Theo van Gogh

One year after Theo van Gogh was murdered we are forced to acknowledge that that event has been a benefit to Islam. Anyone who is critical of Islam will still be branded as a “xenofobe” or an “Islamofobe.” Islamophobia is a newly coined word which has already been used by Kofi Annan.

Following the assassination of van Gogh, the Minister of Justice of the Netherlands, Piet-Hein Donner, proposed to reinstate blasphemy as a criminal offence. In the United Kingdom Islamophilia runs amok. The July 7 bombings, which killed 55 people, seem to have reinforced the taboo on criticism of Islam. The London police chief, Ian Blair (Tony’s parrot, though unrelated), said the bombings could not be qualified as “islamic terror” because “Islam and terrorism do not go together.” Politicians and opinion makers assure us that Islam does not condone terror and that we must support the “beleaguered” Muslim community. With every act of terrorism the press becomes more friendly towards Islam. The Guardian has virtually become al-Guardian.

This is from Sweden:

“‘If we park our car it will be damaged – so we have to go very often in two vehicles, one just to protect the other vehicle,’ said Rolf Landgren, a Malmo police officer. Fear of violence has changed the way police, firemen and emergency workers do their jobs. There are some neighborhoods Swedish ambulance drivers will not go to without a police escort. Angry crowds have threatened them, telling them which patient to take and which ones to leave behind.”

This is from France:

 “Sarkozy says that violence in French suburbs is a daily fact of life. Since the start of the year, 9,000 police cars have been stoned and, each night, 20 to 40 cars are torched.”

David Cameron

I know these posts are meant to be about the EU but I hope you will forgive me if, just this once, I go off-piste and discuss the leadership race in the British Conservative Party. Actually, the two questions turn out to be closely related, but I’ll come to that in a moment. First, allow me to make a couple of general observations about the gravity of the Conservative condition.

Many Tories appear to have settled into the comfortable belief that, at the last election, we turned the corner. The gain of 30 extra seats, and an apparent narrowing of the gap with Labour, might seem to justify a certain guarded optimism.

Is it a sensible idea to move the site of government every three weeks? This is precisely what the European Union does every month, since much of its government moves back and forth – with great wagon trains of trucks carrying government papers (and the luggage of the European parliamentarians) – between Strasbourg, a picturesque city in the Rhine Valley, and Brussels, Belgium.

Not only have the Europeans been unable to agree on having one capital city for the EU, but they are split on almost every major issue. The fundamental disagreement is to what extent Europe should move away from the “social market economy” model that has left France, Germany and Italy in economic stagnation and towards a more classic market economy such as that practiced in the U.S.

Ethnic violence, charges of the police using excessive force, strife, and riots. Los Angeles, Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington DC?

Try Birmingham, England. Try Belgium. Try Paris, France. US readers may be caught unware of the riotous month just past in Europe. No blaring headlines from the mainstream media, no 24/7 coverage on the cable networks, no dead and dying series from Spiegel Online.

The Dutch authorities are not going to annul the so-called samenlevingscontract or “cohabitation contract,” a civil union registered before a notary, which a man recently concluded with two women whom he now considers to both be his wives. Piet-Hein Donner, the Dutch minister of Justice, responded in the negative to a request of the Dutch parliamentarian Cees Van der Staaij to annul the “trio marriage.” Van der Staaij is a member of the smallest party elected in the January 2003 general elections, the Calvinist SGP, holding two of the 150 seats in parliament.

Homosexual couples are legally allowed to marry in the Netherlands, but those in polygamous relationships must find other ways of formalizing their cohabitation. This is why last September Victor de Bruijn and his two “bisexual” women went to the notary in their wedding attire to exchange rings between the three of them.

The East-West division of Europe arose out of numerous misjudgments and as a consequence contributed for decades to the imperilment of the entire Atlantic Alliance.

Much that is to be said about the area begins with the terms of identification used nowadays. Misunderstanding Europe East, West and Center by politicians in the 20th century, explains to a significant extent why the region became the cradle out of which WWI and especially its second “improved” round have arisen. The same goes for the not much less violent, but for observers in the West more subdued, conflict that has been referred to in popular terminology as “Cold War” and has been arguably “WWIII.”

A car set ablaze in Paris

An urban guerilla has been going on in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris, with hundreds of “French youths” battling the police and fire fighters since two teenagers foolishly killed themselves on Thursday night in an electrical transformer cabin. The two boys of 15 and 17 years old were electrocuted when they tried to hide in an electricity sub station. The boys were fleeing the police who were investigating a robbery.

The two “French youths” who died did not have typically French names such as Pierre or Louis but were called Ziad and Banou. Their relatives maintain that their deaths are the authorities’ fault. The police should leave underaged “French youths” such as Ziad and Banou alone when these are roaming the streets late at night while other teenagers with ordinary French names such as Pierre and Louis are in their beds.

Two elements in the ongoing conflict between Denmark and the Muslim world that have not been mentioned in earlier posts here, are worth mentioning.

Firstly, there is the reaction of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who refused to meet eleven ambassadors from Muslim countries, including Turkey, Bosnia, Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and a number of other Arab countries, who wanted to complain about a series of cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. “This is a matter of principle. I will not meet with them because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so,” Rasmussen said. He added that individuals who felt offended by the tone of the public debate should bring their grievances to the courts. “As prime minister, I have no power whatsoever to limit the press – nor do I want such power.”

Like the French and the Dutch, who rejected the European constitutional treaty earlier this year, the Poles have shocked Brussels by voting politically incorrect. If the Eurocrats in Brussels were able, they would send the Poles back to the polls. Brussels is deeply dissatisfied with the president whom 54% of the Polish voters elected last Sunday. Lech Kaczynski, a former Solidarity member and human rights activist who as “an anti-socialist element” spent time in jail in the 1980s, is opposed to economic liberalisation. But that is not what bothers the social corporatists in Eurocratia. Kaczynski is also a Eurosceptic but, surprisingly, that does not seem to bother them much either. What really angers them is that the Poles have elected a “homophobe,” who according to the Eurocrats has no respect for human rights.