A quote from Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice, 26 April 2007

There is no homophobia in the Catholic Church and it is time that all this [the allegations by the European Parliament that Christian religious leaders are homophobic] ended. There needs to be more respect [on the part of the European Parliament] for the orientation of our people. There is no need to tell lies.

I know al-Guardian is not the best yardstick, but this article illustrates the kind of myths that have now penetrated deep into Western universities.

Soumaya Ghannoushi writes in yesterday’s al-Guardian about Europe’s Islamic self:

The “west”, as it conceives of itself, is a gigantic lie… Although the Greek Hellenistic and the Christian traditions were undoubtedly vital in the west's evolution, so too were other elements from which it has sought to distance itself and assert its difference.
At the forefront of these expelled forefathers, these banished ancestors, is the Islamic… Without the gifts of Islamic civilisation in philosophy and astronomy, mathematics and physics, art and architecture, “modern” Europe would have been virtually impossible.'

“We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!”

A quote from?

Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovksy has warned that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. When people who have worked on higher levels in the EU system note similarities as well, it is time people start taking this idea seriously.

In 2002 Louis Michel, the then Belgian minister of foreign affairs and today a member of the European Commission, told the Belgian parliament that the EU will eventually encompass North Africa and the Middle East as well as Europe. The MEDA programme, the principal financial instrument for the implementation of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, between 2000-2006 spent €5,350 million on its various programs, according to the EU’s official website. During the period 1995-1999, some 86% of the resources allocated to MEDA were channelled to Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and the Palestinian Authority.

On a cold winter’s day I visited a fashion conscious teacher. It was hot in her apartment. Yet she refused to lower the heat of the radiators because the tile floor in the hall still felt cold. She was in the habit of walking through the apartment barefoot in a bathrobe after her evening shower. Shortly before she had expressed to me her worries about the increase of CO2-emissions and about evil George Bush junior for not ratifying the Kyoto-protocol.

As a non-Christian, I have been complimenting Christianity for contributing immensely to many of the positive aspects of our culture. But precisely because Christianity has so profoundly shaped our culture, isn’t it plausible that it may also, at least indirectly, have contributed to some of the flaws that currently ail us as well?

According to the blogger Conservative Swede, whom I have debated this issue with at some length, Christian ethics is more unfettered in modern liberalism than it is in Christianity itself. The West, and Europe in particular, is sometimes labeled as “post-Christian,” but this is only partly true. We have scrapped the Christian religion, but we have still retained some of the moral restraints associated with it, which have been so mired into our cultural DNA that we probably don’t even think about them as Christian anymore. Yet our humanitarian ideas are secular versions of Christian compassion, and it is Christian or post-Christian compassion that compels us to keep feeding and funding the unsustainable birth rates in other cultures, even actively hostile ones. Likewise, there are elements of Christian thought, such as universalism, that could be seen as the inspiration behind our one-world Multiculturalists.

This is how our code-breakers at Bletchley must have felt when a fully operational Enigma machine fell into their hands. After months of guesswork, we finally understand the enemy’s intentions. This single providential discovery could, my friends, represent the turning point of the entire campaign.

I am clutching in my hot, trembling hands the most extraordinary document I have come across in eight years of Euro-politics. It is a letter from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to her fellow EU heads of government. In it, she proposes a scheme to bring back the constitution under a new name – or, as she artlessly puts it, “to use different terminology without changing the legal substance”.

A quote from Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the UK Islamic Human Rights Commission, commenting on the decision to allow women to wear the niqab [the full veil] in British courts, 24 April 2007

In the climate of Islamophobia we live in, it is heartening to see the courts base their guidelines on the merits rather than on intolerance and prejudice.

A quote from Bat Ye’or at FrontpageMagazine.org, 26 April 2007

Britain has become the barking dog of its protectors: both Islamists and Palestinians. This situation is not limited to Great Britain, but maybe because it was one of the proudest and most powerful countries in Europe, one of the three major victors of World War II, that this wilful decline and abasement are so traumatic.

A quote from Lawrence Auster at his blog, 26 April 2007

Poland belongs to a transnational body that exercises real authority over member states. This body, the European Union, forbids discrimination against homosexuals. Poland thinks it is in accord with the law to protect homosexuals from discrimination, even as it seeks to ban the promotion of homosexuality! Probably the Poles think that anti-homosexual discrimination consists of things like outright persecution, incitement of hatred and violence, and so forth. But the EU evidently interprets anti-homosexual discrimination as any statement or policy that suggests that homosexuality is in any way less good for human beings than heterosexuality. Where the EU thinking ultimately ends up, of course, is a law like the Sexual Orientation Regulations in Britain, which make it unlawful even for a Catholic adoption agency not to adopt children to same-sex couples. I don't think the Poles realize yet what they have gotten into. They have subjected their country to an egalitarian juggernaut that will not stop until it has eliminated every conceivable type of anti-minority discrimination from every square inch - excuse me, every square centimeter – of the cosmos.

A quote from Melanie Phillips in The Daily Mail, 23 April 2007

Our culture is now deep into uncharted territory. Generations of family disintegration in turn are unravelling the fundamentals of civilised human behaviour. Committed fathers are crucial to their children’s emotional development. As a result of the incalculable irresponsibility of our elites, however, fathers have been seen for the past three decades as expendable and disposable.

Lone parenthood stopped being a source of shame and turned instead into a woman’s inalienable right. The state has provided more and more inducements to women — through child benefit, council flats and other welfare provision — to have children without committed fathers. This has produced generations of women-only households, where emotionally needy girls so often become hopelessly inadequate mothers who abuse and neglect their own children — who, in turn, perpetuate the destructive pattern. This is culturally nothing less than suicidal. A society reproduces itself by nurturing and protecting its young. If it abuses and harms its children instead, it will end up abusing and harming itself.