A week ago in this space, in the wake of the murders at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, I wrote about "the European refusal to acknowledge an obvious and ugly truth":
- that the Continent is awash in the biggest resurgence of open Jew-hatred in 70 years; that it is already routinely violent and spasmodically murderous; and that in the new EUtopia there is no place for a living, honest, open Jewish community, nor even a Jewish museum.
~Do the Europeans understand what they have unleashed? On the home page of The Guardian this morning, there was a teaser: "Michele Hanson: I'm starting to worry about being Jewish."
At last, I thought. So I clicked, and, in fact, the headline to her column is "The Right Is On The Rise Across Europe", and she's worried about Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders.
...whom she managed to lump into the same laundry list of anti-Semitic horrors as the Jewish Museum shootings.
Ms Hanson was no doubt relieved to hear that the Farage/Wilders accomplice responsible for the Brussels murders has now been captured:
Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, was arrested in at a train station in Marseille on Friday.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the suspect had claimed responsibility for the 24 May attack, which left three people dead and another critically ill.
He said Mr Nemmouche had spent over a year in Syria and had links with radical Islamists...
Police found Mr Nemmouche had in his possession a Kalashnikov rifle and a handgun believed to have been used in the attack, the Paris prosecutor told a news conference on Sunday.
With the weapons was a white sheet emblazoned with the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a jihadist group fighting in Syria, according to Mr Molins.
These right-wing Ukip types certainly get around, don't they?
On yesterday's Mailbox page, a reader from Antwerp wrote:
Jozef De Witte, head of the Centre of Equality and Fight Against Racism (one of our many Orwellian institutions) declared shortly after the shooting that it is racist to suspect the perpetrator to be a Muslim.
To which I responded:
Yes, it's totally racist even to think of that Jewish Museum killer as Muslim. Even after he's been arrested. Or as al-Jazeera headlines their coverage:
'Frenchman Arrested Over Jewish Museum Attack'
In its way, al-Jazeera has a point. There are far more people like Mehdi Nemmouche in France's and Belgium's and Britain's future than there are people like his victims. As a Belgian reader observes:
It's very hard to see how the presence of an expanding Salafist movement is compatible with the presence of the Jewish community of Antwerp.
Demography is destiny. Many of the politicians who've been publicly deploring what happened in Brussels privately express the same bleak acknowledgment of reality as the reader above - that in the demographic future Belgium has chosen there is no place for Jews.
~Speaking of demography and democracy, the BBC's Hugh Schofield analyzes Marine Le Pen and le Front National's victory in France:
Its enemies remain unconvinced that the FN has become in any sense a normal or acceptable political force.
"Acceptable" to whom? The FN is obviously acceptable to the French electorate, which voted for them over all other parties, which is how you win in democratic societies, and indeed is the definition of political legitimacy - or "acceptable". So it's the will of the people that is apparently not "acceptable":
Mainstream politicians regard the FN as a classic party of the nationalist extreme, exploiting economic distress to whip up hatred of the outsider, the immigrant.
Wait a minute. So, if I follow Mr Schofield correctly, the winners of the election are "extreme", but the losers of the election are the "mainstream"?
Of course. Everyone knows that. Everyone who matters. But in a functioning democratic society you can't keep telling the people their choice is "extreme" and not "acceptable". Because the point of a democracy is that the people's choice is accepted. As much as the election results themselves, the lofty, condescending dismissals thereof help explain how the Euro-elites got their countries in the mess they're in.
Over a decade ago, in The Face Of The Tiger (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc), I made the point that the Continental political class thought of its subjects the same way the House of Saud and Mubarak did - oh, believe you me, democracy's all fine and dandy, but you wouldn't trust these fellows with it... Eventually, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Chaps like Mehdi Nemmouche will fit right in.
~President Obama hasn't lifted a finger to help the wife of a US citizen shackled to a wall in Omdurman or a US marine held in Tijuana, but he finally found someone he wanted to spring from jail - one Bowe Berghdahl, held by the Taliban and for whom America's commander-in-chief has just traded five Gitmo detainees. Andy McCarthy:
The Taliban get back five of their most experienced, most virulently anti-American commanders.
In return, thanks to the president's negotiations with the terrorists, we receive U.S. Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl — who, according to several of his fellow soldiers, walked off his post in 2009 before being captured by the Taliban. (For more on this, see Greg Pollowitz's post at The Feed.) This was shortly after Sergeant Bergdahl reportedly e-mailed his parents that "the US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at," that he was "ashamed to even be an American," and that "the horror that is America is disgusting."
At the White House ceremony, Sgt Bergdahl's dad, an anti-war activist (and Muslim convert?), addressed his son in Arabic and his captors in Pashto.
So the Taliban get five warriors back to return to the battlefield. And in return we get some Stockholm Syndrome deserter-revert to head up the next "War is never the answer" rally. What did Sgt Bergdahl say? The horror that is America is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at? You don't have to be popping non-alcoholic champagne corks back in Waziristan to figure he might be on to something.
~Speaking of Meriam Ibrahim, New Hampshire's Union Leader takes up her case:
Writer Mark Steyn, also a Granite Stater, has pointed out that Meriam Ibrahim should have joined her husband in Manchester years ago, but she was caught in the unforgivable U.S. immigration bureaucracy. The couple waited and waited and waited, but she was never processed through. The delays kept her in Sudan, where she awaits her execution.
That's the point. The only reason why her evil family were able to get her arrested and shoved on to Death Row was because of the sclerotic incompetent US immigration bureaucracy. That's why this is not a foreign news story, but an American one. As The Union Leader concludes:
New Hampshire's congressional delegation has called for Ibrahim's release. But the President has done little... Gov. Maggie Hassan has said nothing.
The wife of one of our own sits in a Khartoum prison, shackled to the ground, her two tiny children in prison with her because the Sudanese government considers them Muslims too, and most of us shrug and assume someone else will handle it. But what if no one else does? What if her life is really in our hands — the hands of the sovereign people of the United States, to whom all elected officials are accountable — and we do nothing to help her? If we do not find it within ourselves to get outraged over this, what kind of people are we?
~Thanks for all the emails re my Rush stint on Open Line Friday. I'll be back behind the Golden EIB Microphone tomorrow, Tuesday.
