Barcelona’s main annual festival, the Festes de La Mercè, kicks into high gear on September 24, the day of the city’s patron saint, the Virgen de la Merced. Because the holiday falls on a Wednesday this year, the celebrations will be spread out over more than one week. In all, some 600 cultural events have been scheduled from September 19 to September 28. But not a single one of them will make any explicit reference to the religious origin of the event.

The Catholic Church, its leadership if not its flock, seeks common ground with Islam. It has been said that the Church sees in Islam a ray of hope for the re-spiritualization of Europe. Priests see empty churches while mosques are bulging with true believers. They see the secular society addicted to pornography, abortion, and sexual promiscuity, while the Islamic society is tightly controlled. They see the French State divided by "laïcité", while Muslim nations do not recognize separation of Church and State. And they admire Islam to the point where they overlook the dark side and delude themselves into believing that the two religions can not only co-exist, but become strengthened through mutual contacts and understanding.

At the same time as sharia law has gained official recognition as a part of the British legal system and Muslims proudly talk about conquering the Western world, a British woman has been arrested because of a supposedly "racist" doll she kept in her window. In al-Britannia a Muslim man can claim state benefits for children with multiple wives and brag about subduing the country and reducing its traditional inhabitants to second-rate citizens or worse, but you cannot have a "racially insensitive" doll in your own home, at least not if you're white.

Today, 5,000 left-wing demonstrators – self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” – prevented a peaceful gathering on Heumarkt in downtown Cologne of opponents of the Islamisation of Europe. The gathering had been planned by Pro Cologne, a conservative political party which is opposing the building of a giant mosque in the city, the fourth largest town in Germany. The mosque is to have a dome 37 meters high and two minaret stretching up 55 meters. It is being built by the Cologne branch of the department of religious affairs of Turkey, which reports directly to the Prime Minister of Turkey.

Once, Cologne had a mayor to be proud of. Konrad Adenauer, mayor of Cologne from 1917 to 1933, was a devout Catholic. An outspoken opponent of the Nazi regime (1933-1945), he played no political role in Germany until the end of the Second World War when the Americans reinstalled him as mayor of Cologne but the British dismissed him after a couple of weeks for “alleged incompetence.” Following this dismissal for “incompetence” he founded the German Christian-Democrat Party CDU and became the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949-1963) and the “father” of the modern, democratic Germany.

George Handlery about the week that was. Pies in faces. Preventive nuclear war plans. Principle for oil? Palin and Obama. Economics and blame. Good guy: his bomb was for elsewhere. Not lies are the problem: believing them is.
 
1. Pie-in-the-face. It is reported that M. Sobel, convicted in the Rosenberg case for spying for the Soviets, admits now what he has been denying. He really was a Soviet spy. Along with the convicted and executed Rosenbergs. Even this will hardly convince those who have made the innocence of the Rosenbergs into their dogma. The correctness of such positions – as are causes such as “Cuba” and “Viet Nam” which after his release Sobel “fought for” – are articles of faith. The main effect of the regret-free admission is not going to be the clarification of a case whose rational proof has been solid all along. What Sobel’s role and his causes do is to put the unrepentant Hanoi Janes and those chanting “ho, ho, ho Ho Chi Minh” once again, with a pie in their face, into the company they deserve.

It is amazing but true that Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have generally learnt a basic lesson. In most areas they cannot get money for expenses without providing receipts. Sadly it appears that the European Parliament's civil servants have learnt no such lesson. Or at least that is the lesson we learn from this missive sent out by SGPOE (Syndicat Général du Personnel des Organisations Européennes), one of the half dozen staff unions that clog up the internal emails with their vapourings.

Recently I posted an article about the Islamization of the Alsatian city of Mulhouse, and the building of a giant mosque destined to teach Islamic culture and the Arabic language to Muslims and Alsatians alike. Joachim Véliocas, writing at Islamisation, has a complementary article containing some new, some old information. He titled his article "The flag of Hamas flies over Mulhouse." Here are some excerpts:

More than 920,000 new immigrants arrived in Spain during 2007, according to data just published by the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE). This comes on top of the 802,971 new arrivals in 2006, the 682,711 new arrivals in 2005, the 645,844 new arrivals in 2004, and so on. The politically sensitive figures were released during the middle of the summer holidays, presumably in an effort to avoid their detection by the vacationing general public.
 

The Pope’s visit to France is now over, but already there are some repercussions. Benedict XVI spoke at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, delivering a discourse unanimously praised for its high intellectual level. However, Dalil Boubakeur, grand mufti of the Paris mosque, is not pleased. The reason? “The Christian roots of Europe” so often evoked by Benedict XVI. “The Muslim culture was sufficiently present in France during the Middle Ages. You cannot exclude the contribution of the Muslim civilization to French society,” Boubakeur told Le Parisien.