This is the text of a speech delivered to the California Republican Jewish Coalition (RJW) on Saturday, 21 June 2008. The audio of the speech can be found here.

Let us begin where all things begin in this political era: on September 11th, 2001. Everyone in this room has a story of that day. Mine is set in Brooklyn, where I waited long hours for my wife to come home with the ash-covered refugee throngs from lower Manhattan. In the sky we saw a black plume that blotted out the sun. Upon our neighborhood fell the charred debris of the morning’s massacre: A manila folder. Nynex billing records. A burnt in-flight safety card from a Boeing 767.

In the subsequent 24 hours, we heard the President of the United States say two things of note: first, that “freedom itself” was attacked — and second, that Islam is a “religion of peace.” The first statement was widely derided as nonsensical… simplistic… or absurd. The second was lauded as an act of statesmanship… as a magnanimous gesture… and as a necessary conciliatory step.

My friends, I submit to you that the popular assessment of both phrases was precisely wrong — in fact, the opposite of the truth about each. By way of explaining this, I’d like to tell you a bit about where I’ve just been.

The 19th arrondissement of Paris has become a war zone between Jews and North Africans. The most recent flare-up of violence occurred on Saturday June 21. A 17-year old Jewish boy suffered several broken ribs and skull fractures during a violent assault by Mulsim youths. The boy was hospitalized in an unconscious state at Cochin Hospital where he is currently being kept in an artificial coma.

A quote from Daniel Hannan in The Spectator, 18 June 2008

Last month, […] I likened the EU’s leaders to the apparatchiks of the Comecon states who, having given up on persuading their electorates, sought compliance rather than consent, acquiescence rather than approval. Several people emailed me to complain that it was a tasteless parallel: the EU, after all, was an association of democracies. True. No one is suggesting that Brussels is about to take away dissidents’ passports or throw sceptics into gulags. But Euro-federalists, like Cold War communists, believe that their ruling ideology is more important than either democracy or the letter of the law. […] Small wonder that the communist parties of the former Soviet-bloc states led the campaigns to join the EU.

So now you know

Key quote from EU Commissioner Margot Wallstrom,
"Don't forget the European leaders have invested a lot of political capital into this whole procedure".

So here you have the authentic reason why the Irish vote must be ignored. Because the European elite have worked hard.

A quote from John Zmirak at Takimag, 17 June 2008

You can err to the left all you want – Christopher Hitchens still venerates Leon Trotsky, not that it stops “conservative” journalists from licking his Bolshie jackboots. There are no enemies on the left. But lean a little too far to the right end of the narrowly circumscribed spectrum so recently established […] and you might as well be a confessed pedophile. […]

It’s clear that in writing Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, [Patrick] Buchanan was courting controversy […] Like Buchanan, I see much to admire in Winston Churchill, although The Unnecessary War has added shadows to the portrait, revealing that statesman as a flawed and troubling figure, a broken record whose refrain – “Now is the time to stand firm against the Germans!” – finally came round to being right. It was indeed right to stand firm against the Germans in 1937, and again in 1940, when they were governed by a murderous sociopath. What Buchanan reveals is that Winston Churchill had been urging last stands against German “barbarism” since before World War I, when the relatively harmless Kaiser Wilhelm sought an English alliance. (England allied instead with the Tsar who permitted pogroms, and the Belgium which had butchered some 7 million helpless Africans in the Congo.)

It was always clear that the power elites are not going to accept the Irish “no” to their precious plan. This time Eurocrats really are not lying when they say they have no plan B. After the first shock and wailing and gnashing of teeth, they will simply continue carrying out plan A. Accordingly, the spin to dismiss the will of the people and break their own rules as well as the most fundamental principals of free societies has already started.

George Handlery on the week that was. Obama as the sum of projected dreams. Intelligence is not wisdom. Are traits a program? What is privilege? The roots of unilateralism. Russia to help when the US fails. Gypsy law and the sharia. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most corrupt of them all? The right to uncontrollable rage.

A national truck driver’s strike in Spain is gradually winding down, but it has managed to bring the already-troubled Spanish economy to a standstill. In doing so, it has also highlighted what happens when a welfare state goes wild.
 
Some 90,000 self-employed hauliers say they are protesting the soaring cost of diesel fuel, which has climbed to 1.30 euros/liter (about US$8 per gallon) from 0.95 euros one year ago. Skyrocketing fuel prices are, clearly, a big problem all over Europe, and many Spaniards identify with their plight.

This text is written in response to God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis, an American historian and two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. In my opinion the book is largely a waste of money. This essay is not made to review the book as much as it is to refute it. It overlaps to some extent with the text The Truth About Islam in Europe, which I have published at the Brussels Journal before.

Well, I was wrong to predict a Yes vote in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty. I take comfort not only in the result itself, by which I am obviously delighted, but also in the fact that my friend and colleague, Anthony Coughlan, a professor at Trinity College, Dublin who is a euro-critical activist who campaigns tirelessly and superbly against European integration, sent round a pessimistic note on the morning of the vote (12 June) saying that he feared that the treaty would be ratified.