See the article by Paul Belien in the Brussels Journal.

Will everyone please pay attention to the Wilders phenomenon? It is a huge issue, whether a leading national politician can be thrown in jail for saying that Islam is an enemy to civilization, and there is no defence possible under Dutch law? Except by taking over the government, that is.

Note: this is a Minister of the Crown, the Labour Minister for the Environment.

For more on this, read here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/7333470/The-infiltration-of-Labour.html

I am NOT making this up!

Also, more interesting is the report of this by Hizb ut-Tahir, the Liberation Party.

In fact, spend some time on http://www.hizb.org.uk/hizb/

Everything said by Gates of Vienna and like minded anti-Islamic sites seems simply the recitation of facts. They mean to do us in.

UPDATE

“Dispatches” on Britain’s Channel 4 tackles the issue directly in its latest episode, examining how the Islamic Forum of Europe has been infiltrating municipal government in London and redirecting public monies to its jihadist front groups.

Put simply, the situation is as bad as you thought.

http://www.rights.no/publisher/publisher.asp?id=59&tekstid=3259

The Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) emphasizes that a general and public use of such scanners is against the teachings of Islam, natural law and all religions and cultures that stand for decency and modesty,” the group said in a Feb. 10 statement posted at Islam Online.

And the solution proposed  by these sultans of security?

FCNA is asking for changes in scanner software so the machines will produce only body outlines.

Because then, of course, you could really detect the explosive underwear, shoes or other shahid-friendly accoutrements of passengers.

H/T Five Feet of Fury

Geert Wilders is the Dutch politician who is saying Islam is violent. He is on trial in the Netherlands right now. Read all about it.

My recent conversations with European lefties in various forums have convinced me that Europe is far gone into cultural dissolution.

But the final irony is that many of the detainees may not even want to be transferred to Thomson and could conceivably even raise their own legal roadblocks to allow them to stay at Gitmo.

Falkoff notes that many of his clients, while they clearly want to go home, are at least being held under Geneva Convention conditions in Guantánamo. At Thomson, he notes, the plans call for them to be thrown into the equivalent of a “supermax” security prison under near-lockdown conditions.

“As far as our clients are concerned, it’s probably preferable for them to remain at Guantánamo,” he says.

That is not the first time that the detainees at Gitmo have basked in tropical comforts.  A Slate report in 2003 noted this.

Is America the only country in the world that could run a prison camp where prisoners gain weight? Between April 2002 and March 2003, the Joint Task Force returned to Afghanistan 19 of the approximately 664 men (from 42 countries) who have been held in the detention camps at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay. Upon leaving, it has been reported, each man received two parting gifts: a brand new copy of the Koran as well as a new pair of jeans. Not the act of generosity that it might first appear, the jeans, at least, turned out to be a necessity. During their stay (14-months on average), the detainees (nearly all of them) had gained an average of 13 pounds.

A 2006 ABC report noticed the same.

Fueled by a high-calorie diet, detainees at Guantanamo Bay are becoming fat.

Most of the prisoners arrived at the military prison in southeast Cuba slightly underweight but have since gained an average of 20 pounds (9 kilograms), and most are now “normal to mildly overweight or mildly obese,” Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, spokesman for the detention facilities, said Monday.

One detainee’s weight has almost doubled to 410 pounds (186 kilograms), Durand said.

The only upside BBC editors can expect from their shameful behaviour is that the jihadis will slit their throats last.

Free speech

The campaign waged by Ezra Levant in Canada against the speech control fanatics at Human Rights Commissions has been successful. The blogosphere rose in defence of Ezra but he made it work, by patiently devoting himself to de-legitiizing them. Later, the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench joined in the de-legitimization by roundly castigating the idiotic decision of Lori Andreachuk, the Alberta Human Rights Commissioner in the Stephen Boisson case.

Vigorous Nationalism

The nationalist cultural policy first came to light in the Herouxville Declaration, a statement made in 2007 by a small Quebec town’s aldermen and mayor that this is a Christian country, we eat pigs and we don’t treat our women like slaves. If you read it, you will find it surprizingly liberal in tone, but it appeared at a time when it was considered dangerous and provocative to herald Canadian social values, so uptight had everyone become with Muslim cultural intimidation.

In November 2009 the Canadian federal government has issued a citizenship statement which candidly rejects the more obnoxious aspects of Muslim culture as criminal.

One of the principal effects of the Harper regime in this country has been to restore a sense that there is a Canadian nation and it has values worth fighting for. The Afghanistan commitment has sharpened everyone’s thinking considerably. Jonathan Kay captured this well in his recent NatPost article.

Climategate

What a Christmas gift! Imagine that one could have run an experiment in 1917 on communism. Lenin tries it for a few years and then announces that Friedrich Hayek is right: prices are a form of information feedback, so that socialism will have to be built on the basis of taxes on real private sector income, which the government will now accept as legitimate. Imagine how many millions of lives would have been saved in the 20h century if communists had relented in their fanatic destruction of civilization.

Likewise with man-made climate change. Imagine that the world was about to launch on a path of forced income transfers worth trillions of dollars through a United Nations bureaucracy, totally unaccountable to electors, when it was discovered that the basis of the transfers. the moral claim of legitimacy, was completely disproven. Even in the bubble in which cabinet ministers live, it must have been evident that the doubts about man-made climate change through carbon dioxide emissions were not the mere hand waving of crank dissenters, but represented a serious claim.

For those of us more familiar with the climategate “science” , the whole thing is a commie rat. A massive swindle has been exposed. This was the triumph of 2009 for all mankind.

Communism’s second great surge was rolled back, just in time. Halleluyah!

I join with Arran Gold, Duggan’s Dew, Tobermory, Oban, Glendronach, and the barrelstrength team to wish you a happy and prosperous 2010.

The man said he was directed by al Qaeda to explode a small device in flight, over U.S. soil, ABC News has learned. Authorities have no corroboration of that information, and the credibility of the suspect’s statements are being questioned, officials said.

The suspect was identified as Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, who according to federal documents is an engineering student at University College of London.

He was flying from Nigeria to the United States for a religious ceremony, according to his entry visa, which was issued June 16, 2008 and was good until June 12, 2010.

It is indeed fortunate that the attempt was thwarted because of incompetence, but weren’t all these terrorist attacks by Muslims suppose to be history after Obama’s World Apology Tour which included “A New Beginning” speech, aka “The Islam mythologies in the Cairo Speech“, and a statement that the US “is not at war with Islam” in Turkey?  Wasn’t Obama bowing to the Saudi king enough?

Update – Mission Accomplished?

On Dec 22nd Murtha stated the following.

U.S. Rep. John Murtha told reporters Tuesday that he isn’t convinced al-Qaida is still a threat to national security.

Murtha said he visited Kuwait and Afghanistan during Thanksgiving and approves of the military’s strategy, but expressed a need to measure progress in Afghanistan.

“I don’t agree there is a threat to national security,” Murtha said, while not ruling out the possibility that he could be wrong about al-Qaida’s influence. “They keep saying they’ve defeated al-Qaida.”

It seems Murtha is competing with Biden for the title of the resident idiot within the Democratic party.

It all started with listening to Iris Dement singing confessional protestant hymns. Her religion is a deeply personal encounter with Jesus. She sings in an accent so hillbilly it seems unchanged from when her ancestors left the lowlands of Scotland in the 1730s. She is an artist of surpassing power, and ranks with the best female artists we listen to, not excepting opera stars. This led us to a discussion of religion,and the difference between this highly personal encounter with Jesus religion and what Oban calls “state atheism”, namely, the Anglican Church.

Oban – Whenever you go into a real church, you see plaques listing the war dead on the wall. I don’t look at the cross. I look at the plaques commemorating the war dead. That is my religion. Real religion teaches you that you may be called upon to die in the defence of your country, for the maintenance of civilization.

Dalwhinnie – (accompanied by table pounding) – Oban, that is the most Tory thing I have heard in my life! Bravo! But clearly that is what religion is for those of us raised in institutional and establishment religion. But how are we going to deal with the Islamic thing, in that case, because according to them, any ten guys who haven’t been laid in six months have a right to wage war against the surrounding society? Not just go out and get drunk and puke in the streets, but to plant bombs on buses and kill lots of people.

Oban – I agree that this war-making tendency is a fact of Islamic life. But if they make war without the authority of the state, the result will be so disorganized that it is a recipe for societal failure. And indeed, their propensity to wage ceaseless war on all concerned is why they are so backward.

Dalwhinnie – Agreed. But, what if societal failure were a self-reinforcing state? What if a society could function at the Islamic dysfunctional level forever? I see no sign that Islamic societies are reforming out of their dysfunctionality after a thousand years of Islam. In fact the dysfunctionality seems to be intensifying.

Oban – The overwhelming attraction of Western society is that it gives vastly greater pleasure to its participants. At the basic level of sex, western men have more orgasms with better partners. Islam cannot offer this. All it can offer is repression.

Dalwhinnie – The attraction seems to be highly resistible. Children of Islamic immigrants tend to wall themselves off from the outer society more than their parents.

Oban – I think you are underestimating the huge and overwhelming attractiveness of Western society for all people. It is so much better than anything Islamic societies have developed for themselves. And if the young jihadists do become a problem, I think we can roll over and crush them.

Dalwhinnie – Nothing I have read about the invasion of Europe by Muslims, the increasing presence of no-go zones for police and firemen, the use of human rights law to prevent any free expression of distaste for Muslim social practices, the supine passivity of European political leadership, the use of welfare to support a stagnant population of slackers, the sexual self-isolation, the attacks upon European Christian women, suggest that there has been any change in Islamic behaviour. Any tens guys who feel pissed off have the right and duty to wage war against the surrounding infidels, and they do.

Oban – I think you underestimate the assimilating powers of western civilization. It is a much better offer.

____________________________

And that, folks, was what I can recall to tell you. Debate continued until it was time to go home. An excellent exchange was had.

“Explaiing his reasons for dismissing the case, he said Mrs Tazi’s claim that she was verbally attacked by the couple for up to an hour had not been borne out by other prosecution witnesses, who suggested that any discussions lasted around seven minutes.”

By sending additional 30,000 troops and then promising to start withdrawing them in July 2011, Obama will accomplish precisely what he has accomplished before in his political career – nothing.  Troops are not enough to be effective and a withdrawal date provides Taliban with a date to use in strategic planning of their campaign.  Completely missing from his speech was the word “victory” which encapsulates his entire thought process.  Of course it is entirely possible that Obama will change his plans, as he has done before, but for now it seems he has safely punted the ball after the mid-term elections, due next year.

-the result looks likely to sully the country’s image abroad

-the vote represented a triumph for the far right Swiss People’s Party

-the vote also reflected an act of mass defiance of the national establishment

Well, what else would they say? That it was a triumph of the ordinary white Christian Swiss who says he wants to live in a white Christian country? And moreover, have a say on the direction of his own country’s basic nature? No, the Guardian could never say that. That would be….. wait a minute…. uh, racist!!

From an AP report:

“The nationalist Swiss People’s party (SPP) described minarets, the distinctive spires used in most countries for calls to prayer, as symbols of rising Muslim political and religious power that could eventually turn Switzerland into an Islamic nation.

“Muslims make up about 6% of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people, many of them refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Fewer than 13% practice their religion, the government says, and Swiss mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.”

I seem to recall a Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, who  had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”

  Maybe someone listened to him.

PS: It should be noted that Switzerland is a republic, not a disguised monarchy, and that voter initiatives are allowed.  That would explain the difference between Switzerland, say, and Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and so forth.