where the American adventure began. Today, it has legalized sharia.

For a performance by the Muslim Salaheddine Benchikhi, the Zuidplein Theatre agreed to his request to have the first five rows set aside for women only. Salaheddine, an editorialist for the website Morokko.nl, is known for his opposition to the integration of Muslims. The city council has approved this: "According to our Western values, the freedom to live one's own life by virtue of one's convictions is a precious possession." A spokesman for the theater has also defended the director: "It is hard to get Muslims to come to the theater, so we are willing to adapt."

Never mind that this isn’t diversity, it’s a minority monoculture trying to subsume it’s accommodating neighbors for the purpose a the very least of the pride of imagined conquest, and at the sharp end, a real conquest.

Lost on the writer even, is the same of the chap interviewed, and the inherent aggression embedded in it. The editor of Morokko.nl is name is Salaheddine, which is not a conventional given name of any sort, and not likely his real name at all. In proper Arabic it’s pronounced Solh-ed-deine or Duke Solh (with a hard H). In it’s anglicized form, it’s Saladin, the Muslim general who drove the Crusade era Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Frankish knights in particular. Moroccan or not, the naming of oneself after an 11th century muslim general displays its’ own lack of depth on another level: Saladin was a Kurd who “united” a large part of what is what is now the Arab by subsuming it in war, himself a cultural outsider. I’m sure to those who would recall him today, that it’s only results that matter – well, SOME selectively drawn results that matter.

In short, it’s a nom de guerre that even the article’s author shows overlooked, but doesn’t miss this point: what we are looking at is the uninspired sectarian warfare of the malicious and ignorant, something common to the developing world, the 3rd world, and those suspended in the lawlessness of war-zones. The broadly and deeply developed level of European social science is absent, having struck the immutability of a culture that while a lot less comfortable and welcoming, is readily accessible to the simplest minds and to the emotionally bereft.

And as is quite common in the case of France par example, the most politically involved don’t call themselves French, and discuss “muslim rule” in the millennium-old sense of a culture defeating and annexing another. Here they are thinking in terms of the ‘takeover’ of open society, not serious involvement IN it or with it. One can only imagine what they will want to do with the French of Vietnamese and Chinese origin who are themselves rather aware as a group of what oppression smells like.

Paging Captain Headwound

Rhetoric met reality, and the rhetoric that so many people claim as their political raison d’etre lost.

Germany in particular reckons that all additional environmental legislation should be put on ice until economic conditions return to normal, according to one senior diplomatic source.

The REACH regulation on chemicals and the extension of carbon dioxide emission limits to light duty vehicles in the automotive sector were both cited as areas where industry will be offered special treatment.

The aim is to soften the impact of Europe's strict environmental rules as industries fight their way through the economic recession.

Which is amusing given that greenies, pretending to be experts and experienced in any field of endeavor for which they present an opinion, try to convince one that ‘greening up’ will not just come at little or no additional cost, but somehow be more productive that the ‘old, lazy, dirty’ ways of doing and producing things. M’kay. Whatever you say there, Sparky. It sort of reminds me of the recent ‘initiatives’ to insulate ‘in the name of Climate Change’, even if the drive to insulate buildings now puts them 30+ years behind the United States.

The international dimension

Building efficiency has also been the topic of high-level discussions in international fora, particularly in connection with climate change. The 4th Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 4 May states that "Energy efficiency options for new and existing buildings could considerably reduce CO2 emissions with net economic benefit."

Losers. Virtually every word uttered out of the mouths of the politically involved is a saled job and an evasion, even over “international conferences” whose only conclusions are things that were done out of simple common sense decades ago. They are at the point where they need a Global Warning angle just to get out of bed in the morning, let alone insulate a house.

Becoming Thierry Meyssan

This is a how to, as it were, to becoming the great truth-teller and “I’m only asking questions” lesson-giver that constructed the “Bush made 9-11 happen”, widely admired as “complex” and “daring” in the new epicenter of self-serving and mendacious media schlock, Europe, where media figures making up theories to emboldent their world view, even if they cause misery, is all part of that air of superior enlightenment and humanity that they carry themselves with, and always in reference to other peoples and cultures. So very logical and inclusive of them, no? Okay, so let's do the hustle, shall we?

An Air France flight travelling from Brazil to France goes down at sea. Let’s just say that we’re all French now, and all Brazilian now. M’kay? Now let’s treat the item with the same high standards of the European press and conflate the all-too-frequent event of the phoned in bomb threat to say that it’s a conspiracy left over from sleeper cells of the Bush administration who as we know were trying to kill the economy at the expense of environmentalism, what with him having built a “sustainable home” when Al Gore was still growing his inner beard, and all, and probably for suspicious reasons at that.

Let’s ask questions about the automated fault codes, perhaps they were brave counter-terror personnel fighting back against the bombers, who we should make every attempt to understand because... and I’m only asking questions here... might have been trying to save the rainforests and protect the world from severe weather, which we’ve known for centuries, is a direct cause of aircraft and westerners employing combustion engines.

Let’s also start covering our cultural behinds the moment there is a suggestion that a bomb might have gone off too. But, you know, I’m only asking questions, and not making any light suggestions about Airbus executives, or maybe the nefarious murderers at Boeing just trying to prop up sales at the cost of however many lives.

I’m not making light of the victims’ families losses by only asking questions, after all, I have rayonnement to dispense. And if “just asking questions” doesn’t stroke my ego, I’ll passive-aggressively suggest it through fiction.

For example one can clearly see what a lackey of the regime Fraulein Cobb is for not saying that she is only asking question, and merely communicating known facts. I guess she’s is fear-ridden tool of the established order and seeks no troofiness. Of course she’ll get mad, but she just can’t handle the truth towing the line.

They (Heart) Death the Way You (Heart) Life

Youssouf Fofana, tries to bluster though his case, or attending to his “pride”, even though the case is not public. His gang burned alive, tortured, maimed, and left a man for dead for their entertainment because he’s a Jew.

“Élan” about being proud of what he did will not get him off a murder charge, but it’s a process of striving to a heroic image, of personal mythmaking, of somehow making himself into a sort of martyr, as it has now been revised to mean. Basically, he isn’t saying what influential people in the rest of the culture are saying: “may a thousand Fofanas bloom.” Fussing as it normally does, the rest of the culture is happy to either analyze ad nauseum, or dream up new sectarian crimes to legitimize.

They’ve been here before, and it Hurt. For Centuries.

Which is to say, in a death-spiral. While continental talking heads chide American for errors presumably made due to a lack of attention to history, in reality the ones wagging a finger at America for being a martial “new Rome” need to look at what really put it out of it’s misery, and the centuries of misery that came thereafter.

What did a number on the roman empire and set Europe on a centuries-long slog from which they could only have emerged from widespread poverty with free-trade and non-conformist ingenuity?

This peaceful infiltration of barbarians which altered the whole character of the society which it invaded would have been impossible, of course, if that society had not been stricken by disease. The disease is plain enough to see by the third century. It shows itself in those internecine civil wars in which civilization rends itself, province against province and army against army. It shows itself in the great inflationary crisis from about 268 and in the taxation which gradually crushed out the smaller bourgeoisie while the fortunes of the rich escaped its net. It shows itself in the gradual sinking back of an economy based upon free exchange into more and more primitive conditions when every province seeks to be self-sufficient and barter takes the place of trade.

From Eileen Edna Power’s 1924 book, Medieval People

The most obvious manifestation of Roman society in decline was the dwindling numbers of Roman citizens. The Empire was being depopulated long before the end of the period of peace and prosperity which stretched from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius.

[ ... ]

The long duration of Augustus's legislation to raise the birthrate is significant; successful it was not, but the fact that it was maintained on the statute book and systematically revised and developed for three centuries shows that it was at least accounted necessary. It is true of course that the mortality rate was a far more important factor in those days than it is in our own, and the mortality from pestilence and civil war from Marcus Aurelius onwards was exceptional. And it is plain that the proportion of celibates was high in the Roman empire and that the fall in the fertility of marriages was going on. It is the childless marriage, the small family system that contemporary writers deplore. In Seeley's striking phrase: 'The human harvest was bad,' It was bad in all classes, but the decline was most marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the potential leaders of the race. In the terrible words of Swift, facing his own madness, the Roman Empire might have cried: 'I shall die like a tree--from the top downwards.'

[ ... ]

Why (the insistent question forces itself) did this civilization lose the power to reproduce itself? Was it, as Polybius said, because people preferred amusements to children or wished to bring their children up in comfort? Hardly, for it is more marked among the rich than the poor and the rich can have the best of both worlds. Was it because people had grown discouraged and disheartened, no longer believing in their own civilization and loath to bring children into the darkness and disaster of their war-shattered world?

[ ... ]

We do not know. But we can see the connection of the falling population with the other evils of the empire--the heavy cost of administration relatively heavier when the density of the population is low; the empty fields, the dwindling legions which did not suffice to guard the frontier.To cure this sickness of population the Roman rulers knew no other way than to dose it with barbarian vigour. Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more till in the end the blood that flowed in its veins was not Roman but barbarian.

Also employing Canada as an example, Mark Steyn notes that much of it goes not so much to ideologies, but their experience as a population bettered by state control, the brutal measures that inherently come with it, but also the same desire to put their own pleasure above their own children, and consequently about their lack of confidence in the future of humanity:

We are witnessing the end of the late twentieth-century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those Fascists and Republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly.

To quote the Dead Kennedys, like the Romans they’re Too drunk to F*ck

Reconnecting nanny-state populations with cross-generational solidarity requires much more than the marginal tax breaks the Portuguese government announced or the nine thousand bucks the Russian state is now offering for second children. The most important action in reacquainting individuals with a larger sense of life is the one that governments recoil from: shrink the state.

The same demographic death-spiral that motivated dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to ban all forms of contraception and abortion was a result of something very similar: the making of the new communist man presented no case for the future, much as it did with the rigid roman society. What’s bewildering is that what is meant to be a sort of leisure-state socialism which has long tried to bolster having children with financial incentives is doing the same thing: making no case for the need to think about the future, especially in the face of a new barbarism – one with a potent ideology that wants your techniques to build domes and watermills, but could care less about your language, literature, and humanism.

In the end, it’s not about cash: after all, materialism and self-gratification are why Eutopians gave up on the future in the first place. The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people’s pockets but to put more responsibility in people’s pockets.

[ ... ]

To ask the question is, in large part, to answer it. Even if a Muslim wanted to, how would he assimilate with, say, Canadian national identity? You can’t assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It’s much easier to dismantle a society than to put anything new and lasting in its place. And across much of the developed world that’s what’s going on right now. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen.

Returning to Mme Power, we find a striking parallel to Europe’s newest barbarians, much as the socially dislocated culturally non-European confronts the decadent aborigine, the decay in society is at first unseen, later thought of as a ‘lifestyle’, and later still rationalized before the decent and decay that followed: life expectancies shortened, the pillaging continued, and what was left of the body of human knowledge had to be hidden away or survived inadvertently at what were Rome’s most remote outposts.

They cannot, Sidonius and his friends, ignore as Ausonius and his friends did, that something is happening to the empire. The men of the fifth century are concerned at these disasters and they console themselves, each according to his kind. There are some who think it cannot last. After all, they say, the empire has been in a tight place before and has always got out of it in the end and risen supreme over its enemies. Thus Sidonius himself, the very year after they sacked the city; Rome has endured as much before--there was Porsenna, there was Brennus, there was Hannibal.... Only that time Rome did not get over it. Others tried to use the disasters to castigate the sins of society. Thus Salvian of Marseilles who would no doubt have been called the gloomy dean if he had not been a bishop. For him all that the decadent Roman civilization needs is to copy some of the virtues of these fresh young barbarian people.

Not to peddle gloom or advertise for predestination, but the obstinacy of the present day folk we are talking about point directly to accommodation with vulgarity that will lead past their own morally acceptable limits, to be followed by an uncontrollable violence of some kind, and a punished population. All of it will be seen in reflection as unnecessary and a stain on humanity. Again.

La Baf's EU Election (Non-)Vote Sketch Shown on French TV

The La Baf sketch claiming it's useless to go vote in the June 7 elections for the European Union is shown on LCI (at 10:10)…

Proud to be on their Last Legs

The great well of Euro-culture always seems pre-occupied with kicking weak sectors of culture in the teeth if it fits their own individual adolescent obsessions about control and wresting control in their imaginary bugbears in society.

Lars von Trier's film was declared "the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world" by an Ecumenical Jury which every year hands out a prize to a Cannes film that celebrates spiritual values.

With a message of tolerance and free speech, they accuse anyone airing a non-mainstream opinion of censorship, somehow.

Nonetheless, among these “cultural betters” at Cannes:

Critics gasped, jeered and hooted -- and at least four people fainted -- during a preview of the movie, one of 20 films competing for the Palme d'Or top award to be handed out

Apparently to the emptiest minds, this in itself makes it artful and worthy of consideration on that basis alone – that it would somehow offend their long-dead parents or make their kindergarten teacher squirm. It’s a sad display of their lack of depth, and their strange notion that anyone presenting an opinion that they dislike actually “censoring them.”

What is it that they’re rewarding? Thoughtlessness and a LACK of conscious intent of the part of “zee arteest.”

"Maybe von Trier doesn't either: in the press notes, he basically says as much, confessing scenes "were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking," (though he does add "I am very happy about this film and the images in it. They come out of an inspiration that's real to me"

I no longer wonder what it is about “things added for no reason” cause him to thing something seems real to a subculture that can’t dislocate a message from willfully not knowing what one is saying. This by itself instantly makes someone forfeit any right they have to expect anyone else’s attention, especially those who think themselves aesthetes in the film sub-culture.

Stick a fork in them. They’re done.

¡ Но пасаран, Baby !

We are either stuck in their melons, or the thinly-veiled Iranian government propaganda operation is trying to employ the reflexes of the most gullible among the left to advance the cause of totalitarian illiberalism. The very sort who “don’t want you in their bedroom” eventually preferring Sharia.

The Iranian “Mehr News Agency” seems to have taken an interest in our editorial committee here at the HQ. If you don't know who they are, realize that they are an out-and-out propaganda outfit from the Islamic Republic of Iran that only a Spanish graduate student would believe is a genuine news operation. The irony being that they are so 4th rate that they have to navigate modernity using a Lebanese ISP. Nonetheless, we are to believe of the parent company, which is to say the regime, that this sort of outreach will light the world up to praise their brilliance and gentility:

Ahmadinejad told foreign reporters that if he is reelected president, he will invite Obama to a debate on the root causes of global problems.

He went on to say that he had invited former U.S. president George W. Bush to hold talks on global issues when he was in New York to address the 63rd session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2008.

The Iranian president also said all people and major powers should change their approach toward global issues because this is the only way to establish lasting world peace.

President Ahmadinejad also pointed out that there is no need for nuclear negotiations with Western countries, saying, ""Iran's nuclear issue is over, in our opinion.""

Where else, other than a population dumbed down by two decades of mental manipulation would a population believe that their leader, a social and economic nitwit, have “lessons about world peace” for the rest of the world. They must have learned this habit of “rayonnement” from the world’s greatest lesson-givers. But hey, no hard feelings, Mehr News noses! Lekhaim, baby!

Foot drain

It was just the other day when leading taxaholic Richard Murphy was rent-a-quoted as saying the following regarding the flight of individuals before facing taxation oblivion:

"Every time there is a threat to the rich that they will be taxed a little bit more, we have no evidence that they've actually left," Murphy said. "You are in the UK economy because it's a great place to make money. It's also quite a cool place to live."

The very same article chronicles a slate of firms already fleeing the taxman, thus refuting Murphy's thesis (never a difficult task). One wonders if incentives matter to the individual as well? Looks to be on their minds too:

Manchester United striker Cristiano Ronaldo - who earns a reputed £125,000-a-week - would face an increase of about £670,000 a year in his tax bill under the new rate of 50p in the pound.

Others who would be affected include Chelsea stars Frank Lampard, who earns £140,000 a week, his team-mate John Terry (£135,000), Liverpool's Steven Gerrard (£120,000) and Manchester United's Wayne Rooney (£115,000).

In Europe, although players are paid less than in the Premier League, their take-home pay is in some cases higher because of lower income tax rates. In Spain the top tax rate is only 25 per cent, in France it is 40 per cent, in Italy 43 per cent and in Germany it is 45 per cent.

You know you are in trouble when Germany's 45 per cent rate looks attractive. "No evidence" continues to mount.

Playing along for a moment

We all know that global warming is the most important only issue of consequence facing mankind which must be fixed immediately. Given this fact one assumes that all governments and all peoples will find any way to ensure that all solutions are implemented immediately. There are no considerations other than that of saving Gaia, immediately:

Most European Union member states indicated on Thursday they would support a European Commission plan to extend anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on imports of biodiesel from the United States, EU sources said.

The European Union's executive arm, which oversees trade policy for the 27-country bloc, submitted a proposal to impose "definitive", or permanent, tariffs of up to five years to member states at a meeting of the EU's anti-dumping committee.

So, does this mean that saving Gaia is not the most important consideration for some in the battle to save Gaia?

Lincoln, Reagan, and FDR all Marketably Rolled into One

Thanks pal, I realized Pinch needed a new marital aid, butthanks to this lameness, the world doesn’t respect
us anymore, they’re laughing at us. And this time it's real


It’s worse that the NYT selling O-dolitry rubbish for the politically slavish who can’t wait to follow blindly. For weeks now, ads for these Inaction figures have been making the rounds. Just like check-cashing places, loony preacher acts, and predatory lenders, they’re red-lining and preying on the week: I’m told they’re targeting well to do “blue” zip codes, like people being infected unwittingly to test a potent new drug that induces state interventionism.

NP PSA

As a public-service to NP readers as well as the entirety of the humanity, links to most any web browser you the user choose to download and use .... for free. There is no big brother standing over your shoulder insisting you must choose only their product (we leave that uni-directional approach to governmental types):

Mozilla Firefox
Apple Safari
Google Chrome
Opera
Maxthon
Flock

The cost of this post does not even come close to the 2bn siphoned from the productive class by the governmental class here in Bruxelles. The fun sleight of governmental hand being, as always, that consumers are the ones who have had the 2bn siphoned out of their wallets. Microsoft only writes the cheque to the EU, you are the one actually providing the funds.

Enjoy!

Maybe it's Krugman's Idea of Family Values

Makes you wonder, who’s really in the crowbar hotel here?

Jailed Islamic extremists want women prison officers banned from guarding them during Friday prayers - claiming it's against their human rights. Terrorists at Wakefield jail say having them there while they pray is an "insult to their religion".

The group at the West Yorks jail - led by convicted terrorist Kamel Bourgass who killed a cop during an anti-terrorism raid - told jail governor Jacqui Tilley of their anger.

Female and male prison guards oversee prayers from a glassed office.

Services are held in the prison's gym after the 60-strong group refused to pray in the jail's multi-faith chapel because it was used by "non-believers".

You can smell the cultural sensitivity and cooperative interchange, can’t you? To begin with, having seen all sorts of muslims immigrants improvise with all manner of properties, even disused churches, I don’t buy any of this “used by non-believers” crap. It’s just something for them to cause hostility over. You’re supposed to pray 5 times a day wherever you are. My mechanic does it, and apologizes un-necessarily for making me wait 3 minutes when he comes back from his storage room. Unlike these assho*es in the UK, he actually believes in something.

Were they to get prosecuted for crimes of the same magnitude among their “fellow believers” they would likely not be alive to whine like little girls crying over spilt pork. In fact they’re lucky they aren’t in Yemen of a time not that far back when capital punishment took the form of impalement.

They thought this civilized, because, as torturously painful as anything one could imagine, it became the strongest deterrent they could find. Would any of their lefty “civil liberty” supporters have understood that? Or would they just get all moist over using it on their own political opponents?

A Cultural Exception for an Exceptional Culture

This is how the young and vibrant Rock the Casbah:

A pensioner was killed by an urban joy-rider. Inhabitants of Saint-Cyr-l'Ecole are terrorized by the "friends" of a Murderer.

22/05/2009 - 12h00

SAINT-CYR L'ECOLE (NOVOpress) - Yvette, a retired 69 year old died from her injuries on Tuesday night at the Beaujon Hospital (Hauts-de-Seine). Tuesday afternoon, while walking down the sidewalk in Saint-Cyr-l'Ecole (Yvelines) this woman was struck by a motorcycle. Its’ driver, Youssof, was doing a wheelie on an unregistered motorcycle.

As part of the police investigation, several witnesses saw Youssof strike Yvette. Youssef was found to regularly do this type of urban rodeo. In 2006, he had struck and injured a child under the same circumstances. Youssof is also well known to the court for drug trafficking and for driving without a license. But a "support committee" was organized for Youssof ... "In the dense area of the city, the tension is rising a notch. Fear has gripped residents who dare not comment on the event for fear of reprisals," said Constant Julien in Le Parisien on 21 May.

Here’s that cultural exception that they’re always crowing about:

In this multicultural society, the French can die violently, but preferably in silence ...

Papered Over in the Middle of the Night

The “Anti-Zionist” party list posters reported here yesterday have been papered over with blanks, which makes me believe that since there is no counter-message and no public display of covering them over, that it was done by the municipality.



Nonetheless, the posters and the covering over of them are telling. Like people distracted and carried away with BDSM, it’s part of a general continental cultural inability to get past simple moral matters presented by history.

Another Bunch of Reason Why You can’t take them Seriously

To begin with, I can’t tell if these two women are running for office, or selling toothpaste. On the other hand, I realize that one of them is running on a platform of labeling foods that contain peanuts because her kid is allergic. Yup. That’s her platform. That’s it. MEP for three words: “May contains nuts.” In any civilized society, a polite letter to the company headquarters is sufficient.

Despite fitting right in to the Brussels scene, what with all of that serious agenda stuff, one wonders where that famous northern suicidal tendency went to. Basically, if this is why you have elected officials, then why bother. One can’t help but ask: Who is getting in the way of the labeling of packaged foods? For goodness’ sake, why are you wasting oxygen, lady? The other candidate we showcase, calls herself a ‘passionate centrist’, assuring a banal future dealing with Mrs. Peanut and all manner of empty platitudes.

Again, if these are the only things you can find out there that matter to run on, your doctor need to adjust your Lexapro. I don’t care how put together you think you are.

On the other side of this vacuity is Euro-casualness of this kind of thing: there are people in a small northern town of this sophisticated and complex culture, so full of depth and thoughtfulness, who scare off hapless refugees.

'Lynch mob' prompts refugees to flee town in northern Sweden

Nearly half of the predominantly Iraqi-refugees residing in Vännäs in northern Sweden have decided to permanently move out of the area after being terrorized by what police called “a lynch mob” in early May.

“I thought that Vännäs was the perfect place for us. And there are many, many friendly people here. But we still don’t dare to stay; I’m seriously concerned about my children’s safety,” said father of five Ismail Ramadan to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.

Ramadan’s family and several others have decided to abandon plans of starting a life in the small community outside of Umeå less than two weeks after a group of 30 to 50 young people assembled outside the apartment building in which the refugees lived and began shouting threats and throwing stones.

The refugees appear to be making no attempts at being photogenic.

The Outward Signs of a Failed Society

They are one that quite clearly concludes to itself that a group of people may be hated and detested (using a code or pretext to defeat within the heart of the hater the last vestiges of humanism) – that they would be hated for their origin, religion, and belief. The other necessary leap is for the same lot to find a way to hate individual Jews or any other group at which this primitive tribal hatred is directed, not for what they do, but merely who they are.

Seen on the streets of Paris, playing on a recent series of public service announcements to reinforce the French population’s pride in their own nation and society, and recent MEP election compaign material:

In front of the Mairie in the 13th arrondissement.



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Much as I’ve heard the protest that by “Sioniste,” they do not mean all Jews, it’s entirely countervailed by everything the same sort of “anti-sioniste” does or says a minute later. I can’t even find a context in which those people themselves believe the rationalization.

Just like the 1330’s and the 1930’s myth-making and demonizing, Jews are the “money people” who employ others’ strife to cause wars, and they are the only reason an economy could possibly be in recession or go to war. It is nearly up to the level of the kind of theory-forming and hatefullness that you’d find in a 3rd world barrio.

The fact remains that Zionism’s real motives grew out of the actions of virtually the entire European population – it’s superstitions, its’ hatreds, its’ need to find a “genetic” enemy... In the centuries before the 2nd world war, and the years that followed, the obsession with cycles “ethnic cleansing” and repatriation found large population being “sent home” even if they were not born there. As much as they saw a home for the masses of people in DP camps, they wanted to send the Jews, another of many reminders of their inhumanity and hatefulness away – to “home”.

Seeing one opportunity in the history of their religion to do just that, Jews largely agreed – they wanted a place to go, to finally be free of the irrational accusations of “controlling money” as a group, or from the mass murders, forced relocations and pogroms. They wanted a fighting chance to live out their own lives. All of the circumstances that put them in that position were caused by Europeans.

Now in their uneducated, immoral, inhumane social torpor, entirely ignorant of the world, you find at best a strange fantasy of a bureaucratic nullity of a “magical combined land”, and at worst, open agreement that Israel and the Jews need to be effaced from the earth, even though the very thing they detest is the direct product of their own society’s making.

And it’s a society that appears to have not grown enough to genuinely understand what rights are with crowds “demand human rights” or any other cause place-holding for something in their empty lives. If there’s any disease that deserves the kind of “final solution” treatment they skirt around and incrementally try to bring into acceptable speech, it’s the mainstay of European society itself – the one whose past “elected” and unelected dictators, philosophies, movements and ideas, have killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide – from forcable colonization, fascism, socialism, communism, and so on. If humanity is to employ the logic behind what they tacitly hold for the Jews, it should apply to them with the same thoughtless discrimination.

Instead of the world feeding and securing them, and giving them the flattering, “whatever you say, pal,” false importance of being “global leaders” would they prefer that?

They Might Someday Stop Living the Myth

“Long Suffering Martyr” of the Loony Left Murdered by Long Suffering Martyrs of the Loony Left



... „ Benno Ohnesorg, murdered political victim ” ...
You got that right, for once.

I Pensively Remain on the Very Edge of my Seat

Yesterday one could not help but to meditate over the significance and consequences of Swedish Foreign Ministry’s condemnation Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons test (and further short-range missile display,) or the collective press releases of the rest of Europe’s standard reaction: to be sure, these wise words will be sure to change the course of events and bring the rogue opaque regime whose internecine struggles to come to book.

The truth of which is that it just raises the profile of another nuclear-capable weird Harold, and that the Europeans trotting out their WMD, the remote possibility of trade sanctions with a backwater they do little trade with to begin with, are really just raising the North Koreans’ profile, dignifying it while affirming their own impotence to do anything about it. In fact, to make declarations on the tides and turns in a dangerous environment knowing full well that nothing will come of it is largely about trying to raise THEIR profile to be taken seriously, even if they’re just proffering an opinion about a matter that a united ‘human rights and justice’ Europe will other do nothing about other than wring its’ hands over.

Indeed, just like the BBC, I waited with bated breathe in anticipation of the content of the emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. Would they use the word “condemn” or simply express “concern”? Would they go the extra mile and show “deep concern,” knowing of the severe mortal risk that as bold a statement as that would entail? To be sure, they will “speak up, even if their voice shakes!”

It’s altogether too frightening to open the European newspapers in a week or two to find out. Meanwhile, back in the “I’ve been asleep for a decade department”, BBC rings in affirming the efficacy of the “global community”

Laura Trevelyan, UN correspondent

The question is what kind of sanctions against North Korea can be agreed and whether they will be effective in getting this unpredictable nation to rejoin talks on dismantling its nuclear programme.

Existing measures could be expanded - like the financial sanctions against North Korean companies involved in the nuclear programme.

Western diplomats will be watching closely to see whether China will back tough sanctions. China has been reluctant to back measures which it believes could destabilise its erratic neighbour.

Indeed, they will be just watching, as they have many times before.

Do Not Go Vote in the EU Elections

Parce que voter ça craint !
Et que nous avons tous mieux à faire ce jour là !
Ne Votez pas !

Ne votez pas aux élections européennes de 2009
Uploaded by Labaf. - Sitcom, sketch, and standup comedy videos.

La Baf claims it's useless to go vote in the June 7 elections for the European Union…

Update: La Baf's sketch has not only appeared on French TV, but also on the home page of L'Express…

Really, There’s no Pattern There at All

Tales from the crypt Coo-Coo clock: a group of adult men come out of their mosque to attack a group of 15 year olds.

"Dirty Whites! Have you no shame?" Insulted, derided, and even pushed, photographed using mobile phones, fifteen students of the Ecole de Commerce André-Chavanne had been attacked by a group of men who came out of the Mosque of the Grand Saconnex. Their crime? They kept running at the athletic track of their school "during the hours of prayer."

Of course the action was condemned – as bad for their image, while in another corner of the land of glee, the sport of that religion of peace continues. Jihad is after all, about the “inner struggle” – to suggest anything else would be bad for their image:

Yesterday's sectarian clashes were brought about by an argument between the relative of a Coptic girl who was sexually harassed by a Muslim youth, and was on a small scale. Unfortunately, Muslim fanatics in the area propagated a rumour that during the melee, the Copts hurled stones towards the Mosque. As a result thousands of Muslims gathered and attacked the Copts living in the area, and destroyed 6 shops including a pharmacy, a supermarket and some vehicles.

Dr.Gibraeel demanded from the Interior Minister Habib Al Adly to intervene to put an end to this practice of torture.

and here we all thought that they didn’t torture, giving them that magical ‘moral legitimacy’ to call Gitmo a sort of Auschwitz and Stalingrad all rolled into one. As an aside, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to find a better example on any other continent?

The incident, which took place on Wednesday, May 13, 2009,in the area of Saft El-Labn, Giza, resulted in the injury of 14 people from both sides. The police arrested 20 Copts, including 6 women, and 7 Muslims, and security imposed a curfew on the region.

Among the Copts randomly rounded up by the police is 29-year-old Sabry Shaker, a physically handicapped man suffering from infantile paralysis.

Seriously! Look out for THAT GUY!

Alas, we clueless stump-toothed Americans have so much to learn, don’t we? Especially when it comes to the kind of thing found in your hometown paper’s “variety” section, right under the church bazaars, the pie eating contest story, and the high school basketball scores:

Since the beginning of the year, the economic crisis and the various social movements have prompted a wave of protests in the capital. The prefecture of police of Paris had been a marked increase in the number of demonstrators (+ 80.6%) of the first four months of this year compared to last year, at these gatherings.

At the same time, the number of police injured during these events has increased significantly (+ 411%). "All the protesters are obviously not the thugs or do not come to do battle with the police, said a source close to the prefecture. There are employees, the unemployed, students or researchers who are mobilizing to advance their status or defend their gains. This is not questioned.

of course they obviously aren’t thugs, they just came to brain cops, is all.

Some protests are increasingly violent. "We found the presence almost instantly at some events, an organized evil of radical elements who come only to confront the police, argues Alain Gibelin, Assistant Director of DOPC. These are mainly people from the ranks of the ultra-left. In recent weeks, even in groups of Tamils in the capital, we noted the presence of elements belonging to this trend. They are highly mobile and well-organized. They also infiltrate the student demonstrations. "

NOT thugs, I repeat. NOT thugs. None of them. I mean, aren’t “we all Tamil Tigers now”?

What’s almost as predictable as a toy with a pull ring in its’ back is the retorts used when this kind of thing is reported:

Radical extreme left elements or cops in disguised to inflame the situation and cause the early incidents .. to enable their colleagues to unwind after long hours spent in the police car to play cards. As shown in duck fade, there is little time, with photographic evidence to prove their accusations!

As if there was some genuine reason that the riot cops, the steadiest work in the country, would want to basically act as the imaginary intellectual foil of every self-important Parisian wanker punk. I swear: decade after decade, it never changes.

Funny thing about exactly where it was that that “seething Arab street” the left kept telling impressionable, polite, westerners not to enflame – where it turned out to really be.

Steyn asks: Whither EUtopia?

Realistically speaking (because you know how Europeans value social pragmatism over morality): who cares. Your culture can’t compete with barbarians who idolize loitering and beheading people in a Wadi in the 8th century desert.

The joke about Mandatory Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land. But isn’t that Europe, too? And perhaps Russia and maybe Canada, a little ways down the line? Two cultures jostling within the same piece of real estate. Not long ago, I found myself watching the video of another “pro-Palestinian” protest in central London with the Metropolitan Police retreating up St. James’s Street to Piccadilly in the face of a mob hurling traffic cones and jeering, “Run, run, you cowards!” and “Allahu akbar!” You would think the deluded multi-culti progressives would understand: In the end, this isn’t about Gaza, this isn’t about the Middle East; it’s about them. It may be some consolation to an ever-lonelier Israel that, in one of history’s bleaker jests, in the coming Europe the Europeans will be the new Jews.

And history will teach them that ones’ opinions don’t count for very much of a shield, just as one of my slower Arab relatives who upon hearing any German sounding name instinctively mutters “jew” under their breathe.

Good luck with all that.