George Handlery on the week that was. Human rights: the apes are in charge of the bananas. Citizens' rights to enemy combatants and the Supreme Court. Does work for support payments equal racism? What works better, higher dikes or laws against precipitation? State doping. Energy autarchy is not pc but a goal worth pursuing.

Would Nicholas Sarkozy be hot-footing it to Dublin in the dog days of summer if Ireland had voted 'Yes' in its Referendum on the EU Constitution? Of course he wouldn't. He is only going because even he can smell the raspberry the Irish blew at the EU last month. Having spoilt France's grandiose plans for jobs for the boys, expect a whole lot of angry finger-wagging.

As his own spokesman Axel Poniatowski has made clear on his behalf, there is no other choice for the Irish but to hold a second referendum and, regardless of EU and French protestations to the contrary and regardless of whatever emollient nonsense Sarkozy utters in public, behind the scenes Brian Cowen will indeed have to put up with some serious pressure from this angry voyou from Paris to get it right in a second vote and to hold that vote sooner rather than later. Fortunately others are doing their democratic bit.

If you are suffering from insomnia and in the mood to read a 128-page English version of a report, in pdf format, from the European Union, click here. This is the first annual report from the European Agency for Fundamental Rights, based in Vienna, and dedicated to the prosecution of the crime of discrimination. These are the fine folks who keep track of the accusations, litigation, trials, judgments and punishments meted out to those wretched souls who can't seem to straighten up and fly right in matters of diversity. Taking each of the 27 countries of the Union, the report admonishes their laxness, or praises their efforts.

The hard-working Yves Daoudal offers this synopsis:

A quote from the Christian-Democrat, pro-EU Yellow Stars Blog, 30 June 2008

The result of 25-plus years of this destructive and dehumanizing ideology [Conservatism] ruined America, dismantled social safety nets, demonized the poor, destroyed jobs and education funding – and turned American society to one that is unbearable for all except the rich and the well off. […]

A quote from a comment at the New English Review blog, 29 June 2008

[The Belgian politician Jean-Marie] Dedecker spends a suspiciously inordinate amount of time trying to morally equate the Jews and the Muslims. But of course Jews are not flying airplanes into the sides of skyscrapers, or blowing up pizzerias or buses or trains with bomb vests, or lobbing mortars at Muslim schools, and using quotes from the Torah to justify it. Zionism is the belief that Jews deserve to have a homeland where they can be relatively free from the threat of genocide; Islamism is the belief that Islam deserves to have the entire universe, and that it should be conquered with religiously sanctioned violence and genocide. Not only are these two concepts not similar, they are practically contradictory in every sense.

A quote from The Daily Mail, 30 June 2008

A teenager was stabbed to death as he desperately phoned a friend for help. Ben Kinsella, […], was the latest victim of Britain's sickening knife culture. Two 16-year-olds were arrested and have now been released on bail.

Yesterday, the Belgian establishment newspaper De Standaard published a double interview with the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Flemish politician Jean-Marie Dedecker. Mr Dedecker, a popular former judo coach, is a populist right-wing politician who was ousted by the governing Flemish Liberal Party in 2006 and founded his own party, the Lijst Dedecker (LDD) or Gezond Verstand Partij (Common Sense Party). He won 5.5% of the Flemish vote in the June 10, 2007, elections. It is generally assumed that he did so mainly at the expense of the Flemish-secessionist and anti-Islamist Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest) party. According to the latest polls Dedecker is currently at 12.4%, again mostly at the expense of the VB. Last November, Dedecker called the VB “fascistic” and boasted that he is single-handedly succeeding in what the Belgian establishment failed to do for 20 years: “smoking out the VB.”

A quote from Diana West’s blog, 28 June 2008

Well, I went to [the Brussels borough of] Molenbeek earlier this month and brought back this slide show of snaps. What you will see may call to mind something more like Little Marrakesh or Istanbultown than the so-called capital of Europe. To some, it will be possible to see in Molenbeek a fairly bustling display of non-indigenous culture certainly not unfamiliar to Americans who have both lived through and been a part of historic immigration waves. […] What is different here, of course […] is that what is going here is not a traditional process of assimilation to the host (European) culture, but a quietly revolutionary procedure best described as reverse colonization: Europe is being colonized by Islam.

If you can’t beat them, join them! This seems to be the new guiding philosophy of Spain’s opposition center-right Popular Party (PP), which has undergone an extreme makeover to the political center following its second consecutive election defeat to the ruling Socialist Workers Party (PSOE).
 
After losing the national elections on 9 March, most conservatives had expected the beleaguered opposition leader Mariano Rajoy to retire and quietly fade away. Instead, Rajoy, 53, has tenaciously held onto his position, insisting that he is the only individual who can unify the PP and unseat Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at the next national poll, which is set for 2012. Rajoy has been the party’s leader since 2004, when he was hand-picked for the job by former PP Prime Minister José María Aznar.

A quote from RTL Austria: