This post will have a long expostulatory introduction, followed by an explanation to commenters about what will be permitted to remain posted on any given thread on this blog.

In a recent post, “The Self-Imposed Christian Cage” the Baron discussed the pacifist thread in modern Christianity and the implications which follow from that viewpoint. He used Gandhi as an example of someone whose civil dissent was possible only in the context of the humane (and Christian) British protectorate. Under Stalin, Gandhi would have been one more anonymous martyr. In Tiananmen Square, he would have been faceless history.

It was a pertinent post when you consider the inane pacifism of “martyrs” like Rachel Corrie. Her ignorance brought about her death. In my view, mainstream American Christianity has taken on much of the coloring of modern secularism. Its stampede to divest from Israel, to lead the charge on America’s “ugly racism,” and its Sloane Coffin need to be relevant have forced it into a Faustian bargain that has led to declining church attendance and its members flocking to less “with-it” denominations, churches with a clear sense of identity and a firm set of rules.

But that wasn’t part of the post. The Baron’s point was well made in his title: Christianity in a self-imposed cage. All in all, I found what he had to say interesting, but then religion in the public square is of great interest to me personally. Besides I’m married to the author of that discerning essay.

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Then began the comments. The first one took us to task for not mentioning Roman or Orthodox Catholics. Say what??

It went on to talk about “good Muslims” being saved from the evil ways of their beliefs because they led good lives. This was Boinky’s contribution, including a mention of the “baptism of desire” – a catechetical concept I hadn’t heard mentioned in many decades.

I responded by reminding Boinky that the post was not about Muslims, but about Christian pacifism:

This post is not about good Muslims. It is concerned with the fact that Western freedoms and the sanctity of the individual, which are principles which derive from (a)Judaism, (b)Christianity, and (c)Platonist ideals as digested and formed by Christian belief.

While your ideas about what constitutes personal salvation are interesting, they don’t impinge on the threat that faces our secularized, once-upon-a-time-Christian culture — including many corrupted aspects of the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

I didn’t go into details, as I thought they were self-evident, but you can choose your own. For example, the close cooperation of the Russian Orthodox Church with the USSR when it was in power. The reverberations from that will be with us for a long time to come.

Nor did I mention the current crises facing American Catholicism, of which there are many. The two that are most critical right now is the widespread pedophilia among the current generation of middle-aged priests, and the almost total secularization of what are now only nominally Catholic colleges (I will have more to say about that in a subsequent post).

However, I did suggest to Boinky that she look at Oriana Fallaci’s position:

btw, if this doesn’t correspond with your thinking, I recommend that you read Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason. Now there’s an atheist who has long since experienced a baptism of desire… it’s only her personal witness of the corruption of Catholicism which keeps her where she is…

Since I am in the middle of Fallaci’s book I am well aware of her fiery pen when it comes to Catholicism, but particularly to Italian Catholicism. She is ravaged now by cancer, and finds the Church the lesser of two evils; you can see her struggling with her long-held atheism. I didn’t say that, but I did suggest reading her book.

Are those remarks indicative of a “distaste for the Catholic Church and the Holy Father”?

Sluggo_f16 seemed to think so. Suddenly he popped up with this bit of advice:

Baron/Dymphna,

If you could overcome your distaste for the Catholic church and the Holy Father for a minute you would recognize a man who understands this well. Pope Benedict has been quietly (and sometime not so quietly) promoting just this issue. Pope JP was a great man, but the threat of Islam was lost on him. Benedict is not about to give up Europe without a fight.

Umm… exactly how did the thread get hijacked here? The post was about the folly of Christian pacifism, the politically correct kind. While Benedict is an expert historian, he himself has said, out loud and in interviews before assuming the papacy, that Europe was “lost” and that the future of Christianity lay in Africa. Given his German background and the events of the time (about ten years ago) I could see his point.

So tell me, where is this distaste for the Catholic Church and the Pope evidenced in what I said? WHERE?

Then Dan M came in with a diatribe of ugly, and most un-Christian comments about the post and my remarks:

I find fascinating the mixture of intense loathing of the Catholic Church, coupled with calls to remember past CATHOLIC victories, such as Poitiers, Lepanto, and especially, the victory that occurred at “the Gates of Vienna.”

Say what?? “Intense loathing?” WHERE? Since when is criticism synonymous with intense loathing? Does this guy have no sense of proportion? I guess not. As for remembering past victories, if I really “loathed” the church I could recount past atrocities. We could start with, oh, the slaughter of the Jews on the way to the first Crusades. And, of course, there’s always the Inquisition, that threadbare set-piece for “let’s-hate-the-Papists” – so old it’s boring, but very reliable, like references to Hitler.

You might do well to remember something from a bumper sticker i recently saw, which said: “If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read this in English, thank a GI. If you can read this without peering through a veil, thank a Catholic.”

Oka-a-ay. And this is relevant to what? That someone likes to put preachy bumper stickers on their cars? We should emulate this behavior? We should consider this moralizing an uplifting experience? What do you think Jesus would do? Personally, I think he’d rip off the bumper sticker and tell the driver to look at the mote in his own eye. Just sayin’…

But Dan isn’t finished with his lesson yet. The Catholic haters need some history:

Roman Catholicism was the bulwark behind which the Protestants worked their historic mischief. While Catholics were driving the muslim out of Spain, out of Sardinia, out of Malta, out of Sicily, out of the Balkans, the Protestants were ripping and tearing apart the mystical body of Christ himself.

That’s one hell of a record to be proud of.

Well, that’s one way to look at it. However, I know half a dozen conservative Catholic theologians who would argue with Dan’s take on who was doing what with the Mystical Body. You could start with simony, the corrupt (oops) mendicant friars, the degradation of the monasteries, the political infighting and sexual incest among the heirs to the Papal Crown – all the behaviors that repelled the average Johann in the pew.

Dan goes on, really getting wound up now:

But hey, “corruption” I suppose, is an intrinsically “Catholic” sin.

I liked too that comment that the only thing holding Fallici from embracing Catholicism was her being scandalized by “Catholic corruption.” Cut me a fricken break. And grant Fallici a degree of mental sophistication. She isn’t some blockhead scandalized by the sin of her fellow humans.

How do you know this, Dan? Have you read her books? She is quite angry about the Italian Church’s failures. She terms them moral failings, in fact.

Corruption was endemic to the 12, via the misdirection of funds by Judas himself.

If this is the first place you see moral failings among the twelve, I suggest you go back to the primary sources and look at the story of the Transfiguration where the apostles are jostling for first place, or the feeding of the crowds with a few loaves bread and some fish — which the apostles claim can’t be done — or the Garden of Gethsemane, where everyone fell asleep. Judas wasn’t the only slacker in those stories. Even Jesus’ mother tried to have him put away. But I suppose pointing these things out makes me anti-Apostle, doesn’t it?

Dan is rounding the final turn now, layering jibe after jibe onto those unredeemed PROTESTANTS, those unwitting fools who are “brain dead, sophomoric, juvenile, and ahistoric.” These failings simply stagger Dan, who is obviously used to a better quality sinner:

Whereas the Catholic sees that sin, corruption, graft was present even within the Apostles, and that sin is not something to be scandalized over, but rather something to be constantly on guard against, the Protestant pretends that the presence of sin within the institutional Church damns and blasts the entirety thereof. I love it, Christ was NOT scandalized by sinners, “tax collectors, prostitutes,” and he was and is the Son of God. But the dainty, scrupulous, pure as the driven snow Protestant chooses to be scandalized by behavior that Christ himself was not. Christ wasn’t scandalized to be seen in the ranks of the “sinner,” but some Protestants are scandalized to be shoulder to shoulder with Ratzinger, a Wojtyla, a Cardinal Newman, a George Cardinal Pell.

God, irony upon ironies.

It’s sophomoric, it’s juvenile, it’s ahistoric, and it fails to take account of the fallen nature of man. To say that the Church is condemned for her many “corruptions” is to say something so brain dead that it simply staggers the mind.

Martin Luther had issues. However, some of his problems, particularly the practice of simony, warranted remedy. But there wasn’t any need to leave the Church, only to work within it.

And what a picture that Protestantism presents to us today. What is it now, the protestants create a new splinter group every what, 8 or 9 days, something like that. Even before Luther was dead and buried, the “protestants” were “protesting” against one another. And have been ever since.

If you are looking for scandal, just take a good look at what the protestants have wrought to Christian doctrine over the last couple hundred years.

THERE is the REAL scandal, because it impacts the life of the Church, the body of Christ on earth.

Yea, that’s what Christ intended, endless splintering, endless breaking away, endless groups of people looking for some charismatic “pastor” or “preacher,” who says what they want to hear.

The Roman Catholic Church has existed for 2,000 years plus, it’s seen all forms of corruption, financial, sexual, you name it. But throughout it all, one thing has remained inviolate, because of the protection of the Holy Spirit, and that is the deposit of faith.

Whew. All those Protestant splinter groups while the holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church sails on in her serene waters, untroubled by the bickering outside her walls.

And Martin Luther had “issues”??? Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk who had constipation, a bad attitude, and no intention of ever leaving his order, much less the Church. He just wanted reform. The Church cancelled HIS membership, Dan. This made him testy.

Finally, blessedly, Dan finishes his wipe up:

Dan M said…

Baron, the 2d and 3d entry on this comment thread were an attack upon the Catholic Church.

But maybe I’m being too harsh.

Maybe I’m reading too much into the line about “corrupted practises of the Catholic and Orthodox Church,” from entry #2. And Maybe I’m overly irritated about that comment that Fallici would have become Catholic by now, but for the scandals plaguing the Catholic Church.

Corruption and sin no more disprove the Catholic Church than the flood disproves the Ark.

Christ came FOR the sick, he came to call “sinners,” NOT the “righteous,” not the self-satisfied, not the smug.

Hmm… if that’s the case, Dan, perhaps you’d better reconsider your position. Because if I’m sophomoric, juvenile, etc., you sir, are one smug son-of-a-bitch. Smuggest one I’ve seen in a month of Sundays. You’re so smug you’d make a right fine Protestant.

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And this was my comment on the thread itself. Fortunately, as a blog administrator, I get the last word:

The complaints about my “anti-Catholic” attitude on this thread are puzzling. My views re ecclesiology, which I have discussed on other posts, are quite conventionally Roman Catholic, as is my celebration of the liturgical year and my reading of the lectionary.

However, having my ideas called “sophomoric” or being perceived as having an “intense loathing” of the Church makes me angry. In no way did I say I loathed the Church; if someone chooses to infer that from my words, go for it… but why ratchet up the dialogue like that?

You’ll bruise yourself jumping to conclusions, but, hey, be my guest. Fortunately, your judgments as to my orthodoxy are simply that: your judgments.

We all know the scandals that have ensued in the long history of the members of the Church. That does not mean that the ecclesia is itself corrupt; it merely means that its members are human and fallible and always will be. Sometimes brave souls have paid with their lives for that.

As for Fallaci, when it comes to loving God with one’s whole heart, soul, and mind, she’s got two out of three. Not bad. It is hard to be Italian and see the machinations of the Roman bureaucracy up close and not be disillusioned if you’re an idealist. And if she is anything, Fallaci is that. Have you actually read what she has to say? She didn’t title her last book The Force of Reason for nothing.

The strength of the Catholic Church lies in the sacramental life she provides for her members. The Eucharist is primary; the kerygma is secondary — though still essential.

By the way, Christ may not have been scandalized by sinners — as Dan claims — but he had some choice ideas for certain kinds of wrong-doing — e.g., that it was better to have a millstone hung around your neck and be thrown into the sea… that was for those who harmed children. So you cherry pick your Bible verses, and I’ll do the same with mine.

Anti-Catholic? I don’t think so. A little reactive are we? Maybe it’s the plank in your own eye you’re seeing?

Here’s the deal:

If what you perceive of my theology offends you so much, just hit “next blog” because I guarantee you that there will be no further insults allowed to let stand in the comments. The next blowhard (yes, Dan, I can do ad hominem attacks as well as you can any day) who arrives here to breathlessly pontificate on what he or she perceives as the merits of my theology, ecclesiology, catechesis, church history, or scriptural interpretation will be cast into the outer darkness.

Go gnash your teeth and do your name calling and judgmental jumping to conclusions (on quite limited evidence) on your own bandwidth.

What Christian charity I’ve witnessed here. My heavens… maybe I ought to try the Protestants. They certainly can’t be any worse than ol’ Dan here.

Pax vobiscum, y’all.

DirtCrashr has donated another EUSSR graphic, a very nice animation this time.

Timely, and inspiring.

Charles at Little Green Footballs has given Fjordman’s post a link this evening. Here’s what our daily traffic graph looks like as a result:

I call this phenomenon a “lizard-lanche”, but Dymphna says it’s an “LGF minaret”.

I’m not so sure that Charles would approve of her terminology…

When I was gathering illustrations for Fjordman’s post yesterday, I cobbled together the EUSSR flag shown at right, a combination of retro Soviet iconography and the twelve-star EU flag. It is a graphic depiction of Fjordman’s contention that EU, as a socialist super-state, is consciously modeled on the Soviet Union.

Fjordman has written an associated Brussels Journal post, one in which he addresses the question “Is the Nation State Obsolete?” It is a lengthy discussion of the effort to delegitimize the nation-state, and therefore any national identity.

He quotes Roger Scruton:

The political and economic advantages that lead people to seek asylum in the West are the result of territorial jurisdiction. Yet territorial jurisdictions can survive only if borders are controlled. Transnational legislation, acting together with the culture of repudiation, is therefore rapidly undermining the conditions that make Western freedoms durable.

And further:

Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties – the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Yet everywhere the idea of the nation is under attack – either despised as an atavistic form of social unity, or even condemned as a cause of war and conflict, to be broken down and replaced by more enlightened and more universal forms of jurisdiction. But what, exactly, is supposed to replace the nation and the nation state?

Actually, we already know the answer to this question, since we’ve seen it in action before: the troika of Party, Central Committee, and Politburo, serving the interests of “The People” by ruling with an iron fist.

The fact that the Party Congress will likely conduct its sessions in Arabic and apply justice according to the fiqh is neither here nor there.

In Europe, the remaining native speakers of European languages will be obliged to pay for this de-nationalization process. As Fjordman says:

The irony is that while we are being told that we should accept massive immigration because the nation state is obsolete, we are still supposed to pay for it. Many Western Europeans in 2006 typically pay between 35 to 55% of their income in taxes, and almost all of this goes to projects and institutions on a national level. If the nation state is dead, how come it gets half of my salary? The nation state must be the most expensive corpse in human history. It is also noteworthy that Leftist parties in Europe usually get the overwhelming majority of votes from Third World immigrants, who come precisely to enjoy the economic benefits these countries have to offer. The idea that the border should be kept open, since nation states are obsolete, but that citizens should still pay for it has proven to be a stroke of genius for Leftist parties, who can simply import voters and elect a new people. Native Europeans who pay their high tax rates will thus be funding their own colonization.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. If Fjordman is right, there is still time for Europeans to take their nations back from the EU.

My ancestors spoke Northumbrian, Scots Gaelic, Provençal, and Low German, so I am somewhat of an ethnic Europhile. The real Europe, that is: the patchwork of peculiar people jabbering in their own languages and maintaining their ancient and honorable traditions, not the Grand Experiment of the “European Union.”

As my contribution to the effort to take Europe back from the EU, I’ve created some additional graphics. First, the large version:

It means, “Say no to the EU!” Also, “Stop EUrabia!” and “No more EUtopias!” I invite our European readers to borrow this graphic — or the smaller one shown below, which is designed for the sidebar — and use it on your blogs.

Forsake EUphemism and eschew EUnamity!

There’s no reason for Europeans to give up their nations. They can gather together with people from other countries and speak English or French or German, and also speak their own languages at home, in their own parliaments and institutions.

A supranational institution can never assure the security of a free people. No one is going to volunteer to take up arms and die to defend the Treaty of Maastricht. People are moved to defend themselves by the natural ties of blood, language, and custom.

Prosperous free-market democracies tend to be peaceful entities. In any case, smaller nations can form alliances to forestall any threat of resurgent hegemony from Russia or France or Germany.

Let’s hear it for Norway and Latvia and Slovenia and Poland and Denmark and Spain! Long live Republika Hrvatska! Vlaanderen Vlaams!

Are you ready to take the U out of E?

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna. He has published another essay today related to this one (at Brussels Journal): Is the Nation State Obsolete?

I know many Americans, and Europeans, too, have more or less written off Western Europe as lost to Islam already. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t think this too sometimes, but I do see encouraging signs of a real shift of public opinion beneath the surface. Judging from information such as the extremely high number of Germans hostile to Islam, I still believe, or at least hope, that Europe can be saved. But this hope hinges on the complete and utter destruction of the European Union.

The EU must die, or Europe will die. It’s that simple.

Bat Ye’or in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis is right in pointing out that ordinary Europeans have never voted for this merger with the Islamic world through massive Muslim immigration and Multiculturalism. This is closely tied to the rise of the European Union, which has transferred power away from the people and the democratic process to behind-the-scenes deals made by corrupt, Eurabian officials and bureaucrats. Several observers have noted that there is a serious disconnect between the European elites and ordinary citizens. This has been made possible largely because of the EU.

I have heard the term “neo-Feudalism” being used of the EU. There are definitely certain elite groups in Europe who have never really accepted the loss of power to “the mob,” and think that everything that’s wrong with Europe is because of “populism,” what others call democracy. These are also the people who created Eurabia and “forgot” to consult the public about these plans. The EU should be viewed that way, as a de facto, slow-motion abolition of European democracy, disguised as something else. The real force behind the EU is to cede national sovereignty to a new ruling class of bureaucrats, a new aristocracy and a throwback to the pre-democratic age.

I’m really worried about a complete collapse of the democratic system here. It has already been weakened by the EU, the UN etc. for a long time, and now we also have direct physical threats by Muslims to freedom of speech. Ordinary Europeans are no longer in control of our own fates. Sweden has for instance in reality ceased being a democratic country, in my view. We need to recapture this, or Europe is finished.

In an interview with Paul Belien of the Brussels Journal in February 2006, former Soviet Dissident Vladimir Bukovksy warned that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union, an EUSSR as some people call it. In a speech he delivered in Brussels, Belgium, Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fully-fledged totalitarian state.

“I am referring to structures, to certain ideologies being instilled, to the plans, the direction, the inevitable expansion, the obliteration of nations, which was the purpose of the Soviet Union. Most people do not understand this. They do not know it, but we do because we were raised in the Soviet Union where we had to study the Soviet ideology in school and at university. The ultimate purpose of the Soviet Union was to create a new historic entity, the Soviet people, all around the globe. The same is true in the EU today. They are trying to create a new people. They call this people “Europeans”, whatever that means. According to Communist doctrine as well as to many forms of Socialist thinking, the state, the national state, is supposed to wither away. In Russia, however, the opposite happened. Instead of withering away the Soviet state became a very powerful state, but the nationalities were obliterated. But when the time of the Soviet collapse came these suppressed feelings of national identity came bouncing back and they nearly destroyed the country. It was so frightening.”

Bukovksy replied negatively to Belien’s question whether the member countries of the EU didn’t join the union voluntarily, and that the integration thus reflects the democratic will of Europeans. “No, they did not. Look at Denmark which voted against the Maastricht treaty twice. Look at Ireland [which voted against the Nice treaty]. Look at many other countries, they are under enormous pressure. It is almost blackmail. It is a trick for idiots. The people have to vote in referendums until the people vote the way that is wanted. Then they have to stop voting. Why stop? Let us continue voting. The European Union is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage.”

In 1992, Bukovksy had unprecedented access to Politburo and other Soviet secret documents. According to him, some of these documents “show very clearly” that the idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was encouraged in agreements between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988-89 called our “common European home” “Of course, it is a milder version of the Soviet Union. I am not saying that it has a Gulag.”

“The idea was very simple. It first came up in 1985-86, when the Italian Communists visited Gorbachev, followed by the German Social-Democrats. They all complained that the changes in the world, particularly after [British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher introduced privatisation and economic liberalisation, were threatening to wipe out the achievement (as they called it) of generations of Socialists and Social-Democrats – threatening to reverse it completely. Therefore the only way to withstand this onslaught of wild capitalism (as they called it) was to try to introduce the same socialist goals in all countries at once. Prior to that, the left-wing parties and the Soviet Union had opposed European integration very much because they perceived it as a means to block their socialist goals.” From 1985 onwards, “the Soviets came to an agreement with the left-wing parties that if they worked together they could hijack the whole European project and turn it upside down. Instead of an open market they would turn it into a federal state.”

In January 1989, during a meeting between Gorbachev, former Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, American banker Rockefeller and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Giscard d’Estaing is supposed to have stated that: “Europe is going to be a federal state and you have to prepare yourself for that. You have to work out with us, and the European leaders, how you would react to that, how would you allow the other Eastern European countries to interact with it or how to become a part of it, you have to be prepared.” As Vladimir Bukovksy points out, this was 1989, at a time when the [1992] Maastricht treaty had not even been drafted. “How the hell did Giscard d’Estaing know what was going to happen in 15 years time? And surprise, surprise, how did he become the author of the European constitution [in 2002-03]? It does smell of conspiracy, doesn’t it?”

Yes, it does smell of conspiracy. This was in the 1980s, when most of the media still dismissed talk of a political union to subdue the nation states as scaremongering. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, former French President and chief drafter of the awful EU Constitution, an impenetrable brick of a book of hundreds of pages without any of the checks and balances of the American Constitution, has argued that the rejection of the Constitution in the French and Dutch referendums in 2005 “was a mistake which will have to be corrected.” “The Constitution will have to be given its second chance.” He said the French people voted No out of an “error of judgement” and “ignorance”, and insisted that “In the end, the text will be adopted.” “It was a mistake to use the referendum process, but when you make a mistake you can correct it.” Mr Giscard d’Estaing indicated that the treaty could be put to French voters in a second referendum, or be ratified by the French parliament. “People have the right to change their opinion. The people might consider they made a mistake,” he said on a possible new referendum. Anybody who still questions whether Eurabia, the deliberate merger between Europe and the Arab-Islamic world described by Bat Ye’or, is “just a conspiracy theory” should read these statements by Giscard d’Estaing. Why should we be surprised if leading EU officials make behind-the-scenes agreements that affect the future of the entire continent, yet say nothing about this in public or flat out lie about their agenda? This is how the EU has been working for decades, indeed from the very beginning.

From its inception, European integration has been a French-led enterprise. The fact that the French political elite still want to maintain their leadership over Europe was amply demonstrated during the Iraq war. President Chirac famously said in 2003 after Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic backed the US position “They missed a good opportunity to shut up,” adding “These countries have been not very well behaved and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too rapidly with the American position.” Jean Monnet, French economist who was never elected to public office, is regarded by many as the architect of European integration. Monnet was a well-connected pragmatist who worked behind the scenes towards the gradual creation of European unity. Richard North, publisher of the blog EU Referendum and co-author of the book The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive? together with Christopher Booker, describes how Jean Monnet for years, at least from the 1920s, had dreamed of building a “United States of Europe.” Although what Monnet really had in mind was the creation of a European entity with all the attributes of a state, an “anodyne phrasing was deliberately chosen with a view to making it difficult to dilute by converting it into just another intergovernmental body. It was also couched in this fashion so that it would not scare off national governments by emphasising that its purpose was to override their sovereignty.” In their analysis of the EU’s history, the authors claim that the EU was not born out of WW2, as many people seem to think. It had been planned at least a generation before that.

The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation”. As critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people do not even know of their existence. A federation is of course a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.” The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.” Booker and North calls the European Union “a slow-motion coup d’état: the most spectacular coup d’état in history,” designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so in public.

In 2005, an unprecedented joint declaration by the leaders of all British political groups in Brussels called for PM Tony Blair to push for an end the “medieval” practice of European legislation being decided behind closed doors. Critics claim that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s supreme law-making body, which decides two thirds of all Britain’s laws (and the majority of laws in all Western European countries), “is the only legislature outside the Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba to pass laws in secret.” As one of the signers put it: “We still have this medieval way of making decisions in the EU; people hide behind other member states, and blame them. It increases people’s sense of cynicism, but what we need is some straight talking.” According to British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan, this is how the EU was designed. “Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval. So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion.” “Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic.”

Vladimir Bukovksy, too, warns that it looks like we are living in a period of rapid, systematic and very consistent dismantlement of democracy. “Look at this Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. It makes ministers into legislators who can introduce new laws without bothering to tell Parliament or anyone.” “Today’s situation is really grim. Major political parties have been completely taken in by the new EU project. None of them really opposes it. They have become very corrupt. Who is going to defend our freedoms?” He doesn’t have much faith in institutions such as the elected, but largely powerless European Parliament, to curtail these developments. “The European Parliament is elected on the basis of proportional representation, which is not true representation. And what does it vote on? The percentage of fat in yoghurt, that kind of thing. It is ridiculous.” “It is no accident that the European Parliament, for example, reminds me of the Supreme Soviet. It looks like the Supreme Soviet because it was designed like it. Similary, when you look at the European Commission it looks like the Politburo,” which was the real centre of power in the USSR, unaccountable to anyone, not directly elected by anyone at all.

Another former citizen of the USSR, Vilius Brazenas, has noted some of these similarities between EU and Soviet institutions, too. “When former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev visited Britain in 2000, he accurately described the European Union as “the new European Soviet.” He said this with obvious approval, since he sees the evolving EU as fulfilling his vision of a “common European home” stretching “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” as he described it in his 1987 book Perestroika. Mr. Gorbachev is a lifelong Communist.” “It is highly significant that a top-level Marxist-Leninist such as Mikhail Gorbachev could find such affinity with Western leaders about a “common European home” and then, 13 years later, approvingly note that that common home was moving ever closer to the Soviet model.” “Booker and North write that Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, known in Europe as “Mr. Socialist,” was responsible for convincing his fellow EU founding fathers that “the most effective way to disguise their project’s political purpose was to conceal it behind a pretense that it was concerned only with economic co-operation, based on dismantling trade barriers: a ‘common market.’”

Meanwhile, the vast and inflated EU bureaucracy puts its tentacles into regulating every conceivable subject in Europe in great detail, not just the percentage of fat in yoghurt. Beer drinkers in Germany were frothing at the mouth during the summer of 2005 over EU plans to make Bavarian barmaids cover up. The aim of the proposed EU directive was to protect them from the sun’s harmful rays. But the so-called “tan ban” was condemned as absurd by breweries, politicians — and the barmaids. It was eventually withdrawn. In Sweden, most clothes sold in shops contain labels with washing instructions. But the labels were viewed at the EU level as a hindrance to free trade, as it was prejudicial to foreign clothes sold in Sweden that don’t have the labels. A poll commissioned by the Swedish Consumer Agency showed that eight out of ten Swedes read the washing instructions before they wash new clothes, and six out of ten read them before they buy clothes.

These are examples of the more ridiculous or funny aspects of the EU machinery. But there is also a much more sinister side to it: The promotion of an official, “Eurabian” federal ideology promoting Multiculturalism, denouncing all those wanting to preserve their democracy at the nation state level as “xenophobes” and those wanting to limit Third World immigration as “racists.” A report from the EU’s racism watchdog said Europe must do more to combat racism and “Islamophobia.” New anti-discrimination laws to combat Islamophobia are to be enacted, as they already have been in Norway, where Norwegians need to mount proof of their own innocence if Muslim immigrants accuse them of discrimination in any form, including discriminatory speech. The EU also wants to promote an official lexicon shunning offensive and culturally insensitive terms such as “Islamic terrorism.”

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, after the ripples caused in early 2006 by the Muhammad cartoons published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, travelled to the Middle East and made joint statements with Islamic leaders that “freedom of the press entails responsibility and discretion and should respect the beliefs and tenets of all religions.” Solana said that he had discussed means to ensure that “religious symbols can be protected”. Such steps could materialize through various mechanisms, “and maybe inside the new human rights commission created in the UN”, he said. He held talks with Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of Al Azhar University, the highest seat of learning in Sunni Islam, and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa. In a meeting with the leader of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Solana said that “I expressed our sincere regret that religious feelings have been hurt”, vowing “to reach out… to make sure that people’s hearts and minds are not hurt again.” Dutch daily De Telegraaf quoted the Dutch state secretary for European Affairs Atzo Nicolai as characterising the appeasing tone used by Mr Solana as “shocking.” Only a few years earlier, Mr. Solana, then Secretary General of NATO, in a speech stated that “the root cause of conflicts in Europe and beyond can be traced directly to the absence of democracy and openness. The absence of the pressure valve of democratic discourse can lead these societies to explode into violence.” The irony that he himself later was trying to curtail the democratic discourse in Europe through the promotion of Islamic censorship and speech codes apparently did not strike him.

Journalist Nidra Poller, commenting on the debate prior to the EU Constitution referendum in France, noted other incidents of this deliberate, submissive attitude among EU leaders towards Muslim demands. “The Euro-Mediterranean “Dialogue” is a masterpiece of abject surrender. The European Union functions therein as an intermediate stage of an ominous Eurabian project that calls for a meltdown of European culture and its recasting in a monumental paradise of cultural relativism… that closely resembles the Muslim oumma. Isn’t this a more accurate vision of what the Union is preparing for its docile citizens? When subversive appeasement hides behind the veil of “Dialogue,” what unspeakable ambitions might be dissembled by the noble word “Constitution”?”

Intelligent people have been warning against this development for years. British philosopher Roger Scruton, in books such a The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat and England and the Need for Nations, warns that: “We in Europe stand at a turning point in our history. Our parliaments and legal systems still have territorial sovereignty. They still correspond to historical patterns of settlement that have enabled the French, the Germans, the Spaniards, the British and the Italians to say ‘we’ and to know whom they mean by it. The opportunity remains to recuperate the legislative powers and the executive procedures that formed the nation states of Europe. At the same time, the process has been set in motion that would expropriate the remaining sovereignty of our parliaments and courts, that would annihilate the boundaries between our jurisdictions, that would dissolve the nationalities of Europe in a historically meaningless collectivity, united neither by language, nor by religion, nor by customs, nor by inherited sovereignty and law.” “The case against the nation state has not been properly made, and the case for the transnational alternative has not been made at all. I believe therefore that we are on the brink of decisions that could prove disastrous for Europe and for the world, and that we have only a few years in which to take stock of our inheritance and to reassume it.”

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, an admirer of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, has said that the EU enlargement with ten new member states, mostly former Communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, “increased the EU’s democratic deficit.” He warned that “The EU has continued – at an accelerated speed – to expand the number of pages of its legislation which now deals with almost every aspect of human life and human activities.” Mr Klaus also stressed that the nation-state “is an unsubstitutable guarantor of democracy (opposite to all kinds of ‘Reichs,’ empires and conglomerates of states).”

According to Vladimir Bukovksy, “the most likely outcome is that there will be an economic collapse in Europe, which in due time is bound to happen with this growth of expenses and taxes. The inability to create a competitive environment, the overregulation of the economy, the bureaucratisation, it is going to lead to economic collapse.” “I have no doubt about it. There will be a collapse of the European Union pretty much like the Soviet Union collapsed. But do not forget that when these things collapse they leave such devastation that it takes a generation to recover. Just think what will happen if it comes to an economic crisis. The recrimination between nations will be huge. It might come to blows. Look to the huge number of immigrants from Third World countries now living in Europe. This was promoted by the European Union. What will happen with them if there is an economic collapse? We will probably have, like in the Soviet Union at the end, so much ethnic strife that the mind boggles.” “I think that the European Union, like the Soviet Union, cannot be democratized. Gorbachev tried to democratize it and it blew up. This kind of structures cannot be democratized.”

Richard North writes that “If, against all the odds, the Constitution does go ahead, it would be like locking down the lid on a pressure cooker and sealing off the safety valve. The break-up might take a little longer, but it will be explosive when it comes.” In the book he co-authored with Christopher Booker, the authors conclude: “Behind the lofty ideals of supranationalism in short, evoking an image of Commissoners sitting like Plato’s Guardians, guiding the affairs of Europe on some rarefied plane far above the petty egotisms and rivalries of mere nation states, the project Monnet had set on its way was a vast, ramshackle, self-deluding monster: partly suffocating in its own bureaucracy; partly a corrupt racket, providing endless opportunities for individuals and collectives to outwit and exploit their fellow men; partly a mighty engine for promoting the national interests of those countries who knew how to ‘work the system’, among whom the Irish and the Spanish had done better than most, but of whom France was the unrivalled master. The one thing above all the project could never be, because by definition it had never been intended to be, was in the remotest sense democratic.” They believe this is why the EU is doomed and why it will “leave a terrible devastation behind it, a wasteland from which it would take many years for the peoples of Europe to emerge.”

I understand concerns that the destruction of the EU could cause “instability” in Europe. It will. But we will probably end up with some “instability” anyway, given the number of Muslims here that the EUrabians have helped in. Besides, if “stability” means a steady course towards Eurabia, I’ll take some instability any day. I can’t see that we have any choice. The truth is that Europe has got itself into a bad fix, again, and will have some turbulent and painful years and decades ahead regardless of what we do at this point. The choice is between some pain where Europe prevails and pain where Europe simply ceases to exist as a Western, cultural entity.

Some would hope that we could “reform” the EU, keep the “positive” aspects of it and not “throw out the baby with the bath water.” I beg to differ. I was naïve, too, once, and thought there were positive aspects to the EU. There aren’t, or not nearly enough to keep any of it.

The EU is all bath water, no baby.

Which is why, as Bukovksy says, “the sooner we finish with the EU the better. The sooner it collapses the less damage it will have done to us and to other countries. But we have to be quick because the Eurocrats are moving very fast. It will be difficult to defeat them. Today it is still simple. If one million people march on Brussels today these guys will run away to the Bahamas.”

The creation of Eurabia is the greatest act of treason in the history of Western civilization for two thousand years, since the age of Brutus and Judas. In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Brutus and Judas Iscariot were placed in the harshest section of Hell, even below Muhammad. If Dante were alive today, he’d probably make some room for Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his Eurabian cronies in the Hot Place. The EU elites see themselves as Julius Caesar or Octavian, but end up being Brutus. They want to recreate the Roman Empire on both sides of the Mediterranean, bound together by some vague references to a “shared Greek heritage.” Instead, they are creating a civilizational breakdown across much of Western Europe as the barbarians are overrunning the continent. The EU wants to recreate the Roman Empire and ends up creating the second fall of Rome.

Eurabia can only be derailed by destroying the organization that created it in the first place: The European Union.

If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.
        — Ward Churchill, from his September 11th essay

Under normal circumstances, a two-bit academic radical like Ward Churchill would never gain national notoriety, nor garner any attention outside of his Colorado campus and the academic-activist speaker circuit.

But when he was invited to speak at Hamilton College in February of last year, Professor Churchill’s earlier words (about the victims of the 9-11 attacks in New York) created a perfect storm in the blogosphere.

I’m sure he would have preferred the relative anonymity of his earlier stature. After all, he had a nice little racket going — a tenured position that gave him a platform from which to launch his radical revolutionary sorties, his stature as an authentic “Native American” voice, a series of lucrative speaking gigs, a sideline of plagiarized art works, and a sinecure in a nice, hermetically sealed academic environment. Who could ask for more?

His notoriety focused attention, not just on his outlandish views and alleged fraudulent activities, but also on the entire “tenured radical” phenomenon in the modern academy. How many other Ward Churchills are there? Is it likely that he toils alone in his tower of radical pedagogy?

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) had reason to ask the same question. After all, it represents those who (aside from the government) collectively raise the funds to pay for the tendentious nonsense that passes for humanities education in America’s universities.

Last month ACTA published its report, How Many Ward Churchills? (pdf format). As ACTA President Anne D. Neal says in the Foreword:

Is there really only one Ward Churchill? Or are there many? Do professors in their classrooms ensure a robust exchange of ideas designed to help students to think for themselves? Or do they use their classrooms as platforms for propaganda, sites of sensitivity training, and launching pads for political activism? Do our college and university professors foster intellectual diversity or must students toe the party line?

To answer these questions, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni went to publicly available resources — college and university websites, electronic syllabi, and faculty web pages. And what we found is profoundly troubling. Ward Churchill is not only not alone — he is quite common.

By this, we do not mean to suggest that issues of alleged plagiarism, dubious claims of ethnicity, or inadequate credentials — problems specific to Ward Churchill — apply broadly to all academics. What we do mean to suggest is that the extremist rhetoric and tendentious opinion for which Churchill is infamous can be found on campuses across America. In published course descriptions and online course materials, professors are openly and unapologetically declaring that they use their positions to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically.

None of us is really surprised to find that Ward Churchill has many comrades working alongside him in the academic cloisters. If you pay any attention to the History or Sociology sections of Barnes and Noble, or have a kid in college, you can’t help but be aware of the prevailing academic fashions.

But what is surprising about the report is the scope of the problem, the sheer breathtaking extent of the penetration of the Little Churchills into every corner of what used to be known as the Liberal Arts. The smelly little orthodoxies are everywhere, spreading a thick blanket of ideological smog over our college campuses.

Many young people receive little or no education in their high schools. When they arrive at college, their minds are blank slates, ready for the Little Churchills to write their manifestos on. With no alternative ideologies offered, these youngsters emerge from college unable to think for themselves, unable to form a coherent argument or debate ideas other than by name-calling and yelling slogans. They are the shock troops for the radical graybeards, the Hitlerjugend of the 21st century left.

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Reading the ACTA report makes me glad that my son, the future Baron Bodissey, is a chemistry major. Mathematics and the sciences are largely exempt from the ugly cant that infests the humanities courses.

One of the notable features of the classes listed by ACTA is how much alike they all are. According to the report:

Our survey revealed a remarkable uniformity of political stance and pedagogical approach. Throughout the humanities and social sciences, the same issues surface over and over, regardless of discipline. In courses on literature, philosophy, and history; sociology, anthropology, and religious studies; women’s studies, American studies, and ethnic studies; global studies, peace studies, urban studies, and environmental studies; education, political science, and economics, the focus is consistently on a set list of topics: race, class, gender, sexuality, and the “social construction of identity”; globalization, capitalism, and U.S. “hegemony”; the ubiquity of oppression and the destruction of the environment. In class after class, the same essential message is repeated, in terms that, to an academic “outsider,” often seem virtually unintelligible. What is that message? In short, the message is that the status quo, which is patriarchal, racist, hegemonic, and capitalist, must be “interrogated” and “critiqued” as a means of theorizing and facilitating a social transformation whose necessity and value are taken as a given.

Our review of college and university courses revealed a remarkable level of homogeneity. As individual disciplines increasingly orient themselves around a core set of political values, the differences between disciplines are beginning to disappear. Courses in such seemingly distinct fields as literature, sociology, and women’s studies, for example, have become mirror images of one another — a fact that colleges and universities openly acknowledge in their practice of crosslisting courses in multiple departments.

With the elimination of the traditional “core requirements” in most colleges, a Liberal Arts major can emerge from her respected institution holding a baccalaureate yet almost entirely lacking in education. Oh, yes, she is well-versed in the vocabulary of postmodern cant, and is ready to do battle in the trenches of race-class-gender warfare, but it is an open question whether she actually learned anything while in college.

The ACTA report summarizes the course offerings in the different disciplines, outlining the themes that are common to all of them: coursework as sensitivity training, “Social Justice”, “Whiteness”, “Hate Studies”, “Queer Theory”, animal rights, and so on. The ideal humanities course covers all of these topics and crosses the boundaries of all the academic disciplines to do so. From the instructor’s point of view, teaching a college course is an opportunity to fire up his young charges to go out and mount the barricades to “speak truth to power” and fight for “social justice.” Any education that occurs along the way is an accidental byproduct, and may even be counter-productive.

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Appendix B to the ACTA report is a full listing of all the courses surveyed in the report. Each is offered at a major university, and is representative of courses in its field. The published description is taken from the course catalog, or from listings on the internet.

This is where the real meat of the report is found. I cheerfully read the entries aloud to Dymphna, but she soon made me stop, pleading a weak stomach.

I love being filled with loathing, so I persevered. But a cup of strong coffee is recommended if you want to read the whole thing, because your eyes will tend to glaze over after the first three or four. They all sound alike, and after a while the litany of transgressive gendered oppression whiteness colonial racism community activism imperialism social change blurs into a meaningless background drone.

Here’s a representative entry, from Princeton:

American Studies 320: Asian American Cultural Studies: Remembering Race, Domesticity, Globalizations
Grace Hong, Department of English and Program in American Studies

This course will exam how “Asian American” texts remember the history of exclusion, bars to citizenship, racialized and gendered labor exploitation, dispossession of property, and U. S. imperialism and militarism in Asia differently than the American literary canon does. We will study the construction of an Asian American literary canon in the 1970s, as well as later Asian American feminist, queer, and post-colonial contributions.

After reading a few of these, you say to yourself, “You can’t make this s**t up!” These course listings are like lefty Mad-Libs, with a predictable script and blanks to be filled in. Like little kids, these Radic-Libs have a very limited vocabulary, but instead of filling in the blanks with “poop” and “booger” and “underwear”, they use “racist”, “gendered”, “justice”, “transgressive”, “imperialism”, etc.

To prove it to you, I’ll design one of these courses myself. Below are four course listings. Three are real courses from major universities funded in part by your tax dollars. One is a Gates of Vienna creation. Can you tell which is which?

SOC 31: Prisons: The American Way of Punishment. Prison as a place of confinement, punishment and rehabilitation is the focus of this survey of the history, philosophies, structure and operation of corrections in the United States. The course critically examines the concept of prison as a total institution and its panopticism as a model of social control that extends to other social contexts. The course will explore the world of inmates and their strategies of subcultural adaptations to and resistance against incarceration; as well as the role of the prison staff. Particular attention will be paid to how gender, race, economics and politics structure prison policies and dynamics. Specific topics may include cultural representations of prison life, implications of current sentencing practices, privatization and the prison-industrial complex, incarcerated mothers, capital punishment, juvenile justice, and alternatives to incarceration.

ARHI 186wBK. Whiteness: Race, Sex, and Representation. An interdisciplinary interrogation of linguistic, conceptual, and practical solipsisms that contributed to the construction and normalization of whiteness in aesthetics, art, visual culture, film, and mass media. Course questions the dialectics of “blackness” and “whiteness” that dominate Western intellectual thought and popular culture, thereby informing historical and contemporary notions and representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

English 341: The Etymology of Oppression. This course examines the development of the English language as an instrument of the Anglo-Saxon power structure. Topics include: the removal of gender from English nouns, and how this process accelerated the suppression of the Feminine in thought and discourse; the Great Vowel Shift, and how the replacement of diphthongs with monophthongs helped enforce oppressive masculine power-oriented language structures by removing the softer and more intimate vowels; the development of eccentric, irregular, and inconsistent word forms and spelling, which created a despised and subservient class of “ignorant” and “illiterate” people, ripe for capitalist exploitation.

Sociology 384b: Black Marxism. The growth of global racism suggests the symmetry of the expansion of capitalism and the globalization of racial hierarchy. In this context, global racism works to shatter possibilities for solidarity, distort the meaning of justice, alter the context of wrong, and makes it possible for people to claim ignorance of past and present racial atrocities, discrimination, exclusion, oppression, and genocide. By concentrating on the works of Black Marxist intellectuals, this course examines the discourse of confrontation, and the impact of Black Marxist thought in contributing to anti-racist knowledge, theory, and action.

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In The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, Roger Kimball famously said:

To an extent scarcely imaginable three decades ago, the long march through the institutions promised, or rather threatened, by the leaders of the counterculture has finally been accomplished.

That was six years ago. Since then the Long March Through the Institutions has continued unimpeded, with 9-11 not even a speed bump along the route.

How did it get this way? When I was in college in the early 1970s, subjects like History and English were still taught in the traditional fashion. We studied poems, analyzed style, read original sources, cross-checked alternative sources, and generally behaved in a scholarly fashion (assuming we wanted to pass the course). Oh, there were the with-it young professors, the wannabe hippies with longish hair and a hip vocabulary, teaching Marcuse and Verlaine and generally being subversive of the system. But they were the exception, not the rule, and they were mild by today’s standards.

So how did we get here from there?

To start with, those cool young professors with their hippie-envy nurtured and encouraged the radicals among my cohort, bringing them in as graduate teaching assistants and then adjunct professors, finally putting them on a tenure track. There were so many of them! All those dope-smoking smash-the-state baby boomers, moving up and into the faculty, practicing their subversion by institutionalizing it.

The hippies are bald-headed graybeards now, but they are firmly entrenched in a well-funded and lucrative shakedown racket, and they will be very difficult to dislodge.

Time was, they wanted to stick it to The Man. Then they became The Man, and now “speaking truth to power” means talking to yourself.

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So, as Lenin said, “What is to be done?”

None of the pernicious nonsense described in the ACTA report will be easy to alter or remove. In order to persuade the universities to change, we will have to hit them where it hurts: in the pocketbook. Unfortunately, in addition to the generous federal and state subsidies, the tenured radicals are funded by a network of liberal trusts and foundations which are inherently sympathetic to their agenda.

That leaves the alumni and the parents to have an effect. If you are sending an occasional check to your alma mater, you might want to grab a current course listing and examine it, and possibly reconsider your gift. Drop a letter to the president of the institution, and let him know why your modest contribution is being withheld. Multiply your case by a few thousand and believe me, the University will sit up and take notice.

And parents who must pay the outrageous tuition fees have the choice of which institution will receive their check. If your kid isn’t going to major in the sciences or business, you might want to consider a private college like Hillsdale or the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. They don’t have the cachet of Princeton or Dartmouth, but they’ll give your child a real education, which is more to the point. Not only that, they may even be cheaper.

Aside from that, all we can do is to keep the glare of publicity on all the Little Churchills. Just keep turning over the rotten logs, exposing the wriggling grubs to the light of day.

As Ward Churchill himself must have noticed by now, it’s hard to keep running these little rackets when everybody is watching you.

Hat tip: Fjordman.

Hmmm… Canadian jihadists. Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Those peace-loving Canadians harboring a bunch of ammonium-nitrate-wielding bombers? Surreal.

And their exposure long overdue. Thank you, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Thank you, Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Wake-up time, you gentle Northerners. Get your boots on and prepare to live in the muck here with the rest of us. Couldn’t happen there, huh? No 9/11 for you.

Except that you almost had a 6/6 or a 6/11 or whatever date those creatures would have chosen to stick it to you. So no more condescension, okay? No more pious lectures about the violent US. Looks like you have more than your home-grown share.

See, that’s what happens when the immigrants come and they don’t assimilate and you preach multi-culti tolerance for jerks who don’t like you — hate you, even — and refuse to honor all things Canadian, including your laws against killing infidels:

The exact targets of these young terrorists were not revealed, but it is their profile that is most shocking: young Canadian Muslims who have somehow become radicalized while growing up in Canada.

They are “homegrown.” In other words, they have emerged from within Canada, rather than infiltrating it from abroad. They are insiders, not outsiders like Millennium Bomber Ahmed Ressam, who was behind Canada’s last major terrorism scare in 1999.

“Increasingly, we are learning of more and more extremists that are homegrown,” says a declassified CSIS report obtained by the National Post. “The implications of this shift are important.”

Still, your homegrowns are different from our homegrowns. Sure, we have lots of Muslim-American “youths” in schools and working here. Born here, even. But they hang with one another, not with the kaffir. They don’t mingle, thank you.

However, we have another problem, and who knows if you have it, too? Such things aren’t permitted to be discussed under your laws re speech curtailment so this bomb could be sitting on the back burner in, say, British Columbia, just waiting for the temperature to climb.

You see, what we have here are actual American citizens who convert to jihad. They aren’t first or second generation Pakistanis or Saudis or Somalis (though we do have our share of those). No, these are members of a group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra, and they were born to American parents (though usually just one of those. Dad is not normally around), grew up here, went to what passes for American schools, and then — rootless, disaffected and without guidance — they are recruited for jihad duty. Suddenly, their lives have structure, spirituality, and meaning. When you’re at the bottom of the pile, even that bit of daylight can look good.
These are dangerous people. They turn over 30% of their income to their guru in Pakistan, they live in private compounds, and municipal authorities don’t mess with them. Some of their neighbors, sounding just like Canadians, have a “live and let live” attitude toward these strangers in their midst.

These are not Louis Farrakhan’s Black Muslims, though the Nation of Islam is bad enough. And extremists of another sort. Consider Farrakhan’s group the forerunner of the homies in Jamaat ul-Fuqra…

Are we worried? Sure. Are the authorities keeping an eye on them? We hope so, but who knows? Sometimes the “authorities” are so hounded by the suicidally correct that we wonder if they can function effectively. If Jamie Gorelick hadn’t set up her asinine wall between domestic and foreign surveillance, would we have had a 9/11?

Maybe, just maybe, the cooperation between your intel bureaucracies prevented your Ground Zero.

Meanwhile, as the Muslims scream “profiling” and “Islamophobia” learn to hum “O Canada” while you go about trying to live in peace. They don’t deserve your attention: ignore them.

Sing after me:

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!

And sing loud!

Using a post by Dymphna as a jumping-off point, Pastorius has written a powerful essay about the current crisis faced by the different branches of Christianity.

There is a strain of thought in the liberal we’re-all-the-same-under-the-skin wing of Christianity which maintains that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship what is essentially the same God. This assertion can only hold as long as one fails to read the scriptures of the religions involved. The God of the New Testament and the Torah is very different from the Allah found in the Koran.

Pastorius highlights an essential difference:

The first principle of the Bible is that man needs to be Free, and this comes before anything else.

This is not at all a principle of Islam. In Islam, a good Muslim is to learn the Koran by heart, and to follow its rules by rote. He is not to be analytical, because his analysis can never add anything to that which Allah has already provided. The Koran, itself, is the final word of Allah to man. It is not to be amended or added to. It is to be followed only.

And to follow the Koran faithfully is to engage in struggle and violence against the unbeliever until all the world has submitted to the rule of Allah. There is no escaping this imperative.

The most important endeavor the Christian Church can undertake, at this point in time, is to understand that the defense of Western Civilization is of utmost importance to the existence of Christianity. Without the protection Western Civilization provides to Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Speech, and Democracy, Christianity itself would go into a dark age…

The Christian Church must understand that Western Civilization and the Bible go hand in hand. The Christian Church must become warriors for Western Civilization. I am not saying that this means the Church itself must call for violence. No, the Church, at this juncture has the luxury still of keeping its advocacy in the realm of peace. We can still fight our battles in the realm of ideology.

However, if the Christian Church, and the West, allow too many of our cherished Freedoms to slip away, it will become incumbent upon the Church, once again, to go into the business of War. And, that will be a shame upon us, not because it would be wrong to call for war in such a case, but, because we could have won our war without violence, if we had only acted sooner.

Modern mainstream Christianity has put itself into a cage of its own making, a cage of radical non-violence. It has, in effect, repudiated two thousand years of its own history, forsaking all the heroes who gave their lives so that the work of Christ could continue unmolested. Are we to forget that Charles Martel drove out the Saracens in the Battle of Poitiers in 732, or that an alliance of Christian European kingdoms defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, or that John III Sobieski, King of Poland raised the Siege of Vienna in 1683, all so that Christendom could flourish and create the beneficent cultural structure we now know as Western Civilization? If these uncouth, violent, and bloody-minded men had not fought on behalf of their fellow Christians, from whence would have come all the humane and tolerant values of postmodern culture?

This illustrates what I call the “Gandhi Syndrome”. Mahatma Gandhi would not have had the impact he did, nor would India have gained its independence in 1947, if the non-violent Hindu movement had been directed at anything except a humane and Christian culture. Gandhi, in effect, shamed the British, pointing out the basis of their own Christian values and forcing them to act accordingly. Under Hitler, or Stalin, or Saddam, or Kim Jong-Il, the equivalent of Gandhi’s movement would have been exterminated immediately, and its memory erased from recorded history.

The uncomfortable fact remains: modern civil society, with its culture of tolerance and human rights, is a creation of Western Christendom. Its existence is not a given; it is dependent upon constant vigilance and a willingness to do violence against those who would violently overturn it.

The humane tolerance of Western Civilization is an anomaly. On a historical scale, it has existed for but the briefest of moments, and can be extinguished with very little warning.

We ignore these facts at our peril.

Here are two news stories about two different families, one Danish, and one American. The first was sent by a Gates of Vienna reader and commenter, kepiblanc, who kindly summarized his own translation of the following story from Politiken (original in Danish):

“Honor Killings” are by no means unusual in Denmark nowadays. Normally the police grab the killer, and put him in front of a court of justice where he will get a sentence of life behind bars.

But something has changed: For the first time ever an entire family of nine is standing trial for premeditated, cold-blooded murder. That’s right, not only the trigger-man, but his entire family as well.

Last September Ghazala Khan (18) married a young man. Her family didn’t approve, and two days later she and her husband were gunned down in public in front of a railway station in the small town of Slagelse. A man sitting on a nearby bench had his cell phone’s camera activated and took the photo at right.

The man who pulled the trigger was Ghazala’s own brother. Ghazala screamed, “What are you doing?” while she took six bullets from a large caliber Smith & Wesson handgun. She died on the spot. Her husband took the remaining two bullets in the stomach, but survived.

As the investigation turned out it appears that Ghazala’s father orchestrated the killing in cooperation with eight members of the family, including chasing Ghazala down, providing the handgun and the getaway car.

The usual procedure in these “honor killings” is as follows: the family appoints one member to perform the actual slaughter (preferably a teenager in order to get a milder sentence) and the courts will prosecute that man only. But not so this time: The Danish Courts want to set an example and eventually hold the entire family responsible. What that means is: hold Islam responsible.

Stay tuned.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Appositely, a similar story unfolded right here in America this past week. A man already in custody in Lake Dora, Florida, facing a life prison term for multiple counts of sexually abusing his daughters — even raping one at gunpoint — is now in the same jail as his parents, who attempted to hire a someone to kill their granddaughters in order to prevent their testimony in court against the couple’s son:

Lake County deputies Tuesday arrested the couple — she’s 59, he’s 64 — and charged them with plotting to hire a hit man to kill their son’s wife, 10-year-old daughter, his 16-year-old stepdaughter and 14-year-old stepson and the family dog.

Similarly, a cousin in the family has been implicated for helping the rapist find a place to stay in Georgia when he initially became a fugitive after being charged with forty eight counts of sexual battery last Fall. The story notes that the son was “the mastermind” behind the plot to kill his family. His parents simply followed orders.

Both these stories are examples of primitive, tribal thinking. It is a mindset based on an axis of honor vs. shame. We know that the bizarre family in Florida will get due justice. In fact, they’ll get a whole lot more time and more hearings than they deserve, given the mandarin-like environment of our justice system.

But the unusual treatment of this honor-killing in Denmark represents a change in thinking and gives hope that at least one European country is not headed down the dhimmi-tube. When you live by the laws of the tribe, then the whole tribe should suffer the consequences.

Once again, Denmark shows its true colors. And those colors are brilliant.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a watchdog group that monitors infringement of first amendment rights at today’s colleges. Given the level of intimidation on campus and the academic gospel of correct thinking, they certainly have their hands full.

Here’s their mission statement:

The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE’s core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.

Of immediate interest to Gates of Vienna is the ongoing saga of Thomas Klocek at DePaul University in Chicago, which has been followed by FIRE. You may remember Klocek as the professor who stopped by the tables of a Muslim student group in the school cafeteria to argue with them about their depiction of Israel and Israelis. Big mistake. Chronwatch reports:

Depaul University is a large, if not particularly renowned academically, Catholic college in Chicago. Until recently the main cause of controversy surrounding Depaul was its insistence on employing notorious anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein as an assistant professor in its political science department. But recently Depaul took a giant step in implementing Orwellism and anti-democratic suppression of political incorrectness on its campus.

The immediate target of Depaul’s campaign against political incorrectness was Thomas Klocek, a part-time adjunct professor at DePaul University’s so-called “School for New Learning”. (“New learning” evidently is not something Depaul confuses with learning, as the events there show.) Klocek’s crime? He was guilty of expressing support for Israel. Evidently Holocaust Denial is ok at Depaul, but not expressing support for Israel.

After 14 years of continuous employment at the Chicago-based college, Klocek was suspended with pay last September, and then stayed suspended – this time without pay – through the winter quarter. Klocek is guilty of nothing more than expressing pro-Israel views in the face of extremist Palestinian propaganda on Depaul’s campus, including students and non-students proliferating the usual lies and canards about Israel and Rachel Corrie. Klocek’s courses have ranged from Critical Thinking to College Writing to Languages and Cultures of the World. By all accounts, he was a popular teacher and his classes were always full.

Here is the precipitating incident, from the Spring of 2005, as reported by the American Thinker:

… Klocek, who is Catholic, not Jewish, confronted a group of 8 students manning two tables for the groups Students for Justice in Palestine, and United Muslims Moving Ahead. Klocek says he argued that the materials the groups were disseminating were one-sided. On this, he is indisputably correct. Neither group pretends to provide balanced information on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. That of course, is perfectly understandable and acceptable. These are advocacy groups.

[…]

During his cafeteria confrontation with the students, Klocek did not identify himself as a professor at the school. He did not know any of the students, and had not had any of them in a class. After realizing that the argument needed to end, Klocek started to walk off. One student then asked if he taught at DePaul, and if so, what classes. The students followed Klocek, eager to continue arguing with him. He signaled he was done with the debate by thumbing his chin, meant to indicate, he says, enough already. The Muslim students later claimed this gesture was obscene.

For his behavior in this brief debate with the students, Klocek, a popular long-time DePaul professor, has lost his job, his health benefits, and has been smeared and humiliated by the University administration.

It has gotten so bad that Klocek has even been told not to pray at the campus chapel, which he formerly did regularly during his DePaul teaching stint. Such is the retribution of a Catholic University for a [Catholic] professor who has taken the risk of challenging the established mindset at DePaul on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians.

Follow the money, right? Well, at DePaul, it’s oil money, Arab oil money and lots of it:

DePaul University in Chicago is one of the fastest growing universities in the country. It has become the largest Catholic-affiliated university in America. Muslim and Arab students are one of the segments of DePaul’s student population that has seen the greatest increase in numbers in recent years. Although no figures are available, these students are an important source of revenue for the University, and many may well pay full tuition, making their attendance particularly lucrative.

In addition, DePaul is infamous for its hiring of Norman Finkelstein, mentioned above. Got to use that Arab oil money right? Thus Professor Finkelstein appears on the faculty at DePaul, having previously been fired as an adjunct professor by two other colleges in New York —Hunter and NYU — for his “pseudo-scholarship and fraudulent rantings against Jews and Israel.” This sleazy record has not stopped DePaul from hiring him for a tenure-track position. In fact, his support of Holocaust denier, David Irving, may have helped him gain employment at DePaul:

Finkelstein is a disciple of Holocaust Denier David Irving and claims Irving is an authoritative historian. Finkelstein refers to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis as the “Six Million” in quotation marks and says that nearly every Holocaust survivor is a fraud and a thief and a liar. (Finkelstein’s own parents are Holocaust survivors, and Finkelstein has long tried to capitalize on this as a way to legitimize his own anti Semitism.

[…]

Finkelstein routinely libels Holocaust survivor, philosopher, and writer Elie Wiesel in scurrilous terms. Finkelstein is the star on every Holocaust Denial neonazi web site on earth, serving as the “Jew who proved there was never any Holocaust.” He has been denounced as a fraud and anti-Semite by Alan Dershowitz, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Dennis Prager, Professor Omer Bartov, the World Jewish Congress, and just about everyone else on earth, gentile or Jew. The NY Times compared Finkelstein’s book to the old czarist forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion…

So: at DePaul, Finkelstein good, Klocek bad.

In addition to these sins of moral turpitude, DePaul has several other marks against it, which FIRE reports:

DePaul University: Shutdown of Affirmative Action Bake Sale Protest

DePaul University: Censorship of Student Group Protesting Ward Churchill

And again, from the American Thinker essay, above:

DePaul in fact has gone out of its way in recent years to make the campus dialogue “safe” for Muslim and Arab students. The University administration warned the campus community after the September 11th attacks that offensive speech hostile to Muslims would not be tolerated.

But speech hostile to Jews, or Israelis, or for that matter, the great mass of Americans grieving and offended by the 9/11 attacks, was perfectly legitimate. While New York and Washington were digging up their 3,000 dead, Muslims students at DePaul were using the post 9/11 environment to publicly attack America and Israel for their crimes and policies at campus forums, paid for with student fees. The campus has welcomed representatives of the Palestinian terror group Islamic Jihad to campus. The scurrilous propaganda “documentary” Jenin Jenin has been shown on campus.

It is fortunate that the blogosphere is following Professor Klocek’s case. The ACLU and The American Association of University Professors have been the “hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil” deaf mutes in this travesty. Nor is the MSM much better. Compare these two reports on the progress of Professor Klocek’s defamation suit against DePaul. First, The Chicago Tribune:

A Cook County Circuit Court judge has ruled that a defamation lawsuit filed by a former DePaul University faculty member can go to trial.

Thomas Klocek, a part-time employee whose specialty was medieval Slavic linguistics, sued the university in June 2005. He claimed that the university breached its employment contract and made defamatory statements about him after he got into a verbal confrontation with members of Muslim and Palestinian groups during a student fair. At the fair, he questioned literature being passed out by Students for Justice in Palestine, which supports the Arab side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Judge Stuart Nudelman dismissed Klocek’s claims of invasion of privacy and public disclosure of private information.

End of story. Klocek is depicted as a “part-time employee” though the usual academic title is “adjunct professor.” See Finkelstein. Nor does it say “part-time employee for the previous fourteen years.” Not fair and balanced enough to give the duration of his employment, perhaps?

Compare that with the report of the same chancery proceeding from The American Thinker on June 1st — the same day as The Tribune’s account:

A defamation suit was filed in Illinois’ Cook County Chancery last June charging that DePaul University and its leadership defamed Professor Thomas Klocek when DePaul publicly characterized arguments he presented to members of Palestinian and Muslim student groups as racist and bigoted. The suit seeks damages against DePaul for maligning Klocek’s integrity and professional competence. The defendants named include: DePaul University; Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, President of DePaul; and Susan Dumbleton, Dean of DePaul’s School for New Learning.

Yesterday, Judge Stuart Nudelman of the Illinois Circuit County Law Division Court agreed that Klocek’s claims have merit, which will allow his suit against DePaul to move forward toward a trial by jury. Klocek’s advocates characterized the Judge’s statements in court this way:

Judge Nudelman believes that DePaul’s actions to discipline Professor Thomas Klocek went to such extreme that their conduct rose to the level of defamation. He noted that DePaul exhibited destructive political correctness when it gave way to its fear of students’ reactions to Prof. Klocek’s challenges to the student groups’ literature and perspective on the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Judge Nudelman also commented that if such limited debate took place when he was a student, it would have resulted in having an inferior educational experience.

Judge Nudelman also stated that DePaul’s public disclosures about Prof. Klocek defamed him in that they denigrated his ability to perform as a professor.

I wish this were an isolated incident about a mediocre college taken from an Orwell novel. But it’s not. Larry Summers’ fate is not much different from Klocek’s, though fortunately, Summers has the money to pay for his own medical care — which Mr. Klocek does not — and as far as we know, Summers has not been banned from the Harvard campus chapel.

These are shameful stops along the way to dhimmitude, folks. That’s why organizations like FIRE exist. You might want to stop by their site and see where your college ranks in the freedom of speech department.

There’s a news account up on al-Reuters today about Texas Governor Perry’s plans to monitor his state’s borders with cameras, creating a “virtual” border patrol. The cameras would obviously have their own website since the streaming images would be publicly available and people could call in their observations:

Speaking to a gathering of sheriffs from border counties, Perry said virtual border patrollers spotting illegal immigrants would be able to call a toll-free phone number to report them to Texas authorities.

“A stronger border is what Americans want and it’s what our security demands and that is what Texas is going to deliver,” he said.

The cameras, which would cost $5 million to install along the state’s 1,000-mile border with Mexico, will be trained on “criminal hot spots and common routes used to enter this country,” he said.

Then al-Reuters reports this:

The proposal by Perry, a Republican running for re-election in November, comes amid a right-wing-led campaign against illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Is this really a “right wing-led” campaign against illegal immigration? Is it true that no one besides the rabid right is against wide-open borders? Except for that vile fringe, is everyone else just chomping at the bit to throw the doors open and invite illegal aliens to come home for supper, maybe rent a spare bedroom?

Another question: in the counties of this country which immediately abut the border with Mexico, how many of the citizens there are actively against strengthening the integrity of our southern border? I mean people who actually live and work there, not the ones who come in especially to “help” the aliens.

There was a tie this week at the Watcher’s Council. When that happens, the Watcher votes — thereby breaking the tie.

The winner, therefore, was New World Man for “Who Do You Trust With Your Constitution?”

…who would you rather have figuring out whether things are constitutional, the Supreme Court or Congress? Poll every adult American and the answer would be hundreds of millions to 535 in favor of the Court. But no serious observer of the Court in recent years can escape the fact it’s making policy judgments in the guise of constitutional interpretation. “I want a do-over on my juvenile death penalty vote from 15 years ago, because… now it’s unconstitutional!” You may gravely nod and muse that this is just as Marshall intended, I guess.

Laws can be changed. State laws even more easily than acts of Congress. They are changed, all the time. Some that aren’t changed aren’t enforced anymore. But that doesn’t cover every situation! No. You should aspire to perfection in church, not in government. You’ll still be disappointed, but there’s songs.

The problem is that an edict from the Supreme Court can’t realistically be changed. I’m sure that anyone who argues that it’s a terribly hard row to hoe to change a state law will acknowledge that Supreme Court opinions are exponentially harder to reverse. There’s your first problem. If you’re going to hang your hat on the fact it’s hard to change laws in the legislature, it doesn’t make any sense to conclude that therefore, the Supreme Court should step in. Unless, I guess, you think the Court is infallible and will agree with your personal position on things 100 percent of the time. You must have another argument knocking around somewhere.

Joshuapundit placed second for his essay on the Pope’s visit to Auschwitz:

His Holiness visited Auschwitz Sunday….walking like an ordinary penitant seeking absolution through the gate with its mocking inscription ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘labor liberates’). I don’t use that language lightly.The present Pope lived the nightmare firsthand. He was an unwilling member of the Hitler Youth and was drafted into the German army towards the end of WWII. And for him to come to Auschwitz in this way and confront those old demons head on took extraordinary courage.

[…]

The destruction of the people of Israel is essentially the will to destroy G-d, he said: “By eradicating this people, those purveyors of violence wanted, deep down, to kill the G-d who had called upon Abraham, who had spoken on Mount Sinai and established the still valid principles of humanity there….If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the G-d who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that G-d finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone — to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world.”

And he continued: “Ultimately, the destruction of Israel was intended as an unearthing of the foundation upon which Christian faith rests, and as its replacement by a new, artificial faith in the rule of man, the rule of the strong.”

However, though he didn’t win, Sundries Shack had an interesting counter to the Pope’s remembered despair about World War II and the destruction wreaked by Hitler:

“In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God — Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?”

“Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?”

Where was God? God was in the hearts of the Allied soldiers as they fought and bled and died to end the “endless” slaughter. God was in the will of the people of America and England and Australia and Canada and the other Allies as they bent their entire economies to support hundreds of thousands of brave soldiers who threw themselves at the evil that sought to envelop the world.

Here, the Pope is wrong. There was no endless slaughter, no real triumph of evil. The slaughter ended before its eventual goal was realized. Evil won a few victories but was thrown back in many others. Evil did not triumph. God did not remain silent. He spoke in the defiant voice of a man who looked into the face of death and said “Nuts” and in the ringing declaration to the Devil’s Own Hitler that “You do your worst – and we will do our best.” (emphasis mine)

Though a terrible crime was committed, we know that God was far from silent. He just didn’t speak in the voice of the Old Testament. But who expects him to except perhaps the naive or callously skeptical among us?

From the non-Council submissions, Maxed Out Mama won for her essay, “Guest Workers” Are Destroying Us:

…things have reached a tipping point. Many of the people coming here aren’t coming here to live. They wouldn’t bring their families here even if they could, because they don’t earn enough to support them here. They are coming here just to work, and they send the bulk of their wages back home to support their families. They could not support their families on their wages if their families lived here. That’s the problem.

That is why Chief No-Nag, who is an immigrant from Central America, who began life as a Indian peasant, whose village experienced a massacre during WWII, who carried a 50-lb bag of rotten corn on his back 50 miles when he was sixteen in order to save his family in a famine, who got schooling in Central America and rose into the upper middle-class in Central America, who left that and came to this country legally for a life in a just society, who became a naturalized citizen, who went to college here, became a scientist, and holds patents – that’s why Chief No-Nag describes the Senate bill as “sickening”, “an attempt to generate slave-labor”, “insane” and “unjust” and “unconstitutional”. It isn’t unconstitutional, of course, but “unconstitutional” is pretty much the most pejorative term of which he can perceive. To him “unconstitutional” means a violation of the basic rules of American society – a violation of those rules which have created American society.

[…]

He looked up the numbers of Democrats and Republicans who voted for the Senate bill, and he told me with some relish that the support was majority Democrat. He pointed out that it proved what he has been saying about Democrats – that they are elitists, that they are trying to create a plantation stocked with serfs, that they want a servant class. He says their education policies are aimed at creating a helpless class of people to be captive voters.

Here’s what Chief No-Nag knows. The fact is that if an American construction worker is competing to support his family with a construction worker with a family in Mexico, the American will never be able to support his family. Because of massive numbers of unskilled immigrants who aren’t bringing their families to live here, millions of American families are sliding out of the lower middle class. That’s the problem!

Those who support throwing open the doors to basically unskilled immigrants (guest workers) are destroying all fairness in our society. They are foolish beyond belief, and if they succeed they will turn the US into a stratified society with a caste and class system that is utterly antithetical to our culture.

A scary scenario, but I think she’s right.

Everything is over at the Watcher’s post, here.

Say what you will about American politics, we have nothing and no one in our American Congress approaching the level of scumminity that is the soul and substance of Britain’s George Galloway.

Leaving aside his hideous hijinks on stage, his affection for Saddam, his blubbery kisses toward Cuba’s Castro and Syria’s Assad, the fact that he was up to his gluteus maximus in the oil-for-food corruption – shoveling all that muck to one side, let us consider his latest treachery.

Slate has an essay by Christopher Hitchens on Galloway’s newest moral outrage. In an interview with Gentleman’s Quarterly, the toad who is genetically incapable of gentlemanly behavior has suggested a final solution for his country’s Prime Minister:

Asked by GQ if he would justify the suicide-murder of Tony Blair (with the tender GQ proviso that only the prime minister would be killed in this putative assassination) Galloway responded as follows:

Yes it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it, but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable. And morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of people in Iraq as Blair did.

Why is this moral cretin still able to gain access to any medium of communication? He makes Michael Moore look circumspect and the good Lord knows Mr. Moore will never, ever be elected to public office in this country. Galloway makes Howard Dean look sane, even boring in comparison. As Christopher Hitchens explains Galloway’s existence in the public sphere, it goes like this:

Galloway is a member of Parliament by the grace of an electorate in the East End of London but is widely regarded as a corrupt scumbag, an egomaniac, an apologist for tyranny, and a supporter of jihad. How would he phrase his complaint if someone were now to propose overruling his voters and offing him as the insult to humanity that he has become? I think I can hear the squeals of self-pity already.

Next time you see a sleazy Washington politico making fatuous statements, remind yourself: at least we don’t have the likes of George Galloway to degrade our public discourse.

It could be worse, much worse.

And while we’re at it, let’s hear a round of pity for the poor Brits who have to endure him. If any of them are reading this post, could they explain the thinking of the voters in his district?

Hat tip: Norm Geras (btw, Norm’s wife, Adèle, has a new book out, Made In Heaven. It’s her 91st book, for heaven’s sake. Conscience to Dymphna: think of that next time you’re whining about being behind in your posting, Dymphna dear.)

Reader L.A. writes us with the following observations about the Prince of Caracas:

One item that no one mentions, and I don’t know why, is that U.S. refineries are the only ones that are capable of handling the heavy sour crude this nutcase exports.

If the St. Croix and Martinique refineries refused to process the crude he could send it to Europe for processing, at 1/10th the capacity.

I spent 25 years in the gas processing industry and never could figure why Venezuela never built their own processing equipment for their type of crude. Amazing.

And commenter Fluffy reminded us of the following, which was reported early last month in Rigzone (among other places):

A Sudden Plunge In Production?

Is Venezuela’s oil production rapidly waning? One source reports that the world’s fifth largest oil producer is showing signs of a rapid decrease in production, one of the key tenets of the peak oil theory.

Venezuela is buying oil from Russia in order to avoid defaulting on deliveries to clients. The situation raises serious questions about the country’s oil production and the future of PDVSA as a major oil producer, and increases the risk to the U.S. oil supply should the country’s oil production suddenly plummet.

According to the Financial Times: “Venezuela, the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter, has struck a $2bn deal to buy about 100,000 barrels a day of crude oil from Russia until the end of the year. Venezuela has been forced to turn to an outside source to avoid defaulting on contracts with “clients” and “third parties” as it faces a shortfall in production, according to a person familiar with the deal. Venezuela could incur penalties if it fails to meet its supply contracts.”

This is further evidence that the magnificent Venezuelan edifice built by Hugo Chávez is an oil-based Potemkin village.

If the price of oil falls significantly, expect Chávez’ mischief to become even more malicious. There is nothing more dangerous than a dictator with a rapidly emptying piggy bank.