A quote from Joshua Keating at the Foreign Policy blog, 30 August 2007

Paul Belien at the Brussels Journal blog has been all over "the Belgian Crisis" like mayo on frites, deriding the international media for not covering what he calls "Yugoslavia in slow motion" and speculating about Europe after Belgium. Belien might be jumping the gun a little bit,

A quote from Ian Traynor in The Observer, 2 December 2007

Last month Flemish MPs of all parties, bar one Green, dissolved the pact that has been the underlying basis of government in Belgium for decades, forcing a vote against the wishes of the francophone side and resorting to majority rule. [...] In Brussels, more than 20,000 people rallied on the streets a fortnight ago to profess their loyalty to a state called Belgium. But beyond the capital, particularly in Flanders, the mood is different. [...]

Today, on the 174th day after the June 10th general elections in Belgium, Yves Leterme, the leader of the Flemish Christian-Democrats, told King Albert II that it is impossible for him to form a government. Belgium is a multinational country consisting of 6 million Dutch-speakers in Flanders and 4 million French-speakers in Wallonia. The Flemings want more regional autonomy, the Walloons oppose it because they are at the receiving end of the Belgian welfare mechanism.
 
Mr. Leterme won the elections because he went to the elections in an alliance with Flemish Nationalists and promised the Flemings that he would give Flanders more autonomy.

A quote from Swiss Info, 30 November 2007

Switzerland is funding a bleak anti-migration television campaign in Africa to discourage would-be migrants from trying to seek their fortunes in Europe. The hard-hitting advert, which has been aired on prime-time television in Cameroon and Nigeria, depicts the life of freshly arrived migrants in Europe as one fraught with problems and dangers. [...] "Don't believe everything you hear. Leaving is not always living," is the final message of the film, which the SonntagsBlick newspaper said was broadcast on Nigerian state television at half-time during a friendly football match between Switzerland and Nigeria last week. [...]

The Belgian anarchy has not led to anarchy. Because Brussels is not in a hurry, Brussels is in a panic. 
 

 
Belgium has been without a government for 174 days, and we are doing fine, thank you. Daily life continues as before. Everything is still functioning in Brussels and the rest of the country, even our tax collectors continue to do their job. People have come to wonder why a country needs a government. The situation of anarchy (in the original meaning of ἀναρχία anarchía, “without a government or ruler”) has not led to anarchy (political disorder).
 
Since the general elections of June 10th the Belgian politicians are incapable of putting together a government coalition. The previous government of Guy Verhofstadt, which no longer has a majority in Parliament, has continued in a caretaker position for the past six months.
 

Today, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy met the parents of Anne-Lorraine Schmitt. Last Sunday this 23-year old woman was murdered on a metro train in Paris’s northern suburbs by a serial rapist of Turkish origin who had been released from jail despite his criminal record. He stabbed her to death because she resisted him.

A quote from Raymond Ibrahim at FrontPageMag, 29 November 2007

Another depiction ubiquitous to these types of movies is the notion that Christianity, which at one point Beowulf contemptuously calls “the weeping religion of martyrs,” is an effete faith that all “true men” – warriors such as Beowulf – eschewed. […] This in fact is a well entrenched motif, best given intellectual grounding by the many writings of Freidrich Nietzsche, who maintained that Christianity is the religion of the weak, while atheism, paganism, or even “Mohammedanism” – anything, really – is more conducive to the cultivation of manly virtues. […]

A quote from Patrick Poole at FrontPageMag, 29 November 2007

The endgame of muqawama and the "Civilization-Jihadist Process" is "the erosion of the enemy's resolve". For this reason, as Yaari notes, "the essence is to spill blood, and since that is the case, it is better to focus on the civilian population as the primary target".

A quote from a press release of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), 28 November 2007

The FSA, the UK financial services regulator, has encouraged this growth [of Sharia banking] by providing an open and flexible regulatory environment, which accommodates both Islamic and non-Islamic financial institutions. It is the first European regulator to authorise a wholly Islamic bank. Other Islamic financial institutions have since been authorised. […]

Teddy Row