The latest attempt to break the Gaza blockade failed when the Finnish-flagged ship Estelle was surrounded by the Israeli navy today and boarded without incident. Israeli sailors took control of the ship and piloted it to Ashdod, where the passengers and crew — progressive activists from Canada, Europe, and Israel — will be dealt with by the Israeli immigration authorities. There were no violent confrontations or injuries.

In other news, activists from the French nationalist group Génération Identitaire entered and occupied the partially completed Great Mosque in Poitiers, the city where the Islamic invaders of France were defeated by Charles Martel in the 8th century. The demonstrators were protesting the Islamization of France, and demanded a referendum on French immigration policies.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Diana West, Fjordman, Génération Identitaire, Hat Tip: Richard Faulknor, Insubria, JD, JH, JP, Kitman, LS, Seneca III, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

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.

The British actor Rowan Atkinson — better known to many of his fans as “Mr. Bean” — gave a much-noted speech a few days ago on behalf of the “Reform Section 5” campaign, which aims to overturn the provisions of British law that allow people to be criminally prosecuted if their words cause insult (or might cause insult) to someone.

Anticipating the need for translated and subtitled versions of the speech, Vlad Tepes has transcribed it, and used the transcript to subtitle Mr. Atkinson’s words in English:

If I’m not mistaken, a German translation is in the works.

Transcript:

If it weren’t for the Mohammed Coefficient, I could just put together a couple of templates for these news stories about arrested or convicted terrorists. Insert the date and the city, add the terror group and the country of origin, and we’re ready to go.

But sometimes they’re named Abdul or Reza or Yusuf, rather than Mohammed or Muhammad or Mahmoud or Mehmet, and that alters the Mohammed Coefficient of the case. This one, however, fits the standard template:

MC: 100%
Date: 10/19/2012
City: Minneapolis
Terror Group: Al-Shabaab
Country of Origin: Somalia

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

Here’s an article on the same topic from The Star-Tribune:

Minneapolis Man Found Guilty of Aiding Somalia Terrorist Group

Minneapolis man convicted of helping Al-Shabab recruit fighters.

A one-time janitor at a Minneapolis mosque was found guilty Thursday of conspiring to help a terrorist group recruit young Minnesota men for a holy war in their native Somalia.

A federal jury in Minneapolis deliberated about 8 1/2 hours before convicting Mahamud Said Omar, 46, in a case that provided the clearest picture to date of a worldwide investigation into the recruiting of at least 20 young men to fight in Somalia with Al-Shabab, a U.S.-designated terror group.

Omar, of Minneapolis, rocked gently in his seat and studied the jurors dispassionately as the verdict was read.

Guilty on count one: conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. Guilty on count two: providing material support to terrorists. Guilty on count three: conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, namely, the Islamist group Al-Shabab. Guilty on count four: providing material support to Al-Shabab.

Each of those charges carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. Omar swallowed hard in advance of the last verdict, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison: guilty of conspiring to kill or maim people.

The reading of the verdict took just five minutes. Omar, dressed in a black sports coat and blue pinstriped shirt, shook it off quickly. As deputies led him from the courtroom, he turned to his family members, smiled broadly and raised both hands over his head, as if declaring victory.

“We’re going to go lick our wounds,” said Jon Hopeman, one of Omar’s three attorneys. He said Omar would appeal.

The government withheld considerable information it had developed under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretaps, “so we’re going to look at that,” Hopeman said.

The importance of the trial was underscored by the presence of the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, B. Todd Jones, and many of his top prosecutors, investigators and other federal employees who wedged hip to shoulder in the gallery.

“Obviously, we’re very pleased about the verdict,” Jones said outside of the U.S. District Court building.

‘Eyes of the world’ on case

For several years, Jones said, many in the Twin Cities have been curious to know about “Operation Rhino,” the government’s investigation into a pipeline of more than 20 men who were recruited to go fight for Al-Shabab in Somalia. He said the “eyes of the world” were focused on the trial, which allowed the government to showcase the vast amount of work done by the FBI and the Minnesota Joint Terrorism Task Force.

“It is absolutely what we were hoping for,” said E.K. Wilson, an FBI supervisory special agent in Minneapolis who was involved in the investigation. “We’re glad that this case was able to play out in the federal court system and we firmly believe it is a very significant milestone in the progress of the overall Operation Rhino.”

“We’re in essence very relieved that all of this information is out there,” Jones said.

The United States values religious freedom, he said, “but there are some lines that you just cannot cross. One of those lines is, you cannot provide material support to a designated terrorist organization like Al-Shabab, and if you choose to do that, there are going to be some serious consequences.”

Omar’s family members declined to comment, referring questions to community activist Omar Jamal. “They were not expecting this,” he said. “They are a little bit shocked.”

Jamal said the trial revealed many things that were not known to the community about Al-Shabab’s recruiting efforts in Minnesota, but he said many questions remain.

“The most important thing is, this is not the end of the game,” Jamal said. “The people responsible for ruining the lives of these kids are still out there … somewhere.”

On that, he and government prosecutors agreed.

“Some folks are still fugitives … and there are still ongoing investigations,” Jones said. “This isn’t the end.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Docherty, the ever-serious lead prosecutor, declined to comment on testimony that came out in the trial about some Minnesota women who sent money to Somalia so the Minnesota men could buy guns. That would get into an ongoing investigation, he said.

Docherty said he hopes the publicity about the trial will help bring an end to the Al-Shabab pipeline.

Ralph Boelter, former head of the Minneapolis FBI office who was involved in the case as it first emerged, said it was a thorough investigation. “The U.S. attorneys did their part, presented their case very effectively. It’s gratifying but it’s not surprising at the same time.”

One mother: ‘I’m happy’

Abayte Ahmed, whose 19-year-old son left to fight with Al-Shabab and was killed in Somalia, said she was pleased by the verdict. “I’m happy,” she said. She praised the FBI for its hard work. She testified for the government about how her son, Jamal Aweys Sheikh Bana, disappeared one morning never to return. Since that day, she has been living in pain, she said. “I’m not feeling well, for years now. I’m not strong. He was my first son. He was a very smart boy. I don’t know this man [who] brainwashed my son.”

Abdirizak Bihi, whose teenage nephew was among the Minneapolis recruits and is believed to have died in Somalia, also praised the verdict. “I feel great,” he said. “I can sleep a full sleep tonight for the first time in four years.”

The trial began Oct. 1 and ended after 10 days of testimony from government witnesses who included three former Al-Shabab recruits and another supporter who pleaded guilty in the case and cooperated with the government in hopes of lighter sentences. Family members of some of the Minnesota recruits also testified, including the sister of the first known American suicide bomber, Shirwa Ahmed, of Minneapolis.

“I don’t think that there is another case in the country you can point to where four cooperating witnesses in a terror investigation have testified,” said W. Anders Folk, the former lead prosecutor in the case who now is a shareholder with Leonard Street and Deinard in Minneapolis.

Prosecutors said Omar made travel arrangements and supplied cash to some of the men who joined Al-Shabab.

“I think the fact that there is now somebody who’s been convicted who’s not just a foot soldier, but who’s also a recruiter and a financier, should indicate that Al-Shabab’s actions in Somalia have clearly impacted folks in the United States,” Folk said.

“They’re looking for foot soldiers. They’re looking for financiers. They’re looking for facilitators. And I think that’s what Mahamoud Said Omar was, a kind of facilitator,” he said. “I think the verdict really reflects that juries are going to hold people accountable for whatever kind of role folks in the United States decide to play on behalf of Al-Shabab.”

The jury of eight women and four men saw two Al-Shabab propaganda videos. One showed some of the Minnesota men at a training camp learning to use AK-47 assault rifles, belt-fed machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The other showed an ambush on Ethiopian troops who had been asked by the Transitional National Government to help stabilize the country after more than two decades of civil war.

But perhaps the most damning evidence in the case came from Omar himself, as reported by an FBI agent who interviewed him in jail in the Netherlands, and in conversations captured in wiretap recordings with some of the Al-Shabab recruits.

‘A ton of information’

Docherty said the most difficult part of the case was distilling down the “amazing amount of hard work” by the FBI and the terrorism task force to something that could be presented to the jury. “There was literally a ton of information,” he said.

Docherty said he and three other prosecutors — William Narus, of the Department of Justice, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Charles Kovats Jr. and LeeAnn Bell — assembled the evidence one piece at a time and then connected the dots.

It clearly worked. Jurors asked during their deliberations Thursday if they could see a chart prosecutors had prepared showing Omar’s phone contacts with four Minnesota men sequenced against their travel records to Somalia. The charts showed that Omar’s contacts spiked after Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis blew himself up in one of five coordinated bombings on Oct. 29, 2008, and continued through the men’s departures over the next several days. Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Davis denied the motion because the chart had not been admitted as evidence, and told the jurors to rely on their memory.

Omar’s defense team did not call any witnesses. They argued that he was a simple, part-time janitor at the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center in Minneapolis when the alleged conspiracy took off in 2007 and got caught up in the case by accident.

Hat tip for the article: RE.

A British reader writes to tell us that anti-jihad activists are very close to stopping a planned mosque in the Cricklewood area of North London. He’s asking for help from fellow Britons who share his interest in stopping the mosque.

Below are guidelines for filing an objection to help change the Council Planning Officer’s mind, so that she is more likely to recommend refusal. Otherwise she will simply grant planning permission. The mosque’s opponents need her recommendation for a refusal, because it will go to the Planning Committee in front of the elected councilors.

This is a typical case of a mosque operating unlawfully for years, by stealth. And then when locals complain to the Council and force the mosque to apply for planning permission, the Council would rather to pass it on the Q.T. Mosque outfits often do this: operate without permission for years and then say they should have permission because they have been there for a long time! And local Councils are too gutless to say “no” unless they receive encouragement from their constituents.

The decision is will be made during the next few days. Our correspondent believes that if enough Londoners —especially north Londoners — file objections, then the opponents of the mosque just might be able to swing it.

Calling all north Londoners!
(Especially north Londoners)

A mosque planning application in Cricklewood will be decided over the next few days. Your action can stop it.

Please email your polite objection to the planning application at: devcon@camden.gov.uk. Please also cc Seonaid.Carr@camden.gov.uk just to be sure.

The site address is: 78 Cricklewood Broadway, London NW2 3EP, and the application reference is “2012/3185/P”.

This is an example of a mosque operating unlawfully for years. And when locals force them to apply for permission, the Council hope to pass it on the quiet.

You need to include your address in the email, or the Council will probably ignore what you say. It will have more impact if that address is not too far from the application.

Name & address:
__________________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________

Dear Camden Council Planning,

Objection to Planning Application ref: 2012/3185/P
Address: 78 Cricklewood Broadway, NW2 3EP

I am emailing to object to the planning application for the mosque at 78 Cricklewood Broadway.

My objections are as follows:

__________________________________
__________________________________

You can include 1 or 2 of the following 3 points in your email. Please don’t just cut and paste, or this will be another excuse for the Council to ignore you. This is a guide for your objection in your own words:

1. Congestion and Parking

The mosque site is in a congested shopping and residential area, surrounded by quiet terraced streets, double yellow lines, white zigzags, residents-only parking, and a private alleyway to the rear. This is on the main A5 thoroughfare out of London leading up to the M1. The proposal provides no parking. The Applicants don’t say how many the mosque will attract, nor the opening hours, nor how many will come by car. Just a few cars will create huge traffic problems on this busy road.

2. Residential disturbance

The proposal will create unacceptable disturbance, so close to flats and houses all around, and above. Especially on the quiet and densely populated streets to the rear. This mosque will have to operate before sunrise and after sunset, and opening times will prove impossible to enforce during festivals, e.g. the weeks of Ramadan. The Applicants could hardly have chosen a less suitable place.

3. Loss of Shops

Cricklewood Broadway is a Neighbourhood Centre under Camden Development Policies. Losing this shop is contrary to Council Policy. Paragraph 10.6 states: “The Council wishes to retain local shops outside centres where possible, including those on small shopping parades.” Policy DP30 “recognises that shopfronts can contribute greatly to the character of centres and their distinctiveness”, and says the Council “will resist the removal of shop windows”. This proposed mosque breaks all these rules. It is unacceptable for the Council to allow Policy to be so openly broken in this way.

There is a history of lack of candour with the Council on this point. They claim to have been “offering services to our community members since 2004”, despite having claimed, in a 2007 planning application, that the property “is used as A1 leased shop and will remain the same”. This was not the case.

Dymphna and I had a trial subscription to STRATFOR for a while back in 2003, right at the beginning of the Iraq war. It seemed like a great site: lots of information, extensive reports, and detailed maps. But they were so wrong — embarrassingly wrong — in their “expert” predictions about what would happen as the war unfolded, that I lost interest, and quit paying attention to STRATFOR.

Vlad Tepes is not so easily deterred. However, STRATFOR’s “reporting” on today’s events in Poitiers got Vlad’s attention:

STRATFOR, not as neutral as they claim.

I have been a subscriber to STRATFOR for a number of years now, and they make quite a fuss about their non-partisan policy and how they are a geopolitical intelligence forecaster with no judgement on events or groups.

You can imagine my disappointment when I read the following SITREP on today’s stunningly peaceful demonstration in France, were 100 people asked for a national referendum on mosque construction and Islamic immigration. Perfectly reasonable requests given the actions of religious Muslims in France, and the effect immigration is having on French culture. In fact, one could argue that immigration as Europe is doing it might contravene the UN definition of genocide via population replacement. Yet STRATFOR elected to go father than the French media even who referred to the protestors as, “Far-Right” and added ‘extremist’ to the description even though they committed no violence, did not incite violence and gave zero indication of any desire for violence but merely for long-overdue democratic process and an enforcement of the French laws of secularism, ‘Laicité’.

The excerpts from the SITREP are in screen shot images. Go over to Vlad Tepes to see the full details about STRATFOR’s blatant toeing of the PC party line concerning the French opponents of Islamization.

Pay particular attention to the contrast between the “extreme right-wing” demonstrators in France and the “Islamist militants” who bomb and mutilate people in Nigeria.

Switzerland’s economy is generally well-insulated from the crisis in the Eurozone that surrounds the Alpine country. The social crisis is another matter entirely, however, and there’s no guarantee that violent unrest outside of Switzerland won’t spread across the border. When mobs of desperate people see their salvation in the milk and honey of Switzerland — what then?

Hermes has translated a couple of pieces on the topic from German-language news sites. First, from Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten:

The Swiss Army is looking ahead to a dramatic escalation of the situation in the EU countries affected by the crisis, one that will impact the security of Switzerland. This is what Schweizer Zeitung Sonntag reported. The basis for this: because of multiple money-saving measures, the armies of the Southern European countries will weaken, and, as a consequence, the modernization of the army in the neighboring countries will be left aside. This will cause a weakening of the armies, and the European states will be easily extorted. The Swiss defense minister Ueli Maurer declared to Schweizer Zeitung Sonntag after a conference that “I do not rule out that in the coming years we will need the army”.

The defense agency VBS has the same opinion as Maurer. The Euro-crisis increases the potential for violence. Massive unemployment and the radicalization of the population are growing threats in Spain, Greece and Italy.

Due to the fact that there are fears in Switzerland about the spreading of unrest into its territory, the army is being equipped: 100,000 soldiers, 5 billion for military spending, and Gripen fight jets are planned for the defense of the Swiss confederation. In order to counter potential unrest, demonstrations and masses of refugees from neighboring countries, the 2000 top (military) officers have already designed the maneuver “Stabilo Due”. This is Military commander André Blattmann’s plan to defend the borders of the four regions with four military police battalions and a total number of 1600 soldiers.

More from Effecten Spiegel:

Switzerland strengthens its borders

[Translator’s note: these are the first lines of an article published in the printed version of the Effecten Spiegel magazine. The online version publishes only these lines.]

Switzerland is predicting bloody unrest in Europe in coming years due to the Euro crisis. Because of fears that it may spread to their own country, and huge floods of refugees may arrive from Southern Europe, the authorities in Bern are arming their military forces and securing the borders in the four regions of the country. “I cannot rule out that in the coming years we will need the army”, Swiss defense minister Ueli Maurer declared to the Swiss press. Simulations for serious scenarios are already being carried out under the operational name “Stabilo Due”.

Effecten Spiegel already warned at the beginning of the crisis two years ago that the “burning Greek garbage containers” are only the beginning of a social conflagration. Nowadays, mass demonstrations and street clashes have become business as usual. In Spain, people have taken to the streets almost daily since May of last year demonstrating against European policies. The reform of the job market, the raising of the VAT, cuts in health care and education, payment cuts and rising unemployment steadily deepen the grim mood in the country. Pictures of looting rioters setting cars and garbage containers on fire and clouds of teargas and furious people arrive on a regular basis from Italy, Portugal and France…

Lofti Naguedh, the leader of a Tunisian political party that staunchly opposes the ruling Salafist party, was beaten to death during a street demonstration involving several different political parties. Some witnesses report that his assailants were members of the ruling party, Ennahdha, and that the police stood by and did nothing until after Mr. Naguedh had been severely beaten.

In other news, the Washington D.C. headquarters of the National Geographic Channel is on high alert after receiving numerous bomb threats from Islamic extremists, who object to NatGeo’s plans to air a movie about the Bin Laden raid early next month.

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

Thanks to Caroline Glick, Diana West, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, JP, Kitman, LS, RE, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

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 few years ago we had fun playing around with EUSSR iconography, as represented by images such as these:

This was all in good fun, but not to be taken seriously. Not that it wasn’t true, mind you — the European Union really is a totalitarian superstate, albeit with more of an emphasis on the velvet glove than the iron fist — but it hardly seemed likely that the EU would ever adopt overtly Communist symbols as its own.

Well, that was then, and this is now.

As pointed out today by Daniel Hannan, and commented on by numerous others, the EU has now elevated the beloved hammer-’n’-sickle to the very apex of its all-inclusive multiculti star of ever-closer union.

Here’s the celebratory poster, with the foreshortening removed and some of the glare muted:

Obviously, the paladins of Brussels find the paramount symbol of Soviet Communism acceptable, and possibly even to be held in high esteem. It doesn’t remind them of a brutal jack-booted repressive ideology that has left more than a hundred million corpses in its wake. Or, if it does, they’re not bothered about such trivialities. Petty people like me think about the eggs, but they’ve got their eyes fixed on all those lovely omelets.

There are a number of other things about this delightful poster that are worth observing…

First of all, the person who designed it seems to consider the hammer and sickle a religious symbol. Now, that’s perfectly appropriate. It’s what we right-wing extremists have been saying all along, but it’s nice to see the Powers That Be acknowledge the fact.

The other symbols are vaguely reminiscent of those ubiquitous Soros-funded “COEXIST” bumper stickers, but with a few additional religions thrown into the mix. The hand icon is a symbol of Jainism, for example. The little wheel is for Buddhism, and the yin-yang is for Taoism.

Funnily enough, there seem to be two symbols for Hinduism, and none for Sikhism. The Om icon is familiar to most people, but the Trishula, which looks like a trident, is less well-known. I tend to think that the designer — who perhaps skipped a few lectures in his Comparative Religions course — mistook the Trishula for the well-known Sikh icon with its crossed swords surrounding a double-edged blade.

Finally, there is the plain star. What is that supposed to represent? Communism again, perhaps, but the Maoist variety this time?

Or does it stand for paganism? If so, I would expect it to be a pentagram rather than a regular five-pointed star.

In any case, all of these wonderful faiths are going to COEXIST ecstatically in a perfect, brand-new society, the Europe4All:

One Star to rule them all,
One Star to find them,
One Star to bring them all,
And in the darkness bind them.

Hat tip: JP.

Update: This post was originally published on October 17. It has been “bumped” to keep it at the top. Scroll down for more recent posts, including the new Communist iconography of the European Union, and George Igler’s appearance on SUN TV.

The essay below is the eighth in a series by Takuan Seiyo. See the list at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments.

^{Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Right: George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916/17}

The Bee and the Lamb
Part 8

By Takuan Seiyo

Madness 1: We Are All Sadeans Now

In 1963, the German writer Peter Ulrich Weiss published the play “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.” In it, the de Sade character, held in an insane asylum, directs a play about the assassination of one of the most bloodthirsty fathers of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat. In one memorable scene, de Sade is being whipped on his own instructions. A semi-musical, the play contains songs with titles like “Those Fat Monkeys” and “Copulation Round.”

The real Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), one of history’s most notorious nihilist-socialists, did spend 12 years at the asylum of Charenton, where, between his seductions of minors of both sexes, he wrote prodigiously and produced his own plays with a cast of insane inmates. Other than his literary output, with titles like Justine and 120 Days of Sodom, Sade’s CV includes physical abuse and rape of male and female servants, pedophilia, poisoning of prostitutes with dubious aphrodisiacs, 29 years spent in jails and insane asylums, and even a turn as a parliamentarian representing the far socialist left in the French National Assembly.

Just like Norway’s mounting of a vast public production of Ibsen’s “The Enemy of the People” with Fjordman in the leading role, the Western world has mounted a mega-production of Weiss’s “Marat-Sade.” Pain-addicted high-status lunatics are directing the play, lower status lunatics are the cast, and taxpayers underwrite this whipped ecstasy. What exceeds all comprehension is that Mom and Pop, normal white taxpayers with middle class values, are themselves tied to the post, taking the beating alongside the naughty marquis, with nary a protest. And, to add insult to injury, the subsidized inmates refer to their benefactors as Those White Monkeys.

De Sade gets his kicks, but Mom and Pop get only painful welts, and pay through the nose for the whipping. Yet, they are docile, accommodating, and plead — that is, vote — for more. Call it S&M, call it the Stockholm syndrome: as for me, words fail me.

Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Beast” Sept. 24 blog entry was titled, “President Obama: The Democrats’ Ronald Reagan”. Sullivan wrote:

“If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats’ Reagan. The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure who struggled through a recession and a terrorized world, reshaping the economy within it, passing universal health care, strafing the ranks of al-Qaeda, presiding over a civil-rights revolution, and then enjoying the fruits of the recovery.”

There is much more in this panegyric, dumbfounding because Sullivan has degrees from Oxford and Harvard (PhD in Political Science) and describes himself as a “political conservative.” But let’s skip the dumb and hear what a sharper man, the blogger Richard Fernandez, says about it:

“Sullivan’s paragraphs are destined for greatness. It leaves one slack-jawed, unable to credit the words on the page. You have to read it twice to make sure you weren’t hallucinating. It may be quoted decades from now as a truly astonishing sample of what happens when a writer is either a scoundrel or mad — possibly both — involuntarily perhaps, in the corrosive atmosphere [snip] of the post World War 2 cultural elite which we now inhabit .”

I disagree with Mr. Fernandez’ either-or take. There is nothing I ever read by Dr. Sullivan, or showing in his face, indicating that he might be a scoundrel. He is stark mad. But why?

“When Obama is in the White House for a second term I’ll take it all off,” promised Madonna Ciccone during a recent concert for morons who probably rifle through their parents’ pockets to come up with the average $60 ticket price. On this occasion, mercifully, she took off only her outer garments and after some 3rd rate hooker routine on a piano top revealed the name OBAMA painted on her lower back. In her profanity-laced endorsement, Ms. Ciccone cited Obama’s support of “gay rights” and the amazingness of having “an African-American in the White House” as the reason why her audience must vote for Obama.

Now, people interested in questions of IQ and its relation to cognitive and other life skills, know that Ms. Ciccone’s confirmed IQ is 140. That is in the 99.6 percentile for white Americans (Mean: 100, SD: 15). How is that possible?

What does Obama have to do for white and once-Christian Harvard PhDs and 140-IQs to get their first clue? Hand North Africa and much of the Levant to the Muslim Brotherhood? Shower 450 million dollars the U.S. does not have on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in addition to the usual $1.5 billion-a-year windfall? 45 million on the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria? The usual $400 million annual pop on Libya, this time to affiliates of Al Qaeda? Bring to power in Mali (soon to be followed by Burkina Faso and Niger) Mohammedans so savage other Mohammedans consider them savage? Nourish Iran’s excellent nuke adventure to a triumphal denouement? Apologize for the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution on Pakistani TV? Bow, vassal-style, to King Saud? Turn NASA into a Muslim aid charity? Greatly boost the prestige of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to better take Turkey back to pre-Atatürk (i.e. pre-1923) if not all the way back to the 7th century? Disable the Keystone Pipeline project that would reduce dependence on Muslim oil?

Been there, done that.

Hire a convicted terrorist and sworn enemy of the United States to write his personal memoir? Put a lunatic lesbian cabal in charge of the security of the United States? Put a subversive black nationalist in the top law enforcement position to better enforce U.S. laws with a clear, anti-white discriminatory intent? Stream battle rifles to Mexican drug cartels so they can shoot more US Border Patrol agents, not to mention Mexican nationals? Forge his birth certificate? Spit, symbolically, on Winston Churchill? Apologize throughout the world for America, and kiss up to her enemies? Cripple the U.S. military by running the (non-nuke) Navy on a 50-50 fuel mixture of seeds, algae and chicken fat (at $26/gallon!) and running soldier manpower on a mixture aspiring to 50-50 of women, lesbian women, homo-men, Muslims, Chicano gangbangers and race-promoted blacks? Put U.S. soldiers in a shooting war, with orders not to shoot? Run the whole military machine ragged on useless missions all over the world complete with a new “Africa Command” and its crooked 4-star black general? Mire the U.S. in more wars simultaneously than any U.S. president, ever?

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Double the U.S. national debt? Double the number of long-term unemployed? Double the price of gasoline in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world? Halve the dollar’s value against gold? Waste $5 trillion of borrowed money on vaporous stimulus? Dole out $90 billion of taxpayers’ money to “green” scams operated by political cronies and racial kin? Increase welfare spending by 41% to almost $1 trillion a year, without diminishing poverty?^[1] Destroy the best healthcare system in the world? Disable welfare-related work requirements and enable EBT food welfare cards for booze, porn, tattoo and jail bail? Largest tax increase in America’s history? Do all that as a barely disguised form of wealth transfer from white to black America? Generate a tidal wave of black racial hatred, black hate crimes and the worst relations between the races since at least the 1950s? Campaign funded in part, both in 2008 and 2012, by hundreds of millions in small donations either unreportable or via untraceable prepaid credit cards, many from abroad? Success of campaign built, partially, on the vote of the dead, the canine, the foreign and the thrice-registered?

Yup, that too.

So what is it? What generates the holy tingling, patented by MSNBC’s main artillery piece, Chris Matthews, up so many expensively shod white legs? What’s the thrill?

At some higher level, the insanity is so stark that questions are redundant. Consider American Jews. The smartest segment of the population, with a mean IQ almost a full standard deviation above that of non-Jewish whites, chock-full of professors, doctors, lawyers, judges, Nobel prize winners, mathematicians and hedge fund wizards. Voted 78% for Obama in 2008 — the highest of any demographic segment but the Blacks. The Blacks were voting rationally, for their pocketbook and racial pride. But the Jews, what were they voting for?

Repeated polls indicate that 65% of America’s Jews are set to vote for Obama, again. Jewish donors and bundlers have been of such key importance to BHO that if Manhattan’s Westside and the best zip codes in the Los Angeles area suffer a major power failure, the Obama 2012 machine may come to a standstill. Simultaneously, these Jewish supporters feel passionately about Israel, are active in pro-Israeli causes, and are forever on guard against antisemitism. And their messiah (small m) has a few more things on his presidential résumé that ought to be of concern to Jews, above and beyond his record of achievements iterated above. For instance:

Associated in Chicago with known Muslim sponsors of Muslim terrorist organizations? Check. Appointed Susan Rice, a clear and present foe of Israel and a clueless fool otherwise, to the post of US Ambassador to the United Nations? Check. Tight with Center for American Progress — a disseminator of anti-Israel, antisemitic content whose three key officers have held key positions in the BHO administration? Check. Excluded Israel, the world’s premier victim of terrorism, from a counter-terrorism forum in Spain? Check. Sent a Muslim terrorism apologist and Israel-basher to represent the United States at a human rights conference in Warsaw? Check. Presented Saudi Arabia’s ideas for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement as America’s position? Check. Went to see Whoopi Goldberg when Bibi Netanyahu asked to talk about Holocaust II? Check.

The complete list could fill pages. Yet the Jewish Council for Education and Research, having spent a bundle in 2007 on videos urging Jews to vote for Obama, is doing so again. Its website presents a banner picture of Mr. Hussein in a heroic pose in front of the American and Israeli flags, and urges Jews via a provocative video with Samuel Jackson to “wake up” and vote for the greatest enabler of worldwide jihad and Jew hatred that the American presidency has ever known.

Blacks have at least an honest rationality in service to self-interest. The American hip hop plutocrat known as Jay-Z says simply that he supports Obama because Obama is black and has a “vision.” It’s a Black Lootist-Revanchist vision and Mr. Z, a shrewd businessman, should know better — but tribe comes first, except for white fools. At the other end of the economic scale, this black woman says she supports Obama because “He gave us a phone, he gonna do more.”

It’s not what America’s founders had in mind and it does not reflect the Anglo-Saxon concept of civic society. But at least it’s not insane and contemptible.

How about the gathering at the Islamic Center of Southern California, where “leaders from several faith communities” spoke about “shattering stereotypes”? We have here Judith Levy, the female rabbi of the Malibu Jewish Synagogue (serves quite the Who’s Who of “Hollywood”) blowing a ram’s horn with passion, just before a gentleman named Jihad Turk explains the Religion of Peace and a white convert to Sikhism with all the exotic accoutrements asserts that unity in diversity is what makes America great. I haven’t laughed this hard since that earlier multicultural Malibu party, the one with Peter Sellers.

Alas, a disproportionate ratio of people who have been warning for a long time about the self-wrought suicide of white people worldwide also have a Joos-done-it fixation that turns what could have been a salutary effort into another pack of emotion-driven lies, hence a dead end. Things are not so simple.

On October 4, 2012, the Reuters headline read: “Romney’s strong debate showing puts Europe on edge.” It’s difficult to understand why Europe cares so much about a clueless half-breed^[2] jive master who can switch from hateful black talk to “United We Stand” for the white fools quicker than Yasser Arafat could with a different subject but a similar white audience. Besides, roughly four-in-ten American Whites voted for Obama in 2008, and poll for him 2012. And not only does his presidential record stand against him now, but it was fully predictable in 2008 for anyone with an ounce of brain and a dash of curiosity before those 43% pulled the lever — disproportionately, white women and the young and stupid.

It remains most curious, however, that the higher the intellectual quotient, the higher the degree of insanity. For space reasons, just three chance cases will support our thesis here, though there are thousands.

At Harvard, meet Vanidy Bailey, recently appointed as that university’s “Director of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Queer (BGLTQ) student life”. Vanidy, who refuses all gender-specific pronouns, self-identifies as “masculine of center Caribbean-American” (photos here). According to the BGLTQ postmodern lexicon, for the study of which, I am certain, grants and PhDs are awarded, “masculine of center” denotes lesbian womyn (sic.) who tilt towards the masculine. This type of academic discipline being neither academic nor discipline they write “masculine of center” when they mean “masculine off center.” A visit to the University of California Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department will confirm not only the off-center physical types but the off-center, hard core communist politics too.

Of course there have been a thousand Vanidys at Harvard. One Barry Obama was not only accepted and graduated from the Harvard Law School but made president of Harvard Law Review without ever having published a single law review. The aforementioned Homi Bhabha, who holds an endowed professorial chair in American and English Literature and is Director of Harvard’s Humanities Center, writes English prose like this:

“If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.”^[3]

Taking a core sample in a second tier university provides no solace. Vanidy themselves is a prized catch that Harvard poached from University of California, San Diego. To make up for the loss of its black female (sorry, Vanidy) Assistant Director for Education, UCSD, which is a taxpayer-financed institution in a bankrupt state, treated itself to a new and of course black female Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Linda Greene. Ms. Greene, a long-time diversity bureaucrat and professor of diversity-pushing law at the University of Wisconsin (CV here [pdf]), will receive a $250,000 annual salary and a relocation allowance approaching $100,000 in aggregate. To compare, Heather MacDonald relayed that an internationally known expert on cancer nanotechnology at the UCSD Engineering School makes $150,000 a year.

Washington State University, with campuses in the poorer, less Progressive parts of that state, probably could not afford the kind of fees commanded by three-fers like black masculine lesbians or even two-fers like black females, so it had to settle for a black male as Vice President for Equity and Diversity. Last time I checked, there was a full-time staff of fifty-five serving under WSU’s chief diversitoid.

Among WSU’s 59 “Equity and Diversity Initiatives” are such fundamentals of university education as “American Diversity Requirement” — a compulsory module including eleven courses. Then we have “Including Children of Aztlan Sharing Higher Education (CASHE)” — “a student recruitment conference” by MECHA, i.e. a fifth-column of Mexican agitators, glorifiers of mass-murdering, cannibal Aztecs, and open US enemies-in-training committed in writing to a refusal to recognize the US and to “repulsion” of “the brutal gringo invasion of our territories.”

If CASHE does not captivate you, there is CAPTIVATE, i.e. “Community, Activism, Pride Today, Inspiring, Visionary, Action, Tomorrow, Empowerment!” It’s something having to do with “Asian and Pacific Islander women.” Try to tell a woman in Japan or Korea that American Progressives put her in the same drawer with Pacific Islanders.

If CAPTIVATE is not your game either, there is ELLA — “Educated Latinas/Chicanas Leading America” (sic.) and GLBTA, “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered and Allies Center.” It’s those allies who matter.

There is SHAPING — “Shaping High School Asian and Pacific Islander Students for Next Generation, and VIBES: “Visionaries Inspiring Black Empowered Students.” There is NEW Leadership Program (for women) and there is MOSAIC – Meet Our Students and Investigate College — sounds innocent enough until it gets to the part of “furthering the diversity goals of the campus.”

There is “Semana de la Raza” — try it in German, Woche der Rasse, with the proper raspy consonants. Yawohl, Herr Oberst! And there is “YWCA of WSU Racial Justice Program.” But my favorites are those with poetic names:

“Out in the Middle of Wheatfields Conference” — a regional leadership and educational conference for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered college students and their allies.”

“Pah-Loots-Pu Celebration — a pow wow that “serves as a recruitment event and honors the accomplishments and contributions of Native American students at WSU.”

And the best of them all: “Future Cougars of Color”.

An hour with the coprophagic inmates of Charenton has worn me out. As all this demented, treasonous prating pours out at me from WSU’s diversity centrifuge, I have an epiphany. I have broken the code. Now I know the secret cypher, the ‘Open Sesame,’ the magic formula by which Progressive gnosis will bring down Heaven on Earth:

CASHE MOSAIC to CAPTIVATE ELLA Out in the Middle of Wheatfields at Pah-Loots-Pu for the NEW Leadership SHAPING of the GLBTA VIBES

It bears clarifying that hurtful adjectives like “coprophagic,” i.e. eating feces, or “idiot” apply only to the Whites who initiated this jolly hootenanny 40 years ago and are directing it today. One may have nothing but grudging respect for the “minorities” who see an opening to grab unearned advantages showered on them by mental defectives, and rush to seize them per evolutionary rules of survival. When Whites were still subject to their civilization and its rules of conduct, such behavior was deemed improper. But these are different times, and these are different peoples and cultural standards.

Moreover, words like insanity, madness, idiots that this work is sprinkled with are not to be construed as pejorative hyperbole. To the contrary, I use them according to their strict, diagnostic meaning in psychiatry, jurisprudence and in wisdom-based folklore.

Insanity is uniformly defined in medical dictionaries as a mental illness so severe that the patient cannot distinguish reality from fantasy and therefore cannot conduct his life in a manner safe to himself and to others. At law, insanity has a narrower definition: the defendant’s ability to distinguish right from wrong. By folk wisdom, insanity is known as “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” By any of those definitions, the Progressive Left, and all social institutions based on Progressive principles, are insane.

To describe Progressives as idiots seems like gratuitous abuse, but the term “Idiot” has a long taxonomical history going back to the Greeks, and it fits the despoilers of the West like a glove. For the Athenians, Idiotes were citizens who declined taking part in the public process of governing, thus showing bad judgment. By the turn of the 20th century “idiot” acquired a specific meaning in clinical psychology, as the lowest level in a scale of mental retardation above which were the levels of imbecile and moron. Mental retardation in turn is defined as an intellectual disability comprising markedly impaired cognitive functioning and failure in two or more adaptive behaviors.

By any of these criteria, Progressives are idiots. They have chronic bad judgment, always fired by the zeal for social and moral re-engineering schemes that are by definition impossible and have ruinous consequences. Never learning from the experience, they repeat the same schemes as though the previous ones succeeded. Having failed to re-engineer the attitudes to wealth and property, they are now busy re-engineering the attitudes to race and achievement. However, rotten financial capitalism that’s ruining the West may yet deliver to the Left a victory on wealth and property too.

The Cougars of Color business brings to mind one, David Villalobos, who recently jumped into the tiger enclosure at the Bronx Zoo, asserting that he wanted “to be one with the tiger.” Almost two David Villaloboses were dragged out ten minutes later, though still fit to be sewn together.

Reality has patterns, based on which all sentient beings, including homo sapiens, developed rules of conduct that enhance the chance of survival. The “fight or flight” response, the “like likes like” social grouping, the hierarchical structure of such groupings, the in-group, out-group differentiation, the hoarding of vital provision for bad times, male-female role divisions and courtship protocol are all among the basic biological mechanisms of being, for otter and human alike.

You don’t jump into a cage with a tiger. You don’t stoke with invented lies anger and resentment in your indigenous or imported racial minorities disadvantaged in your society for their own biological and cultural reasons. Yes, they were treated badly in the past, but the only salutary remedy is Equal Opportunity, not Equal Outcome.

You don’t let a tiger into your own cage either, which is what the West has done by importing tens of million of Muslims disadvantaged cognitively and culturally in the same way as American Blacks or Mestizos are, and imbued with a creed, tradition and history hateful to Westerners. If you want to be one with the tiger, emigrate to Somalia or Pakistan. But to bring the tiger to your own community and let him loose too, why, that’s criminal mischief.

A serious question weighs on me that I have to pose to the reader: Have you been in touch with your conocimiento lately?

See, there is a problem, the one that everyone from presidents Bush and Obama, to the aforementioned Bill Gates, to the entire millions-strong educational establishment and the entire political class are trying to solve: NAMs, i.e. Non-Asian racial minorities, are vastly underperforming in education, and therefore in all the indices of personal prosperity and stability that depend on good education.

The standard solution is to confiscate billions of dollars more from the taxpayers and throw that treasure at the educational establishment. Strategic support is generated by pounding the brains of the pupils in the system, and their parents, with “white privilege” malarkey, so they accept docilely their transformation into ignorant, guilt-ridden white dhimmis for the sake of “closing the gap.”

The curious thing is that, saddled with the indigenous problem of American blacks’ relative ineducability, America has chosen to import tens of millions of the uneducable from Latin America. Hence anguished cries of the clueless class, with titles like “Hispanic education in crisis”.

Rochelle Gutiérrez, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has come up with the perfect solution. In her lecture, “Rethinking the Knowledge Needed to Teach Mathematics,” Professor Gutiérrez argues that the “achievement gap” is a “social construction” and “equity in mathematics” demands more than access to a good curriculum. As summarized in the synopsis of her lecture, Gutiérrez argues that “a model of knowledge needed for teaching mathematics and addressing equity involves political knowledge.” That in turn calls for recognizing “multiple realities (Nepantla), developing conocimiento with students, becoming comfortable with uncertainty, and seeing tension as a means to birth new knowledge.” [Note the casual use of Mexspanish gobbledygook and postmodern English grammar, based on the assumption it’ll fly with an American university audience.]

I wonder if high school teachers of tens of millions of math students in China worry much about Nepantla and conocimiento. The students, however, hardly sleep in their senior year, to prepare for their rigorous exit exams, then go on to some of the best math departments in the world at Beijing, Fudan and Hong Kong Universities, and then on to China’s ballistic and space programs. And for PhD-level knowledge, they and Chinese graduate-level science students enroll in the best American universities — where they are often 75% of the class. That’s because American schools teach Nepantla and conocimiento instead of mathematics, and graduate people of a concomitant mental caliber.

More than 600,000 American manufacturing jobs went unfilled in 2011 due to a skills shortage. And as for less demanding skills such as basic English competence, that is increasingly difficult to find too. Ideas, including the ideas animating American education, have consequences.

Consider the rise of China as another tiger cage parable, except the idiot is so retarded that he not only transported the tiger into his own abode on silken pillows, but spent 40 years and untold trillions on pedicure of the tiger’s claws and orthodontic restoration of its fangs.

China has risen solely through the voluntary transfer of American and Japanese technology, pilfering such technology as it could not obtain legally, and co-opting Western and Japanese corporations to outsource their manufacturing to the People’s Republic. China’s weapons systems that increasingly threaten its erstwhile benefactors were built by Chinese scientists who obtained their PhDs in American universities, and by Chinese engineers who worked for American research and technology corporations, until they learned enough.

Nature knows not such self-tripping idiocy and, before they flipped, Western peoples did not either. Bottlenose dolphins that develop a new technology pass on the knowledge only to their children. The possessors of this technology then form a clique within the dolphin society. Japanese macaques teach their children how to wash fruit, and Thai macaques teach their offspring how to floss their teeth. Neither species of monkey teaches its technology to dogs or raccoons, or even to each other.

^{A Japanese macaque washing a sweet potato, with her baby looking on. © Frans B. M. de Waal, PhD}

Goodwill, cooperation and a peaceful demeanor befits the West, and reflect its Christian roots. All within reason. But the rise of China is a story of a West that has lost its head, completely. And now it’s too late: the new Chinese F-60 stealth fighter-bomber, for instance, looks so similar to the U.S. Air Force’s most advanced F-22 Raptor that it’s likely to be a copy of the Raptor’s inner and most secret guts too. All of this was easily predictable a quarter of a century ago. Why go this way?

We are veering into spheres of the rulers’ madness; it’s a pattern that requires more proof of it being, first of all, a pattern. It’s easy to see, for instance, that the confounded Snatchers governing the West have done China redux in all that pertains to the West’s relationship with Islam and Muslims. Had they not jumped into that cage, in the name of peace, tolerance, nondiscrimination, global rapprochement and rent-seeking from oil plutocrats, the West could have remained the West, the East could have remained the East, and the twain, unmixed, could have co-existed with nary a terrorist or insult to Muhammad.

But all that is for a later chapter. Here we are concerned with the folded, stapled, spindled and psychologically mutilated proles: Mom and Pop, who pay for all this. They have not been asked whether they care to have much of their income confiscated annually for a pleating of a noose for their own descendants. Why do they accept all this?

Why are they not marching in the streets, and tarring and feathering their Snatcher overlords?

Next time.

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Notes:

Takuan Seiyo is a European-born American writer living in exile in Japan.

Previous posts:

George Igler is the Managing Director of the British think-tank “Discourse: Institute for Free Speech”. He spoke at the Brussels Conference and later appeared at the Stop Islamization of Nations event in New York.

Tonight Mr. Igler talked to Jerry Agar on SUN TV about the rapid deterioration of civil liberties in the UK, as exemplified by the legal crackdown on any form of communication, public or private, that might be considered insulting or offensive by someone.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

Update: Thanks to Steen for sending the link to a YouTube video featuring Rowan Atkinson speaking out on behalf of the “Reform Section 5” movement.

The Swiss immigration authorities, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to impose a batch of immigrants on a small town, one that will almost double the town’s size. To make matters worse, the plan is to have the immigrants run the town’s restaurant and pub.

Many thanks to Michael Laudahn for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for subtitling this clip from Swiss TV:

Vlad has more, also translated by Michael Laudahn:

Protest in Gänsbunnen, Switzerland over absurd demands to tolerate excessive immigration

A town in Switzerland with a total population of 103 people are expected to host 80 third world immigrants. It seems that some genius Swiss authority wants these immigrants to run the local restaurant and pub. Details are a bit scarce as filming and interviews are all being denied but more should come out as demand to know increases.

This madness must stop. If Europeans did this to an African village it would contravene the UN rules on genocide by population replacement.

In Gänsbrunnen, inhabitants (103, see here) protest against a potential asylum accommodation holding lanterns on which they painted sad faces. The local council rejects the idea according to which the asylum seekers henceforth were to run the ‘St Joseph’ restaurant.

In a series of articles earlier this month (see the bottom of this post for a complete list) we reported on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM) in Warsaw.

The “Human Dimension” is one of three general categories within the OSCE. It gives governments, NGOs, and members of civil society in all the member states of the OSCE the opportunity to send representatives to meetings where human rights policies and initiatives are discussed.

Over the past few years Islamic groups have gradually taken over much of the HDIM proceedings. Working mainly through representatives of Turkey and the “’stans”, but also non-governmental Islamic immigrant groups from Western European countries, they have changed the emphasis from human rights as they are traditionally understood within a Western context to the “rights” laid out by the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. The Muslim participants generally follow the strategies recommended by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), demonizing “Islamophobia” and demanding action to prevent “the defamation of religions”.

This month the extent of the Islamization of the OSCE was highlighted by the attendance of Salam al-Marayati, the founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), as the official representative from the United States government.

Fortunately for the Counterjihad, a team of seven dedicated opponents of shariah was dispatched to Warsaw this month to push back against the pressure from the OIC. They came from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, and the USA, and represented ICLA, BPE, the Stresemann Foundation, and ACT! For America. The Islamic activists at the meeting seemed surprised by such intense resistance, and reacted with predictable antagonism.

Our team made presentations, issued responses, and held a side event to demand the abrogation of the Cairo Declaration. The presentations and responses were filed as conference papers, and all have now been officially posted as PDF documents on the OSCE website. A complete list of these documents is below.

International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA)
Official OSCE list of documents

• ICLA speech on dual interpretation of human rights (English)
• Answer to Mr Quaraishy from working session 10 (English)
• International Civil Liberties Alliance recommendation for working session 11 (English)
• Response to the US Delegation (English)
• 2012 Brussels Declaration (English)
• 2012 Brussels Declaration (Deutsch)
• Freedom of Religion (Français)

Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE)
Official OSCE list of documents

• The Right to be Silenced? (English)
• Right to Peaceful Assembly — Only For Some? (English)
• Which human rights? (English)
• Freedom of expression only for you or also for me? (English)
• Apostasy and its Consequences (English)
• Statement by Burgerbewegung Pax Europa-Austria (English)
• Position of BPE (Burgerbewegung Pax Europa) On Criticism of the German Interior Ministry’s Poster Campaign Against the Radicalization of Young People (Deutsch)
• Hate Crimes (English)

The Stresemann Foundation
Official OSCE list of documents

• Democratic states may not prohibit expression of opinion (Deutsch)
• There is no such thing as “Islamophobia” (English)
• There is no such thing as “Islamophobia” (Deutsch)
• Meinungsfreiheit — Menschenrecht oder Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit? (English)
• Meinungsfreiheit — Menschenrecht oder Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit? (Deutsch)

ACT! For America
Official OSCE list of documents

• Islamophobia, Occupation and Slander — A sane perspective (English)

Previous posts about the OSCE and the Counterjihad:

Fazil Say, a prominent Turkish pianist and composer, will face a blasphemy trial in Turkey for insulting Islam. Mr. Say’s alleged crime occurred via the medium of Twitter, where he is said to have tweeted jokes about Islam and Muslims.

In other news, riots are engulfing parts of Tanzania, in particular Dar es Salaam and the island of Zanzibar. The trouble began over rumors that a 14-year-old Christian boy had urinated on a copy of the Koran. Angry Muslims took the streets and began torching churches, demanding that the blasphemous boy be beheaded. A firebrand Muslim cleric was then arrested for allegedly inciting some of the violence, whereupon new riots commenced in response. At least seven churches have been attacked.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Diana West, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, JP, Kitman, LH, Mary Abdelmassih, Nilk, RE, sgtredbluered, Steen, The Observer, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

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.

Alexandre del Valle is an Italo-French lecturer on geopolitics and a researcher for Università Europea di Roma, Institut Choiseul and Daedalos Institute of Cyprus. He specializes in radical Islam, terrorism, and relations between the West and the Rest. He has been an editorialist in Le Figaro, Le Figaro Magazine, France Soir, Israel Magazine, La Une, Il Liberal, etc., and has had articles published in geopolitical magazines and reviews such as Politique Internationale, Herodote, Outre Terre, Geostrategics, Stratégiques, Geopolitical Affairs, Nova Storica, Il Liberal, and many others. Apart from being a geopolitician, he is — together with Rachid Kaci — the founder of the liberal-conservative Right (“Droite Libre”), whose slogan is: “Secularity, defence of the West and Freedom, and struggle against political correctness”. His analysis has influenced French, Spanish and Italian politicians, especially the French party UMP. He is the author of nine books.

Dr. del Valle was one of the featured speakers at the Brussels Conference last July.

The article below, which has been translated from the French, appeared previously in a slightly different form at the ICLA website.

Criminalisation of ‘Islamophobia: The Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s legal jihad

by Alexandre del Valle

Since the scandal surrounding the Islamophobic film “Innocence of Muslims” erupted on an Egyptian Islamist channel on the occasion of the anniversary of September 11th, much ink and blood has flowed. The fanatical Salafists resurrected a film (which previously had gone totally unnoticed) which was attributed to a US-Egyptian, who himself had attempted to gain the endorsement of “Zionist Jewish donors.” This version has naturally found a favourable echo among Islamists, masters of conspiracy theories who make Americans and Jews responsible for all the ills of Muslims.

The rest is history, be it in Benghazi (Libya), Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Germany. Very quickly we went from anti-Judaism and anti-Americanism to a widespread hatred of the West in general. In Pakistan, “whites” were attacked, threatened or insulted just because they appeared to be Westerners.

That said, and contrary to what the media, the best amplifiers for Islamists, would have us believe, few massive mobilizations have actually occurred, except those organized in Pakistan by the supporters of the death penalty for blasphemy, and in Lebanon at the instigation of the Shiites of Hizbullah. It is true that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Shi’ite sponsor of the latter group refuses to be upstaged in the anti-Western rhetoric and the hunt for “Islamophobia”: an Ayatollah has appropriately raised the Salman Rushdie affair by upping to $3 million the contract placed on the head of the author of The Satanic Verses.

And Ayatollah Khomeini invented the term “Islamophobia”

Recall that it was Ayatollah Khomeini who in 1989 launched the term “Islamophobia” and who was the first to test the response capabilities (and submission) of the West he despised and considered cowardly. Even then, rather than defending the Salman Rushdie block, the political and religious leaders of the West fragmented concerning the “blasphemies” of the writer, blamed for the “wrath” of the crazies who also killed the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses.

A few years later, Western leaders and media disintegrated over another Voltaire of the Muslim world, the Somali “apostate” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an elected Dutch MEP, and Theo Van Gogh, who together produced the film Submission that offended Muslims. These two “Islamophobes” were accused of having “provoked” the wrath of their executioners, and Van Gogh was murdered in the street by an Islamist Dutch-Moroccan connected to al-Qaeda, Mohammed Bouyeri, whilst Hirsi Ali was forced into exile in the United States to escape the death threats …

Since then, intimidated by fanaticism and bound by its “allies” among Muslim oil producers (and/or protectors of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia), the West has consistently abdicated in the face of offensive testing by supporters of Islamist censorship eager to spread the spirit of the Sharia and “dhimmitude” in the West. This includes official statements by U.S. and European leaders (except Italy and Denmark) condemning the Danish cartoonists of Muhammad (the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005) and about misunderstanding Pope Benedict XVI on Islam from the speech “Faith, Reason and the University” (September 2006).

More recently, the anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims and the Muhammad cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were officially condemned by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, even in commercials broadcast on television stations in Pakistan. Already in 2009, in his Cairo speech, rather than ask the friendly Muslim states to fight the worst oppressions of Sharia Law and the persecution of minorities, Barack Obama gave a speech totally exempting Muslims from responsibility and casting them as victims whilst condemning the West for supposed “Islamophobia”, and praising the “Lights of Islam” but never daring to speak of reciprocity in tolerance.

Now, the mainstream media and Western officials view in the same light peaceful cartoonists and Islamist terrorists, as if the first were comparable to fanatics who always find an excuse to quench their thirst for blood and achieve their oppressive objectives. In the country of Voltaire, where the right to blasphemy against the Catholic Church has never officially been terminated, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and the Quai d’Orsay have made an exception for Islam, disavowing cartoonists. Reviving the spirit of Munich, Westerners often go further than some Arab Muslim officials and media who sometimes see more clearly than their Western colleagues and refuse to accept obscurantist violence as “reactions to the offense” (see the courageous editorials Al Sharq al Awsat, L’Orient le Jour, or Tahar Ben Jelloun and Tunisian Abdelwahhab Medeb).

Hamstrung by the bad conscience of former colonizers, the media, clergy and European politicians fell into the trap set by the Islamist fanatics who intimidate by killing, and the official Islamic interlocutors, who demand the criminalization of “Islamophobia” as a requirement for the rejection of violence.

The “legal jihad” of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Muslim Brotherhood

So, to calm the “anger” of the former and to satisfy the anti-libertarian requests of the latter, Western officials apologize collectively for “Islamophobic” acts committed by a few, while neither governments nor the masses of the West are in any way liable. In so doing, they recognize the need for a de facto limit on the freedom of expression. This is a major strategic error, because by condemning journalists and writers who “cause” the wrath of the Islamists, they encourage these new censors to demand ever more.

Thus Mahmoud Gozlan, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, whilst acknowledging the criticism by the French government of Charlie Hebdo, immediately invited France to enact laws to criminalize Islamophobia, even daring to draw a parallel with the memorial laws condemning Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism: “Anyone who doubts the existence of the Holocaust is imprisoned, but if someone insults the Prophet, his companions or Islam, the maximum [France] will do is to give a two-word apology. This is neither fair nor logical,” said Mahmoud Gozlan. “We reject and condemn the French caricatures which dishonour the Prophet and we condemn any action that defames the sacred.” Meanwhile, Essam al-Erian, a senior Freedom and Justice Party (PJD, Muslim Brotherhood) in power in Egypt demanded that the French justice “addresses the problem with as much firmness as it did for the topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton,” published in Closer.

In this process of reversal of responsibilities aimed at curtailing freedoms, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations, bringing together 57 Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, of which Turkey and Egypt are the leaders, plays a vital role in the world. Under the guise of “defending threatened Muslim minorities”, the OIC uses its influence to prevent the integration of Muslim immigrants in the West, who are instead taken hostage by the bearded ones and abandoned by our capitulating governments who for many years have entrusted them to foreign preachers and allied Islamic states who fight Christian proselytizing at home and refuse any reciprocity, but who spread the “true faith” in Europe and elsewhere…

To confirm this total absence of reciprocity and impose the supremacy of sharia on the secular and universal conception of Human Rights, in 1981 and 1990 the OIC declared two “Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights “giving precedence to the spirit of the Sharia” and limiting religious freedom (conviction of blasphemy and the right to choose one’s own religion). And since 1999 the OIC has attempted to transcribe into international law, particularly in the United Nations, the concept of “defamation of religions” and “Islamophobia” real weapons of war against legal freedom of expression and to promote Sharia in the world.

Height of paradox: the main states lobbying for the criminalization of Islamophobia within the OIC are the most intolerant Christianophobes: Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Pakistan and Turkey (candidate for EU entry but still denying the genocide of a million and a half Armenian and Aramaic Christians…) Recall that within the OIC and the Council of Human Rights of the UN (HRC), the most virulent promoter of the criminalization of Islamophobia, Pakistan, persecutes minorities officially through the Penal Code which condemns to death “blasphemers” or proselytizing Christians who “insult Islam.” Recall that in 2011, the former Pakistani minister for minorities, the Christian Shahbaz Bhatti, and the former Governor of the Punjab, a Muslim, were killed for proposing the abolition of the blasphemy law and demanding the release of the famous Christian mother sentenced to death for blasphemy, Asia Bibi. This is the same State who, in 1999, presented to the HRC a resolution on “defamation of Islam” (later sweetened to “defamation of religions”).

Even “two weights, two measures” at the Council of Human Rights of the UN, where “Islamophobia” in the West is officially condemned, while the persecution of Christians and other minorities in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Nigeria and Egypt are systematically denied with the complicity of Western countries that only intervene in these proceedings to punish that country (generally pro-Russian and pro-Chinese or pro-Iranians) which threatens their strategic and oil interests, and always defend the “allied” slave Sunni monarchies in the Gulf or Pakistan who persecute Christians and Shiites …

With this inversion of responsibility, we observe that since September 11, 2001, not only have the Islamic states most associated with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan) not yet begun their necessary self-criticism, but have exempted themselves from combating the ideological roots of Islamist totalitarianism (which they promote in their embassies and madrassas), accusing Westerners and “Zionists” of “persecuting” Muslims and so-called “dirtying Islam.”

Thus, in March 2008, after three years of violent Islamist “reaction” to the “cartoons” of Muhammad or the “Islamophobic” speech of Benedict XVI, the UN passed a resolution condemning per the OIC the “defamation of religions” ( in fact Islam). The General Assembly declared itself “deeply hurt by the defamation of religion and Islam in the world and especially in Western democracies”, claiming that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a “genocide” of Muslims, but it went totally silent about the massacres of Christians in southern Sudan or elsewhere.

The OIC demanded that Western democracies criminalize “Islamophobia.” In 2010, another resolution was adopted by the HRC condemning the Swiss popular initiative banning minarets. In June 2011, a Committee of the Council of Human Rights decided to abandon the concept of “defamation of religions”, noting that the anti-blasphemy laws like those in force in Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan violate human rights.

But this draconian concept was reformulated by the OIC Resolution “16/18” adopted on 19 December 2011 in the Council on Human Rights resolution that fights “intolerance, negative stereotyping, stigmatization, discrimination, incitement to violence against persons because of their religion or belief”.

The “Istanbul Process”: an attack freedom of expression

The new strategy for implementing Resolution “16/18”’ was designed by the Secretary General of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (a Turkish diplomat appointed by the Islamist AKP party in power in Ankara), at a meeting of the International OIC held in Istanbul in July 2011. This “Istanbul Conference” called for a ban on all criticism of Islam under the pretext of combating “intolerance against religions.” It permitted the advancement in a new way the concept of “defamation of religions” as applied to human rights.

The OIC text urged that the UN “create the necessary environment for the prohibition of defamation of religions and incitement to hatred, violence and discrimination on religious grounds […] stressing the importance of limits on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, in a structured multilateral way and in the light of events such as the burning of the Koran, according to the test of consequences”.

But this very dangerous concept, which brings us to the news of the Mohammed cartoons and the anti-Islamic film, is based on a great inversion of responsibility: it does not render the fanatics responsible for the violence but the cartoonists themselves accused of “causing” violent reactions of the Islamists, the simple “consequences” of Islamophobia, hence the imperative for legal punishments. The “Istanbul Declaration” alerts the world to the “implications (consequences) The dangerous rise of Islamophobia on peace and security. We emphasize the need to develop the UN, including the Council of Human Rights, a legally binding institutional instrument to promote respect for all religions and cultural values and prevent intolerance, discrimination and incitement to hatred against any group or followers of a religion”. After the first meeting in Istanbul on 12 to 14 December 2011, the OIC met the Obama administration in Washington to persuade the U.S. President to join the “Istanbul Process” and to implement Resolution 16/18 of 2011.

With the official approval of Hillary Clinton, the OIC achieved a major diplomatic coup. Now it is the European Union that plans to host the next meeting of the “Istanbul Process”.

The world’s democracies must reject any form of penalty for or limitation to freedom of expression, including the right to criticize religions, even the most “obvious”. For certain universal principles are not negotiable or “adaptable” based on religious cultures, or they would have to accept human sacrifice, slavery or inferiority of sub-castes under the pretext that they are allowed in some religions. It is therefore necessary to turn against the fanatics the same deadly weapons they use to crush secular democracies, noting in particular that many OIC countries persecute or kill non-Muslims, liberal Muslims and unbelievers with impunity. Western democracies of Judeo-Christian culture must also act within the United Nations to denounce the mirror-accusation of the OIC who blames “Islamophobia” in the West but endorses Christianophobia legitimized by Islamic “blasphemy” or “anti-proselytizing” laws

The sad reality is that anti-Western radical Islamism, as developed and distributed into European suburbs by Salafist preachers trained in so-called “allied” countries (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) is the most combative and efficient system of global hatred, anti-Semitic and totalitarian ideology Christianophobia, and the most popular. Everywhere, anti-Western “green fascism” increases due to the fear it arouses and the violence that unfolds. And this unfortunately owes much to the Western media who make more visible the bearded fanatics rather than liberal Muslims. Now, obviously, the first victims of this “religious fascism” are minorities and moderate Muslims who live under permanent threat and terror. A growing phenomenon such as the “Arab Spring” (quickly becoming an “Islamist winter”) has not halted, but rather accelerated. From Rabat to Sana’a, to Tunis, Damascus or Baghdad, the source of legitimacy is the Shariah, which, when applied in its orthodox or radical, is never a good thing for minorities and adherents to freedom.