Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/31/2010

Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/31/2010Armed jihad fighters stormed a church in Baghdad today and took the congregants hostage, demanding the release of Al Qaeda prisoners in exchange. When Iraqi commandos stormed the church, some of the mujahideen detonated suicide bomb belts, and at least seven members of the congregation and seven terrorists were killed. The death toll may have been considerably higher.

In other news, funding public pensions in California currently costs about $3,000 per Californian. The amount, which is already considered high, may rise to $10,000 per resident within four years.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Barry Rubin, Bobbo, DF, Fjordman, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, KGS, Takuan Seiyo, TB, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

A Window of Opportunity

Amsterdam: EDL Van #1


Earlier tonight I posted the photo above — which was screen-capped by VH from a video — of a peace sign flashed through a shattered window of the EDL minivan in Amsterdam yesterday.

EFI logoAs soon as I saw it, I was reminded of the logo for the European Freedom Initiative, the organization that sponsored the free speech demonstration in Amsterdam. The hand in the logo was almost an exact fit for the one in the photo, and only had to be resized and inserted into its new context.

The hybrid image is below:

Amsterdam: EDL Van #2


I don’t have any particular plans for this image, so members of the EDL, the DDL, the LDF, the GDL, BPE, Mission Europa, Politically Incorrect, ICLA, or any other group that participated in yesterday’s demo: please borrow if needed as a suitable logo for a phenomenally successful event.

It reminds me of the Leonard Cohen lyric:

There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

Mark Steyn Joins Elisabeth’s Voice

Vlad Tepes has edited and Youtubed an interview with Mark Steyn from last night at a gala event in Ottawa. The interviewer had the opportunity to ask Mr. Steyn a few questions about the “hate speech” case against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria. Mr. Steyn, as you might expect — given his own ordeal at the hands of the Canadian Human Rights Commission — had a few choice words to say about the Austrian government, and expressed his unreserved support for Elisabeth:



Readers who wish to donate to Elisabeth’s defense fund should visit the Save Free Speech site. The defense fund is not under her control, and disbursements from it will be made solely to pay her legal fees.

Previous posts about the hate speech case against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff:

2009   Dec   5   Fighting a Hate Speech Charge in Austria
        11   Heckling the Counterjihad
        14   Whose Law?
        17   Defaming the Muslims of Pinkafeld
2010   Mar   11   A Mother and an Activist
        20   An Austrian “Hate School”
        22   Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff at the Freedom Defense Initiative
        29   Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and the Wiener Akademikerbund
    Sep   9   “Islam is a Political Ideology Disguised as a Religion”
        16   “Justice Must Not Be Made the Handmaiden of Sharia”
        17   The Truth Does Not Matter
    Oct   11   Interview With Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
        16   Is the Truth Illegal in Austria?
        20   A Court Date for Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
        21   BPE Press Release on Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
        22   Elisabeth’s Voice: An Appeal
        23   Elisabeth’s Voice: A Follow-Up
        24   Raising Our Voices
        25   Elisabeth’s Voice is Growing
        27   Elisabeth’s Voice: More Information
        27   A Bit More Media Attention?
        28   We Are Elisabeth’s Voice
        30   Elisabeth’s Voice in Amsterdam

Dishonouring the Tommies of the Past

Our British correspondent Gaia was in Amsterdam for the free speech rally yesterday. Below is her report, written while on the train on the way home to London.

Amsterdam: EDL Van #1

My Farewell Message to Mayor Eberhard Van der Laan
by Gaia

My thoughts for Mayor Van der Laan as I wend my way back home by train from Amsterdam:

Sir, you should be ashamed of yourself! The disgraceful treatment meted out to our Tommy and his friends, who came in peace to Holland to speak out about the invasion of your country by people hostile to your culture and way of life brings to my mind their forefathers, the other Tommies. In the not so distant past, those Tommies came willingly to help their Dutch brothers liberate your country from the boot of fascism, many of them dying in the process.

You are a disgrace to their memory!

But rest assured, Mayor Van der Laan: this will not be forgotten! Your time is coming to an end. The tides are changing in Europe and its people will no longer tolerate living as second class citizens in their own lands. The day of reckoning for you and your (il)liberal ilk will surely follow.

My view from the window in the autumn sunshine is of a postage stamp-sized little country where every square centimetre is lovingly tended and orderly. It brings to mind the poignant, closing paragraphs of the excellent book While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer, who expresses it so much more eloquently than I:

As we walked around Amsterdam that March weekend, I thought about those Dutchmen emigrating to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Unlike Muslims in Europe, they’d integrate quickly — they’d find work, contribute to society, fit in. They already spoke English. Yet what, years from now, would their children think? Their grandchildren? What, for that matter, would they themselves think when they lay in bed at night, far from home, their minds flooding with images of the small, loving tended land of their birth, with its meticulously laid-out roads and walks and bicycle lanes, its painstakingly preserved old houses, its elaborate, brilliantly designed systems of dikes and canals.

The irony was tragic: having protected themselves with nothing short of genius from the violence of the sea, having instituted a welfare system meant to safeguard every last one of them from so much as a moment’s financial insecurity, and having built up a culture of extraordinary freedom and tolerance that promised each of them a life of absolute dignity and perfect equality, post-war Dutch men and women had raised up their children into tall, strapping, healthy, multilingual young adults — veritable masters of the world for whom (they were confident) life would be safe, pleasant and abundant in its rewards. They seemed to have brought Western civilization to its utmost pinnacle in terms of freedom and the pursuit of happiness, and the road ahead seemed to stretch to the horizon, straight, flat, smooth, and with nary a bump.

And yet they’d turned a blind eye to the very peril that would destroy them.

The Complete Context of Tommy Robinson’s Speech

Below is another version of EDL leader Tommy Robinson’s speech in Amsterdam yesterday. In this footage you can see that it was necessary to interrupt Gandalf’s speech to allow Mr. Robinson to speak before the EDL had to leave the country, on the advice of the Metropolitan Police who accompanied them to Amsterdam.

You can also see the hordes of media drones who crowded Mr. Robinson at every step. The EDL were definitely the media sensation of the day in Amsterdam:



Many thanks to Aeneas for YouTubing this video.

Tommy Robinson on Dutch TV

Here’s a TV news clip from the Netherlands featuring EDL leader Tommy Robinson. It includes a snippet from his speech yesterday, and a brief walking interview I hadn’t seen before. At the end you can get a good look at the damaged bus.

This is a fair treatment of the EDL by the Dutch MSM — it lets Tommy Robinson speak out fairly, in his own words (in English, with Dutch subtitles):



Many thanks to Kitman for YouTubing it.

Hat tip: VH.

The Metropolitan Police: Guardian Angels?

Amsterdam: EDL #5

Paul Weston and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff reported yesterday about what happened to the EDL delegation when it arrived at the train station near Generatorstraat in Amsterdam on its way to the free speech demonstration.

The Dutch police forced the EDL’s rented minivan to travel very slowly through a crowd of “anti-fascist” demonstrators on its way to the venue while the violent Antifas pelted the van with stones and bricks, smashing the windows. The Dutch police told Tommy Robinson and the other passengers that they must proceed the rest of the way on foot — reportedly about 300 yards — while offering them little or no protection from the anarchists who were attacking them.

I spoke on the phone this morning to an EDL source, and can now add a new wrinkle to this story. As Elisabeth mentioned yesterday, members of the Metropolitan Police were present at the demo, and advised the EDL to depart early. My contact has now shed some light on the role played by the British officers in the day’s events.

According to EDL people who were passengers in the minivan, the British police had accompanied the EDL to Amsterdam to offer them what protection they could. When the EDL guys had to abandon their van and run for it, and the Dutch police declined to protect them, the Metropolitan Police beckoned their compatriots over to their own police vehicle and gave them protection while accompanying them the rest of the way to the venue.

Amsterdam: EDL #6


A little while later the British police assessed the situation and determined that it would be very difficult to protect the EDL much longer, given the presence of the violent leftist mob, and the — shall we say — diffident attitude of the Dutch police towards their English visitors. So Tommy Robinson was forced to give an abbreviated version of his speech ahead of schedule, and then the EDL departed.

This report casts the Metropolitan Police in a new light. The London cops, after all, have often been the object of anger and derision on the part of ordinary Britons who oppose the Islamization of their country and are victimized by the police.

But things are not always what they seem, and it appears that the EDL have at least a few friends on the police force — even if those doughty coppers have to travel all the way to Amsterdam to be able to show their true colors.

“We’re Talking About the Theocracy of Islam”

Yesterday we posted the video of the interview with Paul Weston in Amsterdam, even though the sound quality was low and some of the words were barely audible. Last night I painstakingly played and rewound the clip at high volume over and over until I had transcribed as much of the text as possible.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for the subtitled version:



The text of the full transcript is here.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/30/2010

Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/30/2010The packages carried on cargo planes from Yemen heading for the USA definitely contained bombs, according to the latest reports. The explosive material employed was PETN, the same chemical used by the lap bomber last Christmas, but considerably more powerful. At least one of the devices was intended to be triggered by a cell phone detonator.

In other news, German Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to have contradicted her earlier remarks about the failure of Multiculturalism, and is now insisting that affirmative action is needed to bring more immigrants into public jobs in Germany.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, DF, Fjordman, Insubria, JP, SF, TB, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

And Now For Something Completely Different…

…Well, not different at all, actually. It’s more of the same, just moved across the Channel and/or the Atlantic.

As Vlad says, Anjem Choudary is so helpful to our cause that we might as well put him on the payroll. Silver-tongued taqiyya artists like Imam Rauf and Tariq Ramadan soothe us with pretty lies, but Mr. Choudary reliably gives out the straight dope on Islam, every time, without fail. Sharia for him, for me, and for you, by suasion if possible, by murder and terror if necessary.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:



Hat tip: CB3.

Transcript of the Interview with Paul Weston

The interview with Paul Weston posted earlier today was excellent stuff, but the audio was unfortunately not very good, making Paul’s exchanges with the (obviously biased) MSM interviewer difficult to understand.

In order to help publicize what Paul said, I’ve made a transcript of the entire clip. Portions of it, especially some of the interviewer’s “questions”, were impossible to make out, and I marked those sections “inaudible”. In other parts I made educated guesses to fill in the gaps:

Paul Weston interviewed by an unidentified media outlet
Amsterdam, October 30, 2010

0:06   You clearly have an agenda.
0:08   I am telling you that what is wrong
0:10   is inequality of gender, inequality of homophobia,
0:14   I don’t believe homosexuals should be hung from cranes.
0:17   I hope you don’t either.
0:20   I don’t think young girls should have their genitalia mutilated.
0:23   I hope you don’t believe that either.
0:26   “What I see as people [inaudible]
0:28   and I see gatherings of people, Nazi-saluting,
0:31   singing about…”
0:32   Are you seeing at the moment any Nazi salutes?
0:34   “I never said [inaudible] — there are more media here today.
0:38   [inaudible] right-wing extremists.”
0:40   I don’t know… Why do you say ‘right-wing extremists’?
0:43   “[inaudible] traditionally gather —”
0:46   Do you not understand a very simple thing here?
0:49   The [inaudible] is freedom.

0:51   This is nothing to do with ‘right-wing extremism’.
0:53   This is freedom to live as we have always lived in the West.
0:58   “[inaudible] people [inaudible] Muslims in general.
1:00   People then [inaudible] Muslims in general.”
1:03   We’re not talking about ‘Muslims in general’; we’re talking about Islam.
1:06   We’re talking about the theocracy of Islam
1:08   that does not believe in democracy.
1:11   Man-made laws and democracy are not compatible with Islamic law.
1:16   Period.
1:17   We live in liberal democracies.
1:19   You call me a ‘right-wing extremist’:
1:21   I am telling you that I am a classical liberal
1:25   who believes in freedom and democracy,
1:27   and I see that threatened today.
1:30   Which is why we are here now.
1:32   “[inaudible] Thank you very much.”
1:33   Thank you.

Militant Islam is a Worldwide Problem

The biggest media attraction at today’s free speech rally in Amsterdam was Tommy Robinson, the most well-known of the leaders of the English Defence League. Mr. Robinson’s speech was cut short — in fact, his stay in the Netherlands was cut short — due to violent attacks by “anti-fascists”, whose behavior induced the police to ask the EDL delegation to leave early.

Below is the brief address Tommy Robinson gave to the crowd at the waste ground next to Generatorstraat:



As you can tell from the subsequent videos, the MSM lost interest after their favorite “fascist hooligan” from England left the scene. Fortunately, the Counterjihad media operatives on the ground in Amsterdam were able to provide us with a full record of everything that happened.

Many thanks to Politically Incorrect for this video.

A Follow-Up Demo In Rotterdam?

One of my Dutch contacts just skyped me to pass on an unconfirmed rumor that has been flying around Amsterdam this evening.

There is talk that the European Freedom Initiative (EFI) is planning a follow-up to today’s demonstration in Amsterdam. The proposed event will take place in Rotterdam in honor of Pim Fortuyn, on the anniversary of his assassination (which was on May 6, 2002).

My contact remarked that there is an intense rivalry between the football supporters of Rotterdam and those of Amsterdam. As noted earlier today, the “hooligans” of the AFCA/Ajax football club were prominent among the “anti-fascists” who violently attacked the EDL near the Isolatorweg railway station in Amsterdam.

If I understand it correctly, the members of Ajax hate the Rotterdam supporters almost as much as they do the EDL. What all this has to do with the EFI demonstration is not clear, however.

A Day of Shame for Holland

The following report about today’s events in Amsterdam was written by Paul Weston in collaboration with other members of the Counterjihad Collective.

Amsterdam: EDL, smashed windscreen

Earlier today the EDL visited Amsterdam to make the case that freedom of speech and the ongoing loss of our democracy in Europe is not just a right-wing conspiracy, but a concrete reality.

And the reality was vividly shown to be not just concrete, but cast iron.

Amsterdam Mayor Eberhard Van der Laan led the EDL into an ambush.

Whilst defenders of democracy gathered in the appropriately named “Isolatorweg” area of Amsterdam, the EDL boys were en-route in their hired bus.

The rally started at 2pm, but it started without the EDL. Where were they, we wondered?

Finally we were told — they had been set up, ambushed, and betrayed by the Amsterdam Town Hall.

Mounted policemen, water-cannon, dogs, riot shields, a police helicopter and a massive police presence could not apparently stop 100 left-wing Islamic sympathisers from attacking the EDL transport.

Tommy Robinson and his EDL members suddenly appeared, battered, bleeding and shocked.

The police had allowed their bus to be driven — very slowly — through the left-wing protestors.

Every window was smashed, as bricks, bottles and boots were launched against it.

Amsterdam: EDL #3


At which point the police stopped the bus and turned the EDL boys out to run a 300-metre gauntlet of vicious hatred and violence.

And they had to fight their way through, with no police protection, after which things became even worse. The Dutch police, acting on advice from the British police, stated they could not guarantee their protection, and ordered them to leave the area.

So, a freedom of speech rally was curtailed due to left-wing violence, and the EDL were not allowed to practice their democratic right of peaceful protest in the heart of liberal, tolerant Europe.

Betrayal. total and utter betrayal, carried out not by Islam, but by our own politicians.

A sad day, as Tommy Robinson noted. Democracy and Holland were shamed.