Autumn Fundraiser 2014, Day Seven
Today is the final day of our quarterly fundraising drive. All this past week Dymphna and I have been writing — at least loosely — on the theme of “Third Rails”: the topics we are not allowed to mention in public discourse.
No one has received a greater shock from a Third Rail and survived than Geert Wilders, as was discussed here last night. Compared with Mr. Wilders’ ordeal, the tribulations Dymphna and I have suffered are trivial. And his circumstances are likely to get much worse, given that the public prosecutor is investigating him, and may well file new criminal charges.
One of the things that stood out in the interview with Geert Wilders was the lack of privacy that he has had to live with for the past ten years. Between the constant glare of publicity and the necessity for round-the-clock protection by bodyguards, Mr. Wilders doesn’t have a private life as most people understand it. Most heads of state enjoy more privacy than he is allowed.
We’re fortunate not to have to live like that. However, after Anders Behring Breivik committed his massacre back in the summer of 2011, we were subjected to the glare of publicity for a few months. That was our fifteen minutes in the spotlight, and I’m glad they’re over with. During those evil days we had seven or eight times as many visitors as usual, and it wasn’t the kind of traffic we ever wanted to see.
I was inadvertently reminded of all that when I read an op-ed written by Stephen Glover for The Daily Mail a couple of days ago:
Wind the clock back, and there are historical parallels to be found at the siege of Vienna in 1683. Then, Islamic forces were on the verge of overrunning Christian Europe, with rampaging Ottoman troops standing on the banks of the Danube. In the end, the Poles came to the aid of the Austrians, and Vienna was saved.
More than three centuries later, a new Islamist threat — crueller and infinitely more nihilistic than the Ottomans — stands at the gates of Europe. The psychopaths of Islamic State are besieging Kobani on the Turkish-Syrian border. Almost everyone expects the town to fall.
Although most of Turkey is in Asia, about ten per cent of its population lives in the part of the country that lies in Europe. No one is suggesting that IS would dare to invade Turkey — at least, not yet. My point is only that the killing machine is much closer to home than most people think.
And whereas an effective alliance was eventually fashioned out of squabbling nations to defend Europe against the Ottomans, there seems no prospect of assembling a coalition to drive back IS in Syria and Northern Iraq. The Western powers are ineffectual, Turkey stands aside, and Middle-Eastern nations are hopelessly divided. [emphasis added]
Note the phrase “overrunning Christian Europe”, which is not all that common. In fact, it’s almost proprietary to Gates of Vienna — I coined it myself ten years ago for the first post on this blog: “At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.”
Just out of curiosity I googled “overrun Christian Europe” (including the quote marks) to see what turned up. Sure enough, the first three or four pages of results were all from Gates of Vienna, or references to GoV. So I think we can safely say this Glover fellow picked at least some of his ideas up from us.
While doing that googling, I found an interesting article from CNN that I hadn’t seen before, dated July 27, 2011 and entitled “Suspect admired bloggers who believe Europe is drowning in Muslims”:
The blogs and websites Breivik enthused about were pro-American and pro-Israel, extremely hostile to Islam and despairing that the European political elite would ever see the error of its liberal multicultural outlook.
One such site is Gates of Vienna, whose banner reads: “At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.”
Breivik’s digital footprint Breivik regularly applauded a writer who goes by the name of Fjordman on the site, one of whose contributions, from 2007, reads: “When the Swedish welfare state collapses, the immigrants who lose their payments will have to go somewhere. Denmark will probably be fairly successful at keeping them out. A lot of them will migrate to Norway, some will move to Germany and the Netherlands, and some will probably end up in Eastern Europe.”
Breivik also praised Fjordman’s book, “Defeating Eurabia,” describing it as “the perfect Christmas gift for family and friends.”
The reason I hadn’t found it before was that it quoted us, but didn’t include a link. Reading it more than three years later brought back that ghastly time, the late summer of 2011. Fjordman was in hiding, comments on our blog had been closed, and journalists in Sweden, Norway, and Britain were contacting me, trying to persuade me to talk to them (I didn’t).
The situation has improved since then. Breivik has been tried and imprisoned, and Fjordman has written a book about the trial that will be published fairly soon. The New York Times, CNN, and British and Norwegian newspapers are no longer interested in Gates of Vienna.
And Anders Behring Breivik has repudiated the Counterjihad. He admitted in a letter sent to various press outlets that he never had any real interest in Fjordman or Jihad Watch or Gates of Vienna — it was all a ruse to deflect attention away from his real friends, the neo-Nazis.
Breivik’s purported affiliation with us was big news back in July 2011. But his recantation of that affiliation merited no mention at all in any major news outlet. They had their Narrative, and that’s what they were sticking to.
And that’s what I expected. After all, anything else would have brought them too close to the Third Rail.
On Saturday our generous donors hailed from:
Stateside: Florida, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia
Near Abroad: Canada
Far Abroad: Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK
Thank you all for your willingness to donate to the Autumn Fundraiser of 2014. I’ll post the wrap-up sometime tomorrow.
The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup on our sidebar, or the donate button, on the main page. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button.
The photo at the top of this post is from the New York City Municipal Archives.
Hat tip for the Mail piece: Nick.
They will invade Turkey!
And lose one of their best friends?
Autumn fundraiser
for Gaza
“Palestine authorities” say they need 4 billion USD to rebuild Gaza, and the usual donors are willingly agreeing to give away these billions, first and foremost the UN, the EU and Qatar, even though a country like France would more likely need the money itself to avoid bankruptcy.
I still can’t wrap my brain around the dhimmitude of the media and the Western Left. Are they asleep? Are they all cowards? Have they all become so attached to their “America is Evil” narrative that they can’t wake up? Several patriots on line have expressed the hope that the beheading photos will finally wake up the leftists, but if 9/11 didn’t do it, then why would a few beheading photos.
And the oozing sores of our Southern border and our insane immigration policy continue to import these “students” and “Dreamers”.
What will wake them up?
Nothing will wake them up. Judenlieber. They have no idea they’re sleep-walking and they think people like you and I are nutz. We are rabid & phobic & in need of “care”. I learned that much from the sputteringly vile emails aimed at us from some Swedish academics. They were outraged that we’d closed comments thereby preventing them from fulminating here while Fjordman was free to come on and say whatever he wanted. It wasn’t “fair”. We didn’t practice free speech, etc. Some of the correspondence was weirdly salacious.
In the latest Breivik news, ABB told his daddy – via public channels, of course – that daddy can’t come ’round the jail no more…unless he becomes a fascist first.
http://www.thelocal.no/20140917/anders-behring-breivik-denies-father-visit-unless-he-becomes-a-fascist
Meanwhile, this sperm donor is writing his own book about his son, probably titled Oh How Did I Fail? Mea Culpa, etc.
Daddy is already planning media interviews to discuss his immoral twaddle – his lack of integrity or gravitas won’t even register on the skewed scales of Norwegian “justice” so the MSM are salivating at the chance to draw big audiences interviewing this moral midget.
But have no fear: in the book there will be enough self-serving peeks into his relationship with ABB’s mother to satisfy that strange Norwegian morality. Will he tell them all if he ever supported his son’s mother or played even a small supporting role in ABB’s life as a child? Will he explain his son’s aberrant behavior? Will he reveal ABB’s mother’s relationship to her deeply damaged son?
You can be sure Papa will have enough salacious material about Fjordman, whom he has never met and doesn’t know, to push his sales up enough to make a modest killing. I hope he gets an equitable rate of return on this literary effort to match the investment of time, money and concern he made in his son during that boy’s formative years.
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Parents are not to blame for the sins of their adult children. Even with 20/20 hindsight none of us can say with any certainty what happened if our children shatter. But we don’t raise them in a cultural vacuum either, nor do we necessarily have the wherewithal to care for them when we can’t get the authorities to listen to our gut feeling that something is wrong.
Creigh Deeds is a state senator in Virginia. A Democrat, Deeds is respected by both sides of the political divide as a man of integrity. His son, Gus, began to show signs of things going awry even while he was on the Dean’s List at the College of William and Mary…Gus’ “problems” were well-known within the small universe of Virginia politics where families know one another and where information gets around. The gossip about Gus was a kind of worried murmur w/ lots of second-guessing.
Here is part of Creigh Deeds’ interview with 60 Minutes:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-sen-recounts-mentally-ill-son-attacking-him/
Only a parent with a mentally ill child can begin to fathom where this grieving father visits and re-visits, asking “what if”. The Nightmare Place.
I wonder if Breivik’s father goes there?
“Parents are not to blame for the sins of their adult children”. That’s a big can of worms, Dymphna, as I’m sure you know, maybe better than myself who had a good set of parents.
In possibly my favourite film, “A Matter of Life and Death” (“Stairway to Heaven” in the US; apparently American audiences even in 1946 were thought incapable of dealing with death), in the trial in heaven, prosecutor Abraham Farlan (the magnificent Raymond Massey) says, “We are all as God made us, Sir, but our ancestors had a good deal in the shaping”. Same dilemma, differently expressed.