George Handlery about the week that was. Rejection, quotas, under- and over-achieving minorities. Exploiting refugee status. When cowardice is masked as tolerance. Old procedures for new crimes? Health care, the budget savings and the deficit.

1. The hope of an easily attained good life and ignorance regarding the country and the working of advanced societies attracts large numbers of Gypsies to Canada. At this time, the place of departure is Hungary. With the help of totally distorted reports of the situation prevailing in there and also aided by a skill to say the right things at the right places, the Roma arrive. They travel with tourist visas and upon their arrival, they request refugee status. This is generally refused because Canadian Immigration knows that Hungary, but also the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, etc. are “safe countries”. The Gypsies’ movement-to-paradise is aided and amplified by shady organizations. They feed the eager press with stories of persecution at home while they recruit candidates for export and generously organize their trip. A profit is made as the migrants to the land of milk and honey sell their possessions at a discount. Doing so means burning all bridges to proceed on a road that leads to nowhere. As a result, after their forced return, these “refugees” are totally destitute. Reportedly, Canada is considering the reintroduction of visas – a requirement that had only been suspended a few months ago.

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Herman Van Rompuy. Get used to the name. He is the first President of the European Union, which with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon by all the 27 EU member states in early November was transformed into a genuine United States of Europe.

The President of Europe has not been elected; he was appointed in a secret meeting of the heads of government of the 27 EU member states. They chose one of their own. Herman Van Rompuy was the Prime Minister of Belgium. I knew him when he was just setting out, reluctantly, on his political career.

To understand Herman, one must know something about Belgium, a tiny country in Western Europe, and the prototype of the EU. Belgians do not exist as a nation. Belgium is an artificial state, constructed by the international powers in 1830 as a political compromise and experiment. The country consists of 6 million Dutch, living in Flanders, the northern half of the country, and 4 million French, living in Wallonia, the southern half. The Belgian Dutch, called Flemings, would have preferred to stay part of the Netherlands, as they were until 1830, while the Belgian French, called Walloons, would have preferred to join France. Instead, they were forced to live together in one state.

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The environmental lobby gradually succeeds in promoting "the environment" to the "Golden Calf" of the 21st century. Rationality and sense of proportion have  vanished from the environmental debate. Whoever questions Al Gore's climate alarmism gets labeled as "negationist" worse even than Holocaust deniers. Even human rights, democracy and prosperity give way to the new idolatry.

Recent research however learns how much the climate alarmists exaggerate “global warming” an its effects. Anti-globalist motives seem to dominate the Copenhagen Climate Conference rather than environmental concerns. This hidden agenda is likely to distort global trade and inflict development and the environment far more bad than good.

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The newspapers and the bookies say that Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy is one of the top candidates for the job as the first “EU President.” A glance at his recent career reveals that he is indeed the “perfect” candidate for the job. As Speaker in the Belgian federal Parliament, he changed the locks to the plenary session room overnight in order to prevent a gathering of parliamentarians from taking place. Who would better fit as the head of an organization that forces member-states to organize a second referendum when the first one doesn't give the desired result?

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On Friday November 14 Novopress had warned of possible violence if Algeria lost a soccer match against Egypt. Algeria did lose on Saturday night and, as predicted, Algerian immigrants in France turned violent. The following very short video shows a scene of a boat burning in the port of Marseilles.

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The book that inspired this text was The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by Rémi Brague, a French professor and specialist of medieval religious philosophy. He is also the author of the fine book Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, which I have written an extensive essay about previously. Thematically this text overlaps to some extent with some of the material from my book Defeating Eurabia. I will supplement it with some quotes from two good online interviews with Mr. Brague.

Medieval Muslims were reluctant to travel to infidel lands. According to Islamic jurists Muslims should not stay for too long in the lands of non-Muslims if they cannot live a proper Muslim life there. Muslims had little knowledge of or interest in any Western languages. Only Italian had some currency for commercial purposes, but mainly involving Jews and Eastern Christians, especially Greeks and Armenians. Few Muslims knew any non-Muslim languages well, the knowledge of which was considered unnecessary or even suspect.

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Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak cancelled a November 4 and 5 visit to Spain amid a dispute over the command of the European-led United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The visit was called off after reports surfaced that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had secretly asked Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to keep Italy in command of the 13,000-strong UNIFIL force for six months longer than planned, instead of allowing Spain to take over.

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The Telegraph is reporting that the Conservative Party is investigating its so-called Conservative Muslim Forum. Remarkably, it wasn’t its radical opinions [pdf], its apparent support of Hamas, or even its linking to the website of Ta-Ha publishers, which, as I mentioned last year, is an online bookstore that sells books on sharia, along with the odd conspiracy theory. It has come to the attention of the party that text on the CFM website has been lifted from IslamOnline, founded and co-owned by hate preacher, and terrorism promoter, Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

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George Handlery about the week that was. The killing spree in Ft. Hood. Snake medicine and the snakes. Ignore what you see, believe what they say. How to legalize the Sharia without alarming anyone. Aid to the destitute, poverty through aid.

1. In the past, this writer has repeatedly handled themes related to political correctness. This was done to depict it as an idiocy that survives because so many of us are too foolish or cowardly to defy it. No wonder, the unmasked doubters of PC are quickly tagged as “bad human beings”. Now, we find out that that the killer’s associates had suspicions regarding the Ft. Hood murderer. These reservations concerning his political reliability and commitment were shared by the Major’s superiors. No one dared to undertake anything to deal with the problem that signaled itself through Hasan’s statements and his behavior. It was not the amount and the weight of the evidence that held back the concerned. It was that no one wished to jeopardize his career. Everybody stood in danger of being labeled a “racist” for speaking up and for stating what in PC terms was not supposed to exist at all. Such as that Hasan rated what he considered to be Islam’s command, more highly than his sworn duty to America.) The conclusion: PC is at its best stupid in its motives and ridiculous in their outcome. The case at hand demonstrates that PC also kills. Not only in Texas.

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I have addressed Eric L. Gans and his theory of language and culture previously in The Brussels Journal, and with enough of a response that revisiting the topic seems justified.  In what follows I wish to present the essentials of Gansian theory and to bring under discussion Gans’s latest book, which deserves attention and can be read and understood by those who are not familiar with the author’s earlier work; I want also to discuss Gans’ first book, where the author initially presented his notion that signification and institutions have a common punctual or “evenemential” origin.  I should divulge that I studied with Gans at UCLA during my days as a graduate fellow in comparative literature in the 1980s and that I wrote my dissertation – an anthropological discussion of the modern long poem – under Gans’ supervision.  When I write of Gans, I do so as a former student and a longtime friend.  I hope, by the way, before the year ends, to devote an essay to another theoretician of language, Owen Barfield.   

 

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Speculations whether the Icelandic government’s application for membership of the European Union is really serious are quite understandable. The government is totally split on the issue, the Icelandic parliament only voted narrowly in favour of the application this summer and the people are utterly opposing it. The step is completely premature with all the wrong circumstances at hand.

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It’s been nearly two decades since the United Nations repealed the General Assembly Resolution that equated Zionism with racism. Yet “Zionism equals racism” became the mantra of the radical Left and their Islamofascist allies, and, it seems, some are trying to twist the logic still further: If Zionism equals racism, then “Zionists” (and let’s not forget their neocon allies) must be connected to neo-fascist parties and organizations – the Left’s traditional enemy.

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  An article by Robert S. Wistrich

On November 9, 1938, a massive nation-wide anti-Jewish pogrom took place during peacetime across the entire territory of the Third Reich. The pretext for this orgy of violence against German Jews was the shooting in Paris two days earlier of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish-Jewish refugee. The state-organized pogrom, instigated by Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, resulted in the burning or damaging of more than a thousand synagogues; the ransacking of about 7,500 businesses, the murder of at least 91 Jews, and the deportation of another 30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. This murderous onslaught against German Jewry, cynically described by the Nazis as the “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht), was a major turning point on the road to the “Final Solution” of the so-called “Jewish Question.” It signified that the Nazi regime had crossed a Rubicon and would no longer be deterred by Western public opinion in its “war against the Jews.” The economic expropriation of German Jewry, its complete social ostracism and public humiliation swiftly followed. Jews were banned from public transport, from frequenting concerts, theaters, cinemas, commercial centers, beaches, or using public benches. Only a fortnight after “Crystal Night,” the SS journal, Das Schwarze Korps, chillingly prophesied the final end of German Jewry through “fire and sword” and its imminent complete annihilation.

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Chapter 1:   Harpo ÷ Gekko = Monkey Business x Terminal Greed
 
The Sprocket of History
 

This series has been written against the background of one of the most momentous events in history: the unraveling of the wealthiest, most powerful and most hopeful empire the world has ever known: the United States of America.

The orgy of U.S. government spending on every too-big-to-fail bankster or too-loud-to-ignore “social justice” race huckster is accelerating daily, funded by phantom dollars printed by the government or extracted otherwise from the value of its subjects’ savings. The banksters’ main column is feasting on the taxpayers’ dollars while in a maneuver worthy of Patton, the Goldman Sachs cavalry detachment has been sent to secure the perimeter of a socialist White House.

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