Yearly Archives: 2017

Europe: “The Era of Liberal Babble” by Judith Bergman

June 18, 2017   Uncategorized   0 Comments
  • Uninhibited by the obvious fear of their citizens, the EU nevertheless carries on its immigration policies.Ironically, Western political elites consider this clearly widespread sentiment against Muslim immigration “racist” and “Islamophobic” and consequently disregard it — thereby empowering anti-immigration political parties.
  • “Islam has no place in Slovakia…. [the problem is not migrants coming in, but] rather in them changing the face of the country.” — Robert Fico, Prime Minister of Slovakia.

 

Europe, so many years after the Cold War, is ideologically divided into a new East and a West. This time, the schism is over multiculturalism. What Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has termed “liberal babble” continues to govern Western Europe’s response to the challenges that migration and Islamic terrorism have brought, especially to personal security.

The Western European establishment considers arming oneself against terrorists, rapists and other ill-wishers outlandish, even in the face of the inability of Europe’s security establishments to prevent mass terrorist atrocities, such as those that took place in Paris at the Bataclan Theater or the July14 truck-ramming in Nice.

The European Union’s reaction to terror has been to make Europe’s already restrictive gun laws even more restrictive. The problem is that this restrictiveness contradicts the EU’s own reports: these show that homicides committed in Europe are mainly committed with illegal firearms.

In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, it is still normal to want to defend yourself. Last summer, Czech President Milos Zeman even encouraged citizens to arm themselves against Islamic terrorism. “I really think that citizens should arm themselves against terrorists. And I honestly admit that I changed my mind, because previously I was against [citizens] having too many weapons. After these attacks, I don’t think so”.

Since the president’s remarks, the Czech Interior Minister, Milan Chovanec, has proposed extending the use of arms in the event of a terrorist attack. He explained that despite strict security measures, it is not always possible for the police to guarantee a fast and effective intervention. Fast action from a member of the public could prevent the loss of many lives.

Such reasoning, often seen as laughable in Western Europe, reflects an understanding of the fear that has become a recurring theme on the continent. In Germany, a recent poll showed that two out of three Germans are afraid of becoming the victim of a terrorist attack and 10% perceive an “acute threat” to their safety. Among women, the figures were even higher. 74% responded that they sometimes feel unsafe in crowded places, and 9% said they felt permanently threatened and scared.

Western European leaders, on the other hand, pretend not to understand this fear. In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was asked how Europe could be protected against Islamization. Merkel, who does not move without her own personal security team consisting of 15-20 armed bodyguards around her, working in shifts, answered: “Fear is not a good adviser. It is better that we should have the courage once again to deal more strongly with our own Christian roots.” In December, she told members of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who were asking how to reassure the public about integrating migrants, “This could also broaden your horizons.” (This is the same Merkel, who in 2010 said that multiculturalism had “utterly failed”).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (center) was asked how Europe could be protected against Islamization. Merkel, who has a personal security team of 15-20 armed bodyguards around her, working in shifts, answered: “Fear is not a good adviser.” (Image source: Paralax video screenshot)

As Western Europeans are discovering, however, that the state is increasingly unable to protect them, they have begun acting on their fears:

In France, a survey showed an increase of almost 40% in gun license requests since 2011. “Before the beginning of 2015, it was only a vague trend. Since the ‘Charlie Hebdo‘, Bataclan and Nice attacks, [gun license requests] have become a growing phenomenon”, wrote Le Nouvel Observateur.

In Belgium, requests for gun license applications soared in one major province, Liège, doubling in just five years. “The explanation may lie in the current security context, which generates feelings of insecurity among the population”, said officials from Liège’s Arms Service, the state body in charge of granting gun licenses in the province.

In the wake of mass sexual attacks by migrants in Cologne, major German cities all reported an increase of requests for weapons permits. Cologne police estimated that they received at least 304 applications within just two weeks of the mass sexual assaults. In 2015, the city’s police force saw only 408 applications total over the entire year.

Switzerland has also seen a drastic rise in gun permit applications, with all 12 cantons reporting an increase from 2015. Interim 2016 figures show a further escalation. “There’s no official explanation for the rise, but in general we see a connection to Europe’s terrorist attacks,” said Hanspeter Kruesi, a police spokesman in the Swiss canton of St. Gallen.

Gun sellers in Austria also said that interest in weapons grew after a large number of refugees arrived. “Fear is very much a driving force,” said Robert Siegert, a gun maker and the weapons trade spokesman at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce.

Uninhibited by the obvious alarm of their citizens, the EU nevertheless carries on its immigration policies. “I believe Europeans should understand that we need migration for our economies and for our welfare systems, with the current demographic trend we have to be sustainable,” said Federica Mogherini, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. She added that the continent “does not and will not close its doors” to migrants.

Mogherini is probably not interested in a recent Chatham House study, in which an average of 55% of the people across the 10 European countries surveyed wanted to stop all future immigration from mainly Muslim countries. Only two of the countries surveyed were from Eastern Europe. A ban was supported by 71% of people in Poland, 65% in Austria, 53% in Germany and 51% in Italy. In the UK, 47% supported a ban.

Ironically, Western political elites consider this clearly widespread sentiment against Muslim immigration “racist” and “Islamophobic” and consequently disregard it — thereby empowering anti-immigration political parties.

Several countries in Eastern Europe, such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, have refused to take in more migrants, and several Balkan countries have completely closed their borders.

Czech President Milos Zeman has openly stated, “The experience of Western European countries which have ghettos and excluded localities shows that the integration of the Muslim community is practically impossible”.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has dismissed multiculturalism as a “fiction”. He has also refused to accept EU-agreed quotas on relocating migrants saying, “It may look strange but sorry … Islam has no place in Slovakia.” He added that the problem is not migrants coming in but “rather in them changing the face of the country.”

Western Europe has predictably responded with accusations of “Islamophobia” and “fanning hatred towards minorities and refugees”. One EU state, Luxembourg, even suggested expelling Hungary from the EU for its refusal to toe the EU line and, according to Luxembourg, for treating asylum seekers, “worse than wild animals”. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in turn, harbors little respect for the way that his Western European colleagues have shaped politics: “We are experiencing now the end of an era: a conceptual-ideological era,” Orbán told supporters in 2015, “Putting pretension aside, we can simply call this the era of liberal babble. This era is now at an end.”

Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst.

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Europe’s Planned Migrant Revolution by Yves Mamou

June 18, 2017   Uncategorized   0 Comments
  • Between 2005 to 2014, Germany welcomed more than 6,000,000 people.Two essential questions about integration must be put on the table: 1) What do we ask of newcomers? And 2) What do we do to those who do not accept our conditions? In Europe, these two questions of integration were never asked of anyone.
  • In the new migrant order, the host population is invited to make room for the newcomer and bear the burden not of what is an “integration,” but the acceptance of a coerced coexistence.
  • “No privileges are granted to the Europeans or to their heritage. All cultures have the same citizenship. There is no recognition of a substantial European culture that it might be useful to preserve.” — Michèle Tribalat, sociologist and demographer.
  • “We need people that we welcome to love France.” — French Archbishop Pontier, Le Monde, October 2016.
  • When “good feelings” did not work, however, the authorities have often criminalized and prosecuted anti-immigration critics. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders is currently on trial for trying to defend his country from Moroccan immigrants whose skyrocketing crime wave has been transforming the Netherlands.

Everyone now knows — even German Chancellor Angela Merkel — that she committed a political mistake in opening the doors of her country to more than a million migrants from the the Middle East, Africa and Asia. It was, politically, a triple mistake:

  • Merkel may have thought that humanitarian motives (the war in Syria and Iraq, the refugee problem) could help Germany openly pursue a migration policy that was initially launched and conducted in the shadows.
  • Merkel mainly helped to accelerate the defense mechanisms against the transformation of German society and culture into a “multicultural” space — the “multi” being a segregated, Islamic way of life. The anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now a big player on the German political scene.
  • Merkel raised anxiety all over Europe about the migrant problem. She might even have encouraged the United Kingdom to Brexit and pushed central European countries such as Hungary to the point of seceding from the European Union.

For many years, Germany was the country in Europe most open to immigration. According to Eurostat, the official data body of the European Union, between 2005 to 2014, Germany welcomed more than 6 million people. [1]

Not all six million people came from Middle East. The vast majority of them, however, were not from Europe. Clandestine immigration is not, of course, included in these figures.

Other countries also participated in a migrant race. In the same time frame, 2005-2014, three million people immigrated to France, or around 300,000 people a year. In Spain, the process was more chaotic: more than 700,000 migrants in 2005; 840,000 in 2006; almost a million in 2007 and then a slow decrease to 300,000 a year up to 2014.

The “refugee crisis,” in fact, helped to make apparent what was latent: that behind humanitarian reasons, a huge official immigration policy in Europe was proceeding apace. For economic reasons, Europe had openly decided years ago to encourage a new population to enter, supposedly to compensate for the dramatic projected shrinking of Europe’s native population.

Thousands of migrants cross illegally into Slovenia on foot, in this screenshot from YouTube video filmed in October 2015.

According to population projections made by Eurostat in 2013, without migrants, Europe’s population would decline from 507.3 million in 2015 to 399.2 million by 2080. In roughly 65 years, a hundred million people (20%) would disappear. Country by country, the figures seemed even were more terrifying. By 2080, in Germany, 80 million people today would become 50 million. In Spain, 46.4 million people would become 30 million. In Italy, 60 million would decline to 39 million.

Some countries would be more stable: by 2080, France, with 66 million in 2015 would grow to 68.7 million, and England, with 67 million in 2015, would shrink only to approximately 65 million.

Is migration in itself a “bad” thing? Of course not. Migration from low-income countries to higher-income countries is almost a law of nature. As long as the number of births and deaths remains larger than the number of migrants, the result is considered beneficial. But when migration becomes the major contributor to population growth, the situation changes and what should be a simple evolution becomes a revolution.

It is a triple revolution:

  1. Because the number of migrants is huge. The 2015 United Nations World Population Prospects report states: “Between 2015 and 2050, total births in the group of high-income countries are projected to exceed deaths by 20 million, while the net gain in migrants is projected to be 91 million. Thus, in the medium variant, net migration is projected to account for 82 per cent of population growth in the high-income countries.”
  2. Because of the culture of the migrants. Most of them belong to a Muslim and Arabic (or Turkish) culture, which was in an old and historical conflict with the (still?) dominant Christian culture of Europe. And mainly, because this Muslim migration process happens at a historic moment of a radicalization of the world’s Muslim population.
  3. Because each European state is in position of weakness. In the process of building the European Union, national states stopped considering themselves as the indispensable integrator tool of different regional cultures inside a national frame. On the contrary, to prevent the return of large-scale chauvinistic wars such as World War I and World War II, all European nation-states engaged in the EU process and decided to program their own disappearance by transferring more and more power to a bureaucratic, unelected and untransparent executive Commission in Brussels. Not surprisingly, alongside Islamist troubles in all European countries, weak European states have now to cope with the strong resurgence of secessionist and regionalist movements, such as Corsica in France, Catalonia in Spain, and Scotland and Wales in United Kingdom.

Why did France, Germany and many other countries of the European Union opt for massive immigration, without saying it and without letting voters debate it? Perhaps because they thought a new population of taxpayers could help save their healthcare and retirement systems. To avoid the bankruptcy of social security and the social troubles of “dissatisfied retirees,” the EU took the risk of transforming more or less homogenous nation-states into multicultural societies.

Politicians and economists seem blind to multicultural conflicts. They seem not even to suspect the importance of identity questions and religious topics. These questions belong to nations and since WW II, “the nation” is considered “bad.” In addition, politicians and economists appear to think any cultural and religious problem is a secondary question. Despite the growing threat of Islamist terrorism (internal and imported from the Middle East), for example, they seem to persist in thinking that any violent domestic conflict can be dissolved in a “full-employment” society. Most of them seem to believe in U.S. President Barack Obama’s imaginary jobs-for-jihadists solution to terrorism.

To avoid cultural conflicts (Muslim migrants vs non-Muslim natives) Germany could, of course, have imported people from the countries of Europe where there were no jobs: France, Spain, Italy. But this “white” workforce is considered “expensive” by big companies (construction, care-givers and all services…) who need cheap imported workers no matter the area (Middle East, Turkey, Northern Africa) they are coming from. Internal migration inside the EU would not have solved either the main problem of a projected shrinking European population as a whole. Added to that, in a world where competition is transferred partially from nations to global regions, the might of European countries might be thought to lie in their population numbers.

Can Europe borrow a Muslim population from Turkey, Northern Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, and become a European world power, based on a population that is multicultural and multi-religious?

In theory, one can do that. But to succeed and avoid being crossed, day after day, by racial and religious tensions, two essential questions about integration must be put on the table: 1) What do we ask of newcomers? And 2) What do we do to those who do not accept our conditions?

In other words, integration is an asymmetrical process where the newcomer is expected to produce the effort to adapt.

Of course, if the flow of migrants is big, the host society will change, but that is evolution; the sense of cultural and historical continuity will not be demanded into a decline.

In Europe, these two questions of integration were never asked of anyone. According to Michèle Tribalat, sociologist and demographer:

“EU countries agreed at the Council of 19 November 2004, on eleven common basic principles to which to commit. When it is question of integration they disclaim any asymmetry between the host society and newcomers. No privileges are granted to the Europeans or to their heritage. All cultures have the same citizenship. There is no recognition of a substantial European culture that it might be useful to preserve. The social bond is designed as a horizontal one, between the people in the game. Its vertical dimension in reference to history and to the past seems to be superfluous. They speak about values, but these values appear to be negotiable”.

In France, in Germany, and in Sweden, it became rapidly clear that growing flow of a radicalized Muslim population began to change the rules of the integration game. The migrants did not have to “adapt” and are free to reproduce their religious and cultural habits. By contrast, the local “natives” were ordered not to resist “environmental” changes produced by immigration. When they tried to resist anyway, a political and media machine began to criminalize their “racist” behavior and supposed intolerance.

In the new migrant order, the host population is expected to make room for the newcomer and bear the burden of not what is “integration”, but the acceptance of a coerced coexistence.

France’s Archbishop Pontier declared to Le Monde in October 2016:

“We need people that we welcome to love France. If we always offer a negative view, they cannot love the country. However, if we see them as people who bring us something new, we get to grow together”.

When “good feelings” did not work, however, the authorities have often criminalized and prosecuted anti-immigration critics. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders is currently on trial for trying to defend his country from Moroccan immigrants whose skyrocketing crime wave has been transforming the Netherlands.

He may go to jail for as long as a year and could be fined a maximum of ‎€7,400 ($7,000 USD).

In France, the Paris prosecutor opened a preliminary investigation for an “apologia of terrorism” against the anti-immigration writer Eric Zemmour. In an interview with the magazine Causeur, published October 6, Zemmour said that “Muslims must choose” between France and Islam. He added that he had “respect for jihadists willing to die for what they believe.” The Paris prosecutor chose to take this sentence out of context to prosecute him.

Will this double movement — the injunction to love Islam plus criminalizing anti-Islam critics — be enough to kill off any opposition to the EU’s migration policy, and serve to Islamize the continent?

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Europe’s Out-of-Control Censorship by Judith Bergman

June 18, 2017   Uncategorized   0 Comments
  • If Facebook insists on the rules of censorship, it should at the very least administer those rules in a fair way. Facebook, however, does not even pretend that it administers its censorship in any way that approximates fairness.
  • Posts critical of Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policies, for example, can be categorized as “Islamophobia”, and are often found to violate “Community Standards”, while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s “Community Standards”.
  • Notwithstanding the lawsuits, Facebook’s bias is so strong that it recently restored Palestinian Arab terrorist group Fatah’s Facebook page, which incites hatred and violence against Jews — despite having shut it down only three days earlier. In 2016 alone, this page had a minimum of 130 posts glorifying terror and murder of Jews.

Germany has formally announced its draconian push towards censorship of social media. On March 14, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced the plan to formalize into law the “code of conduct”, which Germany pressed upon Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in late 2015, and which included a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.

“This [draft law] sets out binding standards for the way operators of social networks deal with complaints and obliges them to delete criminal content,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement announcing the planned legislation.

“Criminal” content? Statements that are deemed illegal under German law are now being conflated with statements that are merely deemed, subjectively and on the basis of entirely random complaints from social media users — who are free to abuse the code of conduct to their heart’s content — to be “hate speech”. “Hate speech” has included critiques of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s migration policies. To be in disagreement with the government’s policies is now potentially “criminal”. Social media companies, such as Facebook, are supposed to be the German government’s informers and enforcers — qualified by whom and in what way? — working at the speed of light to comply with the 24-hour rule. Rule of law, clearly, as in North Korea, Iran, Russia or any banana-republic, has no place in this system.

Maas is not pleased with the efforts of the social media companies. They do not, supposedly, delete enough reported content, nor do they delete it fast enough, according to a survey by the Justice Ministry’s youth protection agency. It found that YouTube was able to remove around 90% of “illegal” postings within a week, while Facebook deleted or blocked 39% of content and Twitter only 1%. The German minister, it seems, wants more efficiency.

“We need to increase the pressure on social networks… There is just as little room for criminal propaganda and slander [on social media] as on the streets,” said Maas. “For this we need legal regulations.” He has now presented these legal regulations in the form of a draft bill, which provides for complaints, reporting and fines.

There also appears to be no differentiation made between primary-source hate speech, as in many religious tenets, and secondary-source hate speech, reporting on the former.

According to the draft, social media platforms with more than two million users would be obliged to delete or block any criminal offenses, such as libel, slander, defamation or incitement, within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint. The networks receive seven days for more complicated cases. Germany could fine a social media company up to 50 million euros for failing to comply with the law; it could fine a company’s chief representative in Germany up to 5 million euros.

It does not stop there. Germany does not want these measures to be limited to its own jurisdiction. It wants to share them with the rest of Europe: “In the end, we also need European solutions for European-wide companies,” said Maas. The European Union already has a similar code of conduct in place, so that should not be very hard to accomplish.

Facebook, for its part, has announced that by the end of 2017, the number of employees in complaints-management in Berlin will be increased to more than 700. A spokeswoman said that Facebook had clear rules against hate speech and works “hard” on removing “criminal content”.

If Facebook insists on operating under rules of censorship, it should at the very least aim to administer those rules in a fair manner. Facebook, however, does not even pretend that it administers its censorship in any way that approximates fairness. Instead, Facebook’s practice of its so-called “Community Standards” — the standards to which Facebook refers when deleting or allowing content on its platform in response to user complaints — shows evidence of entrenched bias. Posts critical of Merkel’s migrant policies, for example, can get categorized as “Islamophobia”, and are often found to violate “Community Standards”, while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s “Community Standards”.

Facebook’s bias, in fact, became so pronounced that in October 2015, Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center filed an unprecedented lawsuit against Facebook on behalf of some 20,000 Israelis, to stop allowing Palestinian Arab terrorists to use the social network to incite violent attacks against Jews. The complaint sought an injunction against Facebook that required it to monitor incitement and to respond immediately to complaints about content that incites people to violence. Shurat Hadin wrote at the time:

“…Facebook is much more than a neutral internet platform or a mere ‘publisher’ of speech because its algorithms connect the terrorists to the inciters. Facebook actively assists the inciters to find people who are interested in acting on their hateful messages by offering friend, group and event suggestions … Additionally, Facebook often refuses to take down the inciting pages, claiming that they do not violate its ‘community standards’. Calling on people to commit crimes is not constitutionally protected speech and endangers the lives of Jews and Israelis”.

In 2016, Shurat Hadin filed a separate $1 billion lawsuit on behalf of five victims of Hamas terrorism and their families. They are seeking damages against Facebook under the U.S. Antiterrorism Act, for Facebook’s having provided material support and resources to Hamas in the form of Facebook services, which Hamas then used to carry out their terrorist activities. The US has officially designated Hamas a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” which means that it is a criminal offense to provide material support to such an organization.

Notwithstanding the lawsuits, Facebook’s bias is so strong that it recently restored Palestinian Arab terrorist group Fatah’s Facebook page, which incites hatred and violence against Jews — despite having shut it down only three days earlier. In 2016 alone, this page had a minimum of 130 posts glorifying terror and the murder of Jews.

It is only a small step from imposing censorship on social media companies to asking the same of email providers, or ordering postal authorities to screen letters, magazines and brochures in the event that citizens spread supposed “xenophobia” and “fake news”. There is ample precedent for such a course of action on the continent: During the Cold War, people living behind the Iron Curtain had their private letters opened by the communist authorities; those passages deemed to be out of line with the communist orthodoxy, were simply blacked out.

Who would have thought that more than a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), Western Europe would be reinventing itself in the image of the Soviet Union?

Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst.

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Europe’s New Media Darlings: Terrorists by Giulio Meotti

June 18, 2017   Uncategorized   0 Comments
  • It is such a shame and an irony that terrorists who have killed and ordered the killing of unarmed and innocent Jews, are now being celebrated as Europe’s apostles of peace.
  • Can you imagine Italian or French mayors and members of Parliament naming a street after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who murdered at least 84 people in Nice on July 14? Or honoring the brothers Salah and Brahim Abdesalem for their attack at the Bataclan Theater in Paris on November 13, 2015, in which 89 people were murdered?

What would have happened if the city council of Jerusalem had conferred the honorary citizenship on Italy’s Mafia leader, Totò Riina, calling him a “political prisoner”? What would have happened if the city council of Tel Aviv had named a street after Giovanni Brusca, the Mafia butcher who kidnapped and tortured the 11-year-old son of another mafioso who had betrayed him, and then dissolved the boy’s body in acid? The Italian government would have vehemently protested. With Palestinian terrorists, however, there is another standard, as if in the eyes of many of Italy’s city councils, terror against Israeli Jews is actually justified.

In the pro-Palestinian credentials of the mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, the only item missing was giving honorary citizenship to a Palestinian terrorist. Bilal Kayed is anything but a “man of peace.” He is a dangerous Palestinian terrorist who spent 14 years in Israeli prisons for two shooting attacks, and for planning and attempting the (unsuccessful) kidnapping of a soldier. Kayed is now a new honorary citizen of Naples.

“[It is] a decision that harms the image of Naples”, protested the newly elected president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, Noemi Di Segni. Meanwhile, Naples city council has refused to grant honorary citizenship to the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.

It is not the first time that Mayor De Magistris embraces anti-Israel militancy. The city of Naples provided a municipal room to show a documentary called, “Israel, The Cancer,” which shamefully compares Israeli soldiers to Nazis. Israel’s Ambassador to Italy, Naor Gilon, protested against the screening and noted that “the film’s title, ‘Israel, The Cancer’, is reminiscent of dark eras in the Italian and European history, in which Jews were defined as a disease.”

De Magistris also received reciprocal “Palestinian citizenship” from the hands of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the mayor of Naples returned the favor by granting honorary citizenship to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. De Magistris also gave his support to the “Freedom Flotilla,” a convoy of ships that tried to bring weapons to the Hamas regime in Gaza. Eleonora De Majo, a candidate on De Magistris’ political list, also called the Israelis “pigs.”

De Magistris is not the only Italian mayor who apparently prizes Palestinian terrorism. Palermo’s mayor, Leoluca Orlando, awarded honorary citizenship to Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian terrorist who orchestrated attacks that killed several people and who is currently serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison.

Many of Europe’s streets are plastered with the names of the Palestinian terrorists. The French town of Valenton named a street for Marwan Barghouti; and a few days after a priest was slaughtered this summer in France, a group of French cities planned to honor Barghouti. Towns such as Pierrefitte-sur-Seine have already awarded him honorary citizenship, and a photograph of the Palestinian terror leader was hung on the front of its city hall.

Barghouti, who masterminded the 2002 attack at the Seafood Market in Tel Aviv and a massacre in Hadera which killed six Israelis, is a man Europe’s television stations love to show handcuffed with his arms raised. He is Europe’s idol, a hero, an icon. The Guardian even published an op-ed piece by Barghouti, in which he expresses support for the “Third Intifada” of stabbing- and shooting-attacks and car-rammings.

The mayor of Palermo, Italy, Leoluca Orlando (left), awarded honorary citizenship to Marwan Barghouti (right), the Palestinian terrorist who orchestrated attacks that killed several people and who is currently serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison.

The Western press loves Barghouti and even tries to compare him to Nelson Mandela, in articles such as “The Question of Barghouti: Is He a Mandela or an Arafat?” (Time); “A Mideast Mandela” (Newsweek) and “A Nelson Mandela for the Palestinians” (New York Times).

Twenty French cities, such as Vitry-sur-Seine, La Verrière and Montataire, have granted honorary citizenship to this terrorist and plastered their streets with his disgraceful name. The Jeu de Paume National Gallery in Paris hosted an exhibition calling Palestinian suicide bombers “martyrs.” The exhibit “Death”, by photographer Ahlam Shibli, featured Palestinian suicide bombers with captions that promote the jihadist agenda of glorifying their deaths.

Bezons, an urban conglomerate just 10 kilometers from Paris, was also the first French town officially to include among its honorary citizenship the Palestinian terrorist, Majdi Rimawi, who planned and carried out the assassination of Israel’s Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi in 2001. Rimawi, who sits in an Israeli prison, was immortalized in a plaque prepared by the city of Bezons in 2013, which labels the terrorist as a “political prisoner.”

The mayor of Bezons, Dominique Lesparre, held a public speech in which he called Rimawi a “victim.” In the official document issued by Bezons City Hall, entitled “Prisonnier et citoyen d’honneur,” the fact that Rimawi is a murderer was not even mentioned.

It is such a shame and an irony that terrorists who have killed and ordered the killing of unarmed and innocent Jews, are now being celebrated as Europe’s apostles of peace. They are now even the new media darlings.

Can you imagine Italian or French mayors and members of Parliament naming a street after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who murdered at least 84 people in Nice on July 14? Or honoring the brothers Salah and Brahim Abdesalem for their attack at the Bataclan Theater in Paris on November 13, 2015, in which 89 people were murdered? Or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was linked to nearly every al-Qaeda attack between 1993 and 2003?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

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Europe’s New Blasphemy Courts by Douglas Murray

June 18, 2017   Uncategorized   0 Comments

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors, initiated in a country which once prided itself on being among the first in the world to throw off clerical intrusion into politics.

By prosecuting Wilders, the courts in Holland are effectively ruling that there is only one correct answer to the question Wilders asked. They are saying that if someone asks you whether you would like more Moroccans or fewer, people must always answer “more,” or he will be committing a crime. At no point would it occur to me that anyone saying he did not want an endless flow of, say, British people coming into the Netherlands should be prosecuted. Nor would he be. The long-term implications for Dutch democracy of criminalising a majority opinion are catastrophic. But the trial of Wilders is also a nakedly political move. The Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. In so doing they obviously aspire to keep the peace in the short term, but they cannot possibly realise what trouble they are storing up for our future. Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors. In Britain, the gymnast Louis Smith has just been suspended for two months by British Gymnastics. This 27-year old sportsman’s career has been put on hold, and potentially ruined, not because of anything to do with athletics but because of something to do with Islam. Last month a video emerged online of the four-time Olympic medal-winner and a friend getting up to drunken antics after a wedding. The video — taken on Smith’s phone in the early hours of the morning — showed a friend taking a rug off a wall and doing an imitation of Islamic prayer rituals. When the video from Smith’s phone ended up in the hands of a newspaper, there was an immediate investigation, press castigation and public humiliation for the young athlete. Smith — who is himself of mixed race — was forced to parade on daytime television in Britain and deny that he is a racist, bigot or xenophobe. Notoriously liberal figures from the UK media queued up to berate him for getting drunk or for even thinking of taking part in any mockery of religion. This in a country in which Monty Python’s Life of Brian is regularly voted the nation’s favourite comic movie. After an “investigation,” the British sports authority has now deemed Smith’s behaviour to warrant a removal of funding and a two-month ban from sport. This is the re-entry of blasphemy laws through the back door, where newspapers, daytime chat-shows and sports authorities decide between them that one religion is worthy of particular protection. They do so because they take the religion of Islam uniquely on its own estimation and believe, as well as fear, the warnings of the Islamic blasphemy-police worldwide. The front-door reintroduction of blasphemy laws, meantime, is being initiated in a country which once prided itself on being among the first in the world to throw off clerical intrusion into politics. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has been put on trial before. In 2010 he was tried in the courts for the contents of his film “Fitna” as well as a number of articles. The trial collapsed after one of the expert witnesses — the late, great Dutch scholar of Islam, Hans Jansen — revealed that a judge in the case had tried in private to influence him to change his testimony. The trial was transparently rigged and made Dutch justice look like that of a tin-pot dictatorship rather than one of the world’s most developed democracies. The trial was rescheduled and, after considerable legal wrangling, Wilders was eventually found “not guilty” of a non-crime in 2011. But it seems that the Dutch legal system, like the Mounties, is intent on always getting its man. On Monday of this week the latest trial of Geert Wilders got underway in Holland. This time Wilders is being tried because of a statement at a rally in front of his supporters in March 2014. Ahead of municipal elections, and following reports of a disproportionate amount of crimes being committed in Holland by Muslims of Moroccan origin, Wilders asked a crowd, “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in this city and in the Netherlands?” The audience responded, “Fewer, fewer.” To which Wilders responded, “Well, we’ll arrange that, then.” By prosecuting Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders for making “politcially incorrect” statements, Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. (Source of Wilders photo: Flickr/Metropolico) Opinion polls suggest that around half the Dutch public want fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands and many opinion polls going back decades suggest that the Dutch people want less immigration in general. So at the very least Wilders is being put on trial for voicing an opinion which is far from fringe. The long-term implications for Dutch democracy of criminalizing a majority opinion are catastrophic. But the trial of Wilders is also a nakedly political move. Whether or not one feels any support for Wilders’s sentiments is not in fact the point in this case. The point is that by prosecuting someone for saying what he said, the courts in Holland are effectively ruling that there is only one correct answer to the question Wilders asked. They are saying that if someone asks you whether you would like more Moroccans or fewer, people must always answer “more,” or they will be committing a crime. What kind of way is that to order a public debate on immigration or anything else? People may say, “He wouldn’t be allowed to say that about any other group of people.” And Wilders himself may not say that about any group of people, because he has his own political views and his own interpretation of the problems facing his country. It is worth trying a thought-experiment: If Wilders or any other politician got up and asked a crowd “Do you want more or fewer British people in Holland,” I may not — as a British person — feel terribly pleased with him for asking the question, or terribly happy with the crowd if they chanted “Fewer.” Although if British expats in Holland were responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime and disorder in the country, some mitigating sympathy for the sentiment may be forthcoming. But at no point would it occur to me that anyone saying he did not want an endless flow of British people coming into the Netherlands should be prosecuted. Nor would he be. Like the behaviour of the British Gymnastics association, the Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. In so doing, they obviously aspire to keep the peace in the short term, but they cannot possibly realise what trouble they are storing up for our future. Douglas Murray, British author, commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England.

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