Jose Manuel Barroso today called on Tony Blair to “stand up against public opinion” and have the “courage to ignore populism,” in relation to the forthcoming EU Council summit in Brussels. At the summit next week it is planned that the Heads of Government of the EU 27 to sign a ‘heads of agreement’ on the new Constitution.

A quote from an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, 12 June 2007

About six million Flemish subsidize four million Walloons with billions of euros a year through transfer payments. Such generosity could exhaust a homogenous society, let alone a linguistically riven one like Belgium.

The Very Revd. Rogers Govender in a letter from the Church of England to Sony over «sick» PS3 game:

For a global manufacturer to re-create the interior of any religious building such as a mosque, synagogue, or, in this case, a cathedral with photo-realistic quality, and then encourage people to have gun battles in the building is beyond belief and, in our view, highly irresponsible.

Does anybody know whether Sony indeed has a similar PS3 game playing in a mosque? And who wants to take a guess on how Muslims would react?

A quote from Mustafa Akyol at Turkish Daily News, 9 June 2007

[T]ake the term, “secular state.” For an American, this term implies a state that not just refrains from imposing religion, but also respects its role in society. But in Turkey the term “secularism” is used by most of its staunch defenders as “a way of life” that needs to be imposed on the citizens, and a warrant to suppress religious communities and movements. […] And here lies I think, the mother of many problems in Turkey. The state is just too powerful, dominant and vigilant. It is, to recall an ancient text of wisdom, like a “jealous god,” which wants to see no other identities and ideologies before him. […] If there is a “State ideology,” it is only natural that believers try to redefine it according to their value system.

This means that the much-feared “political Islam” in Turkey, which is already in decline for various other reasons, will be even weaker if the state becomes smaller and liberal. If we minimize our secular Leviathan, then there won’t be much demand for an Islamic version either.

Yesterday’s general elections in Belgium marked a significant move to the right as well as towards Flemish independence. In Wallonia, the French-speaking south of the country which lives off subsidies provided by Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north, the elections led mainly to a shift from one leftist party to another: the Parti Socialiste’s share of the Francophone vote dropped from 34.0 to 26.8% while Ecolo, the French-speaking Greens (red at the core) rose from 8.4 to 15.2%.

One of my better lectures used to “explain” Hitler’s success by putting the name of his party as a programmatic slogan under the microscope. Being young, I regarded the label as genial. However, due to the crash in total defeat, the trick appeared to be a spent PR stunt. Innocently, I also thought that getting away with the miracle cure was an indicator of German naiveté. It could only work in a crisis following upon a stable authoritarian system that got subjected to pastel-toned partial recall. The craving for security and for protection by a leader assuming “responsibility” preconditioned contemporaries to lick up the concoction spilled into their trough as though it was spilled milk and they were cats. Before we get to the present, you want to know about the ingredients of the potion that sold like bananas in a chimp-cage.

Over the last 24 hours I have heard on virtually every news service I can find, English, French, Dutch, (oddly Italian too) commentary and reports of the demonstrations in Germany to mark the G8. But nothing about what happened in St Petersburg. Indeed, if it wasn’t for my good fortune in meeting the organiser only a couple of weeks ago I would have been utterly unaware of its occurrence.

Yesterday the democratic opposition to Putin held a major demonstration in St Petersburg, in attempt to remind international business leaders invited their by the Putin Regime that it is not a democracy, but a despotism.

So well done to AP for running this report. The good news is that the police didn’t go in as they usually do with night sticks and gas. I guess this is because it is possible that one of the billionaires might notice, but I fear it is because Putin feels confident that he has marginalised freedom to such an extent that he no longer cares.

Either way, the new agenda of the mainstream press is extraordinary. Paris Hilton yes, Joseph and Big Brother yes. Even bunches of people in Rostock who hate the west yes. The descent of Russia into a new gangster dictatorship, way too complicated.

Next Sunday, the Belgians go to the polls. For various reasons the elections can hardly be called fair and democratic. Today the leadership of Vlaams Belang, Belgium’s largest party which strives for the independence of Flanders, Belgium’s Dutch-speaking northern half, met a delegation of OSCE observers to complain about various violations of the rules as outlined in the OSCE’s 2005 “Election Observation Handbook” (referred to below as EOH).

VB Senator Jurgen Ceder listed ten serious violations:
•    Electronic voting without certification procedures
•    Discrimination in campaign financing
•    Candidates and political parties do not have access to the media on a non-discriminatory basis
•    The state media are clearly biased
•    Paid political advertising in daily newspapers is available to all parties, except one
•    One political party cannot hold meetings in the capital
•    Intimidation of candidates
•    One party has been banned. Next step will be exclusion of certain candidates from the right to participate in elections
•    The number of representatives is not proportional to the size of the electorate
•    The elections in the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency are unconstitutional

A quote from Mustafa Akyol at his website, 5 June 2007:

Islamism arose in Turkey not because its Islamic tradition was prone to it. No. It arose because its secular fundamentalists kept on suppressing even the most moderate and progressive expressions of religion. And the bad news for today is that they are craving do the same thing again.

The current secularist hype in Turkey, which goes hysterical in the face of any sign of religiosity in society, is a very dangerous political force that might, once again, crush Turkish democracy and prevent the cultivation of a truly modern, moderate and yet still devout Muslim identity. The roots of the incumbent AKP, which is at the eye of the storm, is in the Islamist line of Erbakan, for sure. But the party reformed itself to a great extent and became a true heir of the Progressive Party, i.e., the “modernization within the tradition” line. Neither the AKP nor the rising modern Muslimhood in Turkish society that it largely represents should be sacrificed to the ideological rigidity of the secularist establishment, which is, despite all the changes in the world, as anti-religious, anti-capitalist, and nationalist as it was in the ’30s.

A quote from Ulf Gartzke at The Weekly Standard’s weblog, 7 June 2007

The Old Continent’s demographic trend is even more worrisome when you take into account that in Germany, between 30 and 40 percent (there are different statistics floating around) of all university-educated German women do not have any children at all. This different kind of “brain drain” should be a source of serious concern for a resource-poor country that prides itself on being the “Land of Ideas,” a driver of innovative technologies, and the world’s top exporter.