A quote from Lord Rees-Mogg in The (London) Times, 18 June 2007

This week Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, will propose at the European summit in Berlin a new draft treaty of amendment that will contain most of the legal substance of the constitutional treaty, […] At the summit Britain will be represented by Tony Blair, who has said that he does not think that the new treaty will require a referendum. He has therefore withdrawn from his commitment to the Labour Party manifesto, on which he was elected.

A quote from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2007

If Europe’s political leaders succeed in ramming through a barely disguised remake of the same European constitution rejected by the French and Dutch people, I for one will come off the fence after years of hesitation and join the fight for total British withdrawal from the Union.

A quote from The Financial Times, 15 June 2007:

Tony Blair, the British prime minister, could end up swapping Downing Street for a job as the first full-time European Union president, under a plan being actively touted by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.

Mr Sarkozy is understood to have discussed the idea with other EU leaders ahead of next week’s European summit, Mr Blair’s last major international event as prime minister.

 
A quote from The Daily Express, 15 June 2007:

Tony Blair wants to hand the European Union radical new powers in his last act as Prime Minister, it emerged today.

The Prime Minister has welcomed controversial plans to bring back the troubled EU constitution by the back door – totally bypassing the need for public referendums on sweeping new powers for Brussels. [...] Britain’s voting rights would be reduced by a third under the scheme and our hard-won veto on European directives would be torn up. Britain could also lose the right to impose quotas on immigration.

According to the President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, a former Communist hardliner, Eurosceptics are “psychological terrorists” because they suggest that there is a growing “European superstate.” Napolitano said this when he and Horst Köhler, the President of Germany, addressed a group of students at the University of Siena. The EU is not a European superstate, Napolitano said, it is a “a new form of democracy.”

What Mr Napolitano apparently means is that EU decisions are made without reference to the population, indeed against the wishes of a majority of the population in many cases. This is the current comprehension of democracy within the elites that have the temerity to believe they act in our name. It is in fact “post democracy.”

Even at the Jihad Watch website there are those who question whether the Eurabia thesis presented by Bat Ye’or is correct. I have spent a considerable amount of time checking it, and in my view, her conclusions are perfectly sound.

From the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, 14 June 2007

Aftenposten’s food writer Yngve Ekern has been charged with animal cruelty by animal rights group NOAH after an article about cooking crabs. [...] Ekern angered animal activists with his description of preparing crabs on the beach while his children were watching. He described throwing the crabs into hot oil after bashing them on a cutting board, a process that didn’t kill all of them. The article also outlined how to boil crabs, and included recipes.

“Showing how to boil living crabs is encouraging law-breaking. Crabs are also covered by the Animal Protection Act, and animals shall not be exposed to pain,” NOAH leader Siri Martinsen told Journalisten.no. “It is highly probable that crabs have the ability to feel pain. We know too little about it and the animals should get the benefit of the doubt,” she said.

A quote from Kevin Hassett in The American, May/June 2007

Democracy might be a form of government that many prefer to live under, but […] democracies will not necessarily outperform other types of mechanisms for preference aggregation as a route to economic prosperity. […] The unfree governments now understand that they have to provide a good economy to keep citizens happy, and they understand that free-market economies work best. […] Being unfree may be an economic advantage. Dictatorships are not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state.

A quote from Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, in The Financial Times, 13 June 2007

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

In Sweden, saying that Muslim Albanians are behind much of the drug traffic in Europe (a fact) is considered racism and a crime. Making derogatory statements about the native Christian population, however, is just fine.

Dahn Pettersson, a local politician in Sweden, has been fined 18,000 kronor for writing that 95 percent of all heroin brought in comes via Kosovo. “It is never ethnic groups that commit crimes. It is individuals or groups of individuals,” prosecutor Mats Svensson told the court. The court found Pettersson guilty of ‘Agitation Against a Minority Group.’

When in 2004 Joanna Rytel, a Swedish feminist, wrote an article called “I Will Never Give Birth to a White Man,” the authorities refused to indict her. Prosecutor Göran Lambertz explained why: “The purpose behind the law against incitement of ethnic hatred was to ensure legal protection for minority groups of different compositions and followers of different religions. Cases where people express themselves in a critical or derogatory way about men of ethnic Swedish background were not intended to be included in this law.”

A quote from Expatica, 12 June 2007:

Muslim leaders have robustly criticized a forthright “position papier” [issued by the Lutheran churches in Germany]. Ayyub Axel Koehler, chairman of the Council of Muslims, [a German who converted to Islam in 1963] told the church-people that Europe should be ashamed of the “trail of blood” that it had left throughout the world down the centuries.
 
Comment from Fjordman: It would be interesting to see Muslims deal with the trail of blood they have left behind on several continents, from Thailand via India to Armenia, during more than 1300 years. To quote Paul Fregosi’s book Jihad in the West: