Below is another guest essay sent to us by Dimitri K., our Russian correspondent. It’s gratifying to be able to present an account of Russian history from an entirely Russian perspective.

Mr. K.’s opinions about the USSR are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Gates of Vienna. I invite readers to treat our guest courteously in the comments — if you want to take issue with what he has to say, I’m certain that he would welcome friendly and constructive criticism.

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The Collapse of the USSR
A Figurative Account
by Dimitri K.

There are several different explanations for the sudden collapse of what used to be one of two superpowers of the 20th century. Economists blame the weakness of the Soviet economy. Americans believe it is due to the Afghan war and Ronald Reagan, who called the USSR the “Evil Empire”. Russians blame Mikhail Gorbachev. All those reasons are true to some extent; however, none of them can explain why the country, not too poor and seemingly stable, broke apart so fast. Many countries have experienced worse problems in their history and yet did not collapse. Russians were neither ruthless conquerors nor cruel occupants. Some republics of the USSR had once joined Russia voluntarily for political reasons, other were re-captured by Russians from other empires. Many of those republics were themselves multi-national entities and experienced problems with their own minorities. However, almost nobody doubts the right of those republics to be independent countries, whereas almost everybody claims that USSR was an artificial entity.

Differences in lifestyles were also not the reason for the collapse. Actually, from Ukraine to the Far East, from Lithuania to Georgia, the majority of the population lived a similar life style, understood a common language and did not feel much hatred towards each other. The Soviet Union rather subsidized its European republics than exploited them. Colleges in large cities had reserved vacancies for minorities. I asked my wife, and she argued that the Soviet people existed, because we all had friends of differing national origins and we never had any problems communicating with one another.

And suddenly it all collapsed. The author offers his own explanation, which is figurative but non-contradictory.

Suppose that the Soviet people really existed. Every people must have its forefather, a symbolic figure from whom the people originates. In Russian it is especially clear, because the Russian equivalents for “forefather”, “family”, “people” and “motherland” all have the same root. The forefather of the Jews was Abraham; other nations probably have similar real or mythical persons in their history. The forefather of the Soviet people was Lenin. It was never stated openly, but it was implied. Children learned poems about the kind and wise “grandfather Lenin”. From songs we knew that we all were the children of the Revolution, and that the Revolution was created (given birth to) by Lenin. Of this point there should be no doubt.

However, there was something unique about the founder of the Soviet people. In 1917 power in Russia was usurped by the radical fraction of the Social-Democrats who called themselves “Bolsheviks”. Almost all leaders of the party, those who had led the Revolution, were later officially called “the enemies of the people”. Their leader, Lenin, was announced to be “eternally alive”. The body that was “eternally alive” lay in the coffin, supposedly imperishable. Who is he, the leader of “the enemies of the people”, lying in the coffin, not dead and not alive? By this description, it can only be a vampire.
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There are other indications that the Bolsheviks were associated with the revived dead. They called themselves “Red”, and explained that it was because of blood (though did not specify whose blood). The Russian verb that Bolsheviks used for “rebel” is the same as one used for dead coming to life (vosstal). The metaphor of sucking blood was widely used by Bolsheviks — according to them, capitalists used to suck workers’ blood, but the Revolution was supposed to reverse all the injustice done before. Lenin died from a stroke, but a Communist legend said that he was shot by a special kind of bullet. Red fighters struck enemies with sabers, for which they used a synonym suspiciously similar to Russian equivalent of “fangs” (klinki-kliki). That was different from the Russian military tradition of praising the “fine fellow bayonet”; clearly, “fine fellow bayonet” is rather a property of living men, whereas vampires have fangs.

And the final logical conclusion in this theory — a vampire cannot be a forefather, because he cannot be a father. Thus, the Soviet people, supposedly originating from a vampire, could not exist. And the State established by a vampire can be nothing but the “Evil Empire”. It collapsed immediately as soon as collapse became possible, and its inhabitants rushed to leave the empire for less comfortable but more humane national states. Nobody wants to be a descendant of a vampire. The Great Experiment on producing an artificial nation with an eternally but incompletely alive forefather ended in failure. And may it be a lesson for those who want to build a nation: never choose a vampire to be your founding father.

Last July, Padua, in the northern part of Italy, built a wall around an immigrant estate with a high crime rate. The wall is about 270 feet long and about 10 feet high, and constructed of metal.

This was done by a leftist, multiculturally orthodox town government following riots in the area. In addition to building the wall, the authorities have “relocated” all the illegal immigrants they could find.

Now there is a new initiative, aimed toward restoring peace and attempting to integrate a large variety of ethnic groups into the local population. The new fix will send out 18 immigrants to patrol trouble spots and do “cultural” mediation.

The one-year-long experimental project is innovative in Italy and its objective is to boost the integration of immigrants and improve relations between foreigners and local citizens, said Maria Luisa Ferretti, a deputy city police chief.

“The ‘cultural mediators’ will help immigrants relate in a positive way with local police forces and help their lives along with that of locals,” Ferretti told Adnkronos International (AKI). The 18 will wear a special uniform when they patrol the city, which they will do on a daily basis.

“The main thing is that they talk to people, help them out of difficult situations,” Feretti said.

Once you look at the relative numbers of Italians to immigrants, you know where this “experiment” is headed. Padua has a native population of about 250,000 people. The immigrants number 70,000; they consist of French and English speaking Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Tamil, and Hindi speakers along with some central Europeans. They also reproduce at a rapid rate: a third of all newborns are of foreign born parents.

The report says that much of the conflict comes from the disputes among native Italian and Muslim gangs, fighting a turf war over drugs. If this is the case, then the city ought to take out insurance on this brave patrol of 18 people. Drug dealers responding to “cultural mediation”???

This scheme is doomed. A Moroccan volunteer member claimed:

“Moving towards a multi-cultural society means just this: recognizing the rights of people to maintain their identity while respecting the rules of the country they live in,” she said.
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I’d offer to do a follow up in a year to let you know how this turns out, but my intuition tells me this is another pie-in-the-sky utopian fix-it job. The wall? Good idea. Removing the illegals? Bound to improve the situation. But 18 people to patrol a polyglot of 70,000 non-native, multi-ethnic people? Dream on.

This “experiment” will fall down the memory hole before the year is gone.

Canada, lacking a heritage of slavery, is not afflicted with institutional racism. That’s what Canadians have always believed, and that’s what has put them on the moral high ground vis-à-vis their southern neighbor.

Until very recently, since Canada had almost no ethnic minorities other than Native Canadians, this was an easy position to maintain. No ethnics, no racism, no problem!

However, for the last few decades, Canada’s new multicultural immigration policies have allowed it to acquire its fair share of fashionable ethnic groups. And now — surprise! — the new immigrants aren’t convinced of Canada’s lack of institutional racism. No matter how many diversity initiatives are launched, regardless of mulitcultural outreach and dialogue, despite the passage of “hate speech” laws that protect the new groups from even the most tenuous of insults, it’s not enough. Canadian minorities are moving resolutely down the path of “No Justice! No Peace!”

The latest skirmish in the ethnic culture wars came about because of a group called New Black Youth Taking Action, which decided to hold a rally in Queen’s Park in Toronto on May 15th.

New BYTA is no ordinary hands-across-the-world multi-culti mushmouth liberal anti-racist organization. These people mean business. Their demands include the “[i]mmediate establishment of K-12 black-focused schools; change in the current K-12 curriculum to establish truth; immediate diversion of the $250 million from Brampton (super) jail; and immediate repeal of Safe Schools Act”.

The Safe Schools Act was passed in an attempt to cut down the rising level of black-on-black violence in Canadian secondary schools. While I was in Toronto this past week there was a shooting at a local high school in which a 15-year-old African Canadian boy was killed. I gaped in disbelief as I watched the story on the local TV news — how could this happen in Canada? Everyone knows that Canada has banned guns!

But somehow, despite the ban, a gun made its way into C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute and killed a black kid. The Toronto police have identified a suspect and are reportedly close to an arrest, but since the police spokesman makes no mention of “racism” when referring to the crime, one has to assume that the prime suspect is also black.

This is exactly the kind of violence which the Safe Schools Act was trying to stop, but BYTA considers such initiatives to be inherently racist, and wants the act repealed.

Make no mistake: when BYTA calls for the “establishment of K-12 black-focused schools”, they mean blacks-only schools. The president of the group is Nkem Anizor, and she is a member of the Nation of Islam, whose separatist views are well known. If a white group called for separate schools for whites and blacks, he would immediately run afoul of Canada’s hate speech laws. But, as usual, the favored victim groups are exempt from such rules.

It was only natural that BYTA, in solidarity with its comrades to the south, decided to invite NOI leader Malik Zulu Shabazz to be their main speaker at the May 15 rally. That’s when the trouble started.

Mr. Shabazz, like many other Nation of Islam leaders, has a well-documented history of uttering inflammatory anti-Semitic remarks. According to the Anti-Defamation League:

During a protest in front of the B’nai B’rith building in Washington, D.C. (April 20, 2002), Shabazz led chants of:

“death to Israel,” “the white man is the devil,” and “Jihad.” Shabazz also said, “Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!”

Despite Mr. Shabazz’ impeccable credentials as a certified victim of American racism, this was to big a pill for even Canada to swallow. Canadian B’nai B’rith protested his visit, and the authorities discovered a previous misdemeanor arrest in Mr. Shabazz’ history, allowing them to bar him from the country on a technicality.

The rally went on without its celebrity star, but Ms. Anizor gained a huge new weapon with which to bludgeon the charge of “racism” into Canada’s obsequious élite opinion makers. Black voices in Canada were being silenced, and the sinister machinations of the Zionist lobby were to blame! According to The National Post:

Black youth activists in Toronto are blaming the “Jewish lobby” for the decision yesterday morning by border guards to deny entry into Canada to Malik Zulu Shabazz, a controversial black American lawyer and activist, who had been scheduled to address an afternoon protest rally at the Ontario legislature.

Nkem Anizor, president of the New Black Youth Taking Action, an activist network formed after a spree of gun violence in Toronto in 2005, told a morning news conference that she wanted to draw attention to the unfairness of the provincial Safe Schools Act toward black youth and the potential benefits of black-focused schools, and to denounce the construction of a superjail for youth in Brampton.

Instead, both her news conference and afternoon rally were sullied by vague accusations of Jewish meddling.

“The black community has no political maturity in Toronto, and our first weak little attempt to have a rally is being lambasted and blown apart because one group does not like who we chose,” said Ms. Anizor, 26, a human biology grad from the University of Toronto who now works full time as an activist.

[…]

“What’s to blame is the power of the Jewish lobby to influence politicians, to influence media, to influence whatever it took. Because it took one letter, one press release from B’nai Brith [a Jewish human rights group], and the firestorm began,” she said. “You guys [media] are all here because of what B’nai Brith told you…. They’ve injected themselves, trying to dictate who the black community can and cannot hear.”

BYTA is demanding that the Brampton superjail be closed because too many blacks are being imprisoned. It’s racist to prevent black-on-black crime; it’s racist to convict and imprison black criminals — so what options are left? You guessed it! A Jesse Jackson rhyme-time special: “Education not Incarceration”:
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Four key demands will include: the repealing of the Ontario Safe Schools Act; halting the construction of the $250 million dollar Greater Toronto Youth Centre (“Brampton Superjail”); funding to establish K-12 Black-focused schools throughout the GTA; and specific changes to the K-12 curriculum to include key contributions of Black people to the development of Western and world civilization.

And what does “truth” in the K-12 curriculum mean? The details about African contributions to Western Civilization can be found in this account from The Toronto Star:

But isn’t it divisive to be teaching black kids one thing and others something else, one reporter asked, maybe mischievously, as Anizor had said she wants the entire curriculum overhauled to reflect black achievement and history.

“Don’t think for a second that black people did not give education to the world. We civilized the entire planet,” she said, from the Greeks to the Romans, thanks to the Egyptian civilization that predates Europe. “So if anybody knows how to teach it’s us.”

Every advance in the history of the world is a result of black people?

“Absolutely. Yeah. We were here first. Doesn’t mean you haven’t used technology and developed yourself. Want to challenge me, go head, knock yourself out. But if you were confident of the truth you would not have deleted it from the history books,” she said.

Instead, the image that’s propagated is the doctrine of white supremacy: “We did it all. We got you all in the jungle. Thank God, play ball and dance.”

Sounds like a conspiracy, one reporter said.

“Right. Right, Right. When one group is in control, and the other is not, they can write the story. His-story. Not ours. Is that so strange? What, we don’t have any history of this? Groups subjecting another group and rewriting the history to suit their purposes; or taking scripture to suit what they want to do?

This is an example of a perfect closed logical system: an assertion accompanied by rules which make it impossible to falsify. Any attempt to falsify it is prima facie evidence of a racist conspiracy, and is thereby rejected. We have no choice: we simply must accept it.

If this kind of balderdash were uttered by Anglo-Canadians, or French-Canadians, or Polish-Canadians, or Italian-Canadians, it would be considered racism of the most egregious type, and punished accordingly. The perpetrators would wind up paying fines, doing community service, and maybe spending time in the Brampton superjail (assuming that it hadn’t already been demolished).

But blacks and other protected groups are exempt from these rules. They can’t be racists. It’s impossible for a victim of a historically oppressed minority to practice racism.

I’m giving Dymphna a special guest-slot here to describe her personal experience with this peculiar Orwellian institution:

Before they kicked honkies out, I used to be a member of the NAACP. “Welcome aboard,” they said.

Years later, they slung me off the poop deck.

Back when I worked at a battered women’s shelter, I found a flyer announcing a workshop on racism. It was going to be held on a weekend, starting on Friday night, at the black Baptist church on Fifth Street in Charlottesville. I remember asking the director of the women’s shelter to pay whatever fees were involved. We both figured that if I picked up some good information it might be helpful in resolving conflicts in the residents’ quarters upstairs.

I think of it now as my first “Dip into Delusion.”

When I arrived, there were about thirty people. I was late (as usual, some crisis or other at the shelter). Everyone was seated; I looked around and noticed I was one of two white people. The other one had a beard and wore sandals… not a good sign, I thought. This is going to be preaching to the choir, plus two whiteys.

The speakers — two men — were from New Orleans. They did the usual boilerplate about the history of racism in America. Then the leader of the two proclaimed something startling. He said that only white people could be racists. Black people, because of their place in our culture as a persecuted minority, were not capable of being racists.

I was struck dumb, at least momentarily. I thought of all the names I’d been called by angry black residents, and those were definitely racist slurs they were slinging. When white residents were angry, they didn’t refer to my race but to my ancestry, usually something involving my mother’s morals.

As they went on in this vein, I had to raise my hand. “Excuse me, but I have experienced racist behavior from black people. I’ve been called all the variations of honky names, excluded from conversations because I’m white, told that I couldn’t understand some finer point of suffering because of my skin color. To me that’s racism.”

Hostile silence from the two leaders. Then one said, “No, you’re wrong. That’s not racism, that’s just the result of hundreds of years of oppression. As I said, black people can’t be racist. Only whites can.”

I listened to their claptrap for a little while longer and realized that I was experiencing some severe cognitive dissonance here. I also realized very quickly that these two had nothing to teach me.

Now I wish I’d had some cogent Larry Elder quotes to use in response to their obvious insanity.

But I didn’t know about Larry Elder then, and even though we were sitting in a church, I couldn’t think of one verse of scripture to quote that they would be able to hear. Obviously 1 Corinthians 13 wouldn’t cut it with these guys. So I simply got out of my chair, waved goodbye, and drove home.

As I was coming off the bridge across the James River, I was pulled over for speeding. It was late by then, so the police officer no doubt thought I was a Friday night drinker. She told me I’d been doing 36 in a 25 mph zone. My mind was still back in that church, stuck on those haters and their bilious beliefs. Sometimes when I’m mad I drive too fast.

I apologized for being careless and said I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was. She asked me if I’d been at work and I told her I had been. “Well, pay more attention next time,” she said. And then she waved me on. No ticket.

That night has stayed fresh in my mind. I figured those two dudes from out of town, city guys just pissing poison, were simply the advance troops for a lot more just like them.

As it turned out, I was right.

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So where does this end?

There’s no denying a history of white racism. There’s also no denying a history of black racism, Chinese racism, Arab racism, etc., etc. Heck, there are probably even Hottentot racists — Those stupid Bantus! How many Bantus does it take to put in a light bulb? How do you tell the bride at a Bantu wedding?

But where does it end? When the last white racist either dies or repents of his evil ways, will all the black non-racist anti-Caucasians change their tune?

When current demographic trends play out, and whites become a persecuted minority in a country, will the black people in the same country automatically become racists? Will their white victims automatically have the “racist” stigma removed from their collective character?

What does it profit the black grievance industry to peddle this kind of nonsense? Does their vitriol persuade even a single white person to change his beliefs, and accept blacks as equals? Or — more likely — do their angry accusations generate “racist” feelings where none existed previously?

The ugly fact is that racial grievance-mongers do not serve their own ethnic group well, nor do they reduce anybody’s “racist” sentiments.

As Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have amply demonstrated, race-baiting is simply a ticket to a lucrative career. It’s the shakedown to end all shakedowns.

Hat tip: flyboy.

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

Note: This is an update to Fjordman’s post from yesterday, “Sharia-Supporters and Transvestites of the World Unite!”

One of the bloggers who read this essay stated that “Stuff like this makes me think the f***ing Jihadis ought to just destroy our culture.” OK, but what if that was the intention? I know there is some debate about just how influential radical Leftism and cultural Marxism are in weakening the West. Many observers believe this weakness is mainly caused by a general Western loss of self-confidence, an idea — widely shared even by many so-called right-wingers — that non-discrimination in all walks of life is not just the highest, but the only virtue, and finally, Western guilt for slavery, colonialism, global warming, declining numbers of rhinos — well, just about anything, really. And I sometimes agree with that.

However, when looking at examples such as this, we really have to ask whether cultural Marxism is the prime mover behind this after all. I have seen Socialists in several countries show great respect for Muslims and their culture, on occasion even praising them for their “family values” (What would those be? Honor killings?). Yet these are the very same Socialists who have spent generations systematically dismantling the nuclear family and the traditional culture in their own countries, and smashing their Judeo-Christian religious base in particular. After spending decades destroying our values, they now proceed to import alien cultures to “restore” what they have themselves destroyed. This trend is so powerful that we have to ask whether this is an intentional policy.

British or French commentators tend to talk about a “post-colonial guilt complex” when describing what’s wrong with their countries. Here is a quote by French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, taken from an interview in the Danish newspaper Politiken:

Those Frenchmen who hate France say they hate the criminal French past, and they don’t think we should remain a nation in this modern, democratic world. They want to dissolve the nation state. They do not hate themselves, but are very proud of hating the past, because they feel strongly superior to their ancestors. They are not biased or prejudiced, they are willing to relinquish their roots in favor of universal values. I have never cared for the idea of self-loathing. I see far more arrogance and self-glorification in their intense criticism than self-loathing.

I disagree with Finkielkraut here. They do not necessarily hate themselves, personally, but they do hate their own culture and history, and want to cooperate with Islam in destroying the West, the most inventive culture in history. Finkielkraut again:

Radical democracy is the idea that everything has to be “democratic,” that all differences and any form of hierarchy or separation is undemocratic. For instance, they don’t think we should make a difference between citizens and outsiders. To a radical democrat, there is no such thing as an “outsider.” That’s why they are fighting for a regulation of the laws to ensure free access for all immigrants. All immigrants are welcome. If you say that it’s not possible to let everybody in, you get branded a racist. The radical democrats are a small group, but they wield a lot of influence because they can intimidate people. They function as a radical superego all over Europe, and in my country in particular.

Again, this cannot be entirely explained by past colonial history. Sweden (as well as Norway) doesn’t have a colonial history, yet still shares many of these problems. What does Sweden have? Well, an abundance of Socialism and radical Feminism.
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Artists Thyra Hilden and Pio Diaz projected video images of flames onto 1,000 square-metre glass screens in a museum in the central Danish town of Aarhus. The “art” exhibition was called “City on Fire – Burning the roots of Western culture.” The artists assured us that “It is not actual fire that destroys actual buildings – but the idea of fire that destroys the historical and ideological roots of Western culture.” Part of their vision was “to create an aesthetic image of the deconstruction of the cultural roots of the Western world,” because as they said, Western culture was “very aggressive,” while Islamic culture has been far less so. What these “artists” don’t seem to understand, or maybe don’t care about, is that while they may “only” burn Western culture figuratively, the Muslims they are cooperating with may well burn thousands of years of Western cultural achievements quite literally, judging from past historical records elsewhere..

Some Western Socialists just can’t wait that long. Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen, a Marxist with a history of hostility towards Christianity, caused a stir by burning pages from the Bible in public. This happened only a few weeks after a Muslim mob set the Norwegian embassy in Syria ablaze because of the Muhammad cartoons. Mr. Jespersen was challenged by some Christians to burn pages of the Koran as well, but he declined to do so. He is also known for having burnt an American flag on national TV. A British schoolgirl has been barred from wearing a crucifix necklace in class in Gillingham, England, on the grounds that it breached health and safety rules. Muslim pupils, however, could wear religious symbols. Why this hatred for Christianity (and Judaism) specifically? Well, if you want to destroy the West, starting with its Judeo-Christian foundations might be a good idea. Since God, according to the Bible, created the world in successive steps, the anti-Western Multiculturalists can presumably uncreate Western man in several steps by attacking his culture, his memory, his self-confidence and above all, his religion: A Multicultural Anti-Genesis:

The Multiculturalist uncreated mankind in his own image: Confused, self-loathing individuals with no concept of right or wrong. And he didn’t create them male of female. He said that they were identical, and that claiming otherwise was sexist. And the Multiculturalist cursed them and said, “Be barren and decrease in numbers, vanish from the face of the earth, let Mother Nature rule and the fish of the sea and the birds of the air reclaim the world.”

The Multiculturalist then said, “Let here be darkness,” and there was darkness. The Multiculturalist saw that the darkness was good, and he unseparated the darkness from the light. The Multiculturalist called the light “discrimination and bigotry,” and the darkness he called “tolerance.” On the seventh day, the Multiculturalist rested, and he saw that it was good. He had unmade reason, he had unmade logic, he had unmade truth, he had unmade the very reason and desire to exist. And there was evening on the seventh day, but there was no new morning.

Zombie Time had a photo-shop contest using a picture of al-Gore shilling selling his latest tome. People were invited to change the title of the book he’s holding out for display.

There are some very funny entries. Someone used Machiavelli’s The Prince, which gets it exactly right. Daddy raised Prince Albert to be president and failing at that, Mr. Gore can only slide into further extremes.

He is beginning to resemble Michael Moore in more ways than one. I fear when the definitive (though probably not authorized) biography is written about this man, it will make for sad reading. Sometimes he reminds me of Coriolanus (Shakespeare’s version, not Plutarch’s), but without the military get-up.

Go here. See if you can come up with a better title.

Hat tip: Ron Ackert

[Ends Here]

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

[This post appears without the usual fine illustrations the Baron includes in Fjordman’s posts. Since he is away, I don’t have access to Command Central — thus no images this time. –D]

I was planning to take a break from writing about Sweden, but I just couldn’t help it. Swedish journalist Kurt Lundgren had a noteworthy story on his blog this week. A friend told him about a magazine published by Lärarförbundet, the Swedish Teachers’ Union, the largest union for teachers and heads of schools in the country. The magazine, aimed at preschool teachers who take care of children between the ages of 0-6 years old, included recommendations to not only promote “gender equality” but also “sexual equality” at this tender age. Mr. Lundgren considers the suggestions that are sent out to kindergarten and preschool staff to be clear-cut sexual abuse of children:

“A three-year-old doesn’t have to learn queer theory, a four-year-old shouldn’t have to be force-fed lectures on gay sex by some sex freak from the Teachers’ Union. Children are supposed to play and discover their roles entirely on their own. Children are defenseless and shouldn’t be exposed to indoctrination, neither regarding sex nor politics.. (…) One wonders whether parents are aware of the abuses against preschool children that that Teachers’ Union’s magazine Pedagogiska magasinet is encouraging.”

In a kindergarten in Stockholm, the parents were encouraged by the preschool teachers – apparently ideological pioneers – to equip their sons with dresses and female first names. There are now weeks in some places when boys HAVE TO wear a dress. Lundgren considers this sexual indoctrination as worse than the political: “The political nonsense is seeking to alter opinions – the sex freaks seek to alter the children’s personality, their mentality and their entire constitution.”

After posting this, Lundgren soon received a threatening email: “I have been in touch with the Teachers’ Union. They are considering reporting you to the police for what you wrote about queer and gay sex as abuse of children.”

Lundgren wrote in reply: “To give sex education to preschool children, to force them to have an opinion on gay sex and queer (lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuality, fetishism, cross over, sex change etc.) I regard as abuse of children. (…) Little children, we are talking about three to six-year-olds here, cannot in the preschool protect themselves from these sexual assaults. Their parents are not there, the children are totally left to themselves. (…) Little children need to be left alone, they are supposed to play without adult supervision.”

Some comments left by his blog readers:

“There won’t be a police report about this. The Socialist Teachers’ Union will probably think twice before doing so. There could be a backlash if the media start writing about queer [theory] directed against children and the parents will open their eyes to what’s going on with their loved ones.”

“My 11-months-old son will never be allowed to go to a kindergarten. I and my cohabitant reserve the right to raise our son into a thinking, rational and independent individual. He will definitely be allowed to wear a Superman costume, play with cars and build wooden houses if he wants to. I will never force him to wear a princess costume against his will. Presumably it won’t be long before parents like us will have our children taken away from us, to be raised in accordance with sound, Socialist doctrines.”

“My 13-year-old son had ‘equality day’ [in school] and had to listen to a transvestite. I have myself never encountered or talked to one during my considerably longer life. Why is this important? Today’s children know nothing about the crimes of Communism, but everything about the sexual orientation of transvestites.”

This last comment is quite literally true. A poll carried out on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag, although 95 percent knew of Auschwitz. “Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the findings,” Ander Hjemdahl, the founder of UOK, told website The Local. In the nationwide poll, 43 percent believed that Communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives. The actual figure is estimated at 100 million. 40 percent believed that Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world. Mr. Hjemdahl states several reasons for this massive ignorance, among them that “a large majority of Swedish journalists are left-wingers, many of them quite far left.”

Meanwhile, Antifascistisk Aktion in Sweden, a group that supposedly fights against “racists,” openly brag about numerous physical attacks against persons with their full name and address published on their website. According to AFA, this is done in order to fight against global capitalism and for a classless society. They subscribe to an ideology that killed one hundred million people during a few generations, and they are the good guys. Those who object to being turned into a minority in their own country through mass immigration are the bad guys.

British historian Roland Huntford wrote a book in the early 1970s about Sweden called The New Totalitarians. Huntford notes how equality between the sexes was aggressively promoted from the late 1960s and early 1970s:

“When sexual equality was promulgated, and it was decided that a woman’s place was not at home but out at work, there was a rapid change in the language. The customary Swedish for housewife is husmor, which is honourable; it was replaced by the neologism hemmafru, literally ‘the-wife-who-stays-at-home’, which is derogatory. Within a few months, the mass media were able to kill the old and substitute the new term. By the end of 1969, it was almost impossible in everyday conversation to mention the state of housewife without appearing to condemn or to sneer. Swedish had been changed under the eyes and ears of the Swedes. Husmor had been discredited; the only way out was to use hemmafru ironically. Connected with this semantic shift, there was a change in feeling. Women who, a year or so before, had been satisfied, and possibly proud, to stay at home, began to feel the pressure to go out to work. The substitution of one word for the other had been accompanied by insistent propaganda in the mass media, so that it was as if a resolute conditioning campaign had been carried out. Very few were able to recognize the indoctrination in the linguistic manipulation; in the real sense of the word, the population had been brain-washed.”

This was closely linked to a campaign for sexual liberation:

“Indeed, the word ‘freedom’ in Swedish has come to mean almost exclusively sexual freedom, product perhaps of an unadmitted realization that it is absent, or unwanted, elsewhere. Through sex instruction at school for the young, and incessant propaganda in the mass media for the older generations, most of Sweden has been taught to believe that freedom has been achieved through sex. Because he is sexually emancipated, the Swede believes that he is a free man, and judges liberty entirely in sexual terms. (…) The Swedish government has taken what it is pleased to call ‘the sexual revolution’ under its wing. Children are impressed at school that sexual emancipation is their birthright, and this is done in such a way as to suggest that the State is offering them their liberty from old-fashioned restrictions.”

By old-fashioned restrictions, read Christianity and Christian morality. Huntford notes that this came together with efforts to downplay or attack Western culture prior to the French Revolution. According to Mr. Olof Palme, who was Swedish Socialist Prime Minister until 1986: “The Renaissance So-called? Western culture? What does it mean to us?”

“The State,” in the words of Ingvar Carlsson, then Minister of Education, “is concerned with morality from a desire to change society.” Mr. Carlsson, who was Swedish Prime Minister as late as 1996, has also stated that “School is the spearhead of Socialism” and that it “teaches people to respect the consensus, and not to sabotage it.”

“We have no ethical standards in education, and no rules for sexual behaviour,” in the words of Dr Gösta Rodhe, the then head of the department of sexual education in the Directorate of Schools, and thus in some ways the executive officer of government sexual policy. “You see, since there’s a lack of tension in Swedish politics, younger people have got to find release and excitement in sexual tension instead.”

This was in the early 1970s. Things have gotten worse in the two generations since then. Socialists and state authorities present this policy as liberation of women and sexual liberation. What it is actually about is breaking down rival sources of power: The traditional Judeo-Christian culture and the nuclear family. This leaves the state more powerful, since it can regulate all aspects of life and, most importantly, can indoctrinate the nation’s children as it sees fit, without undue parental influence. The state replaces your entire nuclear and extended family, raises your children and cares for your elderly.
– – – – – – – – – –
As writer Per Bylund observes: “A significant difference between my generation and the preceding one is that most of us were not raised by our parents at all. We were raised by the authorities in state daycare centers from the time of infancy; then pushed on to public schools, public high schools, and public universities; and later to employment in the public sector and more education via the powerful labor unions and their educational associations. The state is ever-present and is to many the only means of survival — and its welfare benefits the only possible way to gain independence.”

Socialist pioneer Alva Myrdal is the hero of the modern Swedish preschools. She wanted comprehensive education for special child carers who could provide children with competent guidance all day long. What the social engineers discovered later was that despite decades of state-sponsored gender equality propaganda, boys and girls still behaved differently. This disturbed them. Instead of concluding that maybe there are genuine, innate differences between the sexes, which sensible people would do, they decided to indoctrinate children more thoroughly, starting at an even earlier age, to eradicate gender differences.

Toy researcher Anders Nelson at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology has warned that toys have become increasingly gender-segregated over the past fifteen years: “People often explain [their toy purchases] by saying that boys and girls want different things. But in order for children to be able to reflect on [the toys] they receive, adults have to open their eyes to [inherent gender] structures. To children, these [gender] roles are more unquestioned and instinctual.” Mr. Nelson encouraged parents to give more gender neutral Christmas presents. In other words, no Barbie dolls for girls and no cars for boys.

The Swedish Consumers Association reacted angrily to a star-shaped,pink ice-cream because it represented gender-profiling. “Girlie, GB’s new ice pop, is pink and has make-up inside the stick. It says a lot about what GB thinks about girls and how they should be,” the association said in a statement. According to them, Sweden does not need more products that reinforce existing prejudices about sex roles, so they asked the producer to make the product less gender specific.

Again, this has thus absolutely nothing to do with “tolerance or diversity.” It’s done in order to break you down and to mold you into a new human being. Great emphasis is placed on destroying the Christian heritage of the native population. Pupils are taught that they have been liberated from the superstition and oppression of Christian nonsense. However, while Christianity has been ridiculed and demonized for generations, so much that some Swedish Christians complain about persecution, Islam is presented in textbooks as a benevolent and tolerant religion, and Islam is granted a high degree of respect in the public sphere.

A bus driver in the increasingly Muslim-dominated Swedish town of Malmö has been fired from his job following revelations that he stopped a woman from boarding his bus because she was wearing full Islamic face-covering, which made her hard to identify. In Sweden, it is thus unacceptable if girls are presented with pink ice-creams or Barbie dolls because this reinforces gender stereotypes, but the burka is just fine. Meanwhile, Sweden is in the midst of the most explosive rape wave in Scandinavian history, largely caused by immigration. While Swedish girls are called “whores” by Muslim immigrants, Swedish boys are told to wear a dress and study queer theory.

Sweden is supposedly the most “gender equal” country in the world. It’s also one of the nations most eagerly (at least officially, all other viewpoints are banned) embracing Multiculturalism. Promoting “sexual equality” alongside a rapidly growing Muslim minority is going to become an increasingly challenging balancing act. Sharia-supporters and transvestites of the world unite!

The Israelis made another sweep through the Gaza Strip on Thursday, arresting thirty-three members of the terrorist organization, Hamas:

…the army described those arrested as “senior members of the Hamas terror organization,” which it said “exploits governmental institutions to encourage and support terrorist activity.” Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, said, “We have information that connects all those arrested to terrorist activity.” Another senior Israeli government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the arrests came “on the heels of concrete and genuine indications that these individuals — all of them — pose a clear and present danger to the lives of Israelis.”

[…]

Israeli government and security officials would not immediately provide any details about the legal status or terms of arrest of those detained on Thursday, other than to say they were “under investigation.” The latest arrests coincided with Israeli air strikes against money-changing offices and businesses in the Gaza Strip, which the army said had been transferring funds to Hamas and other militant organizations. Together, these actions represented a broadening of Israel’s campaign against Hamas since it resumed rocket fire against Israel 10 days ago, ending a six-month Gaza cease-fire.

– – – – – – – – – –

Previously, the Israeli military had focused its attacks on cells launching rockets into Israel, the military headquarters of Hamas and other factions, and buildings that the army said served as weapons storage or production facilities.

The Palestinians continue their same old victim game, as they attack with one hand, and pose as hapless victims with the other:

…the Israeli Air force struck a Hamas Executive Force compound west of Gaza City, and a Hamas post in Deir El-Balah to the south, an army spokeswoman said. Seven Palestinians were injured in the strike near Gaza City, according to Palestinian hospital officials.

Shortly after the strike, Fatma Abu Dakin, who lives close to the Executive Force compound, was at Shifa hospital in Gaza City with her injured daughter and niece. “We were all sitting in the living room and suddenly found ourselves scattered in the street,” she said. “Amnah was crawling down the stairs and Dalal fell unconscious.”

And how many dead Israeli children have been sacrificed by Palestinian suicide bombers, Ms. Dakin? Why don’t you tell your men to cut it out? Or perhaps they could release the people they’ve kidnapped. Here’s a revolutionary idea: a unilateral move to disarm Hamas is a sure-fire road to peace. It’s a shame that peace is the last thing Hamas wants. Peace is not a part of the Ummah plan.

Approximately 200 rockets have been launched at Israel in the past 10 days, many of which have fallen in and around the Israeli border town of Sderot or in surrounding communities. On Thursday, at least five rockets were launched from Gaza, the army spokeswoman said. At least two rockets fell in Israeli territory, causing some damage but no injuries.

Payback is hell.

I’m up here in the Frozen North (a.k.a. Toronto) on business, as Dymphna has mentioned. But I have a brief break and access to a computer, so…

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I’ve been catching up on my reading, and this morning I read an article by Rich Lowry in the print edition of National Review about the Virginia Tech massacre and Seung-Hui Cho. It’s from the May 14th issue, and is available online behind the subscription wall, but I can’t give you the URL from here.

Mr. Lowry says this:

When the [English] department head began to tutor [Cho], she established a secret code word with her assistant to signal when she should call security.

I’ll assume that the English Department at Tech is pretty much the same as English departments at other universities across this great land of ours — i.e., a hotbed of deconstruction, political correctness, multiculturalism, subversion, and general sedition. Yet, in the moment of her crying need, the department’s head apparatchik called on the hated forces of militaristic oppression to rescue her from possibile danger.

I noticed the same thing at William and Mary last weekend. Dymphna and I had to endure various graduation events, several of which involved seniors (some of them English majors) giving speeches that combined lame jokes with overworked rhetoric. These students had the tactlessness to mock old people and tourists — many of their parents were memebers of both these groups — and one ridiculed the various police forces on campus and in the city of Williamsburg.

The young man who spoke so crassly was directing his remarks to the audience at a candlelit gathering of students and their families in the courtyard of the Wren building. All around the periphery were representatives of the despised Williamsburg police, standing with their arms folded, watching carefully and patiently for anyone who might do the assembly harm, whether mujahideen or Cho-wannabes. I’m sure these policemen are used to abuse and reidicule at the hands of W&M students. My cohort directed plenty of the same kind of invective at them back in our student hippie days.

However, as soon as disaster strikes, when the bomb goes off or the deranged loner with automatic weapons arrives on the scene, the first thing these recently-sneering students will do is to dial 911 on their cellphones and summon the pigs to come to their rescue. They know that the traditional forces of law and order will, despite being held in avowed contempt by their young charges, do their duty to the best of their ability to protect them from harm — and then, no doubt, be reviled for not arriving on the scene sooner.

This is a quintessentially adolescent attitude. But the problem is that it has become endemic to the entire elite/academic/political establishment, so that a permanent adolescence has settled into most of our important institutions.

It has caused the members of our protective forces — the military and the police — to despise those they are charged with protecting, to look down on those soft-bodied ingrates whom they have to defend. This situation does not bode well for the future of our constitutional republic — an intelligent, well-educated, and well-armed group of young men regards its civilian overseers with a well-deserved disdain.

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Bob Dylan famously sang, “How many times will the cannonballs fly before they are forever banned?”

The unspoken assumption behind this plea for universal non-violence is that the state or the “international community” possesses some kind of power to enforce such a ban. And if someone — some group, country, or international gang of thugs — refuses to observe such a ban, then what?

Why, then we pick up the phone and call the pigs.

Oh, wait a minute — we’ve “banned” the pigs.

So what do we do now?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

[Nothing follows.]

You know the bloggers’ rules, right? Especially the one about amending and updating mistakes when your readers come crashing down on whatever botch you made? The feedback is instantaneous; for the most part blog readers are sharp. So an update and correction are posted and the world moves on. That doesn’t appear to be the standard operating procedure for The New York Times, whose motto has gradually changed to “All the News We Feel Like Printing.”

Yesterday, Politcal Mavens found this little gem, in a post its author, Robert George, titled “The Times, They Are A Changing…they’re just not telling anybody”:

Sam Tanenhaus’ NYT “Week In Review” essay tries to make a tenuous allegorical link between Jerry Falwell’s death and Paul Wolfowitz’s resignation from the World Bank on the potential falling decline of the American conservative movement.

Linking these two events is surprising, but perhaps Mr. Tanenhaus was overcome by a bit of magical thinking for a moment: imagine two such felicitous events in such a short period. It does boggle the Timesian mind. Mr. George understated the tenuous connection, “It is something of a stretch…” But what bothered him most was this:

However, what immediately undermined the premise for me as I read it in the Sunday paper (dead-tree version) was this sentence:

And after failing to impeach Mr. Clinton, House Republicans, far from retreating into caution or self-doubt, kept up the pressure and turned the 2000 election into a referendum on Mr. Clinton’s character.

Here’s a shot of the piece:

The sentence called the piece into question because of its historical inaccuracy: House Republicans impeached Clinton; the Senate, of course, failed to convict him. Well, lo and behold, this is what we find, when we go to the story on The Times’ website:

And after failing to win a conviction of Mr. Clinton following his impeachment, Republicans, far from retreating into caution or self-doubt, kept up the pressure and turned the 2000 election into a referendum on Mr. Clinton’s character.

Emphasis added.

There is no editorial note anywhere on the page to take note of the change. So, what, The New York Times didn’t think anyone would notice?

Well, the Times or Mr. Tanenhaus must have gotten some flak for their revision of history, because now the online edition carries this correction:

Correction: May 22, 2007

Because of an editing error, an article in the Week in Review section on Sunday about the conservative movement misstated the outcome of impeachment proceedings in 1998 against President Clinton, whose character conservatives made the focus of the 2000 election. The House of Representatives did indeed impeach him. (The Senate did not convict him of the impeachment charges.)

See, it’s not anyone’s “fault” really. Mistakes were made. Revisions of history become “editing errors” when enough people complain. Otherwise, they stand in for the truth for as long as The New York Times can get away with it — which sometimes lasts for decades. The failure to retract Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize? It’s not their fault. It’s the Pulitzer Committee’s failure.

Imagine a world without The New York Times. We could start with this: what would be the perception of the war in Iraq without the dizzy spinning of the tale in those pages?

UPDATE: Be sure to read the thoughtful comment on this post. Some person of unidentified origins left his…opinion. It’s so edifying to read “this sucks” in a comment. It adds so much to the conversation. –D

[originally posted by Christine at Vigilant Freedom.

This is the reply to one of our commenters today who suggested we get used to things or do something about them. If you feel that way, too, join the Center for Vigilant Freedom and offer your services.]

This last weekend, the Commonwealth of Virginia was signed over to the Muslim Brotherhood, care of the Muslim American Society (MAS). Kaine must be hoping for a VP nomination from Obama — after all, if the Democrat Party presidential ticket needs a Southerner, he’d better prove his dhimmitudiness early in the game.

He gave the keynote speech at the local Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation dinner. A real team player, he’s just following Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) game plan from her Syria visit, and Steny Hoyer’s (D-MD) charm offensive with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. With very little effort, his staff could have researched the connections of the MAS to the Muslim Brotherhood and some extreme jihadist doctrine. We have to assume this is a choice, not a mistake. Good to get to know you, governor…

Here’s some background on the Muslim American Society for Virginians. We live in occupied territory in this information war, and it’s about time we began winning some of it back from the occupiers:

A Chicago Tribune (subscription required) article describes the Muslim Brotherhood deciding to operate in the U.S. as the Muslim American Society:

Shaker Elsayed, a top MAS official, says the organization was founded by Brotherhood members but has evolved to include Muslims from various backgrounds and ideologies.

“Ikhwan [Brotherhood] members founded MAS, but MAS went way beyond that point of conception,” he says.

Way beyond indeed. The Brotherhood probably thought they wouldn’t get Virginia for another decade or two, but then they hadn’t planned on this level of help from Kaine.

A Weekly Standard article “MAS’s Muslim Brotherhood Problem,” quotes from MAS curricula. Although MAS has removed the links in that article, the same curricula is still available here at the San Diego MAS website — including as part of the Level I MAS required reading, the Muslim Brotherhood Project document, Milestones by Sayyid Qutb . Visit the link before they hide it again…Here, from the Weekly Standard article — a position that Kaine apparently has adopted as part of the 2008 Virginia Democratic Party platform:

For example, MAS requires all its adjunct members to read Fathi Yakun’s book To Be a Muslim. In that volume, Yakun spells out his expansive agenda: “Until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments, every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.”

And also on that MAS curricula, the writings of Imam Hassan Al-Banna, who teaches the following (and yes, it will be on the final exam for All governors aiming for Democrat Party President/VP primaries, not just early adopters of salafism like Tim Kaine):

Reforming the government so that it may become a truly Islamic government, performing as a servant to the nation in the interest of the people. By Islamic government I mean a government whose officers are Muslims who perform the obligatory duties of Islam, who do not make public their disobedience, and who enforce the rules and teachings of Islam.

There is no problem if the Islamic government utilises the services of non Muslims when necessary, so long as they do not offer them positions of leadership. Islam is flexible as to shape and detailed structure of the government, but it must be in agreement with the general principles of the Islamic ruling system.

Or this letter to the Washington Post by the head of MAS, Esam Omeish, praising the Muslim Brotherhood:

The influence of Muslim Brotherhood ideas has been instrumental in defining our understanding of Islam within the American and Western context …..

At least now Kaine can deliver the Red House, Virginia Jamaat ul Fuqra vote in the 2008 election.

Here’s the press release in entirety:
– – – – – – – – – –

In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

Governor of Virginia Gives Keynote Speech at MAS Freedom Foundation Standing for Justice Award Dinner

WASHINGTON, DC — May 21, 2007 (MASNET) Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia gave the keynote address for the 5th Annual Muslim American Society (MAS) Freedom Foundation ‘Standing for Justice Dinner’.

The governor, joined by members of his cabinet, spoke individually with Muslim community leaders during a special leadership reception. The reception was followed by the Freedom Foundation Award Dinner.

In an occasion marking the first public speech to a Muslim gathering by a Virginia governor, he acknowledged the civic work and civil rights accomplishments of the Freedom Foundation, and stressed the need for people of all faith traditions to work together to overcome intolerance and bigotry.

Imam Sheikh Rashid Lamptey of the Muslim Association of Virginia (MAV) gave a powerful inspirational address that stressed civic participation as an essential dimension of the Muslim faith and our contribution to the larger society.

The 2007 MAS Freedom Foundation awards and their recipients included:

Lifetime Achievement Award

• Dr. Maher Hathout, Muslim Public Affairs Council
• ahijah Abdus-Salaam
• Imam Abofazl Nahidian, Manassas Mosque

Sister Sharifa Al Khatib Award

• Maryam Funches (posthumously)

Humanitarian Award

• Asma Hanif, Coordinating Council Muslim Organizations of DC/MD/VA

Human & Civil Rights Award

• Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ
• Dalia Hashad, Amnesty International
• Ibrahim Abdil-Mu’id Ramey

Media Excellence Award

• Afaq Khiyali, Pakistan Post
• Hassanah I. Tauhidi, Inner-Attainment Television, Inc.

Labor & Justice Award

• Joslyn N. Williams, AFL-CIO

Peace & Justice Award

• Dr. Imad Damaj
• Reverend C. Douglas Smith, Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy
• Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center

The evening ended with the presentation of a free Hajj package and entertainment by Preacher Moss of the Allah Made Me Funny comedy tour.

————————————————————-

The Freedom Foundation is the public affairs arm of the Muslim American Society (MAS), a national grassroots religious, social, and educational organization. MAS is America’s largest grassroots Muslim organization with over 50 chapters nationwide. Learn more at www.masnet.org

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MAS Freedom Foundation
1050 17th Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036

I’m sure he must have announced it at some point, but if not, I’ll tell you now: my better half is employed. A real job, doing the same geeky kinds of things he’s always done, but this time he gets to telecommute. Occasionally this involves some travel, and that’s what he’s doing now.

The future Baron did guard duty last night to be sure his dad would be up at 3:00 am to catch his flight. It was tough duty: watching Buffy DVDs until the wee hours isn’t for the faint-hearted.

By Friday the B should be back in this chair, churning out posts in between bouts of java scripting (no, I don’t know what that is and I don’t want to). In the meantime, ‘tis I, limping from coal bin to hearth to keep the home fires burning at Gates. If the light and warmth emanating from here seems a bit dim…well, that’s why.

Meanwhile, a celebration is in order: thanks to everyone for their fervent wishes, prayers, and donations. It worked! The Baron has always wanted a job telecommuting, and now his dream is a reality.

Also, he has a great boss…well, two of them if you count me.

[The Happy Ending Ends Here]

Today’s Washington Times features the editor of Brussels Journal, Paul Belien:

Europe is in the middle of a three-way culture war, between the defenders of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, the proponents of secular hedonism and the forces of Islamic Jihadism. In Western Europe, the fight between Christians and secularists is all but over. The secularists have won. Now, the religious vacuum left by the demise of Christianity is being filled by the Muslims. Since one cannot fight something with nothing, the European secularists are no match for Islam.

Notice Mr. Belien’s emphasis on Western Europe. He points out the difference in Eastern Europe, where Poland has locked horns with the EU on a number of issues:

On April 25, the European Parliament (EP), the EU’s legislature, adopted a resolution condemning “homophobia.” With 325 votes against 124 and 150 abstentions, the EP warned Poland that it will face sanctions if it adopts a law barring the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Churches, too, were reprimanded for “fermenting hatred and violence [against homosexuals].” Poland’s prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, commented on the resolution: “Nobody is limiting gay rights in Poland. However, if we’re talking about not having homosexual propaganda in Polish schools… such propaganda should not be in schools.” Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice retorted: “There is no homophobia in the Catholic Church and it is time that all this [recrimination of Christians in the European Parliament] ended.”

It is not likely to end. The fight against “intolerance” — i.e. adherence to traditional Christian morality — is intensifying. On May 3, the European Court of Human Rights found Polish President Lech Kaczynski guilty of violating human rights because he banned a “gay pride” parade in Warsaw in 2005. Last March, the same court ordered Poland to compensate a woman who was denied an abortion. Last year, Poland was denounced by the Council of Europe because it prohibited the distribution in schools of a leaflet about homosexuality.

– – – – – – – – – –

When Poland joined the EU in May 2004, it did so on [the] condition that “no EU treaties or annexes to those treaties would hamper the Polish government in regulating moral issues or those concerning the protection of human life.” However, in January 2006 the European Parliament called for “tough action” against Poland and the Baltic states, while Franco Frattini, the EU justice commissioner, warned that the EU has powers under Article 13 of the EU Treaty to combat homophobia. The move came after Latvia included an amendment in its constitution that restricts marriage to a man and a woman, and Estonia proposed similar legislation. Some members of the European Parliament have called for punishing Poland and the Baltic states by suspending their voting rights in EU councils.

The EU is tyrannical and duplicitous. Other member states calling for the suspension of Poland’s voting rights in EU councils is a ludicruous threat. What post-modern EU state would ever stand in solidarity with Poland or Latvia to protect its right to preserve its own culture?

The despots rule in Europe. No wonder the sane are fleeing.

The Financial Times reports on Google’s stated goal:

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

Big Brother is now selling for 475.860 USD, up five dollars from yesterday. Maybe the idea of having a personal secretary appeals to some:

Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

This brings the concept of dumbing things down to a new level:

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’“

The race to accumulate the most comprehensive database of individual information has become the new battleground for search engines as it will allow the industry to offer far more personalised advertisements. These are the holy grail for the search industry, as such advertising would command higher rates.

Mr Schmidt told journalists in London: “We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”

This is truly creepy. Somehow, though, I don’t think the leftists who fight governmental collection of information are going to put up a fight. After all, Google’s owners are solidly in the Dhimmi camp.

I don’t go to Google for news much; they seem to leave out what I’m looking for. The American Thinker reported on this a year ago:

Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.

At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small (when measured by the size of its workforce) technology corporation a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs even its current financial prowess.

It’s Not So Easy Being A Conservative E-Zine

As reported by NewsBusters, the most recent occurrence of this unexplained phenomenon was Friday, May 19, when Frank Salvato, proprietor of The New Media Journal, realized that his content that day hadn’t been disseminated at Google News as it had been on a daily basis since he reached an agreement with the search engine in September 2005.

After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of “hate speech” at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.

Unfortunately, this was not the first conservative e-zine to be terminated in such a fashion. On March 29, Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message as Salvato informing him that:

‘Upon recent review, we’ve found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News.’

For those unfamiliar, The Jawa Report focuses a great deal of attention on terrorist issues and how they relate to radical Islam.

Two weeks after Jawa was cut from Google News, Jim Sesi’s MichNews.com was banished on April 12. In Sesi’s case, the three pieces provided as examples of ‘hate speech’ were articles by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr., all about — you guessed it — radical Islam and terrorism.

And since Google acquired You Tube, the bias is even more blatant. Here is the AT essay from October of last year:

As reported by American Thinker on May 22, Internet search king Google eliminated a number of conservative e-zines and blogs from its news crawl earlier this year. In all of the cases cited, the alleged offense was the dissemination of ‘hate speech.’

After closer examination, the tie between all the banished websites was the publishing of articles about radical Islam and its relation to international terrorism. Yet, sites that actually were more specifically involved in such activities — like Hezb’allah’s propaganda arm in Lebanon, al Manar — were unaffected by Google’s ‘hate speech’ policies, and continue to be a part of its news crawl.

– – – – – – – – – –

The Liberal Bias Virus: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You

Now, five months later, the web’s leading video-sharing portal YouTube has been implicated for demonstrating a similar hypocrisy in its business practices. In the past several weeks, some leading conservative websites have had videos pulled and their accounts closed. As Robert Cox of the Washington Examiner reported on October 12,

Enter Fox News pundit, author and top-rated blogger Michelle Malkin. Last week she received notice from YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing service, that her video had been deemed ‘offensive.’ The result? Her account may be terminated and her videos deleted.

YouTube refused to say why her videos were ‘offensive’ and there was no avenue available to challenge the decision. Today, her videos are gone and her voice is suppressed on the most important video ‘node’ on the Internet.

What was the content of the offending video? You guessed it —radical Islam. As Michelle Malkin posted at her website on October 4,

Back in February, you may remember, I cobbled together a little mini-movie called “First, They Came,” inspired by the Mohammed Cartoon riots. It’s a simple slideshow highlighting the victims of Islamic violence over the years.

Yet, much like the seeming double-standard employed by Google, the folks at YouTube are only offended by those speaking out against radical Islamic terrorism, not those supporting it. As reported by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on September 13,

The wildly popular video-sharing Web site YouTube.com has dozens of videos purporting to show individual American soldiers being killed in Iraq, in what amounts to snuff films, overlaid with music and insurgent slogans.

Some of the videos, including ones of American soldiers purportedly being picked off by snipers or being blown up by improvised explosive devices, have been viewed tens of thousands of times each in the past few months. Some are posted in YouTube’s “news and blogs” category, but others are listed under “entertainment” and even “comedy.”

However, YouTube doesn’t seem to be exclusively disturbed by anti-terrorist messages. NewsBusters reported on October 10 that a video posted by conservative film producer David Zucker poking fun at what the Clinton administration did to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons in the ‘90s was censored by the web-video portal.

Democratic YouTube viewers used the site’s software to “flag” the video as “inappropriate,” a designation usually reserved for extremely violent or sexually explicit video clips. There is nothing even remotely sexual or violent in the clip. The closest thing to an explicit image in the ad is a scene in which Albright bends over and her skirt tears a bit in the seat, hardly the stuff that sets FCC commissioners’ hearts aflutter.

While you can still view the video if you watch it embedded on another web site, if you try to watch it on YouTube, you’ll be greeted with the message: “This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community. To view this video, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up.”

Hmmm…Google wants to organize my life while eliminating any nasty news about radical Islam those brave terrorists.

And the demonic convergence of Google, Soros, and the Dem MSM is disquieting. I wonder when we’ll get our nastygram regarding our blog content? Probably not until our numbers approach those of Michelle Malkin or Jawa Report.

By the way, the latter has a video clip of Al-Qaeda’s paean to jihad martyr Dadullah:

Al-Qaeda spokesman Ayman al-Zawahiri eulogizes Dadullah as a “hero of jihad in this era and a knight among its knights.”

This video is from Live Leak, which is obviously taking up what Google rejects.

In today’s political climate, the first step in discrediting something is to scare-quote the bejayzus out of it. That’s what the Leftist/Islamist alliance is doing to our “national security” (and presumably to our “freedom”, our “culture”, and “Western Civilization” as well) this weekend in Montréal.

I apologize for the short notice, but the Center for Vigilant Freedom needs volunteer operatives to attend the event and monitor the activities. It’s billed as a “teach-in”, and takes place on Saturday from 1pm to 9pm.

If you’re in Quebec (or can be), please attend the conference and record the proceedings, if possible. Send the recordings as .wav files to CVF at info@vigilantfreedom.com, or post them at your own blogs and send us the links. If you can, take notes and post or send an action report as well, in addition to any possible recordings.

Thanks to a heads-up from Sketchy Thoughts, I have a lot of information in hand about the “Conference on Racism, Islamophobia and ‘National Security’“, sponsored by the Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui:

RACISM, ISLAMOPHOBIA AND “NATIONAL SECURITY”
Teach-in and strategy forum

Saturday, 26 May, 1pm to 9pm
Pavillon J.-A.-Sève, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
320 Ste-Catherine East, Montreal (Berri-UQAM metro)

Spies, media, corporations and politically-constructed public debates … In the name of “national security”, many forces in our society are helping to mobilize underlying racism and Islamophobia against Muslims, Arabs and others. The result is often devastating on people’s lives.

Targetted communities are marginalized and unable to participate fully in political, economic or social life. When extreme measures such as security certificates are used against individuals, communities are often too intimidated, alienated or constrained to respond effectively.

Join us on Saturday, 26 May to take an in-depth look at some of the concrete ways in which the national security agenda is being advanced in Canada. The teach-in will bring together community members, academics, NGOs, legal experts and activists in order to develop effective strategies to resist racial profiling and defend the liberty and dignity of all.

Here are some of the listed workshop topics:
– – – – – – – – – –

• “National security” and targetting of Arab and Muslim communities
• Racism and the debate on “reasonable accommodation”
• Panel Discussion: Countering the instrumentalization of “national security”

And here are some extracts from the facilitators’ bios, via I. N. Daily:

Nazila Bettache is a Montreal-based organizer and member of No One is Illegal-Montreal.

Salam El Menyawi is President of the Muslim Council of Montreal (MCM). He has been an outspoken defender of human rights and against racial profiling for many years…

Helen Hudson is a Montreal activist working in solidarity with Political Prisoners, primarily in the United States, as well as on other social justice issues including immigration and feminist questions. She is also a programmer at CKUT community radio.

Faisal Kutty currently serves as general counsel for the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association (CMCLA) and as vice-chair and legal counsel to the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. His dissertation explores the impact of anti-terror laws and policies on the rule of law. In the course of his legal practice, he has also advised and acted on behalf of dozens of individuals and charities that have been directly impacted and targeted by anti-terrorism laws and policies. He is currently acting as counsel to CAIR-CAN and the CMCLA at the Iacobucci and the Air India Inquiries.

As you can see, Saturday in Montréal will see a full lineup of representatives of the Demonic Convergence, gathering to share their ideas and plans in an effort to oppose the Counterjihad on all fronts. The more light we can shine on their doings, the better off we will be.

So if you manage to get there, please let us know.

And thanks for doing your “duty”.