This story is extremely serious. The European Union is now about to do what senior officials have already agreed upon years ago in meetings with Muslim nations, as documented by Bat Ye'or in her book about Eurabia: To officially recognize sharia law in European countries:

Europeans have greeted the news of Sarah Palin’s nomination for Vice President of the United States with a predictable mixture of anger, frustration, resentment and resignation. After more than a year of uncritically praising Barack Obama as a supernatural figure destined by fate to solve all of the world’s problems, European elites are suddenly coming to terms with the unwelcome possibility that the junior senator from Illinois might just be another human being after all.

George Handlery about the week that was. The Neo-Soviet mind-set. Coexistence with a dominator? How not to be a Yankee vassal. Power, cooperation and security. A third-world base for first world power. Personal success as the triumph of freedom. About compromises the sacrificial lambs. Stalin-cult and policy. “Respect.”
 
1. The symptoms of “if you dread to fix it, cover it with masking tape” are appearing. Accordingly, Russia is, as under her previous systems, insecure. Recognition and respect by the West is wanted. Post Soviet times brought humiliation. The equality of living standards was not achieved while equality in power was lost. Material progress was not shared by the masses. Meanwhile, their lack of knowledge precluded the perception of fundamental achievements. This left power as the measuring rod comprehended by all. Therefore, losing control over land that the Tsars or Stalin had conquered is painful. Wanting to separate from Russia implies ungrateful rejection in favor of a superior foreign entity. This confirms the fear of being inferior because one seased to be superior.

Yesterday evening youths in Kuregem, an immigrant neighbourhood of Brussels, threw stones at buses of the Flemish public transport company De Lijn. No passengers got hurt though the buses, heading for Flanders, the Dutch-speaking area surrounding Brussels, were damaged and windows were shattered. The youths were said to be angry because earlier in the day Flemish politicians had tried to hold a vigil for the victims of the 2001 9/11 attacks in Manhattan.

The Irish Times interviews Eamon Gilmore, the Irish Labour leader in today’s edition, and a classic federast political line comes out. “Irish people needed to stop being fixated on the treaty,” he said. Of course it isn’t the Irsh people who are ‘fixated’ on the Treaty after all they defeated it and legally killed it. Instead, it is the Irish political class who are fixated on finding any means by which they can overturn the Referendum result.

Gianni Alemanno, the Mayor of Rome, has got into trouble again for having made remarks which have been interpreted as favourable to fascism. Shortly after his election as Mayor in May, Alemanno was trapped by an English journalist into saying that not everything Mussolini did was evil: the headline above his piece attributed to him remarks he had not made. The same thing has happened now with an interview in the liberal Milan daily, Corriere della sera. Alemanno said that some people supported fascism in good faith and that the regime itself was not “absolute evil”. What was absolutely evil, he said, were the racial laws of 1938 and the concessions thereby made to Nazism.

The leader of Afrikan Youth in Norway (yes, we have several state-sponsored organizations for Africans in Norway), the Norwegian-Nigerian (at least that's the official term, he appears to think more as a Nigerian than as a Norwegian) Sam Chimaobi Ahamba suggests that Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is a freedom fighter, and that the Western media focus on him stems from Western (meaning white racist) anger at an African freedom fighter. "Yes, people get beat up and women get raped, but this happens in all countries, not just in Zimbabwe. But only Zimbabwe generates this incredible media attention," says Ahamba.

One would think the visit to Paris by the Pope would be considered an important event. Not so, if we judge by the official website of the city of Paris. In the agenda of cultural events you will find the current and future events scheduled in the Capital, for example: the Ramadan vigils, the Ramadan concert and the annual Communist shindig called Fête de l'Humanité (which will take place in Courneuve in Seine-Saint-Denis, and not in Paris). While there is ample information about Ramadan, no mention is made of the Pope’s coming.

It’s September and millions of unfortunate Spaniards, having just finished four full weeks of paid summer holidays, are confronting the unbearable trauma of heading back to work. And as happens every year around this time, an armada of psychologists, psychiatrists and sundry other mental health specialists, many of whom are feeding off of the largesse of the social welfare state, are offering their services to those afflicted with an ailment that Spaniards call “Post-Vacation Syndrome.”

As German journalist Henryk Broder put it after the 2006 riots over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad: "Objectively speaking, the cartoon controversy was a tempest in a teacup. But subjectively it was a show of strength and, in the context of the 'clash of civilizations,' a dress rehearsal for the real thing. The Muslims demonstrated how quickly and effectively they can mobilize the masses, and the free West showed that it has nothing to counter the offensive -- nothing but fear, cowardice and an overriding concern about the balance of trade. Now the Islamists know that they are dealing with a paper tiger whose roar is nothing but a tape recording."