30.11.06

55- De Decker stapt naar het N-VA

Persoonlijk ben ik daar niet rouwig om. Hij is veel te zelfingenomen en tegenover vrouwen kan hij al helemaal niet normaal doen.

De laatste keer dat ik De Decker hoorde spreken was in de Vlaams Nationale Debatclub in Edegem. Behalve het tentoon spreiden van wat narcistische trekjes deed hij een lange uitval naar de joden en Israël. Zo erg zelfs dat het soms heel erg stil werd in de zaal. Je kon een muis horen lopen.

Zoveel haat? Waar haalt hij zijn informatie vandaan? Na een paar opzoekingen vond ik het antwoord. Enkele jaren geleden is De Decker samen met Van Quickenborn terroristenleiders gaan opzoeken in Palestina en Libanon. Respectievelijk Hamas en Hezbollahleiders. En hoe hebben ze die gevonden? Door niemand minder dat Abou Jahjah. Ja, dezelfde Abou Jahjah die het, noch hier noch in Nederland, kon waarmaken, ondanks zijn Saoudische geldschieters en zijn Syrische raadgevers.Maar de toon in ons land werd gezet.

Het Israël-bashen gaat tot op de dag van vandaag verder. Ook al verbergen de terroristen van Hamas en Hezbollah zich opzettelijk tussen de burgerbevolking, elke reactie op de aanvallen van deze nazistisch geïnspireerde terroristen wordt hier gezien als joodse agressie die vooral terugslaan met ongelijke wapens. Nochtans beschikken deze terroristische organisaties over de allernieuwste oorlogsapparatuur. Zij zijn waarschijnlijk beter uitgerust dan het belgische leger.

Voor Hamas zijn niet enkel kinderlevens van hun vijand maar ook die van hun eigen kinderen niets waard. Golda Meir zei het al eerder: “We zullen enkel vrede met de Arabieren kunnen maken wanneer zij meer van hun kinderen zullen houden dan dat zij ons haten”

Een aantal jaren geleden interviewde de Nieuwe Gazet Van Quickenborn hierover en hij verdedigde Jahjah door te zeggen: “Het enige wat Jahjah deed was een aantal slachtoffers opvangen en bij hem laten logeren, alsook financiële middelen van sympathisanten uit Egypte en andere moslimlanden ter beschikking stellen (van deze terroristen) om de kosten te betalen. Jahjah hielp hen dan ook om een betere advokaat te zoeken.Saoudi-Arabië die zelf een muur wil gaan bouwen om illegale vluchtelingen buiten het land te houden, maar wel grote sommen geld overmaakt om ze hier op te vangen vind ik toch wel verdacht.

Geen wonder dat er bij elke aanslag nieuwe ‘Belgen’ betrokken waren.

Dat Jahjah niet alles wat hij deed kon bekostigen van zijn ‘stempelgeld’ zou zelfs een De Decker aan het denken moeten zetten. Maar blijkbaar heeft hij heel wat overredingskracht. Hij heeft het zover gekregen dat Vlaams minister van Buitenlands Beleid Geert Bourgeois (N-VA) 150.000 euro steun geeft aan de Vlaamse ngo Fonds voor Ontwikkelingssamenwerking (FOS) voor noodhulp in de Palestijnse gebieden. Hadden ze niet beter de fondsen die Arafat jarenlang op zijn Zwitserse rekening heeft gezet terug kunnen eisen?





Zou De Decker ook de Hamasgroet brengen?

23.11.06

54 - Is het einde van Europa in zicht?


Europe is finished, predicts Mark Steyn

By Daniel Pipes (in JewishWorldReview)


Mark Steyn, political columnist and cultural critic, has written a remarkable book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. He combines several virtues uncommonly found together — humor, accurate reportage, and deep thinking — then applies these to what is arguably the most consequential issue of our time: the Islamist threat to the West.


Mr. Steyn offers a devastating thesis but presents it in bits and pieces, so I shall pull it together here.


He begins with the legacy of two totalitarianisms. Traumatized by the electoral appeal of fascism, post-World War II European states were constructed in a top-down manner "so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures." As a result, the establishment has "come to regard the electorate as children."


Second, the Soviet menace during the cold war prompted American leaders, impatient with Europe's (and Canada's) weak responses, effectively to take over their defense. This benign and far-sighted policy led to victory by 1991, but it also had the unintended and less salutary side-effect of freeing up Europe's funds to build a welfare state. This welfare state had several malign implications.


The nanny state infantilized Europeans, making them worry about such pseudo-issues as climate change, while feminizing the males.

It also neutered them, annexing "most of the core functions of adulthood," starting with the instinct to breed. From about 1980, birth rates plummeted, leaving an inadequate base for today's workers to receive their pensions.

Structured on a pay-as-you-go basis, it amounted to an inter-generational Ponzi scheme, where today's workers depend on their children for their pensions.

The demographic collapse meant that the indigenous peoples of countries like Russia, Italy, and Spain are at the start of a population death spiral.

It led to a collapse of confidence that in turn bred "civilizational exhaustion," leaving Europeans unprepared to fight for their ways.

To keep the economic machine running meant accepting foreign workers. Rather than execute a long-term plan to prepare for the many millions of immigrants needed, Europe's elites punted, welcoming almost anyone who turned up. By virtue of geographic proximity, demographic overdrive, and a crisis-prone environment, "Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans," Mr. Steyn writes.


Arriving at a time of demographic, political, and cultural weakness, Muslims are profoundly changing Europe. "Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare." Put differently, "Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity." Much of the Western world, Mr. Steyn flat-out predicts, "will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries." With even more drama, he adds that "it's the end of the world as we know it."


America Alone deals at length with what Mr. Steyn calls "the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia." Europe's successor population is already in place and "the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be." He interprets the Madrid and London bombings, as well as the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, as opening shots in Europe's civil war and states, "Europe is the colony now."


The title America Alone refers to Mr. Steyn's expectation that the United States — with its "relatively healthy demographic profile" — will emerge as the lonely survivor of this crucible. "Europe is dying and America isn't." Therefore, "the Continent is up for grabs in a way that America isn't." Mr. Steyn's target audience is primarily American: watch out, he is saying, or the same will happen to you.


Pared to its essentials, he counsels two things: First, avoid the "bloated European welfare systems," declare them no less than a national security threat, shrink the state, and emphasize the virtues of self-reliance and individual innovation. Second, avoid "imperial understretch," don't "hunker down in Fortress America" but destroy the ideology of radical Islam, help reform Islam, and expand Western civilization to new places. Only if Americans "can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging world" will they have enough company to soldier on. Failing that, expect a "new Dark Ages … a planet on which much of the map is re-primitivized."

22.11.06

53 - After the muses fall silent

After the muses fall silent

By Caroline B. Glick



If journalists, intellectuals, social critics, authors and concerned citizens throughout the world do not rise up and demand that their governments protect their right to free expression and arrest and punish those who intimidate and trounce that right, one day, years from now, students of history will ask how it came to pass that the Free World willingly enabled its own destruction


British Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone on an appeasement spree and no one seems to mind. On Friday, Blair gave a marquis interview to Al-Jazeera's new psychological warfare platform — its English-language channel — to celebrate its launch.

It is unclear whether Blair meant to give the impression in that interview that he agreed with Al-Jazeera's Man-about-Town-in-Britain David Frost's assertion that the US-British war in Iraq is "pretty much a disaster." But Blair has made unmistakably clear that what he is suing for now is an ignominious American-British retreat from Iraq.

In his recent statements and actions, Blair has been unambiguous in communicating his belief that peace in Iraq begins with Israeli surrender to the Palestinians, Hizbullah and Syria. Blair sees in suicidal Israeli retreats from the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria the key to unlocking the hearts of the mullahs in Teheran and the Ba'athists in Damascus. As Blair sees it, these enemies of Israel, the US, Britain and the entire Free World will suddenly become reliable friends of the non-Jewish West if Israel is left at their tender mercies. As friends, Iran and Syria will allow the US and Britain to surrender Iraq with their heads held high as they hand global jihadists their greatest victory since the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan.

No less disturbing than Blair's embrace of surrender as a national strategy is the utter lack of outrage against his decision in the British and international media. No one questioned for instance, his decision to grant Al-Jazeera in English an exclusive interview. It is widely accepted, even by some of the British media, that Al-Jazeera's Arabic satellite station is used as a recruiting tool for global jihad. It can be reasonably presumed that the English channel will be used to erode the West's will to defend itself against global jihadist domination. The fact that the network is now operating an English channel should send a chill up the spine of Western and specifically British media outlets which will now have to compete against an enemy propaganda arm masquerading as a news channel.





THERE ARE many reasons that actions like Blair's strategic retreat from reason and responsibility have gone uncriticized by the media. It is not simply that Western, and particularly European journalists are overwhelmingly anti-American and virulently anti-Israel. One of the central reasons for the silence of Western intellectuals and media in the face of actions like Blair's is fear of death at the hands of jihadists.

In France today, high school teacher Robert Redeker has been living in hiding for two months. On September 19 Redeker published an op-ed in Le Figaro in which he decried Islamist intimidation of freedom of thought and expression in the West as manifested by the attacks against Pope Benedict XVI and against Christians in general which followed the pontiff's remarks on jihad earlier that month.

Redeker wrote, "As in the Cold War, where violence and intimidation were the methods used by an ideology hell bent on hegemony, so today Islam tries to put its leaden mantel all over the world. Benedict XVI's cruel experience is testimony to this. Nowadays, as in those times, the West has to be called the 'Free World' in comparison to the Muslim world; likewise, the enemies of the 'Free World,' the zealous bureaucrats of the Koran's vision, who swarm in the very center of the 'Free World,' should be called by their true name."

In reaction to Redeker's column, Egypt banned Le Figaro and Redeker received numerous death threats. His address and maps to his home were published on al-Qaida-linked Web sites and he was forced to leave his job, and flee for his life. While Redeker e-mailed a colleague that French police have set free the man they know was behind the threats to his life, Redeker recently described his plight to a friend in the following fashion, "There is no safe place for me, I have to beg, two evenings here, two evenings there... I am under the constant protection of the police. I must cancel all scheduled conferences."

For its part, Le Figaro's editor appeared on Al-Jazeera to apologize for publishing Redeker's article.

This weekend British author Douglas Murray discussed the intellectual terror in the Netherlands. Murray, who recently published Neoconservativism: Why We Need It, spoke at a conference in Palm Beach, Florida sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
He noted that the two strongest voices in Holland warning against Islamic subversion of Dutch culture and society — Pim Fortyn and Theo Van Gogh — were murdered.

The third most prominent voice calling for the Dutch to take measures to defend themselves, former member of parliament Ayan Hirsi Ali, lives in Washington, DC today.

Her former colleague in the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders, has been living under military protection, without a home, for years. In the current elections, Wilders has been unable to campaign because his whereabouts can never be announced. His supporters were reluctant to run for office on his candidates' slate for fear of being similarly threatened with murder. Last month, two of his campaign workers were beaten while putting up campaign posters in Amsterdam.

In 2000, Bart Jan Spruyt, a leading conservative intellectual in Holland established a neoconservative think tank called the Edmund Burke Institute. One of the goals of his institute is to convince the Dutch to defend themselves against the growing Islamist threat. In the period that followed, Spruyt was approached by security services and told that he should hire a bodyguard for personal protection. Although he couldn't afford the cost of a bodyguard, the police eventually provided him with protection after showing up at his office hours after Van Gogh was butchered by a jihadist in the streets of Amsterdam in November 2004.





ANOTHER LEADING conservative voice, law professor and social critic Paul Cliteur distinguished himself for his repeated calls for freedom of thought and for the protection of the Dutch secular state. In the weeks after Van Gogh's murder, Cliteur was the target of unremitting criticism from his leftist colleagues in the press. According to a report by the International Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, his colleagues blamed him and his ideological allies for the radicalization of the Muslims of Holland.

Clituer reacted to their abuse by announcing on television that he would no longer speak out or write about the Islamic takeover of Holland.

As the Helsinki report notes, although the European Human Rights Convention stipulates that states must enable free speech, "Annemarie Thomassen, a former Dutch judge at the [European Human Rights Court] in Strasbourg, stated that the limits to freedom of speech in the European context lie where the expressed opinions and statements affect the human dignity of another person. This means that, according to her, in Europe one cannot simply write and say anything one wants without showing some respect to other persons."





IN BRITAIN itself, the fact that no media organ dared to publish the Danish cartoons of Muhammad last year is a clear indication of the level of fear in the hearts of those who decide what Britons will know about their world.

Melanie Phillips, the author of Londonistan, noted at the Freedom Center conference that what Britons hear is best described as "a dialogue of the demented." In this dialogue, European Islamists protest victimization at the hands of the native Europeans while threatening to kill them, and native Europeans apologize for upsetting the Muslim radicals and loudly criticize the US and Israel for not going gently into that good night.

In the meantime, jihadist ideologues and political leaders are flourishing in Europe today. In Britain, aside from happily helping Al-Jazeera's ratings, the government has hired Muslim Brotherhood members as counterterrorism advisers.

10.11.06

52 - Waarom stemmen joden links?

Why are so many Jews liberal?
By Dennis Prager

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

The most frequently asked question I receive from non-Jews about Jews is, why are Jews so liberal?

The question is entirely legitimate since Jews (outside of Israel) are indeed overwhelmingly liberal and disproportionately left of liberal as well. For example, other than blacks, no American group votes so lopsidedly for the Democratic Party. And the question is further sharpened given that traditional Jewish values are not leftist. That is why the more religiously involved the Jew, the less likely he is to be on the Left. The old saw, "There are two types of Jews — those who believe Judaism is social justice and those who know Hebrew," contains more than a kernel of truth.

In no order of importance, here are six reasons:

1. Judaism is indeed preoccupied with social justice (as well as with holiness and personal morality), and many Jews believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies.

2. More than any other major religion, Judaism has always been preoccupied with this world. The (secular) Encyclopedia Judaica begins its entry on "Afterlife" by noting that "Judaism has always affirmed belief in an afterlife." But the preoccupation of Judaism has been making this world a better place. That is why the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is largely silent about the afterlife; and it is preoccupied with rejecting ancient Egyptian values. That value system was centered on the afterlife — its bible was the Book of the Dead, and its greatest monuments, the pyramids, were tombs.

3. Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right wing — such as the words "right-wing" and "conservative." Especially since the Holocaust, they think that threats to their security emanate from the Right only. (It is pointless to argue that Nazism stood for National Socialism and therefore was really a leftist ideology. Whether that is theoretically accurate doesn't matter; nearly everyone regards the Nazis as far Right, and, therefore, Jews fear the Right.) The fact that the Jews' best friends today are conservatives and the fact that the Left is the home of most of the Jews' enemies outside of the Muslim world have made little impact on Jews' psyches.

4. Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion — especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity — with anti-Semitism. Jews are taught from birth about the horrors of the Holocaust, and of nearly 2,000 years of European, meaning Christian, anti-Semitism. They therefore tend to fear Christianity and believe that secularism guarantees their physical security.

5. Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every "ism" of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew's belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian's belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.
The Jews' religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by G-d to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, G-d-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.

6. Liberal Jews fear nationalism.
The birth of nationalism in Europe planted the secular seeds of the Holocaust (religious seeds had been planted by some early and medieval Church teachings and reinforced by Martin Luther). European nationalists welcomed all national identities except the Jews'. That is a major reason so many Jews identify primarily as "world citizens"; they have contempt for nationalism and believe that strong national identities, even in America, will exclude them.
Just as liberal Jews fear a resurgent Christianity despite the fact that contemporary Christians are the Jews' best friends, leftist Jews fear American nationalism despite the fact that Americans who believe in American exceptionalism are far more pro-Jewish and pro-Israel than leftist Americans. But most leftist Jews so abhor nationalism, they don't even like the Jews' nationalism (Zionism).

If you believe that leftist ideas and policies are good for America and for the world, then you are particularly pleased to know how deeply Jews — with their moral passion, intellectual energies and abilities, and financial clout — are involved with the Left.

If, on the other hand, you believe that the Left is morally confused and largely a destructive force in America and the world, then the Jews' disproportionate involvement on the Left is nothing less than a tragedy — for the world and especially for the Jews.