Last October 28th French Muslim “youths” arsoned a public transport bus in Marseille. A 26-year old female student from Senegal, Mama Galledou, sustained severe burns over 60% of her body when she was unable to get off the bus in time. Mama fought for her life in hospital and survived, though she will be marked for the rest of her life.

As reported recently by the German press, criminals are manipulating the German bottle deposit system on a massive scale in order to make money. They are manufacturing bottles, falsifying the product codes and then returning the self-made bottles to supermarkets throughout Germany.

A quote from Teresa Küchler at EUobserver, 16 November 2006

EU member states are lining up to attack a European Commission proposal to establish common rules for cross-border divorces […]. The proposal – called Rome III and presented last July – sets out which national legislation should apply in the case of a couple of two nationalities or a couple living in their non-native country […]. Rome III would impose the law of the country where they live or have the strongest ties to. […] [A] Swedish justice ministry document [describes] a potential scenario in which […] a Swedish woman who marries an Iranian man in Sweden and emigrates to Iran but after several years decides to leave both her spouse and his country and go home. “The proposal means that Iranian divorce law would be applied by the Swedish court,” the justice ministry study states.

This month’s re-issuance of the British historian Alistair Horne’s seminal A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 is garnering its fair share of attention in the press, chiefly due to ostensible similarities between the United States’ current predicament in Iraq and France’s Algerian quagmire sixty years ago. The analogy seems apt on its face, but has been disputed on a number of grounds, most effectively by Christopher Hitchens, who noted that the presence of the French pieds noirs alone completely transformed the equation for French policymakers. I would also add that the prospect of sectarian violence was a nightmare not for the French during the Algerian conflict, but rather for the rebellious Front de Liberation Nationale, which had nationalistic goals wholly opposite those of Iraqi insurgents.

Geoff Hoon, the rather pointless British “Minister for Europe,” was wandering round the Strasburg Parliament in small circles yesterday. Every few seconds he looked at his Blackberry, obviously desperate that somebody wanted to get hold of him. They didn’t. A veteran hack, one Jim Gibbons who remembered him as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), seeing his lack of stuff to do, hailed him,
“Geoff, what are you doing?”
Hoon’s response was priceless,
“Absolutely nothing, just being here.”

A quote from Dick Cheney, 7 April 1991

I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government would we have? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular along the lines of the Ba’ath Party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all.

George Weigel’s 2005 book about the culture war in Europe between secularists and Christians bears the title The Cube and the Cathedral. The cube refers to a symbol of secularism, the Great Arch of La Défense in Paris.

I have argued repeatedly that there is a three way culture war going on in Europe between secularists, Christians and Muslims. On some issues Christians and secularists team up against Muslims, on other issues secularists fight Christians and Muslims alike. Early this year George Weigel adopted my concept of the three way culture war, most notably in an article in Commentary last May.

Now, however, radical Muslims are also claiming the cube as their symbol. Islamists have taken offense at an Apple store in Manhattan because the building is cube-shaped as is the Ka’ba in Mecca. An Islamist website claims the Apple store “is meant to provoke Muslims.” However, as Professor Kemal Silay writes, “Islamists have been struggling to turn any Western object that they can imagine into a so-called ‘insult to Islam.’ As a Muslim myself, I see no insult to Islam in a computer store but I see plenty of it in Islamism itself.”

At the beginning of the 21st century, Europe is being Islamized, while China is being Christianized. This proves that if God exists He must have a sense of humor. Buddhism and Taoism still claim most worshippers in China but the state-sanctioned churches count up to 35 million followers. The underground churches are estimated to have 80 million members or more, about 12 million of them Catholics, the rest Protestants.

In February 2003, I participated in a massive anti-war demonstration in London because I did not believe a democratic government could be installed in Iraq. The Anglo-American forces did not seem to understand the proper conditions on which they could rest a modern Western government. Today, however, Britain should not follow the dishonourable turncoats in the American Democratic Party and in the British press advocating a sudden exit from Iraq.

A quote from the editorial of La Civiltà Cattolica, October 2006

[...] [T]o combat terrorism effectively [we must] avoid political and military gestures that could appear as actions meant to combat, humiliate, and deride the Islamic peoples. In particular, a fair solution must be sought for the volatile Israeli-Palestinian question, which, according to the viewpoint shared by the entire Islamic world, is a serious wound, because the West has appropriated and given to the Jews an Islamic territory that is ‘sacred’ to Allah and belongs to Muslims ‘by divine law’ until the end of time. It is true that some of the Palestinian authorities and people are willing to accept the existence of the state of Israel, but it can also be recalled that the statute of Hamas, from August 18, 1988, says in article 15: ‘[...] In the face of the usurpation of Palestine on the part of the Jews, we must raise the banner of jihad’.