A quote from French police officer Patrice Ribeiro in The New York Times, 21 October 2006

Tension is rising very dramatically [in immigrant neighbourhoods]. There is the will to kill.

[You read it here first]

A quote from Charlemagne in The Economist, 21 October 2006

Restrictions on free speech are always undesirable. Holocaust-denial laws may have been justified in Germany and Austria because they helped to stop something even worse: a revival of Nazism. Yet that is surely no longer a risk in either country. And it certainly does not justify the extension of such laws to other countries where there is no real threat of Nazism, such as France and Belgium […].

A quote from Mollie Ziegler at AFF Doublethink, 26 July 2006

I am a libertarian. […] But more than a few of my fellow ideologues became libertarians solely because they’re gay, drug users, or God-haters. These people adopted the philosophy to justify their personal issues. Libertines more than libertarians, they have a visceral reaction against people who exercise moral restraint. […] What we’re fighting about, then, is not enjoyment of sex but, rather, a sexual ethic. And since the data rather consistently suggest that those with traditional sexual morality have more satisfactory sex lives, it’s high time liberals shut up about conservatives’ anti-pleasure principles.

[…] While marriage doesn’t always live up to this ideal, it’s at least built around the right archetype. […] Those on the right end of the moral spectrum do not lack imagination—they simply discipline themselves.

A quote from Dale Hurd on CBN.com, 16 October 2006

In southern Germany last week I met members of 4 home schooling families who are being punished by the German government for home schooling.

Three of the home schooling fathers I talked to had already been jailed. And the day after this video was shot, another home schooling father we talked to, Waldemar Block, was taken away to jail. Then two days after our visit, Olga Block, wife of Waldemar’s brother Alexander, was taken to jail.

The European Union gave the Palestinians $342.8 million in aid in 2005 — or, more accurately, $612.15 million when assistance from the 25 EU governments is included. Even the United States has repeatedly donated millions of American tax dollars to the Palestinian Authority, though not at EU levels. In July 2005, as a response to the Islamic terrorist attacks on London a few days earlier, leaders of the G8, the group of influential industrialized nations, offered the PA some $9 billion, dubbed an “alternative to the hatred.”

Why has the French government now chosen to punish its citizens for denying the Armenian genocide? On Thursday 12 October, the lower house of the French Parliament adopted a bill which would provide a jail sentence and a heavy fine to anyone denying the genocide committed by Ottoman Turks against the Armenians in 1915. The bill was passed in the National Assembly by 106 votes to 19. The punishment to be issued for the denial of the Armenian genocide – set at a maximum of one year prison term and 45,000 euros (£30,000) fine – is equal to the punishment already dealt under French law for the denial of the holocaust. To many states in the international community – in particular Turkey – this move aggressively counters an already problematic Turkish law, under which a writer may be prosecuted for the opposite: proposing that there were a set of atrocities in 1915 that the government should accept as “genocide”.  

A quote from the late Ralph Harris in The Times, 20 October 2006

Keep clear of politics. Politics is bad for you. It leads to compromise and deals and confusion and vote-getting and lying and cheating and all these, in the end.

I visited my journalistic mentor and friend Seth Lipsky, the editor of The New York Sun, for whom I worked at The Wall Street Journal Europe in the late 1980s. Seth hasn’t changed. I had barely been in for five minutes or he had set me to work, writing an obituary for Ralph Harris, which will be in tomorrow’s Sun.

I cannot do a better job than Helen Szamuely, however, who writes in her obituary for Ralph that “We shall not see his like again.” He was one of the most generous and inspiring men I have known. I know that most of his friends are as moved by his death as I am. He will be missed by many – not just in Britain, but all over Europe and even in America.

A quote from Helen’s obituary:  “Ralph Harris came from a working class family in north London, [...]. He knew the importance of good education for people who wanted to rise and achieve; he [...] knew that the working classes had been perfectly capable of looking after themselves and their families; [he] knew how destructive the welfare state, imposed largely by do-gooding middle class politicians, had been to working class families and, beyond that, to the whole of this country’s society.”

I arrived in New York very late last night (early morning in Europe). The flight had a three hour delay and I was jetlagged but I did an impromptu interview with Pamela of Atlas Shrugs, which can be seen on her weblog.

This morning (NY time) the news reached me of the death of Lord Harris of High Cross. Ralph was a dear old friend of my wife and me. He played a very important role in helping me establish the Centre for the New Europe and we could always count on his help on many, many occasions. I will miss him. By being loyal to Britain he was a truly great European.

A quote from Jurgen Ruttgers, Governor (Christian-Democrat) of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia, in Newsweek, 23 October 2006:

[German] Conservatives must abandon the ‘lie’ that tax cuts help the economy.