Europe has basically two types of healthcare financing systems: the single payer systems, in which healthcare is paid for and organised by the government with money from income taxes (as in Britain and Sweden), and the social insurance or sickness fund systems (as in Germany and France), in which healthcare is financed through mandatory premiums calculated as a percentage of wages. Whatever way European countries have organised their healthcare, they have all seen their costs rise over the past four decades. The European countries provide more equity in healthcare than the United States, but they do so increasingly by shifting the price tag for healthcare to the next generation, by rationing health to the elderly, and by suppressing useful innovations.

There is no danger that Christian civil servants in Estonia will soon be forced to register gay marriages. While one West European country after another is legalizing same-sex marriages, last Monday the Riigikogu, the Estonian Parliament, rejected a proposal to include same-sex marriage in the new marriage law. Väino Linde, the chairman of the judiciary committee of the Riigikogu and a member of the governing Center Party, said there is no need to legalize the partnership of homosexuals because Estonian laws allow gays to regulate their relationships in other ways.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is shocked at the way in which some Muslims are misrepresenting Denmark in the Islamic world. “I am speechless that those people, whom we have given the right to live in Denmark and where they freely have chosen to stay, are now touring Arab countries and inciting antipathy towards Denmark and the Danish people,” Rasmussen told journalists yesterday.

Rasmussen was responding to the recent visits by certain imams, Muslim intellectuals and representatives of Danish Muslim organizations who toured a number of Muslim countries to “explain” the Danish cartoon affair to local political and religious leaders and media. The affair started last September when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of Muhammad.

Who was the first man to claim that the “French are also sincere Muslims”? Who attempted to bring forth the Arabs to rise up in harmony with the French to aid the French in their opposition to the Anglo-Saxons? No not de Villepin, and his lachrymose prose but his great hero, Napoleon Bonaparte.

In an extended doctoral thesis that became a book, “Edge of Empire, Conquest and Collecting on the Eastern Frontiers of the British Empire, 1750-1850” published last Summer, Maya Jasanoff, now assistant professor of British history at the University of Virginia, brings us to the attention of the behavior of Napoleon when he set out to conquer Egypt.

Here are more observations on France from our Australian friend, SF author Joel Shepherd:

Some Thoughts About the French
by Joel Shepherd

I like them. Yeah, believe it or not, I managed to spend nearly six months in Paris without coming to dislike its inhabitants. And I found many (though by no means all) of the cliches to be untrue. For one thing, I found the Parisiens actually MORE polite than average... though I suppose that depends on what you define as average. Average for a big western city, anyway. They’ll make way for you on the sidewalk, while some others I could name will just barge through. They’ll say hello and goodbye when you enter or leave their shop. And, after much cycling on the roads, I found their drivers remarkably courteous where cyclists were concerned.

The emergence of a new mutation of anti-Semitism in the West (e.g. Norway) is part of an “anti” trend that differs in several ways from its historic precedents.

It is with the foreboding of a calamity being invited to reoccur that minor occurrences can be registered whose totality reminds of past events. The disaster of the past as a possible scenario for the future has its roots in an attempt to blame the world’s ills on a scapegoat. Often most of those who did not subscribe to the guilt of the accused were, when pressured, willing to sacrifice entire categories of their co-nationals in the irrational hope of being left alone themselves. And so the fire of the match lit the stake. Inevitably its flame set the neighborhood afire.

Kristin Halvorsen

It is striking to see how Norwegian politics differs from Danish politics. Europe is turning Muslim and the major threat to European secularists comes from extremist Islamists. While the Danes have been engaged in a conflict with Muslim extremists, the left-wing Norwegian government parties are appeasing them by fighting the Jews. Last Thursday Kristin Halvorsen (45), the Norwegian Minister of Finance, said that she is in favour of boycotting Israel.

Halvorsen, who is also the leader of the Socialist Left Party (SV), told the newspaper Dagbladet that she never buys Israeli products, such as oranges, and that she supports all Norwegian municipalities and provinces that boycott Israel. Halvorsen prefers Cuban oranges instead.

A bit of context regarding the task facing Angela Merkel as she attempts to salvage Germany from the fringe. The numbers show the last 10 years were neither socio or economic.

The public prosecutor in the Danish town of Viborg has dismissed charges by 11 Muslim organizations in Denmark against the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten for its publication of 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad (see them here) last September. Islam prohibits depictions of the Muslim prophet. The charges were brought forward in October. The public prosecutor said the publishing of the cartoons did not violate laws on religious or racial discrimination or on blasphemy. Legal experts say this was to be expected. However, the Muslim organizations are disappointed and are considering appealing to the State Prosecutor and even to the European Court of Human Rights.

Western Europe is no longer Christian and within less than two decades it will be Islamic. The greatest threat to secularists and liberals in Europe today are not the Christians but the Muslims. This is what Theo van Gogh experienced two years ago. This is also the reason why the Swedish jeans manufacturer Bjorn Atldax, who calls religion “a force of evil,” has designed a jeans brand with an anti-Christian logo, but does not plan to make something anti-Islamic. This is why another Christian renegade, the Italian author Luigi Cascioli, has written a book with the title “The Fable of Christ” but would not contemplate writing “The Fable of Muhammad.”