I decided to write this essay after a comment from a journalist, not a Leftist by my country’s standards, who dismissed Eurabia as merely a conspiracy theory, one on a par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I do not disagree with the fact that conspiracy theories exist, nor that they can be dangerous. After all, the Protocols and the Dolchstosslegende, or “stab in the back myth – the idea that Germany didn’t lose WW1 but was betrayed by Socialists, intellectuals and Jews – helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis before WW2.

A quote from Joshua Trevino at Claremont’s The Remedy, 30 September 2006

The war on terror as set forth by the President has been riddled with profound conceptual and rhetorical flaws from the start: beginning with the White House-promulgated phrase “war on terror” itself, which has all the sense of labeling the Second World War in Europe as the “war against mechanized divisions.” This odd call to warfare against a method – fighting a verb rather than a noun, so to speak – was done specifically to avoid offending Muslims. [...] How is it that this President may grasp the value of wartime steadfastness better than any since Truman – and utterly miss the value of forthright honesty in wartime policy discourse, not least with oneself, as poorly as any since Johnson?

Three weeks ago, shots were fired from an automatic rifle at the synagogue in Oslo. This led to a huge debate in the Norwegian press, in which some interesting comments appeared.

In the old days, people used to talk about “death before dishonor.” In our age, this has become “death before discrimination.” Westerners would rather get killed by Islamic terrorists than do profiling of Muslims, because this would be “racism,” which has thus quite literally become a mortal sin, perhaps the only sin left in a world where there is no good or bad and everything is permissible and “equal.”

Yesterday the Belgian authorities decided to provide police protection for people working in the Brussels prisons of Vorst and Sint-Gillis. The decision was taken after two jailers, on their way to work, were attacked on a Brussels tram. Immigrant youths called them “assassins” and threatened them with knives. All the prison employees are now escorted by the police on their way to the car park or to the nearby train station.

Lívia Járóka

The Parliament Magazine, an in house journal of the European Parliament (EP) that exists almost unnoticed but very well funded through advertisers who think that they are getting access to lawmakers, is running a MEP of the year competition. OK, bit of silliness but not essentially harmful. One of the candidates is the Hungarian Gypsy MEP called Lívia Járóka. A number of young assistants, possibly taken with her undoubted charms sent out a round robin email lobbying for her.

She is marvelous in every way according to the blurb. However one of the Bulgarians who are pretending to be MEPs while they wait for EU enlargement decided to take issue with their copy. Over to you, Dimitar Stoyanov:

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) does not protect European citizens against Hitler’s laws. On 11 September the Strasburg-based court ruled that the (German) State may deny parents the right to homeschool their children. The EU Court’s decision [pdf] states that the right to education “by its very nature calls for regulation by the State.”

A quote from Gary North at mises.org, 31 August 2006

The idea that businessmen are strong defenders of the free enterprise system is one which is believed only by those who have never studied the history of private enterprise in the Western, industrial nations. What businessmen are paid to worry about is profit. The problem for the survival of a market economy arises when the voters permit or encourage the expansion of government power to such an extent that private businesses can gain short-term profits through the intervention into the competitive market by state officials. Offer the typical businessman the opportunity to escape the constant pressures of market competition, and few of them are able to withstand the temptation.

Last night Brussels police arrested 53 youths, including 19 minors, in the Marollen neigbourhood. The area had seen heavy rioting the previous nights. Some of the arrested immigrants were carrying combustibles. One schack was set alight and one car was torched. The police said there were no serious incidents. Yesterday afternoon Freddy Thielemans, the Mayor of Brussels, told journalists at a press conference that of the 45 youths arrested the previous night 31 were known to the police for a total of 242 crimes. The Mayor emphasized that the riots were the work of youth gangs and cannot be compared to last year’s riots in France since there had been no direct confrontations between the police and the rioters.

A quote from [Belgian rock singer] Arno Hintjens in an interview with ZoomIn.tv:

I think Brussels is a great city. It smells well too. The city smells of shit. But, good shit. "La merde", but good "merde".  This Brussels spirit, which is at the same time very Belgian, whether it's Flemish, French, Chinese, Arab... I always say: Brussels is one of the only Arab cities which is not in a state of war. I mean this in a positive way.  It might sound naive, sometimes even aggressive, but... it's the future.