Heavenly Switzerland
From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Tue, 2007-10-09 08:18
A quote from Ian Traynor in The Guardian, 8 October 2007
Switzerland is an exercise in exceptionalism. Not least among the exceptions is that the hardline anti-foreigner campaign is coming not from a small neo-fascist party on the margins, but from the strongest political force in the country.
A quote from Elaine Sciolino in The New York Times, 8 October 2007
Unlike the situation in France, where the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen campaigned for president in the spring alongside black and ethnic Arab supporters, the SVP [Swiss People’s Party] has taken a much cruder us-against-them approach.
In a short three-part campaign film, “Heaven or Hell,” the party’s message is clear. In the first segment, young men inject heroin, steal handbags from women, kick and beat up schoolboys, wield knives and carry off a young woman. The second segment shows Muslims living in Switzerland – women in head scarves; men sitting, not working. The third segment shows “heavenly” Switzerland: men in suits rushing to work, logos of Switzerland’s multinational corporations, harvesting on farms, experiments in laboratories, scenes of lakes, mountains, churches and goats. “The choice is clear: my home, our security,” the film states.
[…] As most of the rest of Europe has moved toward unity, Switzerland has fiercely guarded its independence, staying out of the 27-country European Union and maintaining its status as a tax haven for the wealthy. It has perhaps the longest and most arduous process to become a citizen in all of Europe: candidates typically must wait 12 years before being considered.
Who says sequels are boring
Submitted by Arty on Tue, 2007-10-09 18:31.
Face it, Europe's leaders have been betraying their people with disastrous consequences for the better part of a century. The latest method of self-destruction is a cocktail of mass immigration and multiculturalism coupled with a political correctness that prevents anyone from checking the downward spiral into social calamity. It will make for interesting history if you're a spectator.
Summary
Submitted by marcfrans on Tue, 2007-10-09 17:31.
1) Goals scored (out of a total of 6 tries):
-- Kapitein Andre : 6
-- Traynor: 1
2) Surely, psychopaths have nothing to do with serious arguments (pro and contra) about immigration. So, Paganini has the better argument compared with Vanderheyden (pvdh). The latter has a minor point, however, i.e. that Paganini's choice of words was indeed not "well chosen", and as such they weaken his stronger case (on the merits). But, against that is the fact that it was pvdh who introduced the irrelevant news story of psychopaths in the first place - a dishonest tactic when arguments fail - and this immediately following reasonable observations by the Kapitein.
Heavenly Belgium
Submitted by fcal on Tue, 2007-10-09 14:36.
Since Dutroux I know Belgium is the pedophile's heaven on earth. It is clear that in such a society at least all male Belgians must be pedophiles.
Mr. Vanderheyden you are a Belgian, are you also a pedophile?
horrible story but those two
Submitted by Paganini on Tue, 2007-10-09 10:04.
horrible story but those two psychopaths with chain-saws have nothing to do with anti-immigration policies/campaigns: no political party who resists immigration is calling for this kind of sadistic bloodshed.
those psychopaths are probably neo-nazis: they have this kind of dehumanised agression, and always against africans, never against muslims (because fellow jew-haters just like them)
and never compare jews with contemporary immigrants: jews lived for centuries in Europe and were europeans, proud inhabitants of the natuionstates they lived in, without them our continent wouldn't be as superior as it once was. Third World Immigrants are intruders and parasites that don't give a fuck about Europe, and can only lower the level of our society
"Third World Immigrants are
Submitted by peter vanderheyden on Tue, 2007-10-09 12:35.
"Third World Immigrants are intruders and parasites that don't give a fuck about Europe, and can only lower the level of our society"
Notice the high level of intelligent nuance; the well chosen words; the numerable amount of evidence and the humble capacity of introspection and self-criticism without false modesty. A true delight for the eyes.
an article in the
Submitted by peter vanderheyden on Tue, 2007-10-09 09:21.
an article in the washingtonpost:
Swiss Fury at foreigners boiling over
ZURICH -- At 1:30 a.m., Antonio da Costa heard a knock at the back entrance of the McDonald's restaurant where he worked as a janitor after-hours.
He opened the door, he recalled in an interview. There stood two men, each gripping a chain saw. One yanked the cord on his saw, stepped toward da Costa and shouted above the roaring machine: "We don't need Africans in our country. We're here to kill you!"
The two masked assailants cornered da Costa and began raking him with the whirring chain-saw blades. They slashed one arm to the bone, nearly sliced off his left thumb and hacked his face, neck and chest, the 37-year-old Angolan said, his voice quavering as he recounted the May 1 attack
"These campaigns remind me of the worst times in Europe between 1930 and 1938," said Yves Patrick Delachaux, a Geneva police officer and author who has made a career of combating racism in his police department. "The same types of posters were used to encourage people to kick the Jews out. We have to be very careful with such propaganda."
Switzerland's Federal Commission Against Racism warned in a report last month that racial discrimination has become institutionalized in government agencies and that the centuries-old Swiss tradition of community decision-making has been corrupted by xenophobia.
Haeven has a strange look these days
Another Wonderful Offering from Al-Guardian
Submitted by Kapitein Andre on Tue, 2007-10-09 08:45.
Traynor: [Switzerland is] a small, wealthy country that prizes consensus, eschews conflict, and abhors violence...
A country that is so only because it was quite prepared to use violence. Mr. Traynor demonstrates a poor knowledge of Swiss history which is replete with violent incidents as the nation struggled to either gain or maintain its independence, and to resolve domestic political and religious disputes, all the while supplying the battlefields of Europe with mercenaries for centuries.
Traynor: The normally sedate city of Berne...erupted in street clashes at the weekend as hooded and masked youngsters ran riot to prevent Blocher and his supporters rallying on the Federal Square outside the parliament that closed down the day before for major refurbishment.
Leftist thugs at work.
Traynor: Some 48 hours later, the fountain area outside, where mothers walk their baby buggies and the flower sellers set up their stalls, had morphed into a battlefield. There were huge water cannon tanks, the acrid whiff of tear gas, smashed glass. Berne was burning...The young militants won...The stage was demolished. The riot police lost the battle of Berne.
Again, this is a misguided minority determined to use violence to steer Swiss democracy.
Traynor: Blocher and his SVP are very much a Swiss product - inward-looking, isolationist, anti-European, self-sufficient, and democratic. They are populists representing a strong strain of Swiss national conservatism who despise liberals and the left, but are not neo-Nazis.
True.
Traynor: But the extreme right across Europe may be following Blocher's progress with admiration and a touch of envy. In Denmark, France, Austria, Italy, or Germany you have the hard right campaigning against immigrants and immigration, against the "multi-kulti follies" of liberals and social democrats.
So? Should Swiss democracy be subverted to that nationalist parties do not take heart?
Traynor: But all of these parties are either on the fringes or seeking to command a minimum of power by propping up centrist governments. Switzerland is an exercise in exceptionalism. Not least among the exceptions is that the hardline anti-foreigner campaign is coming not from a small neo-fascist party on the margins, but from the strongest political force in the country.
Mr. Traynor earlier stated that the SVP are "not neo-Nazis", yet he is linking them to foreign neo-fascist groups merely because they oppose immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness. The Left tries to lump together all those diverse political positions that share any policies it does not approve of e.g. linking Hitler to George W. Bush.