Geert Wilders' speech in Berlin - The kind of talk Europe's totalitarian elites want to ban

Geert Wilders Berlin Oct 2 English titles from Vlad Tepes on Vimeo.

Transcript:

00:00 On Monday October 4th, 2010, in a court in Amsterdam,
00:03 Geert Wilders was put on trial for his freedom.
00:06 Two days before, on the eve of the anniversary of German reunification,
00:08 an event was held in Berlin, by yet another European political party established to preserve
00:13 the traditions of European liberty and to oppose the Islamification of the continent.
00:16 There Mr Wilders delivered the following speech,
00:18 again giving voice to the opinions that the European establishment,
00:22 would like to see him thrown in jail, for having the courage to express.
00:26 Dear... Dear Friends, I find myself very happy to be here in Berlin today.
00:35 As you know, the invitation which my friend René Stadtkewitz extended to me,
00:41 has cost him his membership of the CDU group in the Berlin Parliament.
00:47 René, however, did not give in to the pressure.
01:01 He did not betray his convictions.
01:05 His dismissal prompted him to establish his own new political party.
01:12 And René, I thank you for your invitation, and I wish you all the best:
01:19 and I also wish you a great great deal of success with your new party.
01:38 My friends as you may have heard, the past weeks have been rather busy for me.
01:46 Earlier this week we succeeded in forging in The Netherlands,
01:49 a minority government of the Liberals and the Christian-Democrats,
01:55 which will be supported by my own party.
01:59 And this is an historic event for the Netherlands.
02:05 I am very proud of having been able to help achieve this.
02:11 And at this...
02:22 At this very moment, while we are here,
02:25 the Christian-Democrat Party conference is deciding
02:29 whether or not to approve this coalition.
02:33 And if they do...
02:35 If they do, we will finally be able to start to rebuild our country.
02:41 To be able to preserve our national identity,
02:44 and offer our children a better future.
02:48 Despite...
02:57 And despite my busy schedule,
03:00 it has always been a wish of mine, to come to Berlin.
03:04 Because Germany too needs a political movement,
03:08 which is both willing to defend German identity,
03:11 and to stand up against the Islamification of Germany.
03:32 Your Chancellor Angela Merkel says that,
03:35 “The Islamization of Germany is inevitable.”
03:39 She has called upon citizens to be prepared
03:42 for more changes as a result of immigration.
03:46 She wants the Germans to adapt to this situation.
03:51 The Christian-Democrat leader has said, and accepts that, quote:
03:57 “More than before mosques will be an integral part of our cities.” Unquote.
04:06 My friends...
04:08 My friends, we should not, and we will not
04:11 accept the unacceptable as inevitable:
04:16 Without trying to turn the tide!
04:31 It is our duty as politicians to preserve our nations for our children.
04:37 And I hope that René’s new movement
04:40 will be as successful as my own Partij voor de Vrijheid,
04:45 as Oskar Freysinger’s Schweizerische Volkspartei [in Switzerland],
04:49 and as Pia Kjaersgaard’s Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark,
04:53 and similar movements elsewhere.
05:06 My good friend Pia Kjaersgaard recently spoke in Sweden,
05:11 at the invitation of the Sverigedemokraterna.
05:15 She said: “I have not come to meddle in Swedish domestic politics.
05:21 Because that is for the Swedish people to be concerned with.
05:24 “No,” she said, “I have come because
05:28 in spite of certain differences today's Swedish debate, in many ways
05:33 reminds me of the debate we've had in Denmark for 10-15 years.
05:40 And I have to come to Sweden because it is also a concern to Denmark.
05:45 We cannot just sit on our hands
05:49 and be silent witnesses to political developments in Sweden.”
05:52 And the same, the very same, applies for me
05:57 as a Dutchman with respect to Germany.
06:00 I am here...
06:12 I am here today because Germany matters to the Netherlands,
06:18 and to the rest of the world;
06:21 and because we cannot, in the absence of a strong German partner,
06:25 establish an International Freedom Alliance.
06:38 Dear friends, tomorrow is the Day of German Unity.
06:43 Tomorrow exactly twenty years ago, your great nation was reunified
06:50 after the collapse of the totalitarian Communist ideology.
06:55 The Day of German Unity is an important day for the whole of Europe.
07:01 Germany...
07:09 Germany is the largest democracy in Europe.
07:15 Germany is Europe’s economic powerhouse.
07:18 The wellbeing and prosperity of Germany is of benefit to all of us.
07:24 Because the wellbeing and prosperity of Germany,
07:27 is a prerequisite for the wellbeing and prosperity of Europe.
07:39 Today I am here, however, to warn you about a looming disunity.
07:45 Germany’s national identity, its democracy and economic prosperity,
07:51 is under threat from the political ideology of Islam.
08:00 In 1848, Karl Marx began his Communist Manifesto with the famous words:
08:08 “A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism.”
08:14 But Today...
08:16 Today, there is a different spectre stretching across Europe:
08:20 It is the spectre of Islam.
08:24 This danger...
08:34 And this danger, is a political one today also.
08:39 Islam is not merely a religion, as many people seem to think:
08:44 Islam is mainly a dangerous political ideology.
09:01 The Flemish Professor Urbain Vermeulen, the former president
09:06 of the European Union of Arabists and Islamicists, points out that,
09:10 “Islam is primarily a legal system: a law,” rather than a religion.
09:19 I quote from the bestseller and BBC television series: The Triumph of the West,
09:26 which the renowned Oxford historian J.M. Roberts wrote in 1985.
09:32 And he wrote that,
09:34 “Although we carelessly speak of Islam as a ‘religion’;
09:38 that word carries many overtones of the special history of western Europe.
09:45 The Muslim is primarily a member of a community,
09:49 the follower of a certain way, an adherent to a system of law.
09:56 Rather than someone holding particular theological views.”
10:02 And the American political scientist Mark Alexander writes that,
10:07 “One of our greatest mistakes is to think of Islam
10:12 as just another one of the world’s great religions.
10:18 We should not do so.”
10:29 “Islam,” he says, “is politics or it is nothing at all.
10:34 But of course, it is politics with a spiritual dimension...
10:39 ...which will stop at nothing, until the West is no more.
10:44 Until the West has... been well and truly Islamized.”
10:49 And, he was right. These...
10:56 These are not all just statements by opponents of Islam.
10:59 Islamic scholars say, and think, the same thing.
11:03 To anyone who has read the Koran, the Sirah and the Hadith:
11:09 there can be no misunderstanding about the nature of Islam.
11:15 Abul Ala Maududi, the influential 20th century Pakistani Islamic thinker, wrote,
11:24 – and I quote, emphasizing that these are not my words but those of a leading Islamic scholar –
11:31 he said: “Islam is not merely a religious creed [but] a revolutionary ideology,
11:39 and jihad refers to that revolutionary struggle...
11:44 to destroy all states and governments anywhere, on the face of the earth,
11:50 which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam.”
11:55 And Ali Sina, an Iranian Islamic apostate who now lives in Canada,
12:02 points out that there is one golden rule,
12:06 and that this golden rule lies at the heart of every religion:
12:12 that is, that we do unto others, as we would have them do unto us.
12:19 But in Islam, this rule only applies to fellow believers, but not to Infidels.
12:39 Ali Sina says, and I quote,
12:42 “The reason I am against Islam is not because it is a religion,
12:47 but because it is a political ideology of imperialism and domination,
12:53 in the guise of religion.
12:55 Because Islam does not follow the Golden Rule, it attracts violent people.”
13:03 A dispassionate study of the beginnings of Islamic history,
13:07 reveals clearly that Muhammad’s objective was
13:11 first to conquer his own people, the Arabs, and to unify them under his rule,
13:19 and then to conquer and rule the world.
13:23 That was the original cause.
13:26 It was obviously political and was backed by military force.
13:32 “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah’, ”
13:41 is what Muhammad said in his final address.
13:44 He did so in accordance with the Koranic command in sura 8:39:
13:50 “Fight them until there is no more dissension and the religion is entirely Allah’s.”
14:00 According to mythology, Muhammad founded Islam in Mecca,
14:05 after the Angel Gabriel visited him for the first time in the year 610.
14:11 However, for its first twelve years, when Islam was religious rather than political,
14:18 Islam was not a success.
14:20 But in 622, Muhammad emigrated with his small band of 150 followers, to Yathrib,
14:29 which was then a predominantly Jewish oasis.
14:32 There he established the first mosque in history, and seized political power,
14:39 he gave Yathrib the name of Medina (which means the “City of the Prophet”);
14:44 and began his career as a military and a political leader,
14:49 who conquered the whole of Arabia.
14:52 Tellingly, the Islamic calendar starts with the hijra,
14:58 the migration to Medina:
15:01 the moment when Islam became a political movement.
15:07 And after Muhammad's death, Islam developed,
15:11 based upon his own words and deeds: Sharia.
15:14 An elaborate legal system which justified,
15:17 the repressive governance of the world by divine right
15:22 – including rules for jihad,
15:25 and for the absolute control of believers and non-believers.
15:30 And Sharia as you all know,
15:32 is the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran, among other Islamic states.
15:38 It is also central to the Organization of the Islamic Conference,
15:44 which in article 24 of its Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,
15:50 proclaims that, “all rights and freedoms are subject to the Islamic Sharia.”
15:58 And the OIC is no religious institution; it is a political body.
16:06 It constitutes the largest voting-block in the United Nations,
16:11 and writes reports on so-called “Islamophobia” in Western Countries,
16:17 which accuse us of human rights violations.
16:22 To speak in biblical terms: They look for the splinter in our eye,
16:29 while ignoring the log in their own.
16:48 Under Sharia law, people in territories conquered by Islam,
16:53 have no guaranteed legal rights,
16:56 not even the right to life or the right to own property,
17:00 unless they convert to Islam.
17:04 Before I continue,
17:07 and in order to avoid any misunderstandings,
17:10 I want to emphasize that I am talking about Islam,
17:15 not about Muslims.
17:17 I always make a clear distinction
17:20 between the people and the ideology,
17:23 between Muslims and Islam.
17:27 There are many moderate Muslims,
17:31 but the political ideology of Islam is not moderate,
17:37 will never be moderate, and has global ambitions.
17:53 It aims to impose Islamic law, or Sharia, upon the whole world.
17:59 The way to achieve this is through jihad.
18:03 The good news is,
18:05 that millions of Muslims around the world,
18:08 – including many in Germany and the Netherlands –
18:11 do not follow the directives of Sharia,
18:14 let alone engage in jihad.
18:17 But the bad news...
18:19 The bad news however, is that those who do follow them,
18:25 are prepared to use all available means
18:28 in order to achieve their ideological, revolutionary goal.
18:34 In 1954 the British-American writer and historian Professor Bernard Lewis,
18:42 in his essay Communism and Islam, spoke of,
18:46 “the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition.”
18:51 Professor Lewis said that,
18:54 “The traditional Islamic division of the world
18:58 into the ‘House of Islam’ and the ‘House of War’...
19:01 ...has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs...
19:06 ...The aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same.”
19:12 says Professor Lewis.
19:14 And the American political scientist Mark Alexander states,
19:19 that the nature of Islam, differs very little
19:22 – and only in detail rather than style –
19:25 from despicable and totalitarian political ideologies,
19:29 such as National-Socialism and Communism.
19:34 He lists the following common characteristics for these three,
19:39 these three, ideologies:
19:42 Communism, National-Socialism and Islam.
19:45 First: They use political purges to “cleanse” society of what they consider undesirable.
19:56 Second: They tolerate only a single political party,
20:01 where Islam allows more parties, it insists that all parties be Islamic ones.
20:09 Third: They coerce the people down a road that they must follow.
20:16 Fourth: They obliterate the liberal distinction between areas of private judgment and of public control.
20:27 Fifth: They turn the educational system into an apparatus for the purpose of universal indoctrination.
20:35 Sixth: They lay down rules for art, for literature, for science and for religion.
20:44 Seventh: They subdue certain people who are given second-class status.
20:53 Eighth: They induce a frame of mind akin to fanaticism,
20:58 adjustment takes place by struggle and dominance.
21:03 Ninth: They are abusive to their opponents, and regard any concession on their own part,
21:10 as a temporary expedient, and on a rival’s part, as a sign of weakness.
21:19 Tenth: They regard politics as an expression of power.
21:24 Lastly: They are anti-Semitic.
21:29 There is one more striking parallel,
21:33 but this is not a characteristic of the three political ideologies,
21:40 but rather it is a characteristic of the West:
21:43 It is the apparent inability of the West to see the danger.
21:50 The prerequisite to understanding political danger:
21:53 is a willingness to see the truth, even if it is unpleasant.
22:14 Unfortunately, modern Western politicians seem to have lost this capacity.
22:22 Our inability leads us to reject, the logical and historical conclusions,
22:28 to be drawn from the facts.
22:32 Though we could, and should know better.
22:36 What is wrong with modern Western man,
22:40 that we end up making the same mistake over and over again?
22:45 There is no better place to ponder this question,
22:52 than here in Berlin.
23:07 Here in Berlin, the former capital of the empire,
23:11 of the evil that was Nazi Germany.
23:14 And a city which was held captive by the
23:17 so-called German “Democratic” Republic for over forty years.
23:22 When the citizens of Eastern Europe rejected Communism in 1989,
23:30 they were inspired by dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
23:35 Václav Havel, Vladimir Bukovsky, and others, who told them:
23:39 that people have a right,
23:41 but also an obligation, to “live within the truth.”
23:46 And freedom, dear friends...
23:49 Freedom requires eternal vigilance;
23:53 so it is with truth also.
24:08 So it is too with truth.
24:10 Solzhenitsyn added however, and I quote, that,
24:14 “The truth is seldom sweet. It is almost invariably bitter.”
24:21 Let us, let us together, look the bitter truth squarely in the eye:
24:27 We have lost our capacity to perceive the danger,
24:32 and to understand the truth,
24:34 because we no longer value freedom.
24:38 Politicians from almost all establishment political parties today,
24:41 are facilitating Islamization.
24:44 They are cheering for every new Islamic school,
24:47 every Islamic bank, and every new Islamic court.
24:52 They regard Islam as being equal to our own culture.
24:57 Islam or Freedom?
24:59 It doesn't really matter to them.
25:03 But to us? To us? It does matter.
25:18 The entire establishment, the elite
25:21 – universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians –
25:27 are all putting our hard-earned liberties at risk.
25:32 They talk...
25:39 They talk about equality,
25:42 but amazingly fail to see how in Islam,
25:47 women have fewer rights than men,
25:49 and infidels have fewer rights than adherents of Islam.
26:01 Are we, then, going to repeat the fatal mistakes of the Weimar Republic?
26:20 Are we succumbing to Islam because our commitment to freedom is already dead?
26:26 No. It will not happen.
26:30 We are not like Frau Merkel.
26:32 We will not accept Islamization.
26:55 We have to keep our freedom alive.
26:59 And, to the extent that we have already lost it,
27:01 we must reclaim it in our democratic elections.
27:16 This is exactly why, precisely why,
27:19 we need new political parties that defend freedom.
27:30 It is to support such parties that we established the International Freedom Alliance.
27:40 As you know, I am standing trial in the Netherlands.
27:46 On Monday, in two days time, I will have to go to court again.
27:50 And I will have to spend most of the coming month there.
27:55 I have been brought to court because of my opinions on Islam,
28:01 and because I have voiced these opinions in speeches,
28:07 articles and in my documentary film Fitna.
28:11 I have personally lived under constant police protection for years.
28:16 Islamic extremists want to assassinate me,
28:19 yet it is I who stand before a court,
28:22 because the Dutch establishment – most of them non-Muslims –
28:28 want to see me silenced as well.
28:32 I have been dragged to court because in my country,
28:36 freedom can no longer be fully enjoyed.
28:42 Unlike America, we do not have a First Amendment which guarantees people
28:49 the human right to express their opinions,
28:54 and foster public debate by doing so.
28:57 And in contrast to America, in Europe, the nation state,
29:02 and increasingly the European Union also,
29:05 prescribes how citizens
29:07 – including democratically elected politicians such as myself –
29:11 how we should think, and what we are allowed to say.
29:26 One of the things we are no longer allowed to say,
29:31 is that our culture, our culture, is superior to certain other cultures.
29:39 This...
29:48 Saying only this, is seen as a discriminatory statement
29:55 – a statement of hatred even.
29:58 We are indoctrinated on a daily basis, in the schools and through the media,
30:02 with the message that all cultures are equal,
30:06 but that, if one culture is worse than all the rest,
30:09 then it is our own.
30:14 We are inundated with feelings of guilt and shame
30:18 about our own identity and what we stand for.
30:25 We are exhorted to extend respect to everyone and everything,
30:29 except ourselves.
30:31 This...
30:46 This is the message of the Left and of the politically-correct ruling establishment.
30:54 They want us to feel so ashamed about our own identity,
31:01 that we simply refuse to stand up for it.
31:05 The detrimental obsession of our cultural and political elites with Western guilt,
31:13 merely reinforces the view which Islam has of us.
31:17 The Koran says that non-Muslims are kuffar [the plural of kafir],
31:21 a word which literally means “rejectors” or “ingrates”.
31:26 Hence non-believers, are “guilty”.
31:30 Islam teaches that in our natural state we have all been born as believers.
31:36 Islam teaches that if we are not believers today, the fault for this thus lies with us,
31:41 or the fault lies with our forefathers.
31:45 Subsequently, we are always kafir – guilty – because either we or our fathers are apostates.
31:53 And hence, according to some, we deserve subjugation.
31:57 And our contemporary leftist and politically-correct intellectuals,
32:02 are entirely blind to the dangers of Islam.
32:07 Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky argues that the West,
32:13 after the fall of Communism,
32:15 failed to expose those who had collaborated with the Communists.
32:21 By for example purposefully advocating policies of détente and improved relations,
32:27 or a relaxation of international tension, and peaceful coexistence.
32:33 He points out that the Cold War was, “a war we never won.”
32:41 “We never even fought it… Most of the time, the West engaged in
32:47 a policy of appeasement toward the Soviet bloc
32:53 – and appeasers don’t win any wars.”
33:06 Dear friends... Islam is the Communism of today.
33:12 But...
33:17 But, because of our failure to come clean with Communism,
33:23 we are unable to deal with Islam,
33:26 trapped as we are in the old Communist habit of deceit and double-speak;
33:33 which in the past plagued the countries in the East, and that now plagues us all.
33:39 So we see the sort of people, who before turned a blind eye to Communism,
33:46 are precisely the same politically-correct, leftists, who today close their eyes to Islam.
34:03 They are using exactly the same arguments
34:07 for “improved relations”, and appeasement as before.
34:13 They argue that our adversary is just as peace-loving, as we are,
34:20 that if only we were to meet him half-way, then he would also do the same.
34:26 That he only asks for respect, and that if we respect him, he will in turn respect us.
34:34 We even hear a repetition of the old moral equivalence mantra.
34:40 They used to say that Western “imperialism” was as bad as Soviet imperialism;
34:49 today they say that Western “imperialism” is just as bad as Islamic terrorism.
34:57 In my speech a few weeks ago in New York, on September 11th,
35:02 I emphasized that we must stop this “Blame the West, Blame America”-game,
35:09 which Islamic spokesmen are playing with us.
35:27 And we must stop playing this game ourselves.
35:32 And I have exactly the same message, dear friends, for you today.
35:39 It is an insult to tell us that we are guilty,
35:44 and deserve what is happening to us.
35:47 How is it exactly, that we deserve becoming strangers in our own lands?
35:53 We should accept such insults no longer.
36:12 First of all, Western civilization is the freest and most prosperous on earth.
36:21 Which is precisely why so many immigrants are so keen on moving here.
36:24 Secondly...
36:29 Secondly, there is no such thing as collective guilt.
36:33 Free individuals...
36:41 Free individuals are free moral agents who are only responsible for their own deeds.
36:51 I am very happy, very fortunate, to be here in Berlin today in order to deliver this message,
37:00 which is extremely important, especially so, here in Germany.
37:05 Whatever...
37:07 No matter what took place in your country in the past,
37:13 the present generation is not responsible for it.
37:34 Whatever happened in the past, is no excuse for punishing the Germans of today.
37:49 But... But, neither is it an excuse, for you to shrink from the fight for your own identity.
38:10 Your only responsibility is to eschew the mistakes of the past.
38:16 It is your duty to stand with those threatened by the ideology of Islam,
38:24 such as the State of Israel and your Jewish compatriots.
38:41 The Weimar Republic refused to fight for freedom,
38:46 and was overrun by a totalitarian ideology,
38:50 with catastrophic consequences for Germany, the rest of Europe and the world.
38:56 Please do not refuse to fight, for your freedom, today.
39:14 I feel lucky to be in your midst today because it seems,
39:18 that twenty years after German reunification, a new,
39:23 a new generation no longer feels guilty, just for the fact of being German.
39:41 The current and very intense debate about Thilo Sarrazin’s recent book,
39:48 is an indication of the fact that Germany is coming to terms with itself.
39:53 I have...
40:01 I have not yet read Dr Sarrazin’s book, but I say this:
40:05 While the minds of the ruling politically-correct establishment
40:09 may be closed to, and almost unanimously critical of his thesis,
40:12 and while he may have lost his job as a Bundesbanker,
40:16 nevertheless, a large majority of Germans acknowledge that Dr Sarrazin
40:21 has addressed an important and pressing issue.
40:35 “Germany is abolishing itself,” warns Sarrazin,
40:40 and he calls upon the Germans to halt this process.
40:44 The enormous impact of his book indicates that many Germans feel the same way.
40:50 The people of Germany, do not want Germany to be abolished.
40:54 Despite all...
41:04 Germany is no longer ashamed to assert its national pride.
41:18 In these difficult times, when our national identities are under threat,
41:23 we must stop feeling guilty about who we are.
41:26 And with that cease feeling shameful,
41:29 and say together who we are:
41:31 We are not kafir, we are not “guilty”.
41:48 Like other peoples, Germans too have the right to remain who they are.
41:53 Germans must not become French, nor Dutch, nor Americans, nor Turks.
42:00 They should remain Germans.
42:10 When the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan visited your country in 2008,
42:17 he told the Turks living here that they had to remain Turks.
42:23 He literally said that, “assimilation is a crime against humanity.”
42:28 And Erdogan would perhaps have been right,
42:32 if he had been addressing the Turks in Turkey.
42:47 However, Germany is still the land of the Germans.
42:52 And hence, the Germans have a right to demand that anyone
42:56 who comes to live in Germany should assimilate.
43:00 They have the right...
43:07 They have the right
43:09 – no, they have the duty to demand, for the sake of their children –
43:17 to demand that newcomers respect German identity,
43:21 and fully respect Germany’s right to preserve its identity.
43:25 And we must realize...
43:29 We must realize that Islam expands in two ways.
43:35 Since it is not a religion, conversion is only a marginal phenomenon.
43:41 Historically, Islam has expanded either by military conquest,
43:48 or, it has expanded by using the weapon of hijra: immigration.
43:55 Muhammad conquered Medina through immigration.
43:59 Hijra is also what we are experiencing today.
44:03 The Islamization of Europe continues all the time.
44:09 But the West, our West, has no strategy for dealing with the Islamic ideology:
44:17 because our elites say to us, that we must adapt to them,
44:22 rather than the exact opposite.
44:35 In this regard, there is a lesson which we can learn from America,
44:41 the freest nation on Earth.
44:43 Americans are proud of their nation, its achievements and its flag.
44:50 We, too, should be proud of our nations.
44:55 The United States has always been a nation of immigrants.
44:59 And President Theodore Roosevelt was very clear about the duty of immigrants.
45:07 Here is what President Roosevelt said, and I quote:
45:12 “We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith,
45:19 becomes an American and assimilates himself to us,
45:22 he shall be treated with a full and exact equality with everyone else...
45:29 But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American,
45:35 and nothing but an American...
45:38 There can be no divided allegiance here...
45:43 We have room for but one sole loyalty
45:47 and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
45:52 Endquote.
46:05 And it is not up to me to define what Germany’s national identity consists of.
46:13 That is entirely up to you.
46:16 However I do know, that German culture,
46:19 like that of neighbouring countries such as my own,
46:24 is rooted in Judeo-Christian and humanist values, and not in Islam.
46:43 Every responsible politician has a political obligation:
46:48 to preserve these values against ideologies which directly threaten them.
46:55 And a Germany...
46:56 A Germany full of mosques and veiled women,
47:00 is no longer, my friends,
47:02 it is no longer the Germany of Goethe,
47:05 of Schiller and Heine,
47:06 of Bach and Mendelssohn.
47:28 It will be a loss to us all.
47:32 It is vital that you cherish and preserve your roots as a nation.
47:38 Otherwise it will be impossible for you to safeguard your identity:
47:43 you will be abolished as a people, and you will lose your freedom.
47:49 And the rest of Europe will lose its freedom with you.
47:55 My friends, when Ronald Reagan came to a divided Berlin 23 years ago,
48:04 he uttered, not far from here at the Brandenburg Gate,
48:09 the following historic words, to the Soviet General Secretary:
48:20 “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
48:25 President Reagan was not an appeaser,
48:29 he was rather, a man who spoke the truth, and who loved freedom.
48:34 Today, we must again tear down a wall.
48:40 It is not a wall of concrete,
48:43 but rather it is a wall of denial and ignorance, about the real nature of Islam.
48:50 The International Freedom Alliance aims to coordinate and stimulate these efforts.
48:59 And because we speak the truth – and it is the truth – voters have given my party,
49:05 and many other parties too, from Denmark all the way to Switzerland,
49:09 the voters have given us the power to influence the political decision-making process.
49:15 Whether that be in opposition, or through supporting a minority government;
49:21 as we too want to do soon in the Netherlands.
49:26 President Reagan... President Reagan showed, that one can, by speaking the truth,
49:33 one can change the course of history.
49:37 He showed...
49:47 He showed also, that there is no need to despair.
49:52 Never!
49:55 My friends... Just do your duty.
50:00 Do not be afraid.
50:03 Speak up. Speak the truth.
50:06 Defend Freedom.
50:08 Together we can preserve freedom,
50:12 together we must preserve freedom,
50:14 and together, my friends, we will be able to preserve freedom.
50:19 Thank you.

VIA Gates of Vienna: Islam or Freedom?

Bruce Bawer just spoke in Montreal

Blazing Cat Fur sent the notice around, but I didn't get the live feed for the Bawer conference up in time. But here's the link to the videos (in English with a few introductory words in French):





And here is the French-language introduction of Bawer by PointdeBascule's Marc Lebuis:

Sept. 11

This would be a good day to take an hour and listen to Gil Bailie's July talk to the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. It is exemplary of the kind of moral striving and frank, courageous, informed and irenic talk we all need to pursue if the West is to save itself from its own decadence and from its religious-political rivals who take from what remains of the legacy of Western freedom, science, and free economies, but have, to be blunt, as yet little to offer the cause of this freedom's renewal and survival.

The talk is found in three audio files currently at the top of this page.

Dreams and delusions

Ari sends us some photos, and a Caroline Glick JPost piece which raises the question of why Israelis want to join the increasingly antisemitic European Union. Is it because Israel has Arabia on its other flank? Or do we have to look for answers in the kind of story recounted by David Goldman, two posts below?

Israelis are wild about Europe. A poll carried out by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation last month showed that a whopping 69 percent of Israelis, and 76% of Israeli Jews, would like for Israel to join the European Union. Sixty percent of Israelis have a favorable view of the EU.

This poll's most obvious message is that as far as Europe is concerned, Israelis suffer from unrequited love. A 2003 Pew survey of 15 EU countries showed that 59% of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace. A poll taken in Germany the following year showed that 68% of Germans believe that Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians and 51% said that there is no difference in principle between Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

And it isn't simply Israel that they hate. They don't like Jews very much either. In an empirical study published in 2006, Professors Edward Kaplan and Charles Small of Yale University demonstrated a direct link between hatred for Jews and extreme anti-Israel positions. A recent poll bears out the fact that levels of hostility toward Israel rise with levels of anti-Semitism.

[...]
According to a 2008 Pew survey, anti-Semitic feelings in five EU countries - Spain, Britain, France, Germany and Poland - rose nearly 50% between 2005 and 2008. Whereas in 2005, some 21% of people polled acknowledged they harbor negative feelings toward Jews, by last year the proportion of self-proclaimed anti-Semites in these countries had risen to 30%. In Spain levels of anti-Semitism more than doubled, from 21% in 2005 to 46% in 2008.

Not surprisingly, increased hatred of Jews has been accompanied by increased violence against Jews. Just last week, for instance, three men assaulted Israel's ambassador in Spain Rafi Shotz as he and his wife walked home from a soccer game. They followed after him and called out, "dirty Jew," "Jew bastard," and "Jew murderer." A crowd witnessed the assault, but no one rose to their defense.

Shotz was lucky. As Israel's ambassador he had two policemen escorting him and so he was not physically threatened. The same was not the fate of Holocaust survivors who assembled at Mauthausen death camp in Austria last week to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the camp's liberation by American forces.

As Jewish survivors of the camp where 340,000 people were murdered mourned the dead, a gang of Austrian teenagers wearing masks taunted them, screaming "Heil Hitler," and "This way for the gas!" They opened fire with plastic rifles at French Jewish survivors, wounding one in the head and another in the neck.

And Austria is not alone. From Germany to France, Belgium, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and beyond, Jewish kindergartens and day schools, restaurants and groceries have been firebombed and vandalized. The desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues has become an almost routine occurrence. Jewish leaders from Norway to Germany to Britain to France have warned community members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public. Rabbis have been beaten all over the continent.
[...]

There is no all-encompassing explanation for the EU's popularity in Israel. It is a function of a number of complementary causes. The most important among them is the abject failure of the Israeli media to examine European anti-Semitism and its implications for European policy toward Israel in any coherent fashion.

Rather than recognize that European anti-Semitism and its concomitant hostility toward Israel is the consequence of internal European dynamics, the Israeli media tend to cast both as a function of Israel's actions. Doing so certainly makes for neat, easily digestible news stories, but it also trivializes the situation. Moreover, by acting as though Israel's actual behavior is at all relevant to European treatment of Jews and the Jewish state, the local media effectively buy into cynical European moves to belittle the significance of anti-Jewish violence. They give credence to false European claims that the firebombing of synagogues is simply the regrettable consequence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Then there is the issue of Israel's constant quest to end its international isolation. For many Israelis, it is tantalizing to think that we can end our international isolation by joining the EU. The EU is seen as a club of rich and cultured countries with which Israel would benefit from merging. This view again is nurtured by the media, which have failed to report on the failure of the European welfare state model.
[...]
Finally, there is the nostalgia that many Israelis feel toward the old pre-war Europe from their grandparents' stories. That long gone Europe, where young women and men would walk along the promenades in Berlin, Paris, Antwerp and Prague holding hands and eating ice cream, breathing in the air of Heinrich Heine and Franz Kafka, has been kept alive in the imaginations of generations of Israelis. Many of them work today as leading journalists, movie directors and actors. For many Israelis, then, the myth of Europe is more familiar than the real Europe.

Column One: The Europe of our dreams | Columnists | Jerusalem Post
Howard Rotberg welcomes this Glick piece, noting that

just as I have started a new series on the myth that Europe is a positive force in world history, the Jerusalem Post's great columnist Caroline Glick writes a superb column on Europe's anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, and why Europhiles in Israel must re-assess their attitudes

Have Europeans or even Canadians become mercenaries?

What does it take to recognize a basic covenant in which you work to guarantee the security of women neighbors? Among the now-familiar claims about the death-cult nihilism of Western multiculti liberals, this comment in a recent Ayaan Hirsi Ali piece stands out:

Women's shelters have adapted their curriculum - instead of teaching the women who come to them how to become self-reliant, the shelters facilitate prayer rooms and employ mediators from the Islamic community. All this mediation serves only one purpose - that is, to return the woman to the circumstances of abuse she left.

Here is a system, which was a tool to emancipate, that has been completely transformed to serve the Muslim purpose of obedience. If the wife obeys, then the husband no longer needs to beat her. The matter is settled.
[...]
In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today - unlike their forbears in the Second World War - will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.

It's time lily-livered Europe stood up to Muslim bigots | Opinion | The First Post
That title had me wondering, what is the origin of this interesting expression? I wonder if "random" has it right:

The word 'lily' does not mean white, it means of an unregulated order or uncategorised. It originally referred to a wide variety of flowering plants that were lumped under the genaral title 'lily'. The word liver or in its earlier form, liber, means someone or something dependant on the direction of another. It once refered to middle ranking people in the service of large household. Being liveried meant to wear the colours or uniform of the house to which you were indentured. Hence to be liberated meant to be set free from an indenture. It is only recently that the prospect of 'liberation' has been viewed as an attractive prospect. The liver as applied to the body organ is a lateral extension and is so named because it is the organ in the body at the direction of the other organs. It processes everything for the continued function of the body.Its function therefore is determined by what the rest of the body throws at it. The extension to the colour 'red' or 'reddish brown' is a figurative one. Being 'lily livered' therefore meant you were not attached to anyone, you were unclassified. It originally referred to mercenaries who were apt to go home when the pay ran out.

Meanwhile, Phyllis Chesler continues to explore the case of the Afghan "Canadian" who killed his sister and her fiance in an apparent "honour" killing. Speaking first of the mother of the victim and the murderer:

In court, she described herself as “more open minded” than her husband.

But the close-minded monster held onto his “property,” his children. He did not allow them to see their mother for six long years. The (unspecified) paternal abuse “worsened.” In poor Khatera’s case, her father drove her to at least one suicide attempt and ultimately caused her to flee to her mother in Vancouver. Fayez sent tickets to all three children to join her. Her two daughters came. Hasibullah did not do so. In fact, Hasibullah tried to have Khatera return to their abusive father.

One can only speculate as to why Hasibullah did not break with his father. Perhaps his father treated him differently, better, because he was a son, not a mere daughter. Perhaps Mr. Sadiqi humiliated and beat Hasibullah as well, turned him into his personal servant too– but nevertheless, he became Hasibullah’s male role model.

In the Dallas honor killings of Sarah and Amina Said, their brother, Islam, cleaved to his father, agreed with him, stalked his two sisters on his father’s behalf and on behalf of the family’s “honor.”

Likewise, Hasibullah became his father’s eventual enforcer and avenger. He rejected his mothers’ version of reality: “Don’t talk to me about my dad like that.” His mother wept.

Please remember that, in 1989, Marc Lepine, who mass-murdered fourteen female engineering students in the Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal, also had a wife-beating Algerian father. This fact, which I found crucial, was completely ignored by the police and by all those who wrote about this tragedy. The police saw this as the isolated act of a madman.

So, if we too become blind when thinking about women brutalized by their "brothers" have we not too become mercenaries in the service of whatever local thug, or post-national bureaucratic tyrant, scares or controls some or all - be he of any particular ethnoreligious background, or a postmodern nowhere man sitting above all as politically-correct emperor/serf? If there is a covenant that promises we each will strive to give full effort to guarantee every citizen's freedom, in the face of violent men of any stripe, what kind of "father figure" must rule us all? How do we remember a time when the worst thing a man could do was to beat women, an act sure to be punished by his patriarchal god, the kind of god who makes demands of an individual with the freedom that clearly distinguishes one, as a full person, from any social role (like father or son or bricklayer) that one sometimes plays?

So, to return to Hirsi Ali's question, why would a modern European listen to calls to fight and perhaps self-sacrifice for the freedom of Muslim women, or for any fellow citizen? Why would you as an individual give up your life for a stranger?

Well, you never will if you do not believe that Muslims, or any other kind of person, are capable of living in a freedom comparable to yours. But in asking whether they are, first you must understand how your own person and its freedom is indebted to a shared "god" of personhood, to a history of shared agreements to make the individual sacred above all other claims, above claims advanced in the name of "group rights". Only when you truly love this personal "god", or the covenant s/he seems to guarantee, can you begin to find the love and courage that makes you a full person and not a mere narcissist.

I put "god" in quotes because while some will give him a name, what we really need to understand is the human freedom and history by which people come to share certain understandings, or signs, as sacred. For every human, from the most primitive tribe to the most advanced societies, there is a "god" on which any and all freedom depends, to whatever degree the community is freer than our animal brethren. Even the god of the honour killers allows for some significant degree of collective human freedom, generally accessed through the good graces of the local and chief tyrants who are given freedom to protect the community from outsiders.

But a god who will allow for a greater freedom and equality to women, that they may live like modern Westerners, without falling into the heresies that lead to cultural suicide, is actually, in some respects, rather more demanding, as our present suicide watch suggests. Any freedom is a form of discipline, a way of remembering and honoring, through your actions, history's revelation of the signs or gods that made you freer, as a community, nation, or civilization, than you were before. But it is also a faith in your shared ability to discover new signs when faced with new conflicts, new peoples, and new situations.

If you forget the need for discipline, you soon enough lose some freedom. So don't listen to those who tell you not to challenge the less free other within, in the name of multicultural sensitivities. That is a sure road to worshiping the lowest common denominator, the lesser degree of freedom. Real respect for the other entails insisting on the inevitably of either a shared covenant in which all will be equal in legal freedom and normal discipline, or one or another form of war or tyranny.

Thomas Bertonneau now writing at The Brussels Journal

I am greatly pleased to see that The Brussels Journal has acquired the services of one of my favorite essayists, Thomas F. Bertonneau.

A few quick notes on Bertonneau's latest contributions:

In his previous outing for TBJ, Bertonneau reviewed Sylvain Gouguenheim’s recent book, Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne, a work which seeks further to dispel the PC myth that the Renaissance in Europe was highly indebted to Islamic scholarship. Bertonneau writes:

Long before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners – Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold – to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. The sultan and dervish look with amused tolerance on the gaucheries of the European rubes. The rubes swing their elbows and knock over the pottery. It was the Eighteenth-Century philosophes and illuminati who coined the pejorative term Dark Ages to refer to the centuries immediately following the collapse of the Roman imperial administration in the West under pressure of the Gothic assertions of the Fifth Century. Liberal discourse often casually extends the same term to apply it to all of medieval European civilization up to the Renaissance. Specialist historians have, however, long since demonstrated that no such absolute discontinuity as the term Dark Ages insinuates ever existed, which means that the Enlightenment version of history is at least partly wrong. And yet the usual story retains its currency, as an item in a kind of liberal folklore.

Part of that story is the motif of the Islamic middleman role in the transmission of classical knowledge to Christendom. According to this motif, the West in the Eleventh Century possessed no first-hand knowledge of the Greek and precious little of the Roman classics. Fortunately (so the story goes) the Muslims had translated Plato and Aristotle into Arabic, knew all about them, and bestowed the gift of their lore on the benighted monks of Italy and France. The benefactors under this notion behave suavely and generously, while the beneficiaries are – to paraphrase a line from a David Lean film – ignorant, barbarous, and cruel.

In the spasm of western Islamophilia that followed the terrorist attacks of 2001, the myth of medieval Muslim learnedness and medieval European illiteracy gained strong new power for the Left whose acolytes have disseminated it with vigor from their ensconcement in the colleges and universities. Facts might have dispelled the myth had anyone cared to notice them.

Read more...

The jolly idea of Muslim competence in classical learning, as Gouguenheim argues, rests on a misunderstanding: what Islam knew of Greco-Roman wisdom, which it possessed at no time extensively, it knew largely thanks to Syriac scholars. “The Syriac [Christians] were in effect the essential intermediaries of the transmission into Arabic of the philosophical texts of the ancient Greeks,” who generously gave far more than the reluctant takers took. Obtuse westerners betray their lack of discrimination and their poverty of real knowledge in failing to differentiate between Syriac culture and the Arabic-Muslim culture that, by means of the Jihad, conquered and cruelly stamped out Nestorian (and Coptic and Byzantine) society.

Unlike their Muslim beneficiaries, however, the Syriac Christians could assimilate the full range of Greek logic and speculation. The Johannine Logos stemmed from the Greek Logos and the Christianity of the Patres – whether Greek, Latin, or Syriac – therefore comported itself as a rational theology; already in Late Antiquity, Cappadocians and Syrians stood out as the chief developers of Neo-Platonism; emperors both Pagan and Christian sought counsel from the professors of Antioch’s renowned Daphnaeum. In a chapter on “Islam and Greek Knowledge,” Gouguenheim notes that for Muslims, on the other hand, the Logos constituted an inassimilable scandal, subversive of the absolute submission to Allah’s commands, as articulated in the Koran, that the name Islam denotes. Islam kept of Greek thought “in general [only] that which could not come in contradiction with Koranic teaching.” Furthermore, “Greece – and so too Rome – represented a world radically foreign to Islam, for reasons religious, but also political”; and, unlike the Latinate and Frankish peoples, “Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”

More aggressively, “Muslim rejection – or indifference – to Greek knowledge manifested itself again through the destruction of the cultural centers that were the monasteries, the Muslims not acting in this way any differently from the Vikings.” One could remark here, however, that the Vikings at least had the decency after two centuries to cease their predatory behavior and settle down as members of Christendom.

Multiculturalists and Islamophiles have pointed to the Abbasid establishment in Spain (Andalusia) called the Bayt al Hikma or “House of Wisdom” as proof of Muslim enthusiasm for classical learning. Gouguenheim demonstrates that this is another “seductive” misunderstanding, to which the fanciful eagerly yield. The “House of Wisdom” never functioned other than as a Koranic school, and even in that capacity it enjoyed only a truncated existence.
[...]
Christianity was ready, moreover, to receive, not only the philosophy, but also certain basic political principles, of the ancient Greeks, particularly of the Athenians, such as “liberty, reason, and democracy.” Christian Europe in the medieval centuries was, indeed, in a position to admire from the ancient heritage – and to adopt critically – whatever might enhance its Gospel-based conviction of the free will of the individual. Thus the Attic achievement in particular lies at the elective root of a paradoxically self-identifying European culture. Islam knows only that it is Islam whereas Europe, when at its best, has always understood that it is itself and yet something else at the same time. A European sense of intellectual insufficiency and need gave unexpected strength to the progress and consolidation of the medieval mind. Europe would prove itself “permeable” in a way that Islam could not – convinced as it was of its own perfection ab origine. Thus, concludes Gouguenheim, “the Hellenization of medieval Europe was the fruit of Europeans,” who discovered, on their own, their filiations with the ancient societies.

Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel is one of the most significant publications of the last few years. It is, I believe, destined to become a classic – not only in its original French, but also in the other European languages, once it has been translated. It dispels a myth, an invidious one that has long been central to the perverse palaver of western self-hatred. For those who, like me, command their French a bit unsurely, Gouguenheim’s prose is a miracle of balanced sentences and clear meaning. I would say that Gouguenheim’s study has a potentially large audience outside the academy and could become something of a popular success in the Anglophone nations.

All among us who fear we have entered a new "dark ages" and that only a renewal of the eighteenth-century spirit can save us, would do well to spend some time with this essay and the works to which it refers. Those familiar with Bertonneau's other writings might assume the writer is himself fearful of a looming darkness, but he certainly seeks the roots of our proper modernity in the full length of our Western history and not in some singular moment of englightenment. It is remembering the many events of our civilization's renewal that will kindle our passions and help us renew iconic models and a sense of our purpose in dark times.

Similarly, in his latest TBJ piece, Bertonneau reflects on the basis of our faith in respect to a great problem of modernity: people's desire to overcome their loneliness by playing the boy who cried wolf, to take the short cut to appearing morally righteous by playing with and denying a proper apprehension of reality:

No period is so richly guilty of abusing the primary ostensive function of language – of shouting Wolf! – as modernity. I recall [Eric] Gans saying once in a throwaway remark during a lecture that modernity specializes in creating specious differences while simultaneously denying the positive reality of actual differences. We can observe such specious differentiation most especially in current social and political rhetoric.

Take the vocabulary of equality, one of the obsessions of the self-denominating democratic societies. Modernity uses – or rather abuses – the term equality in two incompatible and self-canceling ways and in a verbal sleight of exasperating slipperiness. First, modernity posits equality as a moral absolute and as an eschatological project of the saints. Never mind that otherwise modernity hotly denies the existence of moral absolutes or that elsewhere it despises sanctity. Next, modernity claims that any and every instance of inequality signifies a moral offense and an intolerable injustice. The advocates of equality (their dubious name for which is “social justice”) invariably take the opportunity of their allegations to indict putative authors of inequality, whom they promise to chastise for causing the wickedness. Notice that the scheme of leveling all differences requires the difference that the plaintiff always be morally superior to the defendant. It was on this basis of this morally superior attitude, to which he was keenly sensitive, that Eric Voegelin declared modernity to be essentially “Gnostic.”

What agenda stems from the penchant of the levelers? If the inequality or difference in question consisted, for example, in the empirical fact that certain children at the end of twelve years in school spell well while certain others spell badly or cannot spell at all – were that so, the modern subject in his outrage would urgently equivocate between spelling well and spelling badly and he would urgently seek to nominate as generative of the difference any cause that shifts attention from direct linear explanations thereof (some students had better teachers than others or some students simply paid closer attention to their lessons than others) to extrinsic, “third party” explanations that permit the laying of blame against supposed malefactors. (Never, of course, the teachers or the school or the curriculum.) One might encounter the exculpatory claim that makes of spelling an arbitrary standard imposed by a ruling elite to stabilize the existing unjust establishment.

Read the whole thing...

Local readers will immediately recognize the figure of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation in these remarks, that body of professional Gnostics who are so keen to outlaw the duly-elected government's desire to have standardized testing of students, lest the results of these tests be publicized by that most egregious of bad boys, the pro-free market think-tank Fraser Institute, to actually show the concerned public which schools are incapable of teaching certain children a basic competency in maths or letters.

But indeed the ranks of those who would invoke the presence of an absent wolf are legion, "educatedd" by just such wishful teachers, weakening us for the work of properly apprehending harder realities to come.

The Brussels Journal, at least, is getting better and better.

Let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark

The other day, Blazing Cat Fur linked to this post: Denmark: Street war between Hells Angels and immigrant gangs spreading » Balder Blog

This is the kind of news from Europe that you can these days usually only find in blogs. Today, Pamela Geller has more:

When the situation became hopeless in 1945 Germany, Hitler and his monsters retreated to his fuhrerbunker[; it is said] that in their last days any semblance of decency and morality was recklessly abandoned. Europe's political elites remind me of these desperate, bankrupt zombies, naked and screwing everybody. Strange metaphor I know but it came to mind when reading an email I received from Tomas Kierstein describing the disastrous disintegration of the basic fabric of Danish society (and many European countries). Tomas Kierstein is vice-chairman of The Danish Association (in Danish: Den Danske Forening - introduction in English) He wrote me after viewing my video interviews with Lars Hedegaard parts I(here) and II (here).

His account is frightening but less so than Hedegaard's mystification with America's inexplicable and almost deliberate denial, willful ignorance of the creeping sharia and stealth jihad descending over our great nation. At least, Hedegaard insisted, "we know what is happening in our country".[paraphrasing
[...]
[Kierstein writes:] On the other hand, if Europe becomes a failed Continent, you don’t have to consider whether or not to intervene. At that point you will simply not have the money to support your military efforts anymore, as both the Chinese and your domestic economies, which are heavily tied to each other and the European market, will probably collapse – as more than half a billion of what used to be among the wealthiest consumers in the World will leave the World economy and enter the abyss of perpetual hostilities.

At this point in time, it seems to me we don't have to wait for the perfect account of just how bad things are in Europe, or what hope there is for Western nations to renew themselves to face down the ethical chaos sown by those whose fear of national cultures, and the individual freedom that grows out of them, has encouraged them to foster, in the name of multiculturalism, all the conditions for a collapse of self-ruling democracies and a movement towards rule of the streets by tribal gangsters and warlords.

It is enough at this moment that we recognize and vote for the politicians that, despite their many faults, are at least somewhat aware of the Global Intifada being waged by the left-Islamist alliance:

Having lived 30 years in Pakistan and 10 in Saudi Arabia, Fatah knows intimately what constitutes "soft jihad" when he sees it. He expressed his sorrow, as a lifetime social democrat that after 17 years of engaged support for the NDP, he could no longer be affiliated with that party. He saw the doors opening to Islamists under Alexa McDonough and now, under Layton, he has seen them "flood" into the party.

It soon became apparent that the particular political focus of all three of the speakers is the NDP, which has shamelessly courted and integrated into its inner circles Islamist Muslims with views that are antithetical and even dangerous to the continued health of Canadian values. Fatah has watched in frustration as Islamists in the NDP pursue a relentless campaign to instill a sense of victimhood in Muslim youth. Yesterday an NDP candidate in Toronto Centre - an immigration lawyer, Farouk El-Khaki - accused the judiciary of being anti-Islam. He was not chastised by Jack Layton, and even more worrying, he was not held to account by any other party candidate. It is clear that no party leader wants Islamism raised as an election issue.

Jack Layton, Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists." He is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law, which, all the panelists made clear is the litmus test for dividing real moderate Muslims from Islamists. Fatah also expressed his contempt for the Ontario Human Rights Commission which, he asserted is "infiltrated by Islamists": There are commissioners in the OHCR closely linked to the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Canada-Arab federation, both of which, according to Fatah, have "contempt for Canadian values." Anyone, he says, "who brings religion into politics should be suspect" because they "are a threat to western civilization." The NDP's failure to interrogate their Muslim supporters for fear of revealing their Islamism is the "racism of lower expectations."

Raheel Raza introduced herself as "the proud recipient of a fatwa" for having the gall to try to lead prayers. She shared her joy in having the freedom in Canada to be spiritually religious without fear of political coercion, something she could never have in a Muslim country: "No Muslim country would allow me the rights I have here." She knows she is being monitored from abroad, since she received her fatwa by e-mail from Saudi Arabia. How would they have known about her if she were not being informed on by Islamists here? She cannot fathom why politicians pander to the Islamists. Actually she can fathom it. "Political correctness" will not allow politicians to raise the question of allegiance in their Muslim supporters.

As for feminists, where are they? Also pandering. They have not spoken up about the Talibanist woman in Mississauga who teaches the virtues of polygamy to her female students, nor have they criticized a cleric who openly admits to performing polygamous marriages. Feminists seem to have lower expectations for Muslim women than for themselves: what Tarek Fatah calls "left wing racism." Ms Raza is, according to an Islamist website, #5 of the "most hated Muslims in the world." "My aim," she chuckles, "is to become #1."

Geert Wilders speech in New York

September 25. My thoughts on this speech follow excerpts from Wilders' text:

...I am a lawmaker, and not a movie maker. But I felt I had the moral duty to educate about Islam. The duty to make clear that the Quran stands at the heart of what some people call terrorism but is in reality jihad. I wanted to show that the problems of Islam are at the core of Islam, and do not belong to its fringes.

Now, from the day the plan for my movie was made public, it caused quite a stir, in the Netherlands and throughout Europe. First, there was a political storm, with government leaders, across the continent in sheer panic. The Netherlands was put under a heightened terror alert, because of possible attacks or a revolt by our Muslim population. The Dutch branch of the Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir declared that the Netherlands was due for an attack. Internationally, there was a series of incidents. The Taliban threatened to organize additional attacks against Dutch troops in Afghanistan, and a website linked to Al Qaeda published the message that I ought to be killed, while various muftis in the Middle East stated that I would be responsible for all the bloodshed after the screening of the movie. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the Dutch flag was burned on several occasions. Dolls representing me were also burned. The Indonesian President announced that I will never be admitted into Indonesia again, while the UN Secretary General and the European Union issued cowardly statements in the same vein as those made by the Dutch Government. I could go on and on. It was an absolute disgrace, a sell-out.

A plethora of legal troubles also followed, and have not ended yet. Currently the state of Jordan is litigating against me. Only last week there were renewed security agency reports about a heightened terror alert for the Netherlands because of Fitna.

Now, I would like to say a few things about Israel. Because, very soon, we will get together in its capitol. The best way for a politician in Europe to loose votes is to say something positive about Israel. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I, however, will continue to speak up for Israel. I see defending Israel as a matter of principle. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel. First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.

Samuel Huntington writes it so aptly: “Islam has bloody borders”. Israel is located precisely on that border. This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia. Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. Therefore, it is not that the West has a stake in Israel. It is Israel.
[...]
This is the most painful thing to see: the betrayal by our elites. At this moment in Europe’s history, our elites are supposed to lead us. To stand up for centuries of civilization. To defend our heritage. To honour our eternal Judeo-Christian values that made Europe what it is today. But there are very few signs of hope to be seen at the governmental level. Sarkozy, Merkel, Brown, Berlusconi; in private, they probably know how grave the situation is. But when the little red light goes on, they stare into the camera and tell us that Islam is a religion of peace, and we should all try to get along nicely and sing Kumbaya. They willingly participate in, what President Reagan so aptly called: “the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”

If there is hope in Europe, it comes from the people, not from the elites. Change can only come from a grass-roots level. It has to come from the citizens themselves. Yet these patriots will have to take on the entire political, legal and media establishment.

Over the past years there have been some small, but encouraging, signs of a rebirth of the original European spirit. Maybe the elites turn their backs on freedom, the public does not. In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat to our national identity. I don’t think the public opinion in Holland is very different from other European countries.

Patriotic parties that oppose jihad are growing, against all odds. My own party debuted two years ago, with five percent of the vote. Now it stands at ten percent in the polls. The same is true of all smililary-minded parties in Europe. They are fighting the liberal establishment, and are gaining footholds on the political arena, one voter at the time.

Now, for the first time, these patriotic parties will come together and exchange experiences. It may be the start of something big. Something that might change the map of Europe for decades to come. It might also be Europe’s last chance.

This December a conference will take place in Jerusalem. Thanks to Professor Aryeh Eldad, a member of Knesset, we will be able to watch Fitna in the Knesset building and discuss the jihad. We are organizing this event in Israel to emphasize the fact that we are all in the same boat together, and that Israel is part of our common heritage. Those attending will be a select audience. No racist organizations will be allowed. And we will only admit parties that are solidly democratic.

This conference will be the start of an Alliance of European patriots. This Alliance will serve as the backbone for all organizations and political parties that oppose jihad and Islamization. For this Alliance I seek your support.

How "bad" is the situation? I went to Google News and entered: "Geert Wilders" "Hudson Institute" "New York" . This returned only three hits for the last month (the speech was given Sept. 25; you get one more hit if you omit "Hudson Institute"). And these hits are for a couple of Israeli news bulletins and a Quebec blog. Clearly, the Western Establishment believes there is absolutely nothing to Wilders' arguments, or they are scared stiff of them.

This situation should not demoralize people however. I would take it as a sign of an impending paradigm shift. Reality, however much of it Wilders grasps - and surely the answer is some, however much one might disagree with some of his characterizations of the European scene - cannot be denied forever. The world Orwell imagined cannot really come to pass, no more in this worldly world than the Kingdom Christ imagined, or the Umma Mohammed imagined. Things will break open sooner or later and people will have to face up to the need for new paradigms and forms of transcendence, if they are to avoid great violence.

I'm glad Wilders recognizes that the renewal of Judeo-Christian nation-state values can only happen with parties that are not founded on racial hate. But inevitably the opposition to a large Islamic presence in Europe will have racial aspects to it. Islam is not a race, but most Muslims in Europe will not see themselves, nor will they be seen, as of the same race as what Wilders awkwardly calls the "indigenous" Europeans. We cannot run from such questions whether in righteous and imperialistic "anti-racism", or in worship of an atavistic tribalism as Europe's last and only "hope".

We must find a way to talk about reality, e.g. of national cultures which are not tribal entities (the national should be defined as that which transcends the tribal by entering, in its own particular way and tradition, into open conversation with the universal) but as the guarantors of a strict, uncompromising defense of human freedom, of the individual, and of what must be restrained if the free-thinking individual, and the kind of family which can produce them, is to be reproduced in future. In short, individual freedom must be defended against claims that "human rights" or "freedom" can allow for deference to the anti-liberal claims of certain tribal and religious forms of the sacred. There is and can be no right for the free individual to buy into relative unfreedom.

The many who fantasize about the more compact "communitarian" societies of the past must be given endless kicks in the mental butt, or most of them will end up starving or killing in post-scientific, post-liberal, waste lands.

There will be, must be, many more than one way to make the future of free individuals; but today it can only begin by flooding the world with new forms of reason and faith to dissipate the fear that makes a Wilders speech unreportable. Those who would shut such people up in the name of "human rights" must be faced with a higher reason, and love for the human and the human's foundation in the sacred. For in any vicious conflict, that love is what will ultimately be key to motivating and organizing the more creative and winning side.

Without it Europe will be defenseless. There is no such thing as a successful tribe of nihilists. And presently, that's a rough approximation of what both the unsuccessful EU political class, and the more resentful and truly doomed forms of opposition to it, are.

Can someone please tell me why a civil war in Europe is maybe not a bad idea?

Here are some quotes from articles on the home page of today's The Brussels Journal | The Voice of Conservatism in Europe:

1) 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.

2) 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.

3) 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.”

4) 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.’

5) Jose Manuel Barroso today called on Tony Blair to “stand up against public opinion” and have the “courage to ignore populism,” in relation to the forthcoming EU Council summit in Brussels. At the summit next week it is planned that the Heads of Government of the EU 27 to sign a ‘heads of agreement’ on the new Constitution.

A responsible person never advocates violence or revolution unless there is good reason to think it can prevent a greater violence in future. At what point of democratic decay, with the loss of transparent and democratically accountable governments to which both Europeans and the rest of the world can relate in good faith, is great violence likely to befall Europe, and by extension the rest of the world? Not too long from now, it seems to me.

On the other hand, if what remains of the national and truly inter-national spirit in Europe were to organize itself now, and aim to dispatch the present gang of Euro thugs ruling oligarchically through Brussels and its satellites, would there really be many people who would come to fight on the side of the technocratic gangster elites? I imagine, when push comes to shove, most of the military and police leaders in Europe would quickly side against the Brussels crowd. Why? Because beyond the legitimate concern to organize common markets and free trade, the European project has nothing ultimately to offer in the way of defending its continuing expansion into all manner of post-democratic government and regulation, other than appealing to pseudo-aristocratic snobbery and fear of the ordinary European people and their nationalisms; and ultimately, that is rather little to hold people together. In times of crisis, people look for loyalties, however narrow, and alliances, that are more real.

Present-day technocratic liberalism, at least as this term is now understood in North America, tends strongly to nihilism with its refusal to favor any particular form of (e.g. national or religious) cultural transcendence over another; unfortunately, in the long run, nihilism can only be a ruling principle of a tyranny. Interestingly, the quote from Baroso seems to suggest that the Euro elites somehow grasp this now and are willing to pursue their project regardless, crying to hell with what ordinary European "populists" think about the EU constitution. Jim Kalb summed up the logic of liberalism quite well the other day:

...a tendency to treat the transcendent as an add-on rather than a constituent element of the this-worldly. You can’t divide up reality that way, though, because the lower depends on the higher. The same erroneous tendency to treat the lower as self-sufficient crops up in liberalism. Liberals want to limit the concerns of the state to a few secular topics like freedom and equality and say they can do so without putting other concerns like religion in question. To the contrary, however, the state has the rightful power of life and death, so it’s extremely authoritative, and its actions have pervasive effects in all social relations. If that’s so then it’s impossible to limit the concerns of the state to one narrow set of topics without causing it to act blindly and therefore destructively.

The principles on which the state is founded matter a great deal. The state’s concern is the public good, and man’s public good can’t be understood without reference to the nature of man and his good in general, because the higher permeates the lower. Reason is public by nature, for example, so in the long run we will not be able to appeal rationally even in private life to principles that in principle have no right to public authority. If a principle is just my say-so, why should family and friends pay attention to it?

So it seems to me that the political order always reflects some general understanding of the good and therefore some particular answer to religious questions. That doesn’t mean that the state is necessarily large and active, or that utopian theocracy is a sensible goal. Politics is necessarily imperfect and you can’t demand too much of it. It does mean though that you can’t in principle exclude transcendent concerns from politics, as is now demanded throughout the West. To do so is a recipe for tyranny, since the effect is to turn abstractions like freedom, equality and secularism into absolutes.

And, to be clear, national identities and constitutions are transcendent concerns that, if they are to hold people together, must be open to free and rational, democratic and transparent, exchange. To my European readers I say: organize yourselves now against the current crop of European anti-national elites. The sooner you do it the more likely you can get the Blairs and Barosos running to the beaches of Bermuda for a quick retirement, without much bloodshed. But the more entrenched the new technocracy gets, the more that will have to be destroyed to bring your political culture back in touch with a human reality that is ultimately organized around truly shared forms of linguistic, religious, and political constitutional transcendence, not around thick books of regulations, Orwellian legal rulings in the name of "human rights", and other sundry techniques of dimwitted experts who want to rule you because everyone who counts knows you're just a bunch of historically dirtied white Islamophobic racists who care more about partying, holidays, and the Welfare State than anything more high minded.

Hope springs eternal in Malibu

There doesn't seem to be much in the blogs about the Collapse of Europe Conference held last weekend in Southern California. (UPDATE: See Gil Bailie's impressions, not discussed here.) Pajamas Media has a report that suggests no great fireworks were witnessed but rather a calm representation of the cultural fault lines with which conservative blog readers are now familiar. Thankfully, it appears that even Mark Steyn modifies his prediction that America must soon find itself alone in a hostile world:

not one of the distinguished panelists wanted to write off or dismiss Europe. Instead, they all hoped that the imperiled Contintent could be saved.

Which of course it can be, if the Europeans come to care again about their specific cultural tradition as something worth saving, as something which can find ways to go on after the Somme and after Auschwitz. This, of course, will require backing down from the present end-of-history mindset that collapses into the non-thinking mode of seeing all social inequalities as real or potential victimization on the Nazi-Jew model, and seeing all assertions of nationhood and national self-interest as irredeemably a part of social historical forces that must lead again to wars on the model of the great world wars of the last century. The fact that the present European Union, with its dense, expensive, and largely unaccountable webs of bureaucratic regulation, taxation, and social welfare, shows few signs of being a viable or legitimate political agent, one on which people will stake their honour and lives when difficult times arise, let alone of being an ideal form of economic or productive organization (notwithstanding our shared needs for free markets and trade), has yet to budge many Euro leaders from their blind dash away from the national disasters of the last century. This inability or unwillingness to conceive of a competitive and conflictual, a humbling but realistic, future for an international nation-state system as a necessary means for containing and mediating the means for organized violence, and for economic production, makes it all too appealing for European politicos to play the game of endlessly identifying victims of this nation-state system, which plays right into the hands of those unable to assimilate to modern societies and who thus dream of building an empire and religion to dominate and destroy present freedoms (freedoms for which accountable, self-ruling nations are the ultimate and only serious guarantors):

Hirsi Ali explained that for jihad to succeed, a sense of victimization is necessary. Muslims have mastered the art of creating enemies and conspiracy theories which results in group solidarity at the expense of assimilation.

And then, in a nod to those who are thinking of joining us at one of our Thursday night Vancouver Covenant Zone meetings at the central library, it was also noted that:

it is the vibrancy of America’s civil society that has most impressed Hirsi Ali during her eight months in the country. She contrasted this with the Europeans’ reliance on the government to solve their problems. Another cause of exasperation for her is the tendency of Europeans to always apologize for their inefficiencies, uncritically romanticize the exotic and declare that all religions are equal. The end result is that the Islamic enterprise – which is made possible by the spread of Saudi money – is facilitated by European schools, media and politics. Hirsi Ali recommends imposing the values of Western society – the ones that were so appealing to her – on immigrants.

While Ali, with her history of attacks on all religious and conservative forces, including those of Christianity and Western nationhood, is less than convincing about what values are needed to make Western societies viable and immune to the kind of corrosive forces we see at present (after all, American civil society is rather religious), she does not seem to have had the last word. Mark Steyn got in many wry notes, not least at the expense of the incoherent idea of "multiculturalism":

Steyn reappeared at an afternoon panel on “Multiculturalism and its impact on democratic society.” He called multiculturalism an elusive enemy because one of its very tenets is that there is no point in ever having an argument. The quest to never be culturally insensitive has led to some pretty horrible things. In Britain, for example, many honor killings now go uninvestigated. He could have added that last year a German judge cited the Koran when he rejected a woman’s request for a quick divorce because her husband beat her. Steyn pointed out that multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon: only Western countries have signed up for the project. As he once explained to a caller on a radio show, there are very few free Muslims countries. Steyn got plenty of laughs when he said that after he presented the caller with objective statistics showing the lack of freedom in the Muslim world, the man responded, “Well, that’s just your opinion.”

...a world where everything is just an opinion, and all opinions are equal, or equally useless: is that the kind of Orwellian nightmare in which you want to be living? If not, it's time we all started asking people: what are opinions for? and seriously pressuring those who have forgotten that opinions owe a debt to reality, like the total dhimmi in London (writing in a pro-homosexual magazine!) who writes an article full of lies to say it will be great when his city becomes predominantly Islamic (because "under Islam all ethnicities are equal. Once you have submitted to Allah you are a Muslim – it doesn’t matter what colour you are. End of story." - end of story indeed, especially for women and homosexuals), all the while willfully ignoring the violent reality of Islam at present, a highly delusional, paranoid, system for projecting infantile desires of domination over supposed enemies. However, as the immediately above-linked panel discussion notes, it is just the present Islamic license to resent reality, and project some kind of narcissistic victory over it, that increasingly appeals to Europe's elites.