Monthly Archives: August 2014

An End to Phony Tolerance

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The following op-ed from the Austrian daily Kurier has been kindly translated by JLH:

An End to Phony Tolerance

Which Islam do Muslims in Austria actually follow?

By Martina Salomon | August 24, 2014

By 2051, every fifth Austrian will be Muslim. The figure is already 11.6% ( up from 0.4% in 1971). Official Austria has always operated on the premise of religious co-existence. But the newest reports indicate that shockingly great swathes of the Muslim population are regressing to the Middle Ages. Their brutal attitude toward “infidels” (up to and including bestial murders), their imperialism, their repression of women and homosexuals and the dominion of religion over politics all come to them from the Koran.

In recent years, anyone who criticized or even caricatured Islam ran the risk of earning a death fatwa. Self-styled “holy warriors” are killing and dispossessing Christians all over the world. Nonetheless, Western governments have appealed for tolerance. This may come from the misinterpretation of a comment by Jesus: “But I say unto you, That you resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also.” The meaning of the Biblical episode is that Jesus is standing firm and demanding respect. We must do the same, for the sake of our culture and our values. In conversation even with educated Muslims, their contempt for our liberal society is often palpable.

The Role of the Victim as an Excuse

Muslim advocates like to play the victim card. Marginalization of their co-religionists, they say, brings on radicalization. That, however, is only part of the truth. Not a word about the fact that some immigrant groups close themselves off and overburden the educational and welfare systems. Interestingly, it is (liberal) Muslims most of all who denounce the propagation of “fascist Islam” and criticize the support it receives from indigenous parties. It was clear to see, in demonstrations for and against Erdogan in Vienna, that there are thousands of Turks from backward regions in Turkey who are easy to mobilize in our streets. But anyone who has been in Istanbul has also seen the other side of Turkey with its dynamic, well-educated upper class, and many women in top jobs.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/30/2014

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Thirty-two Filipino UN peacekeepers on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights escaped from being surrounded by al-Nusra mujahideen by crossing the border into Israel, after Israeli troops opened the border for them. They had been trapped by the terrorists for several days. Forty more Filipinos in a different group remain surrounded by the al-Nusra Front, and a group of Fijian blue helmets has been taken hostage by the mujahideen.

In other news, according to the latest reports, the Islamic State is selling captured Yezidi women in Syria for about $1,000 each.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, DS, Fjordman, Insubria, Jerry Gordon, JP, Mark H, Papa Whiskey, Steen, Vlad Tepes, 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.

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.

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The Burning of the Mevlana Mosque

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Several weeks ago a recent addition to the Mevlana Mosque in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin was destroyed by fire. Even before the incident was judged to be arson, German politicians fell all over themselves to express their “solidarity” with victimized Muslims in the mosque’s congregation.

Today, however, the announcement of the ethnicity of the principal suspect showed that earlier assumptions had been wrong, and no “Islamophobia” was involved.

Rembrandt Clancy has translated a series of media items about the case. We’ll begin with a news report that was televised before the ruling of arson was confirmed. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

The translator notes that the incident bears comparison with the silence after the fire a year ago in the Lutheran church at Garson.

The following article from Der Tagsesspiegel, also translated by Rembrandt Clancy, discusses the determination by the police that the fire was set deliberately:

Fire in Mevlana Mosque was an Attack

27 August 2014

Having been long in question, now it is certain: The fire in the Mevlana Mosque in Kreuzberg was set deliberately, according to police investigations.

The fire in the Kreuzberg Mosque must be attributed to an arson attack, according to the assessment of the investigators. “We can now rule out a technical defect,” said Police President Klaus Kandt on Tuesday after he had visited the mosque together with the Minister of the Interior [for the City-State of Berlin] Frank Henkel (CDU). Also negligence is to be ruled out: “We are assuming an intentional act”.

Politicians demonstrate signs of Solidarity

The flames also deposited soot on the facade of the mosque. On Sunday evening the SPD chief [Social Democratic Party] and the Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel visited the crime scene and spoke of an “assassination attempt”. Also, Henkel wanted to demonstrate by his visit “a sign of solidarity”, as he put it. “When in Germany houses of God burn, it is not sufficient for the society simply to show sympathy”, said the Senator. “The society and the politicians must send a signal that such crimes must not be accepted”. The police will do everything in their power to solve the case. State security and fire experts are investigating the case in concert.

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“We Have Come to You With Blood”

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In an ISIS video released yesterday, a mujahid threatens the kuffar with fire, bloodshed, and death.

Many thanks to ritamalik for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

A note from the translator:

I translated the first speech by the guy in the beginning. After that the music starts, and the rest is a poem he recites in praise and prayer for the fighters of Fallujah. It was too hard for me to understand everything that he was saying in that poem and it was not important. It was just an “artistic touch”, so to speak, which bizarrely enough these ISIS guys seem to be so fond of!

This is as much as I could understand, because he was shouting too much and the music took over.

So yes, the ISIS guy was threatening the unbelievers and the Jews. Is it important? It is nothing new. But the more people hear what these Jihadis are up to straight from the horse’s mouth, the better. At least later when the threats come to pass they cannot claim they didn’t know!

Video transcript:

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Send In The Clowns

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Another one from The Firewall:

Reporter and author Colin Flaherty has taken a cold, clear-eyed view of the statistics that don’t make the news because they are suppressed by the news. He reports, for example — again in 2010 — the National Crime Victimization Survey reported approximately 13,000 black-on-white rapes and 39,000 black-on-white robberies — both violent crimes. The statistics show that the number of white on black rapes and violent robberies were so small that they had to be rounded to the nearest whole number, and that whole number was ZERO.

Critics will say that I am using these statistics to justify the murder of Michael Brown. But I said at the beginning — if Michael Brown were shot in cold blood then the police officer needs to pay the price for murder. This has nothing to do with Michael Brown. This has EVERYTHING to do with the narrative that the President, the Attorney General, and all of these race hustlers are trying to create using Michael Brown.

There is, in fact, a racial war of violence and hatred in America. Open racism is simply not tolerated in white America today, but black racism is the toxic glue that holds the progressive coalition together. Tolerance of — in fact, as we see from the events in Ferguson, open encouragement of black rage at a narrative that not only does not exist but reverses the daily outrages that do exist, is what defines modern progressivism. It is the politics of envy, anger, entitlement, lawlessness, violence and bald-faced lies.

And of all the promises broken by this man, surely none is more heartbreaking than the one promise that got him elected in the first place: the promise of a post-racial future. He and his racist progressive cohorts can never surrender the weapon that has gotten them everything, not the least of which is personal political power and trillions of dollars of redistributed wealth. And this latest outrage in Ferguson is yet another example — as if another was needed among the economic wreckage, creeping totalitarianism, and foreign-policy disasters — that he and his leftist cohorts would rather rule over ruins than disappear into the dustbin of a healthy and healed nation.

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A few things to notice: First, this book by Colin Flaherty, whom Bill Whittle mentions, is self-published. That means he updates it as circumstances require:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/29/2014

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The Rotherham child-rape scandal has spread to Australia. A former children’s services director in Rotherham is now a senior education official in Australia, and anti-abuse activists are calling for her resignation.

In other news, 43 Fijian soldiers, part of a UN peacekeeping force in Syria, were abducted yesterday in the Golan Heights. Today the Fijian government announced that they are “safe”.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JP, Papa Whiskey, RR, 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.

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.

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Komm, Heiliger Geist

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Last Christmas Dymphna gave me a boxed set of the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach, as performed by the late Marie Claire-Alain. It’s the best Christmas present I’ve received since 1980, when she gave me the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (which I still have — the tattered, dog-eared volume, now broken into four pieces, sits on the little desk next to me here as I type this), and possibly the best ever. The set includes fourteen CDs, each containing at least an hour of music by J.S. Bach played on the pipe organ.

Can you imagine anything more sublime? I’ve been working my way slowly through the set (I’m up to #10), enjoying Ms. Alain’s interpretation of works I already know, and savoring the ones I’ve never heard before.

It was one of the latter that caught my ear last month the first time I listened to it. About two or three minutes in, I thought, Why haven’t I heard this before??

It’s a chorale prelude for “Komm, heiliger Geist”, or “Come, Holy Spirit”, BWV 652 (I know of at least one other prelude for the same chorale, BWV 651). One of the unusual things about it is that it is exceptionally long, more than ten minutes when played by Marie-Claire Alain. I found two live performances on YouTube, where you can see the hands and feet of the organist, but the following rendition is of higher quality. It also features the score of the prelude, timed to match the performance, as a special treat for people who can read music.

This incomparably beautiful piece of music is “Komm, heiliger Geist”, performed by Bine-Katrine Bryndorf on the Wagner organ (built in 1738) in the Nidaros Cathedral at Trondheim, Norway:

As I have said many times before, this is why we fight.

I chose to enter the trenches in this information war so that music such as this might not be wiped off the face of the earth.

I decided to do what I do now so that these lambent pipes might not lie dented and silent amidst the broken and charred woodwork in the rubble of the cathedral, next to the headless body of the organist.

Come, Holy Spirit!

Our Nostrum

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Late last year two boatloads of illegal immigrants capsized and sank in the Mediterranean Sea between North Africa and Italy, killing more than 350 would-be migrants. The two tragic incidents, coming in close succession, caused huge public relations problems for the Italian government. No one in Italy had requested that those desperate migrants pay extortionate sums to human traffickers and attempt the crossing in overcrowded rickety boats. The Italians never asked for them to come. Nevertheless, “world opinion” blamed the Italian government for its negligence when all those asylum-seekers died.

In response, the government launched Operation Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea” in Latin), whereby the Italian Navy was tasked with rescuing every single migrant who attempted to make it to Italian shores. Rescued refugees were brought to port, fed, clothed, and housed until their “asylum” applications were processed by the relevant EU agencies.

Not surprisingly, the new policy resulted in a huge surge of migrants attempting to make the crossing from Libya or Tunisia to Italy. According to the latest estimates, at least 113,000 refugees have landed in Italy since last October, which is a much higher rate of migration than any I have seen since I started monitoring the situation in the Med seven or eight years ago. In contrast, the “Camp of the Saints” crisis of 2011 — which was an unprecedented wave of migration at the time — amounted to just over 60,000 arrivals over the course of a year.

The Italian government has been complaining to the European Union and petitioning for help with Mare Nostrum ever since the operation began. The European Commission kept promising more financial help, but whatever eventually arrived never quite made up for Italy’s increased expenditures. At the same time the EC repeatedly reminded Italy, Spain, and Greece that the primary responsibility for dealing with migrants lay with the countries at the “point of entry” — that is, they were mostly on their own.

In its latest appeals, the Italian government pointed out that Mare Nostrum was costing the Italian Navy €9 million a month ($11.8 million), out of a total naval budget of €9.2 million. This level of expenditure is clearly unsustainable, and the Italians put the EU on notice that they were going to shut down Mare Nostrum unless Brussels did something.

The most recent Italian complaints (and threats) must have been convincing, because on Wednesday EU Interior Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström announced that Mare Nostrum would be folded into Frontex, the EU border agency, and become “Frontex Plus”. Whether this will be more than a cosmetic change, and actually free Italy from some of the burden of mass migration from Africa, remains to be seen.

The raw figures for Italian spending on Mare Nostrum are disturbingly high. €9 million per month over the last ten months comes to roughly €90 million ($118 million). That’s about €800 ($1050) per surviving refugee.

And those are just the costs to the Italian Navy. After the navy unloads the refugees from its landing craft, the culture-enrichers must be housed, fed, clothed, and provided with asylum lawyers, all at the taxpayers’ expense.

But there’s more. Take a close look at the photo at the top of this post, and the one below:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/28/2014

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An Egyptian jihad group in the Sinai known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis have beheaded four people, whose headless bodies were later discovered. The group announced that the victims had been agents of the Mossad.

In news from England, a respected Tory MP named Doug Carswell caused a new crisis for his party by resigning his seat, switching to UKIP, and announcing that he would stand for the same seat in the resulting by-election.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JP, RR, Vlad Tepes, 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.

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.

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Multiculturalism — The Final Solution

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The following essay by Nick McAvelly was originally published at Partiot’s Corner in a slightly different form.

Multiculturalism — The Final Solution
by Nick McAvelly

“One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals — justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution.

“This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another. ‘Nature binds truth, happiness and virtue together by an indissoluble chain’, said one of the best men who ever lived, and spoke in similar terms of liberty, equality and justice.

“But is this true? It is a commonplace that neither political equality nor efficient organisation nor social justice is compatible with more than a modicum of individual liberty, and certainly not with unrestricted laissez-faire; that justice and generosity, public and private loyalties, the demands of genius and the claims of society can conflict violently with each other. And it is no great way from that to the generalisation that not all good things are compatible, still less all the ideals of mankind . But somewhere, we shall be told, and in some way, it must be possible for all these values to live together, for unless this is so, the universe is not a cosmos, not a harmony; unless this is so, conflicts of values may be an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life. To admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera.”

— Berlin, Isaiah (2012-12-31). The Proper Study Of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (pp. 237-238). Random House. Kindle Edition.

Finally, the mainstream media are beginning to acknowledge the poisonous fruits of multiculturalism. For years journalists have been afraid to speak the truth about what is happening in Britain, just as the council workers in Rotherham who were responsible for child welfare were afraid to speak the truth. And what is the truth they have been so afraid to give voice to? Multiculturalism is a failure, both as a political theory and as a matter of fact.

When the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany joined forces at the beginning of the war, Time magazine referred to the enemies of civilization as “Communazis”. Each had their final solution to the question of how human beings should live together on earth, and they were both willing to employ absolutely any means in order to achieve that end. We have seen the same mindset in government, both at a national level and in local councils up and down the land for many years now. Their final solution to the question of how we are to live is “multiculturalism”, and woe betide anyone who questioned that unproven, impossible theory.

The Soviets would as a matter of practice smear individuals who questioned the party line by declaring them to be Nazi sympathisers, and the Communazis who have been running rampant in the UK for years now have, as we all know, adopted the same policy. Anyone who questions them is immediately said to be a “Nazi”, “far right” (whatever that even means) and of course, a “racist”. The new Communazis of the UK will happily sacrifice the livelihoods and reputations of dissenting individuals in the name of their final solution.

As we have just seen, the new Communazis have been willing to sacrifice thousands of vulnerable young girls in the name of their final solution, too. In their minds, any price must be paid, if it means their final solution is to come to pass.

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Vienna is Different

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JLH has translated an op-ed by Andreas Unterberger about the rapid demographic changes currently underway in Vienna. The translator includes this note:

We could paraphrase Mark Twain: “There are facts, awful facts and godawful statistics.”

How typical too, that cosmopolitan centers are the first to be corrupted, because this is where the con-men, power brokers and know-it-alls go to assert themselves, while the rest of the country tries to get on with business. I wonder how fast the rest of the country would be transformed if the administration should start taking large numbers of refugees and shipping them off to unsuspecting towns and provinces. (I did not say “Obama”)

The translated op-ed from the independent information portal Vienna.at is below.

Vienna Is Different

by Andreas Unterberger

Nothing shows it more clearly than the unvarnished demographic figures: In recent years, Vienna has become a completely different city — one that is in some parts purely Balkan-Turkish. And it will become even more so in coming years. Isn’t City Hall being really short-sighted when it applauds this development?

To be sure, the tourist crowds in “imperial Vienna,” — center city — are largely from the West. Even though it is possible more than ever this summer to see women covered head-to-toe and Arabic men with their not-exactly-European-deportment.

The money-grubbing Tourist Office is ecstatic and sees no problems. Likewise our leftist ideologues. The rest of the Viennese are beset by powerful worries. An influx is always good for the ventilation of a society, to be sure, but if an influx is too rapid and intense, it leads from control over everyday customs, to the economy, to a complete tipping over and then to the collapse of the society.

Presently, Vienna differs more than ever from the rest of Austria. For instance, if more than half of the students in Vienna’s schools already speak some language other than German at home, then Viennese children — even with the addition of Germans, Swiss, Liechtensteiners (and presumably also Luxembourgers) and South Tyroleans — are no longer the majority there.

Religious Statistics in Vienna

Religious statistics are similar. In one generation, the percentage of Catholics has been halved — and that is despite the influx of almost totally Catholic Poles, Croats and Slovaks. Simultaneously, the number of people of no religious affiliation has risen sharply (even among immigrants). And, indeed, the third largest group is the Muslims, who have been multiplying exponentially since 1971. Trending rapidly, they are already 11% of the population, while the average across Europe is 6%, even though many of those countries — unlike Austria — have a colonialist past. Members of the Orthodox Church, too — mostly from Serbia — have increased more than seven-fold.

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