European Political News

I need some new friends. Where can I find them.   A cartoon from Dave Walker of We Blog Cartoons. Cartoon by Dave Walker. Tags: Cartoon, Dave Walker, Cartoon Blog, Monday Morning, Administration

Last Wednesday the Belgian King Albert II appointed the Flemish Christian-Democrat Herman Van Rompuy as his “scout” (explorateur). Mr Van Rompuy, a member of the Crown Council, has to defuse the political crisis ensuing from the inability of Belgium’s parties to put together a government after last June’s general elections. In Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of the country, where 60% of the Belgians live, these elections were won by parties that aim for greater Flemish autonomy and are no longer willing to subsidize Wallonia, the Socialist-dominated French-speaking south of the country.
 
In 2004 the economic output per person in Flanders was 124% of the EU average, in Wallonia it was but 90% of the EU average. Today the Walloon business paper L’Echo writes that if Wallonia loses the Flemish subsidies, amounting to 3.3 billion euros, this would cost every Walloon 1,000 euros per year. Brussels, Belgium’s bilingual capital, receives 0.2 billion euros from Flanders each year, or 200 euros per citizen. Some Walloons suggest that if pro-market Flanders secedes from Belgium Socialist-dominated Wallonia cannot survive and will have to join France. 40% of the active population in Wallonia works for the government (compared to “only” 25% in Flanders) and 20% is unemployed (7% in Flanders).
 
Mr Van Rompuy belongs to the pro-Belgian wing of the Flemish Christian-Democrat party CD&V. Officially CD&V aims for the transformation of Belgium into a confederacy. This implies that Flanders and Wallonia become almost independent, but continue sharing the monarchy and a very limited number of competences, such as defence and foreign affairs (which, it should be said, the European Union is gradually beginning to assume).
 
The royal “scout” is shunning the media and refuses to give interviews. He hopes that by keeping a low profile the rising political tensions in Belgium will cool down. Last Wednesday a prominent French Member of the European Parliament, Joseph Daul, expressed his concern about the Belgian crisis. Mr Daul is the group leader in the European Parliament of the European People’s Party, to which CD&V belongs. He said he hoped Belgium will be able to solve its problems soon, “although we are worried, because with Belgium one never knows.” International media are gradually beginning to take notice of the crisis in Brussels. Recently BBC Radio 4 devoted its main Sunday news programme, The World This Weekend to the “Belgian problem.”
 
Yesterday Joshua Keating wrote a piece on the blog of the American journal Foreign Policy about the “simmering ethnic tensions” in Belgium. Keating notes that “If nothing else comes from this, it should certainly give EU diplomats some pause before chastising Albanians and Serbs, Palestinians and Jews, or Sunnis and Shiites for failing to coexist. I suppose Congolese peacekeepers on the streets of Brussels would be too much to hope for.” Keating’s editor remarks that “Belgium was ranked number 167 on the 2007 Failed States Index. We’ll be watching closely to see if the country slips at all in next year’s rankings.”
 
Meanwhile, the Walloon Parti Socialiste, traditionally the dominant party in Belgian politics, is embroiled in a corruption scandal involving Pierre-Dominique Schmidt, Belgium’s ambassador to France. France is Belgium’s most powerful neighbour. If the country falls apart, the role of France will be pivotal. The position of Belgian ambassador to Paris is a privilege of the PS. Belgian diplomats need the patronage of a political party. As a rule the position in Paris is bestowed on a diplomat who is a PS party member. He is one of the most important ambassadors in Belgium.
 
Last Wednesday the Flemish weekly P-Magazine revealed that Ambassador Schmidt had forged Foreign Office documents in order to obtain bank loans to pay for his luxurious life style. The ambassador has been throwing regular private disco parties costing up to 75,000 euros. Ambassador Schmidt is a homosexual and a friend of PS leader Elio Di Rupo, the president of the Walloon Regional Government. According to P-Magazine, Mr. Di Rupo, who is also a homosexual, attended some of Schmidt’s parties. The magazine writes that the Belgian embassy in Paris is known at the Belgian Foreign Office in Brussels as ‘la cage aux folles,’ after a French 1978 movie about a homosexual couple that runs a nightclub featuring drag entertainment.
 
On the day the article appeared Ambassador Schmidt was recalled to Brussels. Today the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro provided additional details about the parties of the gay ambassador “that did not benefit the image of Belgium in France.” The Belgian judiciary has opened an investigation. The Ambassador denies the charges of counterfeiting. His lawyer, Marc Uyttendaele, is the husband of Laurette Onkelinx, the Belgian minister of Justice, who is a leading PS politician.

It is really getting quite untenable for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to continue pretending that the new European treaty is not the Constitution, hence no referendum is needed. Yesterday the Conference of Presidents, the organising body of the European Parliament, had its first meeting after the summer recess. And what was on the agenda?

Conference of Presidents
Thursday 30 August 2007

Organisational arrangements for the ‘Citizens’ Forum’/Agora meetings in 2007

The Conference agreed to postpone the holding of the first Citizens’ forum on the Constitutional Treaty issues from 18-19 October to 8-9 November 2007. [My Italics]

So it now seems that even the institutions of the European Union have given up pretending that the new treaty is not the Constitution but the “Reform Treaty” or that, as we are told by Brown, Milliband et al, it was just a tidying up exercise with all constitutional aspects removed.

Hugo Coveliers, the lawyer of the organizers of the pan-European anti-Islamization demonstration which is planned to take place in Brussels on 11 September, is taking his appeal against the ban of the demo by Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels, to another court. Earlier the organizers brought an appeal case before the Council of State (CoS), Belgium’s highest administrative court. Last Wednesday the CoS refused to overrule the ban, claiming that the organizers are unable to prove that their interests have been harmed by the refusal to demonstrate on 11 September.
 
Mr Coveliers has now decided to bring the case before a civil court. He is going to argue that the “subjective rights” of the organizers have been denied. If the court agrees with that argument there is a possibility that the organizers can claim damages from the Brussels mayor if he does not allow the demonstration to go ahead.

Mr Coveliers, a member of the Belgian Senate, was shocked at the CoS ruling. Freddy Thielemans, the Brussels mayor, is a Socialist. Judge Roger Stevens, the chairman of the three CoS judges who refused to overrule his ban, happens to be the co-author of a book with Johan Vande Lanotte, who until last June was the party leader of the Socialists. Judge Daniël Moons, one of the two other judges who ruled in the case, was appointed to the CoS in 1997 by the same Mr Van de Lanotte, who was Belgium’s Vice Prime Minister at the time. The superior of the three judges, the recently appointed CoS president Marie-Rose Bracke, is the sister-in-law of former Socialist minister Luc Vanden Bossche and the aunt of Freya Van den Bossche, the current Belgian Budget Minister, also a Socialist. As TBJ reported earlier, the lawyer of the Brussels mayor is Marc Uyttendaele, the husband of Laurette Onkelinx, who is the Belgian minister of Justice. Mrs Onkelinx, a Socialist, is responsible for appointing, promoting and suspending judges in Belgium.

In Belgium the ban of the demonstration has led to widespread indignation among non-Socialist citizens. A student organization linked to the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Verhofstadt, who is governing in a coalition with the Socialists, is calling its members to “go for a walk” in the European district of Brussels around noon on Tuesday 11 September. “Freedom loving citizens should agree that banning a peaceful demonstration, every demonstration, violates the principles of our free democracy and the rule of law, hence it is totally unacceptable,” the students write.

Owing to what seems to be a lack of coordination between the British-Danish-German organizers of the banned demonstration it is not clear where the demonstrators are expected to meet. Some say that people should assemble in front of the European Parliament (EP) at the Luxemburg Plaza, others are distributing maps indicating the back entrance of the EP at Wiertz Straat, yet others are telling us to come to the Schumann Plaza in front of the headquarters of the European Commission.

Perhaps, since all these places are within walking distance from each other, Europeans who are concerned about the Islamization of their continent should just stroll from one place to another. Stay on the footpaths and behave as if you are a tourist, but wear a white ribbon or white shirt or hat, or carry a white balloon, white banner, anything white, to make clear that in post-democratic Europe politicians and judges no longer allow citizens to speak their minds. Demonstrators are advised to come to Brussels by train or plane. The Belgian police might intercept buses, especially convoys of buses from the Netherlands and Germany, on the highway and prevent them from driving on.

Meanwhile, following the example of The Wall Street Journal and my own piece in The Washington Times, major international media such as the BBC, The International Herald Tribune (via Associated Press), Polish radio, the Italian paper Il Giornale, the Czech newspapers Hospodarske noviny and Lidove noviny, the [British] Muslim Weekly and even The China Post have begun to mention the banned demonstration.

For the Chinese Communists it must be a consolation to learn that the jackboot Socialists in the capital of Europe also ban demonstrations.

In the first post of this series, I wrote about blogging whilst just 22. I suggested that there was a pretty much definite positive correlation between age/life experience and the worth of opinions. In this post, I am going to pick a few holes in that premise. As I mentioned in Part 1.5, Graachi and Matt Sinclair wrote posts replying to it, and picked on the main point I am going to write in this post: that age is not everything. I started making this argument in the conclusion of the first post in this series, where I said: Nevertheless, young people are the future of this country and of the world. Our opinions do deserve to be taken seriously, even with some adjustments. I blog, even though I am just 22, because I think that the voice of my age group does need to be heard. We see the world in a different way to generations before us. Not only does the voice of my generation need to be heard, it needs to be taken seriously. (more…) Previous in series

We are a fickle lot, the electorate - but not in the way you might think. When it comes to changing our mind about issues and then blaming the government for taking a stance we no longer support we are as fickle as can be. Take Iraq - back in 2003 there was mass support for the war (though also those who opposed it, granted). Now it is in the same league as admitting you’re a complete loon to saying you think Iraq has been a good idea. Or the NHS - we all moan about it and say how terrible it is, but you are risking a public lynch mob if you suggest privatising it. Yet we, as an electorate, are amazingly conservative (will a little c, of course) when it comes to voting out a government. In fact, we have only done it once in 28 years! So why is this? (more…)

A quote from Dominic Lawson in The Independent, 31 August 2007

[T]he founder of Amnesty International was a Catholic convert, Peter Benenson. However, Mr Thomas Wiggins, of Wokingham, insisted that it is “completely wrong” to accuse Amnesty of “betraying the vision of its founders by supporting abortion”. Mr Wiggins argued that “Amnesty was not set up to protect the rights of the unborn, but to prevent human rights abuses.”

Well, as the philosopher said, it all depends on what you mean by human. I think the unborn child is human, equipped with everything he or she requires for independent life, save maturity. [...] Amnesty’s statute declares “the indivisibility of human rights”; the Catholic Church agrees, and does not think that they can be divided by the umbilical cord.

There is, as always, a wider context. In this case it is that Amnesty is devoting particular energy to campaigns against violence to women. [...] There can be no better illustration of that than the mass sex-selective abortions that have been a feature of Indian life ever since the ante-natal ultrasound machine arrived on the subcontinent. Over the past 20 years it is estimated that up to 10 million Indian female embryos have been aborted, a large proportion at five to six months gestation. [...]

The Indian government is trying to do its bit: a criminal prosecution was brought against General Electric for supplying ultrasound machines to unauthorised clinics carrying out sex-selection tests. This is just a drop of prevention in a sea of blood, however. [...] So I asked Amnesty International to let me know if it could supply me with any material it had produced on this. It could not: still less is it planning to mount a campaign.

As someone who has not attended a meeting of an Amnesty branch for 30 years, I am hardly in a position to lecture an organisation with more than two million members on what it should or should not be doing. As a matter of fact, I don’t need to. The facts should speak for themselves.

Further ramblings on health and safety from a H&S professional. Sensible. Its not a word that inspires the heart to beat faster is it? It reminds us of the shoes we had to wear to school and the boring kid in the class that our parents always wished we could be a bit more like. That Rodney, hes such a sensible boy. My dictionary says it means judicious, moderate and practical. I think it just means dull, dull and dull. However on the next line it gives an alternative meaning " aware, alive to (a thing or idea). Now thats more like it. So lets not think of dull, dull, dull safety. Lets think of being alive to safety, of being aware of it in our lives " not as an obstacle but as an enabler. When applied properly (Oh OK, sensibly) health and safety assessment shouldnt be a barrier, it should be a tool towards a better, healthier, safer way of life and of work. It should stop people getting hurt unnecessarily, but not stop them having fun. It should reduce risk but not remove it. Life without risk would indeed be dull, dull and dull. (more…)

This isn’t really the next post in the series [hence the “1.5″] but primarily to point to a couple of replies to my first post. First, there is this very well thought out post from Graachi, who very nicely refers to me as “one of the rising stars of conservative blogging”, and says: It isn’t merely the quantity of experience that can furnish someone with an aid to understanding politics, but also the quality of that experience. Knowledge and experience are related but they are not necessarily equivalent. To take a simple example there are plenty of seventy year olds who have less understanding than I do of economics, the science of a changing situation than I do, partly because they have never studied calculus. There will be plenty of 18 year olds with a better understanding than mine because they studied economics for longer than I did. It is not merely experience but the type of experience that matters as to whether you understand politics. Matthew Sinclair also has this to say: Thunderdragon posts to the Wardman Wire his explanation of why, despite being just 22, he has taken up political blogging. I had to do a bit of a double-take. “Just” 22? I started blogging at that age and didn’t consider myself young at all. Thunderdragon is old enough to be not just a graduate but a postgraduate. That was actually my first response when Matt Wardman first proposed the topic as well. Both of the posts linked to above - Graachi’s and Matt’s - are very much worth reading. Also, very cleverly, they have both picked up on what is to the general thrust of the real Part 2 in this series, which I hope to be posting tomorrow morning [it was going to be today, but then I broke my glasses]. Previous in series Next in series

A warning from the SIAD/SIOE website, 30 August 2007:

As expected a march like the 9/11 march has attracted organizations and people who intend to hijack our demonstration. [...] For example we can see that Paul Belien’s attempts to fragment the demonstration iby encouraging people to meet in a certain places in Brussels for a minute’s silence for the victims for 9/11 terrorist attack or even to celbrate his birthday.
 
SIOE alone decides the time, place and whatever is happening because our concern is, and always has been, the safety and security of demonstrators. [...] Paul Belien is not licensed organizer for SIOE and thus, whether he means to be or not, is a factor for splitting the stop-Islamisation wave that is building up now.
 
You cannot be against Islamisation and then use it for your own minor purposes. There is, but one goal - to stop the Islamisation of Europe.

My comment (pb):

I have no idea what this is about. I am a journalist. I have written about the 9/11 Brussels demonstration (as one of the few reporters to do so), but I have never claimed to be its organizer, which I am not. As far as I know Udo Ulfkotte speaks for the organizers. Since I am not involved I have no intention to “use it for my own minor purposes,” let alone “hijack” it. Nor have I “decided the time, place and whatever” where the demonstrators should meet or what they should do. As far as I know people are asked to come to the Schuman Plaza, in front of the Berlaymont building, at noon. My apologies if this is not correct.

I am referring to televsion, but my question should perhaps be ‘where do you watch the stuff you want to watch?‘ because the concept of television has changed in recent times. Nobody just sits down and watches television any more, they sit and pick something they want to watch. The old style was watching whatever was on, but now you can choose what’s on and when. In my last post I touched on this change and how the likes of Sky Plus has led a cultural change in the demand for televisual services and contributed to the start of the new web telly set-top-box market. But what about video on the internet? If it’s getting easier to pump on demand content down to a television will people still want to sit in front of a computer to watch video or slump in the armchair? I know which I would prefer. The Rise and Rise of Flash Video In the last couple of years Flash has begun dominating the online video market. It’s cross-platform and means producers can make fantastic media players for their website that gives them so much more interaction with their users. Compare that to Windows Media, languishing in second place with about 87% of the online market. You can’t customise the player, but it’s a lot cheaper. Flash also represents the way that online video through a browser will evolve. Now that longer videos and feature films can be pumped to a television set the producers can focus on alternative delivery with Flash. If your viewer is watching your video through a browser they’re not there to kick back and watch a 30 or 60 minute interview. Chances are that they are there for a few minutes of laughter or to find out some information, perhaps on something like how to make an omelette or to see what a coveted gagdet is actually like. That’s where YouTube has been very successful. But, there’s more incentive for producers than just being able to deliver a video. Flash opens doors both ways - there’s feedback stars, chapter points and so much more that can be entered into a Flash video that further gives the desktop user what they want, when they want it, but also giving the producer vital feedback on their video. For an example of an excellent implementation of Flash video check here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92 Flash for Desktop, Windows Media for TV? It looks set that Flash will continue to dominate the browser-based market and there will perhaps be more emphasis of associating data to the video, resulting in the browser-based web becoming the place for video as information with the set-top-box market becoming the place for video as entertainment. The Broadcasters BBC and 4 On Demand have both opted for a Windows Media based system. Indeed, so has 18 Doughty Street where I act as Head of Technology. We, and I imagine it is the same for the beeb and Channel 4, are aiming firmly at the set-top-box market. However, we will not abandon the browser-based market, indeed we will embrace it and I suspect the other broadcasters will do the same. Within a year when you tune into 18 Doughty Street through a television you will have a slightly different experience than if you watch from your browser. Your television version will allow you to sit back and enjoy the show where the computer version will allow you to jump around content and interact with us in many more ways. Join Me Next Time… In my next post for the Wardman Wire I want to look at the citizen journalist revolution. Does the point and shoot generation pose a threat to broadcasters and professional producers? Your comments and thoughts on today’s post are very welcome and I hope you can join me, Mike Rouse, next time.

Until yesterday you probably hadnt heard of Christine Ohuruogu " I certainly hadnt. It may be that you still havent! Christine Ohuruogu is our first female athlete to win a gold medal in a sprint track and field event for so many years hardly anyone can remember. Woo and yay for her " it is about time Britain had a female role model to look up to in the extra-ordinarily competitive world of sprinting. Only Paula Radcliffe can claim to have had any success in recent years for the female team (though the men arent doing much better " in fact this year they are doing worse). So lets build her up and get the 2012 meddle haul up based upon success stories like Christine. Only there is a small problem (more…)

In June 2002, the Arab-European League (AEL), an anti-Semitic Islamist organization of Belgian immigrants led by Lebanese-born Dyab Abu Jahjah, a notorious member of the Hezbollah, requested permission to hold a demonstration in Antwerp. Two months earlier, an AEL march had led to heavy riots in the city. Antwerp has Belgium’s largest concentration of Jews. The Antwerp mayor, fearing new violence, prohibited the demonstration.

The AEL appealed against the ban before the Council of State (CoS), Belgium’s highest administrative court. The CoS ruled that the mayor had violated the constitutional freedom to demonstrate and allowed the demonstration to go ahead. The demonstrators shouted pro-Hezbollah and pro-Hamas slogans, called George W. Bush a murderer, demanded a Belgian boycott of Israel and burned the effigy of a Hassidic Jew. The police kept a low profile and allowed the 600 demonstrators to do as they pleased. “Thanks to the independent Belgian judiciary we have been able to demonstrate,” a victorious AEL leader Dyab Abu Jahjah said, as the puppet representing the Jew burned behind him.

Many Antwerpians remember the event. It made it plain for all to see who is the boss in the city. The Jews remember it, too. They no longer feel safe in Antwerp. Many of them are leaving.

Last April a group of Danish and British citizens convened in Copenhagen for what they called a “counterjihad summit.” The attendants were concerned citizens, many of them bloggers, who had come to know each other through the internet. These people are decent, ordinary citizens who have nothing to do with the far right. For many of them the 9/11/2001 terror attacks in the U.S. and the Danish cartoon affair triggered an interest in the problem of Muslim immigration into Europe. It made them aware of the unwillingness of a substantial part of the latter to accept basic Western values.

Since a growing number of Europeans are concerned about this issue, the Copenhagen “summit” decided to organize an international demonstration in front of the European Parliament buildings, situated in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, on 9/11/2007. Initially the British organization Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) and the Danish group Stop Islamiseringen af Danmark (SIAD) acted as the demonstration’s organisers. Soon they were joined by the German group Pax Europa.

On 9 August, Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels banned the demonstration. He did so, he explained, primarily because the demonstrators were coming to Brussels on September 11: “First and foremost the organizers have chosen the symbolic date of 9/11. The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. […] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly pronounced judgments condemning this type of acts.”

According to the mayor the demonstrators are “racists,” “xenophobes,” hence criminals under Belgian and European law. “With regard to the planned demonstration of September 11 […] my mind is made up. And my decision is final: it will not take place,” he said. In The Wall Street Journal of 27 August Mr Thielemans added: “I won't have Brussels regarded as the capital of racism.”

The organizers appealed against the mayor’s ban before the CoS. They were confident that it would overrule the mayor’s decision. After all, the CoS had overruled the mayor of Antwerp’s ban of the AEL demonstration five years earlier.

Yesterday, however, the CoS upheld the mayor of Brussels’ ban. In its verdict the CoS stated that the organizers cannot prove that their interests are harmed by the mayor’s decision not to allow them to demonstrate on 9/11. The impropriety of the date of the planned demo was the crucial element in the argument made before the court by the mayor’s lawyer. Anyone who dares to suggest that the 9/11 terror attacks have anything to do with Islamism is a racist, a xenophobe, a criminal. That is what the mayor of Brussels says, and what the verdict of the CoS implicitly but undeniably reaffirms.

To make this point quite clear, the Brussels mayor is allowing an anti-American demonstration on 9 September by a group claiming that the 9/11/2001 terror attacks are the work of the American government, acting on behalf of the Jews. In Brussels, stating that the attacks on the WTC towers and on the Pentagon were committed by Muslims is a crime, although it is a fact. Stating that America and Israel were behind the attacks is not a crime, although it is a lie.

Perhaps the Belgian politicians and judiciary assume that if the people are no longer allowed to state the truth, the truth will cease to be the truth and become the lie. But it does not work that way. From now on people will simply keep their opinions to themselves, but they will become more strongly convinced of the things they know to be a fact and they will regard their politicians and their judges as the guardians of lies.

Since the court ruling in 2002 it is clear to everyone in Antwerp who really is the boss in the city. That is why the Jews are leaving and the indigenous citizens vote for the “Islamophobic” Vlaams Belang party. Since yesterday’s CoS ruling it is clear to everyone that the non-Islamic indigenous Europeans no longer are allowed to voice their opinion in the “capital of Europe.” Undoubtedly the Islamists have taken note of this as well. It will make them even more arrogant than they already are. They now know that they are allowed to say whatever they like, that they are allowed to demonstrate whenever they like, that they are allowed to burn effigies of Jews in the streets. But do not dare to say that Muslims committed the 9/11 atrocities, do not dare to demonstrate on 9/11, and never burn an effigy of a Muslim in the streets or the Brussels police will kick the hell out of you and the Belgian judiciary will condemn you as a criminal.

I have Muslim friends. They are decent, devout conservatives who live in Turkey and back the AKP. Last year, when I was being harassed by the Belgian government’s so-called “anti-racism” body for articles written on this website, these Turkish Muslim friends, upon hearing of my problems, told me that I would always be welcome in Turkey if Belgium’s secularist authorities should ever prosecute me as a “racist” or “Islamophobe.”

Last year I wrote here that “It is no coincidence, I think, that precisely the fanatic proponents of a complete secularisation of European society, such as Belgium’s leading politicians and intellectuals (including priests such as Father Leman) are harassing the so-called ‘islamophobes’ and ‘racists.’” That is why I agree with a devout Muslim such as Mustafa Akyol that the real threat to our freedoms are “secular fundamentalists,” not religious people.

Freddy Thielemans, the Brussels’ mayor, is a secular fundamentalist who hates religion. On the day of Pope John Paul’s death he ordered “Champagne for everyone.” Freddy backs the Islamists, not because they are religious people, but because he knows that they are intolerant totalitarians like himself. That is precisely the reason why his party, the Parti Socialiste, teams up with the Islamists, offering them good places on its candidates lists at election time and letting them become Belgian politicians.

If we are not allowed by secularist and Islamist extremists (and their allies in the Belgian judiciary) to state that Muslims committed the hideous carnage of 9/11/2001 we indicate that there are no such things as radical Islamists on the one hand and moderate Muslims on the other. Ordinary Europeans, who do not have Muslim friends but who know the truth about the 9/11 criminals, will come to see all Muslims as equally dangerous and evil. That is why I consider the CoS ruling as more than a mistake, a stupidity, a miscarriage of justice, it is a crime.

Meanwhile, the Belgian media say that European neo-Nazi groups, keen on wrecking havoc, are planning to come to Brussels on 9/11. As the demonstration has been declared illegal the organizers have been deprived of the means to control events and keep away the skinheads of the far right. Perhaps next 11 September will witness some nasty fighting in front of the European Union headquarters between organizations such as Blood & Honour and Abu Jahjah’s AEL, which has also rallied its members to demonstrate in Brussels. Perhaps Mayor Thielemans can invite both B&H and the AEL to the town hall of Brussels in an effort to reconcile them. They are, after all, all Socialists at heart as well as anti-Semites.

A quote from Bruce Thornton’s review of Diana West’s latest book, 24 August 2007

Much of the jihadist picture of the West is distorted, a caricature based on superficial observation and selective evidence. Yet there remain troubling aspects of American culture that give traction to the Islamic critique. In her book The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Times, pulls together the various dysfunctions and discontents of American civilization by seeing them as the expression of a unique historical development, the “death of the grown-up.” The demise of the adult has led to the abandonment of adult virtues and mentalities, and their replacement by the instant gratification, impatience with the limits of reality, and the obsession with the self typical of the teen-ager.

West starts by explaining the historical conditions of the “rise of the teen age,” a time of life unknown before modernity. Rather than flog the 60’s, West correctly sees that decade’s cultural degeneracy as the “epilogue” of the 50’s and its post-war affluence, demographic explosion, and increased freedom for the young. Changes in family size, the advent of work-place skills that demanded longer education, the discrediting of authority spawned by fascism, the inevitable progress of liberalism towards radical individualism – all contributed to the shift from an adult-centered world to a child-centered one. Also important was the development of adolescents into the most coveted demographic for consumer capitalism, the group most prone to transient fashion and impulse buying – and now possessing the funds to gratify those ad-stoked desires for products like Princess telephones, portable record players (six million sold in 1952 alone), 45rpm records, hairspray, and movies like Rebel Without a Cause that flattered and glamorized teen-aged angst and petulance. [...]

One of West’s shrewdest ideas is to link multiculturalism’s self-loathing idealization of the “other” to the adolescent “identity crisis.” Our ignorance of the West’s unique goods enshrined in its history and traditions has led to a loss of cultural identity, which “would seem to be linked to the loss of maturity. At the very least, the easy retreat from history and tradition reveals the kind of callow inconstancy and lack of confidence that smacks of immaturity as much as anything else. It seems that just as we have stopped ‘growing up,’ we have forgotten ‘who’ it was we were supposed to grow up into.” At the same time, we give to non-Western cultures a groveling respect and timidly acquiesce in their dysfunctions. This bad habit, as West shows with numerous examples, is particularly dangerous for the struggle against Islamic jihad. That battle isn’t going to be won by calling Islamic terrorists “gunmen” or “activists,” or by ignoring the West’s long, unique tradition of tolerance for the “other” at the same time we indulge the myth of Islamic tolerance.

The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization Author: Diana West ASIN: 0312340486

By Heather Yaxley As the general secretary of the Motor Industry Public Affairs Association (MIPAA), I develop training and workshops forour 450 members. One area that we have identified as key, especially in relation to organising launch events with journalists,is risk assessment. This was evident from the recent report bythe HSEinto the Top Gear crash in 2006 involving Richard Hammond. Although this did not involve a standard road test vehicle, there are several areas where lessons can be learned by PR practitioners (and the media). Traditionally, organising press events, such as new car launches, has involved finding a good hotel, planning an interesting driving route and ensuring cars and journos are in the right place at the right time. Today, things are very different. Where once the social side dominated (with alcohol evenserved at lunch stops), a more professional approach is evident. In recent years, journalists have been required to sign indemnity forms, driving licences are routinely checked, and opportunities to drive at speed are kept to racing tracks. But is this enough? We don’t think so and so I’m looking at offering a specific course in risk assessment for automotive PR practitioners. Would something based on the CIEHLevel 3 Award be appropriate? It appears to cover principles and practices that could be related to our particular needs. Should we seek to offer this general qualification or would it be better to focus on specialist aspects of PR and the motoring industry? I really would appreciate some expert H&S insight into this area. It is undoubtedly going to be more and more important for PR practitioners to be trained inrisk assessment.So how can we best help our members gainrelevant skills and knowledge?

Today the Belgian Council of State (CoS) ruled to maintain the prohibition of an anti-Islamization demonstration on 11 September. Three weeks ago the demo was banned by Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels. Thielemans’s party, the Parti Socialiste (PS), caters for the many Muslim inhabitants of Brussels, the “capital of Europe.” Udo Ulfkotte, a German citizen and one of the organizers of the demo, who intended to bring 20,000 demonstrators to Brussels, decided to appeal against the mayor’s verdict before the Council of State, the highest administrative court in Belgium.
 
Yesterday, the Council of State postponed its ruling because it said it had to decide first whether the appeal could be made in Dutch or should be presented in French. Today, however, the CoS cut the case short and ruled outright to maintain the ban. According to the CoS Udo Ulfkotte cannot prove that his interests have been harmed by the mayor’s ban.

This verdict may sound nonsensical to non-Belgians, but in Belgium it is not considered harmful to have one’s political freedoms restricted. In Belgium it is also considered quite normal that the lawyer representing Mayor Thielemans before the CoS is Marc Uyttendaele. The latter is one of the most expensive lawyers in the country. He is also the husband of Laurette Onkelinx, the Belgian minister of Justice, who is responsible for appointing, promoting and suspending judges.

The forbidden demonstration was an initiative of Danish, British and German organizations that wanted to protest in front of the European Parliament in Brussels against the introduction of Sharia laws in Europe. They chose to do so on the symbolic date of 11 September, which would allow them to end their demonstration with one minute of silence for the victims of the 9/11/2001 terror attacks in America.

Mayor Thielemans banned the demo precisely because the organizers picked 11 September as the date for their protest. The mayor wrote: “The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. […] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly pronounced judgments condemning this type of acts.” He told The Wall Street Journal: “I won't have Brussels regarded as the capital of racism.” Obviously, Brussels as the ‘capital of socialism’ or ‘capital of Islamization’ will do.

Over half the inhabitants of the Brussels region are of foreign origin, many of them from Morocco. Thanks to the Muslim vote Mr. Thielemans’s PS is the largest party in Brussels. Ten of the 17 PS members on the Brussels municipal council are Muslims. As it lost its appeal among native Belgians, the PS began to court the Muslim vote. One of the most outspoken proponents of this policy is Justice Minister and prominent PS politician Laurette Onkelinx, the head of the Belgian judiciary and the wife of the lawyer opposing Mr Ulfkotte before the judges of the Council of State.

Meanwhile the Belgian media are reporting that all sorts of far-right and neo-Nazi groups are calling their members to come to Brussels on 11 September. The media say they want to join the anti-Islamization demo, but given the sympathy of neo-Nazis for anti-Semitic Islamists, they might come to cheer the Brussels mayor, a fellow totalitarian.
 
See also:

Europe’s Jackboot Progressives, 29 August 2007

A quote from the VRT (Dutch-language Belgian public television), 28 August 2007

Udo Ulfkotte [the organizer of the banned anti-Islamization demo in Brussels next Sept. 11] (in German):

I do not understand why I have to defend myself. When one million people take to the streets in Turkey no-one says: These people are extremists who protest against the Islamization of Turkey. No-one would dream of saying a thing like that. But if the same thing happens here, in the heart of Europe, they say: These people are extremists. Can you explain this to me?

VRT journalist:

But you do know that Hugo Coveliers [Ulfkotte’s lawyer] is a little bit of a collaborator of the far-right [Vlaams Belang]…

Hugo Coveliers (in Dutch):

I find it totally inappropriate of you to say that not just I, but also the Vlaams Belang are far-right… It all depends where you position yourself in politics. If you, as most VRT journalists do, are a left-winger, then people who are centrists are to the right of you. But who belongs to the far-right here? Obviously the mayor of Brussels [Freddy Thielemans, a leading member of the Parti Socialiste (PS)], who acts in an authoritarian fashion. The PS, by the way, a party which has been convicted for corruption – many members of that party have been convicted for corruption, but that is never mentioned – that is the party that is now adopting an extreme authoritarian position. And don’t forget: Mussolini was a socialist!

Udo Ulfkotte (in German):

I have worked for the Frankfurter Allgemeine [Germany’s leading (conservative) newspaper] for 17 years, I am a writer and I am currently a professor in security management at a German university. This is exactly why I am so fascinated by the mayor banning this demonstration for security reasons. […] You want to know why I am here, in the offices of the Vlaams Belang? If someone in your family, your child for example, falls ill, you are not choosy when help is offered. In Belgium the only party which offered to help me was the Vlaams Belang. […] As a German I come from a family that made mistakes during the Second World War. I have learned that we should not make that mistake again. […] [Upon hearing that the case has to be brought before French-speaking judges] I seem to be in one of Kafka’s novels.

Before I go on with the rest of this guest post, I am just going to briefly introduce myself: I am ThunderDragon, a 22 year old who has recently finished a postgrad course at University and is now job searching. I am Conservative blogger, and I post every day on anything that catches my eye, from politics to social commentary to general rants, here. When I asked Matt for some ideas on what topic(s) to guest post on here about, one of his suggestions was “why I blog about politics when I am still 22″. I thought that this was an interesting topic, one on which I could probably write quite a bit and hopefully be interesting at the same time. So why do I blog at just 22? (more…) Next in series

Belgium’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, is not expected to rule soon in the case of the anti-Islamization demonstration planned for 11 September. Two weeks ago Freddy Thielemans, the Socialist mayor of Brussels, banned the demonstration because, as he said, “the organizers have chosen the symbolic date of 9/11. The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. […] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation.”
 
The organizers decided to appeal against the ban before the Council of State. Today, the Council of State decided to postpone its verdict until it has decided whether or not the appeal, which was presented in Dutch, one of Belgium’s two official languages, should have been presented in French, Belgium’s other official language.
 
When Udo Ulfkotte, the German organizer of the demonstration, filed his initial request for the demo he was told by the mayor’s office that he had to do so in French, which he did. Ulfkotte told us that, being a foreigner, he was not aware that he could also opt for a Dutch-language procedure. Now the Brussels authorities demand that he should stick to French and that the case should be brought before French-speaking judges of the Council of State. Dutch-speaking (Flemish) judges are more favourably inclined towards defending political freedoms than French-speaking (Walloon) judges. The Council of State judges are political appointees. Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium, is free-market oriented while Wallonia, the French-speaking south of the country, is Socialist-dominated.
 
Hugo Coveliers, Mr Ulfkotte’s lawyer, reacted with indignation to the court’s decision to rule first on the appropriate language for the case, instead of proceeding immediately with the Dutch procedure. Mr Ulfkotte could not believe it and said: “I seem to be in one of Kafka’s novels.” It will take a couple of days for the court to decide which linguistic community the judges should belong to. Only then the actual case can be brought before the court. Seeing as the court has postponed its decision it can already be assumed, however, that the case will be sent to French-speaking judges.
 
Obviously, it is the strategy of the Belgian authorities to drag the case out in order to make life harder for the organizers. It is not impossible that the Council of State will only rule on 10 September, leaving the organizers less than one day to make arrangements. It is even possible that, adding insult to injury, it will rule after 9/11 that the 9/11 demo is allowed to go ahead.
 
However, whether or not the demonstration will be permitted, Europeans who oppose the islamization of their continent will convene on Tuesday 11 September at 12 am (noon) at the Schuman Square (Rond-Point Schuman), in front of the Berlaymont building, the headquarters of the European Commission, to hold one minute of silence for the victims of 9/11/2001.

  

See also:

The Mayor in the Dark, 28 August 2007

Pro-Hezbollah Group Will Demonstrate in Brussels on 9/11, 23 August 2007

Brussels Mayor Warns: 9/11 Demonstrators Are Criminals, 20 August 2007

This Demo Is NOT Being Banned, 17 August 2007

Organizers of Brussels Anti-Sharia Demo Appeal against Ban, 16 August 2007

See You in Brussels, Freddy, 15 August 2007

Thank You, Mr. Mayor: Champagne for Everyone, 13 August 2007

Today Adam Boulton has returned from his summer break and has begun blogging again. Now that the summer recess is coming to a close and the parties prepare for their conferences, it back to business in Westminster. With that, Boulton has posed a few questions, which I will attempt to make my predictions on. So here goes: (more…)

A quote from Cal Thomas at Townhall.com, 28 August 2007

 Between June 2005 and June 2006 nearly 200,000 British citizens chose to leave the country for a new life elsewhere. During the same period, at least 574,000 immigrants came to Britain. This number does not include the people who broke the law to get there, or the thousands unknown to the government. [...] Abraham Lincoln said no nation can exist half slave and half free. Neither can a nation be sustained if it allows conditions that result in mass emigration, while importing huge numbers of foreigners who come from backgrounds that do not practice assimilation or tolerance of other beliefs. [...] The greater tragedy is that the people of Britain have little say in any of this, so they are taking the road of last resort. They are leaving.

Blogger Vanishing American continues what is gradually becoming one of the most important discussions of our age: What role does, or should, Christianity play in Western civilization? Is it the bedrock of our culture, as Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch thinks, and is our decline associated with abandoning it? Or is Christianity, as John Derbyshire puts it, a religion for once and future slaves, an ideology that is now fueling globalist ideals and undermining our borders through mass immigration?

The Christian-non-Christian divide is perhaps the most difficult divide to overcome within the West today. I’m struggling with this myself. Some of the criticism of Christianity, or at least the way many Western Christians are behaving now, is legitimate. I have heard Catholics claim that Multiculturalism and Political Correctness are tied to Protestant culture. I’m willing to consider that possibility. There are significant doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants regarding redemption and the sinful nature of man. Maybe some of this is tied to the Protestant concept of “salvation through Faith alone.” However, when it comes to just plain old-fashioned dhimmitude and abandoning national borders, Catholics are at least as bad as Protestants.

The Second Vatican Council from the 1960s was good for reaching out to Christians of other denominations, Protestant and Orthodox, and for reaching out to Jews. The problematic aspect is in relations to Islam. The big Achilles’ heel of Christians in general, and of Jews, when confronted with Islam is the idea of a “shared community of monotheists worshiping the God of Abraham.” As long as this myth is maintained, Christianity can actually in certain situations be a bridge for Islam to enter the West, rather than a bulwark against it. I have seen more than once Christians making common cause with Muslims as “men of faith” against the godless forces of secularism. I notice, however, that Christians hardly ever do the same with, say, Hindus, so it must have something to do with a shared sense of monotheism.

Christianity is growing fast in South Korea. It is interesting to see how newly converted Christians react in non-Western nations. I’ve been critical of Christianity sometimes because it is one of the impulses behind the Western inability to protect our borders, and it is. But it is Christianity within a specific cultural-ideological context that reacts like this. Koreans don’t have the same problem, as far as I know. Nor did we, until the 1960s and 70s. So what changed? It can’t all be related to Christianity, can it?

As vanishing American writes:

These days we hear so many arguments against Christianity, such as from the ‘proselytizing atheists’ like Dawkins and Hitchens, and then we hear the arguments from the secular right which attack Christianity for being too pacifistic. The atheists claim that Christianity fomented violence, and that it is as militant and bloodthirsty as Islam, or in fact worse, and on the other side, we hear that Christianity is a religion of slaves, which weakens and emasculates the West. So Christianity gets it from both sides; it’s too militant, it causes wars and persecutions, and at the same time, it's a religion that turns men into milquetoast pacifists. Does this make any sense?
 
Christianity contains elements of both militancy and pacifism, but it is not one or the other. […] We know that our forefathers did not believe Christianity commanded them to be pacifists, or to erase borders and nations. To assert that they, for centuries, were wrong and that we are the first generation to really understand Christianity and the Bible is arrogant in the extreme. If anything, we today, on the average, are far more ignorant than our ancestors where the Bible and the faith are concerned. If anybody is wrongly handling the word of God, it is likely to be us, not our forefathers. Their brains were at least not addled by nonsense and Political Correctness, and I trust the consensus of our forefathers through the centuries rather than the consensus among today’s compromised generation.

In a comment on VA’s blog one of his readers writes:

I used to be a devout, practicing Christian. Today, I cannot recognize myself in any brand of Christianity currently available. Nor am I alone. Many of my friends tell me: “I can't enter any church now without having to leave my brain at the door.”
 
In this regard, the evangelist, fundamentalist churches are no better than the liberal ones. I once attended a presentation at a nearby Pentecostal church about Third World poverty. The cause? Lack of infrastructure. All we had to do was dig deeper into our pockets and the problem would be solved.
 
I’m sorry to say this but the cause is deeply rooted and largely intractable, at least in the short term. We will not help the world’s poor by welcoming them to our shores. We will simply destroy ourselves in the process.
 
John Derbyshire is more right than wrong. Yes, medieval Christianity had no qualms about resisting invaders, but medieval Christians (as Protestants love to point out) had adulterated their faith with pagan beliefs. Over the past few centuries, Christianity has stripped itself of its pagan accretions. In the process, it has become as much a threat to ourselves and our loved ones as Marxism used to be, if not more so.
 
That sounds like a harsh judgment. It is.

Brussels, the capital of Belgium, prides itself on being the capital of Europe and of the Atlantic Alliance. The city, where the European Union and NATO headquarters are located, has no fewer than three U.S. ambassadors: one to Belgium, one to the EU and one to NATO. Like Washington, Brussels hosts hundreds of protest demonstrations each year. During the past six years Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels, allowed 3,500 demonstrations. He banned only six, including, last year, a march of Kurdish nationalists belonging to a terrorist organization. As a rule everyone – except criminals – is allowed to demonstrate in Brussels.
 
Two weeks ago Mr. Thielemans issued his sixth ban. “Stop the Islamization of Europe” (SIOE), a pan-European organization led by a Dane, an Englishman and a German, was denied permission to demonstrate on September 11 against the introduction of Shariah law in Europe. Many European countries are introducing elements of Shariah law, such as granting welfare benefits to polygamous families, prohibiting private soup kitchens from distributing pork, banning Muhammad cartoons and organizing separate swimming hours for Muslim women in public pools.
 
SIOE planned to bring 20,000 to 50,000 participants to Brussels from 26 European countries. The march would end in front of the European Parliament building with one minute of silence for the victims of the September 11 terror attacks in America. According to the mayor, however, the latter is an indication of SIOE’s criminal nature.
 
“I decided to forbid the September 11 demonstration,” the mayor wrote, because “First and foremost the organizers have chosen the symbolic date of 9/11. The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. [...] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly pronounced judgments condemning this type of acts.”
 
The mayor concluded: “With regard to the planned demonstration of September 11 [...] my mind is made up. And my decision is final: it will not take place.”
 
SIOE is not at all a racist organization, but a broad group of people who want to preserve Europe’s Judeo-Christian civilization, its freedoms and values. It intends to proceed with its demonstration and turn it into a “birthday party” for Mr. Thielemans, who was born on Sept. 11, 1943. The mayor’s words, however, are very clear. Anyone who intends to participate in the September 11 SIOE demo is a criminal under Belgian and European law: he or she is a racist and a xenophobe. The Brussels police, usually very soft on crime, might not look on passively next September 11, when “racists” and “Islamophobes” try to celebrate the mayor's birthday with one minute of silence for the September 11 victims.
 
It is equally clear, however, that the true reason why Mr. Thielemans banned the SIOE demonstration is his fear of upsetting the large Muslim population of Brussels. Over half the inhabitants of the Brussels region are of foreign origin, many of them from Morocco. Mr. Thielemans’s Parti Socialiste (PS) caters for the Muslim immigrants. The PS is the largest party in Brussels. Ten of its 17 members on Brussels's municipal council are Muslims. They do not tolerate criticism of their religion and they approve of the “Islamization of Europe” – a process which, as Mr. Thielemans's ban shows, is well on its way in the “capital of Europe.”
 
Though Mr. Thielemans has forbidden the SIOE demonstration, he gave permission for a demonstration in Brussels on Sept. 9 by United for Truth (UfT), a group of conspiracy theorists who claim that the attacks of September 11 on the WTC towers in New York and on the Pentagon were organized by the Bush administration. Before giving permission for the UfT demonstration the mayor’s office checked that the demonstration would not address religious topics. “The biggest issue was if there was any possible conflict [of our demonstration] with religion,” UfT writes on its Web site. “As we just base ourselves on facts and political issues, we have no intention to discriminate or promote any religion.” Obviously, the religion one is not allowed to discriminate against in Brussels is Islam. In April 2005 Mr. Thielemans himself clearly illustrated this. Upon hearing the news of the death of Pope John Paul II he ordered “Champagne for everyone!”
 
Americans should ask themselves whether a city with a mayor like Mr. Thielemans deserves to be the capital of the Atlantic Alliance. A few years ago, when Belgium threatened to take President Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair to court as war criminals for the invasion of Iraq, America threatened to move NATO to the erstwhile capital of the Warsaw Pact. That city would be deserving of such an honor.
 
This piece was originally published in The Washington Times on August 29, 2007 .

A quote from Paul Belien in The American Conservative, 27 August 2007

Minister Albayrak told Parliament that the amnesty for everyone who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001 implies that illegal aliens who entered after 2001 have to be expelled. But she knows that this is not going to happen because the government needs the collaboration of the local authorities to track down illegal aliens. Many mayors, especially those belonging to Albayrak’s own Labor Party, have already announced that they will refuse to assist the government in their search for the immigrants. [...]

Some Americans might be inclined to think that an amnesty for illegal immigrants who have already been living in the country for many years might be a good idea, on the condition that it be the final one. But the European experience teaches us that governments always underestimate the number of people who can apply for an amnesty, and that amnesties do not close floodgates, they open them.

For the past two days King Albert II of Belgium has been consulting the members of the Crown Council. He is seeking their help to solve what the Royal Palace itself calls the Belgian “political crisis.” The members of the Crown Council, the so-called “Ministers of State,” are unelected. They have been appointed by the King at his own discretion. Most of the “Ministers of State” are former politicians, though they also include representatives from the Belgian establishment.
 
On 10 June the Belgians went to the polls to elect a new Parliament. Instead of seeing their elected representatives dealing with the country’s political problems and putting a government together – as would be the case in democratic countries – they now see an unelected official, the King, and a group of unelected “wise” men, most of them politicians from the last century, usurp the duties of their elected representatives.

Belgium is a multinational state, the model for the European Union’s efforts to turn Europe into a single multinational state. It is made up of 60% Dutch-speaking, free-market oriented Flemings in the north and 40% French-speaking, predominantly Socialist Walloons in the south. The Flemish economic output per person is 124 percent of the EU average, and there is growing resentment that Flemish taxes are being used to subsidize the poorer French-speaking south, where economic output is 90 percent of the EU average.

Belgian governments always have to rely on a majority in both Flanders and Wallonia, since major decisions need the support of both parts of the country. In practice this means that 20% of the population (i.e. half of the Walloons) can veto every decision. In the past decades the Flemish efforts to reform and democratize Belgium have always been vetoed by Wallonia. Usually, the Flemings managed to literally buy Walloon approval by handing out more subsidies to the south. This method became unsustainable when the government money ran out. Belgium is still working off debt piled up in the 1970s and 1980s.

The present crisis began after the June 10 general elections were won in Flanders by parties who are no longer willing to subsidize Wallonia in return for larger Flemish autonomy and pro-market economic reforms. The immediate cause of the crisis is a 2003 ruling of the Belgian Constitutional Court that the present Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) electoral constituency be divided into a bilingual constituency Brussels and a Flemish constituency Halle-Vilvoorde. The Court ruled that the BHV-constituency is unconstitutional because it allows Walloon politicians to stand for elections in Flanders, while Flemish politicians are not allowed to stand in Wallonia. The Walloon politicians, however, refuse to approve the division of the BHV-constituency if the Flemings do not pay a price for it.

The resolve of the Flemings is causing the Belgian establishment to panic. Yesterday two members of the Crown Council, Wilfried Martens, a former Belgian Prime Minister (1979-1992) and the current president of the European People’s Party, and Willy Claes, the former Secretary-General of NATO (1994-1995) who had to resign his NATO position because of his involvement in a Belgian corruption scandal, appeared on Flemish public television to warn the Flemish against opting for independence. “If we still want to play a significant role in Europe, we [Flemings and Walloons] have to accept common responsibilities,” Mr Martens said. “Solidarity [read: the duty of the Flemings to subsidize Wallonia] is an essential value of the European Union. It is simply unthinkable that we should renounce that.” Another Crown Council member, Herman De Croo, recently said that “Flemish nationalists are mentally handicapped.” He later offered his apologies for this statement to... the mentally handicapped.

The last time the Belgian King summoned the Crown Council because he had lost confidence in the elected politicians was in 1960, during the crisis surrounding the independence of Belgium’s Congo colony. Apart from 1960, the Crown Council has only convened on four occasions during Belgium’s 177 years of existence: in 1870 at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1914 on the occasion of the German ultimatum to Belgium, in 1919 for the Treaty of Versailles, and in 1950 at the return from exile of Albert II and his father, King Leopold III, a notorious anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator.

Sarkozy urged to annex Wallonia

Yesterday the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro published a column by Alexandre Adler in which Adler urged the French President Sarkozy to prepare for the annexation of Wallonia by France. Adler said Sarkozy should not miss this historic opportunity “to govern an enlarged France.” He referred to the example of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who in 1990 grabbed the opportunity to incorporate East Germany into the German Federal Republic. Last week a survey in the Netherlands showed 77% of the Dutch in favour of reuniting the Netherlands and Flanders.

Adler also offers an explanation for the remarkable fact that the international media (apart from the media in the Netherlands and France) are largely ignoring Belgium’s worst political crisis ever. He refers to a Russian anecdote from the final days of the Soviet Union. When a Soviet official asked a colleague why he had not come to the last meeting of the leadership, the colleague answered: “If I had known it was going to be the last meeting, I would have come.” The foreign media do not seem to realize the seriousness of the current crisis.

Another reason why the international media might not be devoting much attention to the present crisis might be because last December the Walloon television network broadcasted a fake news programme in which they announced that the Flemish regional parliament had unilaterally declared the independence of Flanders. That event was widely reported all over the world, which might give the foreign media the impression today that the Belgians are again “crying wolf.”

Finally, a third reason why the international media are failing to report on Belgium’s demise might be that they do not deem the story sexy, or rather bloody enough. The unraveling of Belgium is a slow, non-violent process. Belgium has sometimes been called “Yugoslavia in slow motion.”

In 1830 French revolutionaries, intent on annexing it to France, occupied Flanders, then a part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and detached it from the Netherlands. Britain’s Lord Palmerston prevented the annexation by France but merged Flanders with French-speaking provinces in a newly created artificial state called Belgium. The latter was run by Francophones from Liège, a province that had historically never belonged to the Netherlands. The Liegeois made French the only official language in Belgium and tried to “Frenchify” the entire country, even though the majority of the population spoke Dutch. This policy succeeded in the capital Brussels and villages near the linguistic border, such as Waterloo.

Today Dutch is recognised as an official language in Belgium, but the French minority still determines how the country is run, forcing the socialist paradigms of the Walloons (i.e. Belgium’s French) on the more free-market oriented Flemings. The Flemings, though the majority in the country, have always been treated as second-class citizens. Their linguistic rights were denied for decades, politically they have been reduced to a minority position where their demographic majority is neutralized, and they are being forced to subsidize the Walloon part of the country.

In spite of all this, the Flemings have never used violence against their oppressors. The geography of Flanders, a densely populated flat country with no forests or mountains to hide, simply did not allow an armed rebellion. This has forced the Flemings into an attitude of outward compliance, whilst individuals organize their economic activities as much as possible outside the authorities’ reach. Cheating the taxman, by making deals under the counter and especially by “working on the sly,” are the preferred way of anti-Belgian rebellion. According to Prof Leo Van Hove of Brussels University, 30% of the money in circulation in Belgium is used in the underground economy. The majority of the Belgians, i.e. the Flemings, see the Belgian government as an enemy. They do so, not because (as is sometimes said by government officials), “Belgium had [my emphasis – pb] a long history of foreign occupations,” but because Flanders is still being ruled in a non-democratic way, with foreigners imposing their will on the Flemings. Will the King and his Crown Council succeed in prolonging this situation? That is the issue that is at stake today in Brussels.

A Throne in Brussels
Author: Paul Belien
ASIN: 184540033X

Continuing in the series of ramblings on health and safety while Matt’s away. Ask the man in the street " or at least the man in my office " what he thinks and hell tell you that compensation culture definitely exists. Ask theTUCand apparently it doesnt. So whos right? Apparently we spend less percentage of our GDP on claims than any other European country with the exception of Denmark. Of course this wonderful statistic doesnt take into account that our legal systems differ so widely that its a bit like saying oranges make better orange juice than apples do. Lets get away from the numbers for a moment and see how people feel. Sir Digby Jones who has recently helped to launch aprogramme about a sensible approach to risk in schoolshad this to say in 2005 while still Director General of the CBI Unless you educate children about risk, get them to understand it, get them to embrace it, then we will fail as a nation and fall behind our economic rivals..We are saying to them you can have rights until they are coming out of your pores. But responsibilities, taking charge of your own actions? We don’t seem to have got it. We are trying to create a nation of victims.” So he certainly believes in the compo culture. In a speech at University College, London in 2005the then Prime Minister Tony Blair said: Then there are the legal claims. People are entitled to sue. And often the most outlandish cases that are brought are dismissed. But their headlines live on, create a myth and the myth is acted upon. Here in Britain, whatever the actual state of the so-called compensation culture, the perception of it and the effects of that perception are real So he believes in the perception of the compo culture. Quite how that differs from the real thing is beyond a simple safety manager to understand. The Department for Constitutional and Media Affairs issued a consultation document this summer relating to the law on damages, which says that the governments programme of work intends to: stop a compensation culture from developing .. (and) tackle perceptions that can lead to a disproportionate fear of litigation and risk averse behaviour So even the DCMA believes there is the potential for a compo culture. What do I think? Ive been dealing with personal injury claims brought against my employer now for about 10 years so I feel qualified to comment. Its true that we see fewer claims now than we dida decadeago. In general the injuries are less serious and claims for the traditional industrial diseases like deafness and asbestosis are rarer. However theres a really big difference. I see claims now for the sort of trivial accident that we would have laughed off ten years ago. I see claims where not only has the employee had no time off work but they cant show any lasting damage or pain and suffering either. More often than not they get a few thousand quid " pays for the kids Christmas presents thank you very much " and their lawyer gets two or three times as much in costs. Am I sick of seeing this? You bet I am. Is there a real danger of this compo culture growing? Maybe. Like Sir Digby said, we need to teach our children more about their responsibilities and less about their rights. Only then will we avoid the slide into a US-style claims culture, which has been running at nearly 2% of their GDP. Im getting closer to talking about those conkers.

By: Heather Yaxley Maybe you think that if only those PR people would do their job properly, there wouldn’t be all the media outrage about “health & safety” gone mad - and the public would have more respect for risk management. Well, as a professional public relations consultant, I thought it would be interesting to borrow Matt’s blogging chair and provide the PR perspective. We are often at the recovery end of these matters - it may be that the press has picked up on a decision made by management that strikes the journalist as wonderfully ludicrous. Let’s call that the “bonkers conkers” example, that Matt is fond of discussing. I’ll come back to those later. The more strategic issues come in the form of corporate crises - frequently requiring us to protect the organisation’s reputation as a result of a lapse in health and safety. In general, we are very good at working with the media to respond to serious disasters. The PR process has been refined over many decades, with the golden rule relating to communicating quickly, openly and continuously with all relevant stakeholders, particularly journalists. Ensuring that the PR team is integral in any crisis plan is a message that most organisations have understood. Normally this will include media relations training for anyone called upon to explain the organisation’s position. The corporate crisis should be rare for any particular organisation - but you can find examples any day of the week. Today, I note that ICL has been fined ?400,000 over an explosion at its Glasgow factory. When the original incident occurred in 2004, the PR team will have reacted immediately - and today they should have been prepared to respond to media enquiries. The way that any organisation is judged today in response to a major crisis owes a lot to the professional PR approach. In some cases, this leads to challenges - two senior PR executives at BAA in the UK have recently quit their jobs, apparently as a result of being informed by the Spanish company owners that they should not engage with media enquiries and simply provide only agreed facts. PR is not simply a matter of publishing agreed statements or responding to a crisis once it has occurred. Those in PR and H&S have a lot in common and should work closely together primarilyto prevent the problems that generate the newspaper headlines. Our expertise in explaining how the media will respond to an issue can be a vital element of risk management. The key question in PR crisis management is “What if”? As part of the management team considering any key decision that encompasses risk, PR professionals are able to counsel on strategies that should be avoided and the best way to communicate with those affected by any change in practice. This includes using our expertise for internal communications too. Which brings me back to “bonkers conkers” - with our media relations hats on, we can see why such stories capture the media, and public attention. They often make a great story, meaning something that will be passed on by word of mouth. Journalists know this and recognise how the example can draw upon stereotypes such aspolitical correctness, European bureaucracy, nanny state, or waste of taxpayers’ money, to get a reaction from the public. Again, media reaction should be part of the risk management of any policy that has the potential for generating headlines. If such decisions must be taken, expert PR advice can construct suitable wording for internal communications, policy documents and press statements. Once you’ve got a journalist on the phone, gleeful at the potential to generate headlines about bonkers conkers, it is much harder for us to do our job. We probably have minutes to provide a quote or respond to the “allegations” put to us. The journalist will be reluctant to bin their story - if we are lucky, we can add a voice of reason. But giving factual information about risk and responsibilities at that time, isn’t going to help. At these times, I believe our only chance of avoiding becoming a laughing stock is to use humour. We have to roll with the story and be seen as seeing the funny side (even with serious issues). I know this works when handling such criticism - I once worked for a car company where a sporty model was slated by Jeremy Clarkson as less likely to attract the women then having a 12 inch cucumber down his trousers. So I sent him a gift wrapped cucumber by taxi from Harrods - he loved the joke and admitted he was wrong in his next column. You might not understand the mentality of journalists, but an experienced PR practitioner should know when a full blown crisis plan is necessary, and when the headlines need a lighter touch. Now where did I keep that bag of conkers?

A quote from Frank Gaffney in Jewish World Review, 21 August 2007

Sovereignty is an abstraction to which few Americans give much thought. We take it for granted, like the air we breathe or the water we drink. Yet, the essence of the most successful political experiment in history — the United States of America — is the sovereign power entrusted by the people via our Constitution to our elected, accountable representatives.

Unfortunately, such sovereignty is endangered by those who believe the world of nation-states is too disorderly for efficient global commerce and the peaceable resolution of disputes. Call them the Transnational Progressives (conservative wit John O'Sullivan coined an abbreviation he insists must be spelled Tranzies). They prefer supranational arrangements like the European Union, run by wholly unaccountable bureaucrats.

The trouble for the Tranzies is that a lot of folks who value their freedoms — notably, the American people and many who represent them in Congress — generally don't fancy such arrangements. They see them for what they are: big government on steroids, unwieldy, unchecked and unresponsive to the will of the ruled.

So it is necessary for the Tranzies to resort to extraordinary means to supplant national governments. The European Union's architects have acknowledged privately they could never have pulled it off if the publics of the Continent's various nations understood what was afoot.

A quote from Helen Szamuely at EU Referendum, 27 August 2007

[W]hy is it that there have been far more problems with neo-Nazis and other unpleasantly violent and racist groups in the former GDR [German “Democratic” Republic, East Germany] than in the former FRG [Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany]? […] Another problem [EU] Commissar [for Justice, Freedom and Security and also Vice President of the European Commission, Franco] Frattini might like to ponder over is why this [violence by neo-Nazis] should be happening. Was the EEC/EC/EU not the organization that was going to do away with all political nastiness, particularly racism and xenophobia? Is there not an organization set up by a Regulation specifically to deal with the subject? Are there no directives about it? So why is the problem getting worse, if, indeed, it is getting worse?

[…] In any case, Frattini is spitting in the wind, if I may use such a vulgar expression. The last time there was an attempt to outlaw the NPD [Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands], the case was thrown out by the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, refusing to accept evidence from paid informers and agents provocateurs.

This essay was inspired by a comment from blogger and TBJ reader Conservative Swede, who once stated that the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions were the products of Greek logic and Roman engineering skills, and had little to do with Christianity. I think he goes too far in his criticism of Christianity, which isn't to say that none of what he says about it is true. Yes, a globalist outlook in part derived from Christian universalism contributes to the difficulties Western nations have in upholding their borders. In Britain, hundreds of thousands of failed asylum seekers may be allowed to settle permanently under a "back-door amnesty." This is supported by many Christian leaders. The West isn't a "Christian" culture alone. The first recognizably Western people were Greek pag