A quote from Cal Thomas at Townhall.com, 28 August 2007

 Between June 2005 and June 2006 nearly 200,000 British citizens chose to leave the country for a new life elsewhere. During the same period, at least 574,000 immigrants came to Britain. This number does not include the people who broke the law to get there, or the thousands unknown to the government. [...] Abraham Lincoln said no nation can exist half slave and half free. Neither can a nation be sustained if it allows conditions that result in mass emigration, while importing huge numbers of foreigners who come from backgrounds that do not practice assimilation or tolerance of other beliefs. [...] The greater tragedy is that the people of Britain have little say in any of this, so they are taking the road of last resort. They are leaving.

Blogger Vanishing American continues what is gradually becoming one of the most important discussions of our age: What role does, or should, Christianity play in Western civilization? Is it the bedrock of our culture, as Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch thinks, and is our decline associated with abandoning it? Or is Christianity, as John Derbyshire puts it, a religion for once and future slaves, an ideology that is now fueling globalist ideals and undermining our borders through mass immigration?

Brussels, the capital of Belgium, prides itself on being the capital of Europe and of the Atlantic Alliance. The city, where the European Union and NATO headquarters are located, has no fewer than three U.S. ambassadors: one to Belgium, one to the EU and one to NATO. Like Washington, Brussels hosts hundreds of protest demonstrations each year. During the past six years Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels, allowed 3,500 demonstrations. He banned only six, including, last year, a march of Kurdish nationalists belonging to a terrorist organization. As a rule everyone – except criminals – is allowed to demonstrate in Brussels.

A quote from Paul Belien in The American Conservative, 27 August 2007

Minister Albayrak told Parliament that the amnesty for everyone who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001 implies that illegal aliens who entered after 2001 have to be expelled. But she knows that this is not going to happen because the government needs the collaboration of the local authorities to track down illegal aliens. Many mayors, especially those belonging to Albayrak’s own Labor Party, have already announced that they will refuse to assist the government in their search for the immigrants. [...]

Belgium’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, is not expected to rule soon in the case of the anti-Islamization demonstration planned for 11 September. Two weeks ago Freddy Thielemans, the Socialist mayor of Brussels, banned the demonstration because, as he said, “the organizers have chosen the symbolic date of 9/11. The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. […] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation.”
 
The organizers decided to appeal against the ban before the Council of State. Today, the Council of State decided to postpone its verdict until it has decided whether or not the appeal, which was presented in Dutch, one of Belgium’s two official languages, should have been presented in French, Belgium’s other official language.

For the past two days King Albert II of Belgium has been consulting the members of the Crown Council. He is seeking their help to solve what the Royal Palace itself calls the Belgian “political crisis.” The members of the Crown Council, the so-called “Ministers of State,” are unelected. They have been appointed by the King at his own discretion. Most of the “Ministers of State” are former politicians, though they also include representatives from the Belgian establishment.
 
On 10 June the Belgians went to the polls to elect a new Parliament. Instead of seeing their elected representatives dealing with the country’s political problems and putting a government together – as would be the case in democratic countries – they now see an unelected official, the King, and a group of unelected “wise” men, most of them politicians from the last century, usurp the duties of their elected representatives.

A quote from Daniel Schwammenthal in The Wall Street Journal, 27 August 2007
 
"I'm a free thinker," says Freddy Thielemans. Really? Many critics now doubt it after the socialist mayor of Brussels banned a demonstration under the slogan of "Stop the Islamization of Europe" (SIOE). [...] As the mayor of not just Belgium's but Europe's capital, shouldn't he rather err on the side of political freedom? Not in this instance, Mr. Thielemans shoots back. "I won't have Brussels regarded as the capital of racism, that's what I think for sure." Apparently, anti-Americanism doesn't qualify as racism. [...]

A quote from Frank Gaffney in Jewish World Review, 21 August 2007

Sovereignty is an abstraction to which few Americans give much thought. We take it for granted, like the air we breathe or the water we drink. Yet, the essence of the most successful political experiment in history — the United States of America — is the sovereign power entrusted by the people via our Constitution to our elected, accountable representatives.

A quote from Helen Szamuely at EU Referendum, 27 August 2007

[W]hy is it that there have been far more problems with neo-Nazis and other unpleasantly violent and racist groups in the former GDR [German “Democratic” Republic, East Germany] than in the former FRG [Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany]? […] Another problem [EU] Commissar [for Justice, Freedom and Security and also Vice President of the European Commission, Franco] Frattini might like to ponder over is why this [violence by neo-Nazis] should be happening. Was the EEC/EC/EU not the organization that was going to do away with all political nastiness, particularly racism and xenophobia? Is there not an organization set up by a Regulation specifically to deal with the subject? Are there no directives about it? So why is the problem getting worse, if, indeed, it is getting worse?

This essay was inspired by a comment from blogger and TBJ reader Conservative Swede, who once stated that the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions were the products of Greek logic and Roman engineering skills, and had little to do with Christianity. I think he goes too far in his criticism of Christianity, which isn't to say that none of what he says about it is true. Yes, a globalist outlook in part derived from Christian universalism contributes to the difficulties Western nations have in upholding their borders. In Britain, hundreds of thousands of failed asylum seekers may be allowed to settle permanently under a "back-door amnesty." This is supported by many Christian leaders. The West isn't a "Christian" culture alone. The first recognizably Western people were Greek pagans, and many Christian nations are not even remotely Western. On the other hand, Christianity has exerted a powerful influence on our civilization for two thousand years. It is difficult to envision our culture without it.