Suppose the foiled terror plot in the UK had not been foiled and thousands of innocents had perished aboard planes heading for the United States. I fear that one of the scenes we would have witnessed would have been one we witnessed following 9/11: scenes of celebration and jubilation in certain boroughs and banlieus of major European cities.

Never before has the West faced an enemy like this. It is an enemy who is prepared to blow up thousands of innocent people in suicide actions, but it is also one who lives in our midst. As in the 1930s the Europeans prefer to appease the enemy. Drawing people’s attention to the fact that he is living in our midst is regarded as hate-mongering. Thou shalt not hate the enemy, let alone fight him, thou shalt appease him.

A quote from Xinhua (Communist China’s official press agency), 12 August 2006

The number of murders and attempted murders in Belgium has increased 35 percent over the past 5 years, new figures revealed on Friday. [...] A spokesman for Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt blamed the rise on vigilantes. [... He] said Belgian people who have lost faith in the state’s ability to maintain law and order are taking the law into their own hands. [He] also accused the extreme right Flemish Interest [Vlaams Belang] of creating a climate of fear and hostility in society. [...] Murders such as the mp3 robbery and killing at Brussels Central station in April have been blamed on materialism and the lack of social cohesion.

Following Prof Glenn Reynolds’ appeal to the American blogging community to write to the Belgian Embassy and protest the harassing of The Brussels Journal, Prof Kenneth Anderson wrote to the embassy in Washington DC. This is the answer he got:

Dear Sir:

In response to your mail I wanted to inform you that Belgium is a democracy in which the freedom of expression and a free press are guaranteed by the constitution and the legal system.

A major terror plot has been disrupted in the UK. The plan was to blow up five to ten airliners above the Atlantic, on their way from Heathrow to the US. Airlines that were targeted: United, American, Continental. 21 people arrested - most of them Pakistanis - possibly up to fifty were involved. This could have been much bigger than 9/11.

Sounds like a remake of Operation Bojinka from 1995:

The aircraft would have blown up over the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea almost simultaneously. If this plan worked, several thousand would have perished, and air travel would have been shut down worldwide for days, if not weeks. The U.S. government estimated the prospective death toll to be about 4,000 if the plot had been executed.

This morning the police came to my door again to question me about allegedly racist articles on The Brussels Journal. I was not in. Tonight the local police phoned to “invite” me urgently to the police station. In Belgium any leftist or totalitarianist can lodge a complaint against “internet racism” through a Belgian government website and the judiciary starts an investigation. Apparently someone in Ghent has lodged a complaint against this website. I am not allowed to know who this person is, but I am requested to come to the police station to be interrogated. I told the officer that I refuse to justify my writings for anonymous complaints. “I am not living in the Soviet Union,” I told him (though I fear I am).

As a matter of principle I will not go to the police station. I defend the freedom of the press, which implies the right of journalists not to be questioned by the authorities about articles and opinions that they write or edit. I told the officer that if the police wants to question me they will have to arrest me. The Belgian authorities are clearly intent on intimidating us and closing down this website.

The Italian government stopped the proposed merger between Autostrade, Italy’s largest motorway company, and its Spanish counterpart Abertis. In a joint statement the infrastructure minister Antonio Di Pietro and the minister for economic affairs Tommaso Padoa Schioppa say that the merger violates the terms of the 1999 privatization, under which no construction company can enter the Autostrade shareholding. Abertis’ main shareholder is Grupo ACS, the world’s third largest construction company, that would hold a 12.5 percent stake in the new company resulting from the merger.

We need to talk about immigration. In modern Britain, the criticism of religions and the public defences of immigration tend to coincide. Equally, the discussions of immigration tend to occur when religious cultures have achieved a tense climax in their historical trajectories. However, many seem to neglect the case that debates concerned with religious divisions are irrevocably bound to the necessary debate over immigration vis-à-vis nationhood. Given our defences of a freedom of opinion on religious matters, it now seems that we must also confront a similar freedom of opinion on immigration. That old ghost of the holocaustal European conscience – immigration – must be opened to free debate without religious minority groups warning of Nazis or other pathetic antiquated reports on extremely unlikely events. That discussion on immigration, religious culture and nationhood is absolutely essential if we are to begin discussing them sensibly.

A quote from Frank Furedi on Spiked-online, 4 August 2006

Marie Stopes International, one of the sponsors of Masturbate-a Thon, warns that “in our work all over the world, every day we see the consequences of fertile orgasms”. The denigration of the experience of a fertile orgasm expresses a profound sense of unease with human passion, particularly when it has life-creating consequences. Here, traditional prudishness is displaced by a far more lifeless dread of acting on spontaneous desire. Sadly, this dread also haunts sex education in schools, as instructors attempt to scare children from having sex by emphasising the emotional costs of such an experience. As one factsheet targeting teenagers claims, masturbation is “satisfying without risks”. From this standpoint, whether an act is morally right or wrong is determined by whether it has consequences.

Flemish blogger Dog of Flanders has discovered another quirky set of captions. Spot the differences.

Belgium is one of the few countries where the liberal agenda has been pushed so far that, apart from abortion and gay marriage, euthanasia is also allowed by law. However, “market failure” is now jeopardizing the right of Belgians to die. The standard euthanasia procedure in Belgium (as in the Netherlands) is through injection with an overdose of the drug Pentothal. Brussels’ leading euthanasiast, Prof Wim Distelmans, complained in the Belgian press today that the supply of the drug to Belgium has all but stopped since Abbott Laboratories, the American pharmaceutical company that used to produce Pentothal, transferred the production to its spin-off Hospira in 2004.