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Jeff Sessions and Hillary Clinton React to Brexit

June 24, 2016

Jeff Sessions and Hillary Clinton React to Brexit, Power Line, John Hinderaker, June 24, 2016

Senator Jeff Sessions released a statement on yesterday’s Brexit vote. As usual, Sessions has his finger on the pulse:

[The people’s] strong vote arose not out of fear and pique but out of love for country and pride of place. Their experience with a distant government in Brussels was given a long and fair chance to succeed. In the end, however, they concluded that the costs outweighed the benefits. …

Now it’s our time. The period of the nation state has not ended. No far off global government or union can command the loyalty of a people like their own country. Vague unions have no ability to call on the people to sacrifice for the common good. They seem incapable of making decisions and when they do, they have difficulty executing the decision.
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In negotiations and relationships, national leaders should first ensure they have protected the safety and legitimate interests of their own people. This principle has been eroded and Brexit is a warning for America. Our British friends have sent the message loud and clear.

The interests of powerful international corporations, media, special interests, and leftist international forces are not coterminous with those of our people. This we must understand. The ultimate interest that our government is legally and morally bound to serve is that of our people.

Just as in the U.K., our November presidential election presents a stark contrast. The establishment forces, the global powers, are promoting their values and their interests. They want to erode borders, rapidly open America’s markets to foreign produced goods, while having little interest in advancing America’s ability to sell abroad. These forces have zero interest in better job opportunities and higher wages for our citizens.

It has been known for years that the European Union has often served as a barrier to its members taking action that would serve their own interests. Perhaps nothing proves this more definitively than the current migrant crisis, where the EU has clearly been part of the problem, not the solution.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, had this to say:

Hillary Clinton foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan said on a conference call Friday that Clinton “doesn’t believe Americans are isolationist” and that the results of Britain’s Brexit vote will not affect the outcome of the American presidential election.

Huh? What does standing up for British sovereignty have to do with being isolationist? If you don’t want to be ruled by unelected bureaucrats, you’re an isolationist? If you don’t want your country’s borders to be dissolved by unlimited immigration, you’re an isolationist?

As is so often the case, it is hard to tell whether Hillary is clueless or disingenuous. Or both.

Categories: 2016 elections, BREXIT, Britain, European Union, Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions
Tags: BREXIT, Britain, European Union, Jeff Sessions

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How Brexit will Change America and the World

June 24, 2016

How Brexit will Change America and the World, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 24, 2016

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During Obama’s first year in office, Count Von Rompuy grandly declared that “2009 is also the first year of global governance.” Like many such predictions, it proved to be dangerously wrong. And now it may just well be that 2016 will be the first year of the decline and fall of global governance.

The power of the establishment is illusory. Like the naked emperor, it depends on no one challenging it. The harder it is challenged, the harder it will fall. Brexit was an impossible dream. Then it was reality.

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Yesterday the British people stood up for their freedom. Today the world is a different place.

Celebrities and politicians swarmed television studios to plead with voters to stay in the EU. Anyone who wanted to leave was a fascist. Economists warned of total collapse if Britain left the European Union. Alarmist broadcasts threatened that every family would lose thousands of pounds a year if Brexit won.

Even Obama came out to warn Brits of the economic consequences of leaving behind the EU.

Every propaganda gimmick was rolled out. Brexit was dismissed, mocked and ridiculed. It was for lunatics and madmen. Anyone who voted to leave the benevolent bosom of the European Union was an ignorant xenophobe who had no place in the modern world. And that turned out to be most of Britain.

While Londonistan, that post-British city of high financial stakes and low Muslim mobs, voted by a landslide to remain, a decisive majority of the English voted to wave goodbye to the EU. 67% of Tower Hamlets, the Islamic stronghold, voted to stay in the EU. But to no avail. The will of the people prevailed.

And the people did not want migrant rape mobs in their streets and Muslim massacres in their pubs. They were tired of Afghani migrants living in posh homes with their four wives while they worked hard and sick of seeing their daughters passed around by “Asian” cabbies from Pakistan in ways utterly indistinguishable from the ISIS slave trade while the police looked the other way so as not to appear racist. And, most of all, they were sick of the entire Eurocratic establishment that let it all happen.

British voters chose freedom. They decided to reclaim their destiny and their nation from the likes of Count Herman Von Rompuy, the former President of the European Council, selected at an “informal” meeting who has opposed direct elections for his job and insisted that, “the word of the future is union.”

When Nigel Farage of UKIP told Count Von Rompuy that “I can speak on behalf of the majority of British people in saying that we don’t know you, we don’t want you and the sooner you are put out to grass, the better,” he was fined for it by the Bureau of the European Parliament after refusing to apologize. But now it’s Farage and the Independence Party who have had the last laugh.

The majority of British people didn’t want Count Von Rompuy and his million-dollar pension, or Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and the rest of the monkeys squatting on Britain’s back.

Count Von Rompuy has lost his British provinces. And the British people have their nation back.

The word of the future isn’t “union.” It’s “freedom.” A process has begun that will not end in Britain. It will spread around the world liberating nations from multinational institutions.

During Obama’s first year in office, Count Von Rompuy grandly declared that “2009 is also the first year of global governance.” Like many such predictions, it proved to be dangerously wrong. And now it may just well be that 2016 will be the first year of the decline and fall of global governance.

An anti-establishment wind is blowing through the creaky house of global government. The peoples of the free world have seen how the choking mass of multilateral institutions failed them economically and politically. Global government is an expensive and totalitarian proposition that silences free speech and funnels rapists from Syria, Sudan and Afghanistan to the streets of European cities and American towns. It’s a boon for professional consultants, certain financial insiders and politicians who can hop around unelected offices and retire with vast unearned pensions while their constituents are told to work another decade. But global government is misery and malaise for everyone else.

The campaign to stay in the EU relied on fear and alarmism, on claims of bigotry and disdain for the working class voters who fought and won the right to decide their own destiny. But the campaign for independence asked Britons to believe in their own potential when unchained from the Eurocratic bureaucracy. And now Brexit will become a model for liberation campaigns across Europe.

And it will not end there.

Brexit showed that it is possible for a great nation to defy its leaders and its establishment thinkers to throw off its multinational chains. And while the European Union is one of the biggest prisons forged by global government, it is far from the only one. America and Britain are sleeping giants covered in the cold iron links of multinational organizations that limit their strength and their potential.

It is time to break those chains.

Americans who want to cut their ties with the United Nations have found Brexit inspiring. Leaving the UK was once also seen as a ridiculous idea at the margins that could never be taken seriously. Serious politicians refused to listen to it. Serious thinkers refused to discuss it. And then it gathered speed.

There is growing opposition even among Democrats to treaties like the TPP. Trump has challenged NAFTA. Americans across the political spectrum are suspicious of economic treaties and organizations. Support for Brexit came from Labour areas in the UK. Support for Trump’s challenge to multinational treaties and alliances could very well come from unexpected places, like Bernie Sanders backers.

Brexit has shown us the weakness of the multinational establishment. Its vast bureaucratic power rests on using the media to suppress political dissent. When the media’s special pleading fails to stop the democratic process, it is more helpless than any dictator when the outraged mob pours into his palace.

What was true of Britain, is also true of America. Our elites are just as impotent. The power they have illegally seized is defended zealously by a media palace guard that spends every minute of every day lecturing, hectoring and messaging Americans. But when no one listens to the media, then the men and women who run our lives, who feed off us like a colony of parasitic insects, are helpless.

Their power is purely persuasive. When we stop listening, then we are free.

That is the lesson of Brexit. It is the future.

The future is not a vast behemoth of global government that swallows up nations and individuals, that reduces democratic elections to a joke and eliminates freedom of speech, but the individual. The elites have gambled everything on big government, big media and big data. But all of those lost to Brexit.

They lost to Brexit in the UK. They can lose in the US too. And they will lose.

The power of the establishment is illusory. Like the naked emperor, it depends on no one challenging it. The harder it is challenged, the harder it will fall. Brexit was an impossible dream. Then it was reality.

Our impossible dreams, the policies that conservatives are told by the establishment are not even worth talking about, can be just as real as Brexit.

If we are willing to fight for them.

Categories: BREXIT, Britain, Establishment, Globalists, Islamic invasion, U.S. politics
Tags: BREXIT, Britain, Establishment, Globalists, Islamic invasion, U.S. politics

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Populist Anger Upends Politics on Both Sides of the Atlantic

June 24, 2016

Populist Anger Upends Politics on Both Sides of the Atlantic, New York Times, Jim Yardley, June 24, 2016

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Outside the Houses of Parliament in London on Friday. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Time and again, the European Union has navigated political crises during the past decade with a Whac-a-Mole response that has maintained the status quo and the bloc’s lumbering forward momentum toward greater integration — without directly confronting the roiling public discontent beneath the surface.

“There is a very widespread rejection of politics everywhere. There is a similar mood in the United States, an antipolitical sentiment.”

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LONDON — From Brussels to Berlin to Washington, leaders of the Western democratic world awoke Friday morning to a blunt, once-unthinkable rebuke delivered by the flinty citizens of a small island nation in the North Atlantic. Populist anger against the established political order had finally boiled over.

The British had rebelled.

Their stunning vote to leave the European Union presents a political, economic and existential crisis for a bloc already reeling from entrenched problems. But the thumb-in-your-eye message is hardly limited to Britain. The same yawning gap between the elite and mass opinion is fueling a populist backlash in Austria, France, Germany and elsewhere on the Continent — as well as in the United States.

The symbolism of trans-Atlantic insurrection was rich on Friday: Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and embodiment of American fury, happened to be visiting Britain.

“Basically, they took back their country,” Mr. Trump said Friday morning from Scotland, where he was promoting his golf courses. “That’s a good thing.”

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Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for president, arriving at his Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland on Friday. Credit Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Asked where public anger was greatest, Mr. Trump said: “U.K. U.S. There’s plenty of other places. This will not be the last.”

Even as the European Union began to grapple with a new and potentially destabilizing period of political uncertainty, the British vote also will inevitably be seized upon as further evidence of deepening public unease with the global economic order. Globalization and economic liberalization have produced winners and losers — and the big “Leave” vote in economically stagnant regions of Britain suggests that many of those who have lost out are fed up.

Time and again, the European Union has navigated political crises during the past decade with a Whac-a-Mole response that has maintained the status quo and the bloc’s lumbering forward momentum toward greater integration — without directly confronting the roiling public discontent beneath the surface.

But now the question is whether the dam has broken: Before breakfast on Friday, anti-Europe leaders in France and the Netherlands were rejoicing and demanding similar referendums on European Union membership.

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Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels on Friday. Credit John Thys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Victory for liberty!” declared the far-right French leader Marine Le Pen, writing on Twitter, who changed her profile picture to an image of the Union Jack.

It is not clear whether the message is getting through to more establishment leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, or what lessons they are taking from the shock of the British exit.

Perhaps the liberal Democrats in the House who staged a clamorous sit-in Wednesday night in Washington, while part of the system themselves, were channeling the populist anger of the American left in their willingness to break the rules to make a point about the need for gun control. In Brussels, many member governments appear divided between an instinct to respond to the British referendum vote by driving for greater integration among Germany, France and other core members of the bloc and a willingness to moderate their ambitions in recognition of public opposition.

European leaders were under pressure to reassure the European public, and the world, that the bloc was not at risk of unraveling. For decades, the European Union had moved forward, always expanding in size and influence. Britain has now reversed that trend.

“We’re completely in uncharted territory,” said Hans Kundnani, a Berlin-based expert in European politics at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Mr. Kundnani said the British vote exposed a contradiction at the core of the European project. European leaders define success as steering member states toward greater political and economic integration. And many of the bloc’s inefficiencies and dysfunctions can be traced to the unfinished work of strengthening European institutions and achieving greater integration between member states in areas such as banking, finance, security and defense.

But public opinion is deeply skeptical of this “more Europe” agenda. Far-right populist leaders have stoked public anxieties and resurgent nationalism by lashing out against immigrants, while portraying the European capital, Brussels, as a bastion of political elites out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. Far-left populists have demanded a re-examination of the neoliberal economics of free trade and limited regulation, while resisting efforts to deconstruct the social democratic welfare state.

“The E.U. robs us of our money, our identity, our democracy, our sovereignty,” said Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom. “The elites want more E.U. They think they know better than the people. They look down on the people and want to decide in their place. They want us to be ruled by undemocratic, unaccountable bureaucrats in a faraway place like Brussels.”

And permeating everything is the weak Continental economy and the crippling debt burden across Southern Europe.

“The E.U. is kind of trapped,” Mr. Kundnani said. “On the one hand, the instinct will be to move ahead with further integration and reassure the rest of the world that the European Union is not unraveling. But that is very difficult because of the fault lines that exist.”

He added: “They are trapped because moving ahead is very difficult. Moving backwards is the last thing they want to do. And the status quo is unsustainable.”

Britain has always been a skeptical member of the European household. During the 1990s, Britain chose to keep the pound and not to join the countries sharing a common European currency, the euro. Many of the British concerns about the euro proved true, undermining the bloc’s credibility, even as Britain has remained mostly insulated against the Continent’s still unresolved euro crisis.

Before the referendum, some European officials portrayed Britain as an idiosyncratic case that should not be seen as a bellwether for the Continent. But that is a hard argument to make. In France, Ms. Le Pen’s far-right National Front party is experiencing steadily rising popularity as the country prepares for national elections next year. In Germany, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany polled strongly in recent state elections.

Right-wing leaders in Hungary and Poland are hostile to immigrants, while critics say the governments of those countries are also rewriting national laws to undermine democratic checks and balances. In Italy, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement scored major victories last Sunday by winning mayoral elections in Turin and, more important, in the capital, Rome.

Donald Tusk, one of the European Union’s top leaders, has started to talk about the risks facing the political establishment. At a speech last month before Europe’s coalition of center-right political parties, Mr. Tusk cautioned his fellow political elites.

“Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our euro-enthusiasm,” said Mr. Tusk, the president of the European Council, which comprises the heads of state of all the 28 member states in the bloc. “Disillusioned with great visions of the future, they demand that we cope with the present reality better than we have been doing until now.”

Yet taking action may be difficult, since most analysts say the European Union is paralyzed by the coming national elections in 2017 in France and Germany, the two most powerful countries in the bloc. Neither the French nor the German government is eager to endorse sweeping initiatives for more European integration before the elections out of fear of a populist whipping at the polls.

“Europe is very divided and the main European country, Germany, has no will or skills to lead the union — and is approaching important national elections,” said Lucio Caracciolo, the editor of the Italian geopolitical magazine Limes. “France is a country in crisis, while Italy has its own problems. I can’t see who would assume a European leadership capable of producing a deeper integration process.”

He added: “There is a very widespread rejection of politics everywhere. There is a similar mood in the United States, an antipolitical sentiment.”

Few industries in Britain are likely to be more directly hit than the financial services industry in London. Damon Hoff, a hedge fund manager, said that he had voted to stay in the European Union, but that he understood the sentiments of those who had voted to leave.

“Europeans don’t feel more prosperous,” he said. “Europeans don’t feel more empowered. And certainly the British don’t.”

He added: “You want to be part of something that continuously evolves. Does the European Union feel like it is evolving? No.”

Categories: 2016 elections, BREXIT, Britain, Donald Trump, Establishment, Europe, European Union, Islamic invasion, U.S. politics
Tags: BREXIT, Britain, Donald Trump, Establishment, Europe, European Union, Islamic invasion, U.S. politics

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The rout of the globalists

June 24, 2016

The rout of the globalists, American Thinker, Patricia McCarthy, June 24, 2016

Brexit prevailed and our globalist elites are shocked! The rest of us are shocked that they are shocked. The elites of the globalist world are shocked by the candidacy of Donald Trump. What is wrong with this picture? It is a loud shout-out re: the willful blindness of those globalist elites…like Cameron, Obama, Kerry, etc. Obama threatened the Brits: if they voted for Brexit, they would “go to the end of the queue.” What a thug our misguided President is – and an ignorant one at that. The Brits just gave Obama the back of their hand.

None of the UK toffs, or the American lib elites thought this would happen. How fun to see them so discombobulated. But who on earth could believe the people of the Britain could possibly be happy with what has happened to their country? They have been overrun by immigrants from vastly different cultures who demand and get submission to their religious mandates.They are being out-populated by the birthrates of those immigrants. Entire neighborhoods are now governed by Sharia law. British citizens are daily victimized by the few but venal among those immigrants. And still, the elites of the world believed that the UK would vote to stay in the EU! Can there be any question about the cluelessness of our self-regarded betters?

People who have been taught to feel entitled want free stuff from the people who earn what they desire. Poor economies feel entitled to the perks that productive nations produce. Greece thought, once it became a member of the EU, that it could spend like Britain and now they are both broke and in debt, (Greek debt, $351b, UK debt $1.6 t) like the US (US debt, $19t). Obama has doubled our debt. American taxpayers are his ATM just like they were for the Clintons and will be again if Hillary is elected.

Cameron has come forward to resign. He backed the wrong horse. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Was this subterfuge? Did he really support the Remain camp? Will he be coddled into staying in office? London, wholly in the Remain camp, is like NY, SF, LA and DC; bubbles like the one Pauline Kael inhabited when she was so shocked that Nixon had won and she knew no one who had voted for him. Like NY, SF, LA and DC, it is the wealthy and powerful elites who are so, so willing to surrender their rights, their freedoms and their country’s sovereignty to be politically correct. Support the Islamists, trash the Christians; Orlando was about guns, not terrorism. Give us a break!

We have been sold down the river by members of some elite, juvenile fraternity of submission to nonsense. Radical Islamists submit themselves to an utterly, brutal, murderous unreformed “faith.” The Orlando shooter is a perfect example of what submission hath wrought. The dems who staged that silly sit-in about guns are a laughingstock to all Americans who actually pay attention to facts and reality.

The Left’s response to Orlando is an hysterical defense of Islam and an even more hysterical move to repeal the Second Amendment . Who are these people? If Brexit is not a wake-up call for Americans, then we are truly mind-numbed. Trump may be a jerk but he is not Hillary. She is America’s version of the UK elite, ready to sell us out for the deadly imposition of political correctness. Think before you vote. Our lives and the future of this once great nation depend upon who is elected in November.

Categories: BREXIT, Britain, Economy, Globalists, Islamic invasion, US politics
Tags: BREXIT, Britain, Economy, Globalists, Islamic invasion, US politics

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Brexit Vote Has Huge Ramifications for U.S. Politics

June 24, 2016

Brexit Vote Has Huge Ramifications for U.S. Politics, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, June 23, 2016

(Amen! — DM)

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A bubble has broken, but it isn’t a stock bubble. It’s a human bubble consisting of elites who seek to govern in a manner not all that distant from Comrade Lenin, just hiding under a phony mask of bureaucratic democracy. They’ve taken a big body blow from the citizens of England. Churchill would be proud. Time for America to follow suit.

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News flash: The revolt against elites is real in the UK and America and it’s only getting started. Maybe there will always be an England.

In a surprise, Leave won the Brexit referendum on whether to stay in the European Union by an equally surprising amount. British sovereignty won. David Cameron lost. Jeremy Corbyn lost. The EU lost. Bureaucrats lost. Angela Merkel lost. Barack Obama lost. Globalism lost. Authority figures almost everywhere lost. And, most of all, unlimited immigration lost.

So what happened to the vaunted British betting market that is almost invariably correct and was predicting by 80 percent a Remain victory? Or all those recent polls that were tilting Remain?

Answer: Those same elites had convinced each other they would win and therefore convinced the usual suspects—media, pollsters and, sadly, financial markets—that they were right. They were wrong. Watching them now on the BBC they still cannot comprehend what has happened. The peasants have revolted—oh no, oh no. There must be some mistake. Didn’t they get the memo? The sky would fall if they left the EU.

Earth to elites: Citizens of truly democratic countries don’t want unlimited immigration into their countries by people who couldn’t be less interested in democracy. They also don’t want to be governed by the rules and regulations of faceless bureaucrats whose not-so-hidden goals are power and riches for themselves and their friends. Simple, isn’t it?

This vote is of immense help to Donald Trump if he is smart enough to seize it properly and doesn’t bobble the ball. Many, probably most, Americans feel exactly the same as their brothers and sisters across the pond. They despise the same elites and want to save their country. Trump, now fortuitously in Scotland (I know—they voted Remain, but not in the numbers they were supposed to), should show his support. The UK is America’s closest ally. We should be the first to extend a hand, negotiate free trade, etc., and get her rolling again.

That most elite of presidents, Barack Obama, who opened his morally narcissistic mouth supporting the Remain side and warning the British people, as he is wont to do, that there would be “consequences” if they voted to leave the EU, is in no position to do anything, even if he wanted to. And he doesn’t.

Hillary Clinton is so elitist she practically defines the term. She was probably up all night figuring out what to do about the situation. I have a suggestion—move to Brussels.

Meanwhile, Trump should take up the gauntlet for the U.S. and the UK now. Why wait? Act like the president—we could use one. Donald has a natural ally in the leading Leave spokesperson conservative Boris Johnson. The two men are said to be similar and in many ways they are.

Long live the Anglosphere. Remember the Magna Carta and all that. This is a day truly to celebrate, even if stock markets are crashing around the world. They’ll come back. Look on it as a buying opportunity. A bubble has broken, but it isn’t a stock bubble. It’s a human bubble consisting of elites who seek to govern in a manner not all that distant from Comrade Lenin, just hiding under a phony mask of bureaucratic democracy. They’ve taken a big body blow from the citizens of England. Churchill would be proud. Time for America to follow suit.

But don’t get cocky. This is only one small victory—a non-blinding referendum—but make no mistake about it, still a victory after all. Just follow the instructions of Sir Winston and “never, never give up.” Yes, I know the quote is falsely attributed, but it’s good advice nevertheless.

ainston

Categories: 2016 elections, BREXIT, Britain, Democracy, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton
Tags: BREXIT, Britain, Democracy, Donald Trump

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EU Debate – Oxford Union. Daniel Hannan MEP

June 22, 2016

EU Debate – Oxford Union. Daniel Hannan MEP via YouTube June 20, 2016

(An excellent presentation. — DM)

Categories: BREXIT, Britain, European Union
Tags: BREXIT, Britain, European Union

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How Much of our Culture Are We Surrendering to Islam?

June 21, 2016

How Much of our Culture Are We Surrendering to Islam? Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, June 21, 2016

♦ The same hatred as from Nazis is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

♦ Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.

♦ It is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses of a poem, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.

It all occurred in the same week. A German judge banned a comedian, Jan Böhmermann, from repeating “obscene” verses of his famous poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A Danish theater apparently cancelled “The Satanic Verses” from its season, due to fear of “reprisals.” Two French music festivals dropped Eagles of Death Metal — the U.S. band that was performing at the Bataclan theater in Paris when the attack by ISIS terrorists (89 people murdered), took place there — because of “Islamophobic” comments by Jesse Hughes, its lead singer. Hughes suggested that Muslims be subjected to greater scrutiny, saying “It’s okay to be discerning when it comes to Muslims in this day and age,” later adding:

“They know there’s a whole group of white kids out there who are stupid and blind. You have these affluent white kids who have grown up in a liberal curriculum from the time they were in kindergarten, inundated with these lofty notions that are just hot air.”

As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “Western liberals are doing their dirty work for them; they’re silencing the people Isis judged to be blasphemous; they’re completing Isis’s act of terror.”

A few weeks earlier, France’s most important publishing house, Gallimard, fired its most famous editor, Richard Millet, who had penned an essay in which he wrote:

“the decline of literature and the deep changes wrought in France and Europe by continuous and extensive immigration from outside Europe, with its intimidating elements of militant Salafism and of the political correctness at the heart of global capitalism; that is to say, the risk of the destruction of the Europe and its cultural humanism, or Christian humanism, in the name of ‘humanism’ in its ‘multicultural’ version.”

Kenneth Baker just published a new book, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word. It is a compendium of so called “bibliocaust,” the burning of books from Caliph Omar to Hitler, and includes the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. When Nazis incinerated books in Berlin they declared that from the ashes of these novels would “arise the phoenix of a new spirit.” The same hatred is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

Theo Van Gogh’s movie, “Submission,” for which he was murdered, disappeared from many film festivals. Charlie Hebdo‘s drawings of the Islamic prophet Mohammed are concealed from the public sphere: after the massacre, very few media reprinted these cartoons. Raif Badawi’s blog posts, which cost him 1,000 lashes and ten years in prison in Saudi Arabia, have been deleted by the Saudi authorities and now circulate like forbidden Samizdat literature was in the Soviet Union.

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After the massacre of Charlie Hebdo’s staff, very few media reprinted their Mohammed cartoons. Pictured above, Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor and publisher of Charlie Hebdo, who was murdered on January 7, 2015 along with many of his colleagues, is shown in front of the magazine’s former offices, just after they were firebombed in November 2011.

Molly Norris, the American cartoonist who in 2010 drew Mohammed and proclaimed “Everyone Draw Muhammad Day,” is still in hiding and had to change her name and life. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York pulled images of Mohammed from an exhibition, while Yale Press banned images of Mohammed from a book about the cartoons. The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Mohammed’s wife, was also pulled.

In the Netherlands, an opera about Aisha, one of Mohammed’s wives, was cancelled in Rotterdam after the work was boycotted by the theater company’s Muslim actors, after it became evident that they would be a target for Islamists. The newspaper NRC Handelsblad headlined its coverage “Tehran on the Meuse,” the river that passes through the Dutch city.

In England, the Victoria and Albert Museum took down Mohammed’s image. “British museums and libraries hold dozens of these images, mostly miniatures in manuscripts several centuries old, but they have been kept largely out of public view,” The Guardian explained. In Germany, the Deutsche Opera cancelled Mozart’s opera Idomeneo in Berlin, because it depicted the severed head of Mohammed.

Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great,” which includes a reference to Mohammed being “not worthy to be worshipped,” was rewritten at London’s Barbican theater, while Cologne’s Carnival cancelled Charlie Hebdo‘s float.

In the Dutch town of Huizen, two nude paintings were removed from an exhibition after Muslims criticized them. The work of a Dutch Iranian artist, Sooreh Hera, was yanked from several Dutch museums because some of the photographs included the depictions of Mohammed and his son-in-law, Ali. According to this disposition, one day London’s National Gallery, Florence’s Uffizi, Paris’ Louvre or Madrid’s Prado might decide to censor Michelangelo, Raffaello, Bosch and Balthus because they offend the “sensibility” of Muslims.

The English playwright Richard Bean has been forced to censor an adaptation of Aristophanes’s comedy, “Lysistrata“, in which the Greek women hold a “sex strike” to stop their men from going to war (in Bean’s script, Muslim virgins go on strike to stop suicide bombers). Several Spanish villages stopped burning effigies of Mohammed in the commemoration ceremony celebrating the reconquest of the country in the Middle Ages.

There is a video filmed in 2006, when the death threats against Charlie Hebdo became worrisome. Journalists and cartoonists are gathered around a table to decide on the next cover for magazine. They speak about Islam. Jean Cabu, one of the cartoonists later murdered by Islamists, puts the issue this way: “No one in the Soviet Union had the right to do satire about Brezhnev.”

Then another future victim, Georges Wolinski, says, “Cuba is full of cartoonists, but they don’t make caricatures about Castro. So we are lucky. Yes, we are lucky, France is a paradise.”

Cabu and Wolinski were right. Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.

Thanks to the Islamists’ campaign, and the fact that now only some “crazies” still venture in the exercise of freedom, are we now going to be just fearful? “Islamophobic” cartoonists, journalists and writers are the first Europeans since 1945 who have withdrawn from public life to protect their own lives. For the first time in Europe since Hitler ordered the burning of books in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, movies, paintings, poems, novels, cartoons, articles and plays are literally and figuratively being burned at stake.

The young French mathematician Jean Cavailles, to explain his fateful involvement in anti-Nazi Resistance, used to say: “We fight to read ‘Paris Soir’ rather than ‘Völkischer Beobachter’.” For this reason alone, it is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.

Or is it already too late?

Categories: Britain, Censorship, Europe, Freedom of speech, Islam - submission, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamists, Obama's America
Tags: Britain, Censorship, Europe, freedom of speech, Islam - submission, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamists, Obama's America

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Brexit: Welcome, Britain, To Our Revolution

June 21, 2016

Brexit: Welcome, Britain, To Our Revolution, The Federalist, Robert Tracinski, June 20, 2016

(America will have her own “Brexit” to vote on this November. Many of the same issues are involved in both. — DM)

As an American, the Brexit — Britain’s upcoming referendum on whether to exit the European Union — does not directly affect me, nor do I have a vote on it. But from the perspective of American history, I think I can offer some relevant context and advice.

The Brexit is a good opportunity to welcome the mother country to our revolution, because the fundamental issue in the Brexit is exactly the same as the one that impelled us to separate from Britain more than two centuries ago.

I recently took the kids to Colonial Williamsburg, a reconstruction of Virginia’s colonial capital that has been turned into a kind of living museum of revolutionary era America, where you can see re-enactors take the stage in the personae of Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the rest of that crowd, and debate the big political issues relating to the Amerexit.

Oh yes, and we also got together in a mob outside Raleigh Tavern and hanged Lord North in effigy. See the photo at the top of this article. Most of you, I suspect, will not know who Lord North was or why we were (symbolically) hanging him. But it’s entirely relevant today.

Lord North was His Majesty’s Prime Minister during the crucial years of the American Revolution, from 1770 to 1782. The specific infractions for which he was subjected to mock trial and hanging in effigy were the Intolerable Acts, a series of punitive measures against Boston that were widely interpreted as a declaration of war against colonial America.

Today, we tend to think of the American Revolution as a war against King George III. But it was just as much a war against the British Parliament and its leadership, which was increasingly regarded by Americans as a “foreign” body that did not represent them. We already had our own, long-established legislatures (Virginia’s General Assembly, for example, will soon celebrate its 400th anniversary and is one of the oldest in the world), and we considered them to be our proper representatives, solely authorized to approve legislation on our behalf.

That was the key issue of the American Revolution: the consent of the governed. The question was whether we were to be subject to laws passed by representatives elected by and accountable to us or whether we were to be subject to the decisions of an institution that was not answerable to the people it governed. So it’s not just about rejecting the sovereignty of a hereditary monarch. It’s also about rejecting control by a distant and unaccountable bureaucracy.

Which, in an interesting historical irony, is precisely the issue Britain faces in its relationship with the European Union.

The Telegraph‘s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard puts the issue succinctly and in terms that are totally recognizable to a student of American history

Stripped of distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the British people can never remove, even when it persists in error.

The effect of the European Union, as currently organized, is to send the mother of parliaments to a rest home. As Evans-Pritchard has recently pointed out, Britain’s judicial system has already been put into an impossible position, forced to issue a warning to the European Court that it will resist its mandates if they conflict with such ancient guarantees as the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights.

The key issue — the breaking point — is the European Union’s practice of seeking to validate its authority through popular referendums then ignoring them when they don’t get the result they wanted.

The EU crossed a fatal line when it smuggled through the Treaty of Lisbon, by executive cabal, after the text had already been rejected by French and Dutch voters in its earlier guise. It is one thing to advance the Project by stealth and the Monnet method, it is another to call a plebiscite and then to override the outcome.
He is referring to the 2005 attempt to push through the European Constitution, which was resoundingly rejected by France and the Netherlands, only to be substantially resurrected as the Lisbon Treaty in 2008.

The whole premise of the EU has become the idea of a bureaucratic clerisy holding power beyond the reach of the people. It’s the great dream of the party of big government here, too. They want to impose their policies on every issue — global warming, immigration, gun control, transgender bathrooms, and on and on — by way of regulatory rulings by an entrenched civil service, without ever having to put anything up for an actual vote by the people’s representatives. The European Union takes that idea farther, placing the bureaucratic aristocracy at an even greater remove from its subjects.

The pro-EU side of Britain’s debate makes it sound as if the Brexit would be an act of destructioncarried out in a fit of irrational anger. But this is not about destroying institutions. It’s about preserving them.

It was no different for America. After I recently defended the idea of the right to depose tyrants, a friend of mine who is an historian sent me an interesting, minor correction. The Founding Fathers, he told me, described the creation of America as a “revolution,” not a “rebellion.” It’s a distinction that has largely been lost today, but they viewed a rebellion as an insurrection against legitimate authority, while a revolution was a legitimate exercise of the people’s right to change their government and its leadership, in this case by firing their “chief magistrate,” the king. But they viewed this as a way of re-establishing and reforming the legitimate authority of their own, long-established colonial legislatures.

And when you think of it, we were just following the British example. Britain had faced its own conflicts between the authority of Parliament and the overreaching ambitions of its kings, and they had already set the example of removing the king to preserve the power of Parliament. Before we did it in the 18th century, they did it in the 17th century — twice. Britain itself had established the precedents of the rule of law and the consent of the governed. I don’t know why they would want to throw that away now.

British citizens shouldn’t fear that leaving the EU will cause Britain to be “isolated.” The American example is instructive. After a little more unpleasantness (let’s not mention that unfortunate incident with the White House in 1814), Britain and America eventually settled down into our “special relationship.” Our common bonds of commerce and culture were too strong and deep to be disrupted permanently. The same will be true of Britain and Europe, only more so, since its departure will be on friendlier terms. There is no reason Britain cannot do as other European nations have done and remain part of a common market without submitting to the authority of the European Union.

That’s the choice Britain faces: to maintain the legitimate authority of its own government or to turn the country into a mere colony of Brussels. If the British want to preserve their ability to govern themselves, they will vote to leave the European Union.

Categories: American Revolution, BREXIT, Britain, European Union
Tags: American Revolution, BREXIT, Britain, Eurpean Union

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Cartoons of the Day

June 20, 2016

H/t Joopklepzeiker

eunboarding1068-2

Leaders

Categories: BREXIT, Britain, European Union, Humor, World leaders
Tags: BREXIT, Britain, European Union, Humor, World leaders

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Why This American Supports ‘Brexit

June 18, 2016

Why This American Supports ‘Brexit, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, June 17, 2016

roger_brexit_article_banner_6-17-16-1.sized-770x415xc

But what this is really about, what Britain and we really need from this vote, is a firewall against Islamization. Economic niceties aside, that is finally how “Brexit” will be judged—here and in Europe. The Brits have to suck it up, brave the inevitable accusations of Islamophobia and put poor old Hannan out of a job.

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For those of us of a “certain age,” Europe was the height of old world cool and sophistication—Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the glorious Julie Christie. We wanted to be like them. That was a long time ago. No more Nouvelle Vague. No more Beatles. Now it’s a continent on the verge of imploding with moribund or worse economies, intermittent (and, in the case of France, persistent) violence, and a growing Islamization that is turning countries once among the most free on Earth into Sharia-laced nightmares.

The European Union—consciously or unconsciously—has been complicit in all that, an ever-growing bureaucratic miasma that seems more distant from the needs of its constituents than even our own government.

Americans—concerned ones anyway—watch from afar as right-wing separatist parties have sprung up across the continent, gaining popularity from Austria to the UK. Are they avatars of the World War II-era fascist parties the liberal-left (our guardians at The Guardian) would have us believe or are they natural responses to this monolithic EU and its fruits and therefore the true protectors of the Enlightenment?

It’s hard to say at this point. A welter of conflicting forces are at play. The only thing that is clear is that things are bad.

Those of us who travel often to Europe have seen it, ever-expanding Islamic enclaves in and around many of the major cities that are now larger, quite literally, than any since the days of Muslim-ruled Spain. The “Reconquista” is in progress via what Robert Spencer calls “the stealth jihad.” (Sometimes, as we know, it’s not so stealthy.) Putting up barely a fight, Europe appears to be relinquishing the values they have fought for since the Magna Carta. Who cares about misogyny, homophobia or that outdated separation of church and state when you don’t have any religion of your own to separate? We’re multicultural! We’re diverse! We’re…. dead? Well, not quite but wait.

Meanwhile, here in the US of A, the same process has been revving up. Under the Obama administration we’re on track to admit a million new Muslim immigrants—and that doesn’t include those overstaying their visas, etc. Our politically correct, morally narcissistic president has decreed that these people are culturally our equal and deserving of citizenship even though roughly half (probably more if we really knew) of those already here, and therefore supposedly assimilated, believe in that oppressive religious legal system straight out of the Dark Ages—Sharia law.

Is that what we want? Call me a bigot, but I don’t think so. There are lots of places believers in Sharia can live, thank you, and I have long passed my tolerance for wife beatings, adultery stonings, and repellent women-hating rape laws—even, maybe especially, if they’re only practiced in secret—not to mention mass shootings in Florida gay bars and at California Christmas parties in the name of somebody’s twisted vision of God, events that are from from secret.

Which leads me to “Brexit” (Britain-exit) and the coming June 23 vote on whether the United Kingdom will remain in the European Union. Enough ink has been spilled to fill every issue of theTimes Literary Supplement back to its 1902 founding with a few Virginia Woolf novels thrown in about the economic ins and outs of the UK leaving the EU. I am not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion about that, but suspect the witty Daniel Hannan, a 17-year Member of the European Parliament who asked to be “sacked” by his readers in his recent book on Brexit, is a more than reliable source. Hannan makes the case that Brussels has become ground zero for crony capitalism—hardly a surprise, alas.

But what this is really about, what Britain and we really need from this vote, is a firewall against Islamization. Economic niceties aside, that is finally how “Brexit” will be judged—here and in Europe. The Brits have to suck it up, brave the inevitable accusations of Islamophobia and put poor old Hannan out of a job.

There may not “always be an England,” but let’s give her a chance, even if her neighbors have given up (some of them, anyway). The arrogant moral narcissism of Angela Merkel and her ilk has caused enough problems. It was truly tragic and horrible that that Labor MP was murdered by a psychotic the other day —this time a right-wing one—but I sincerely hope it won’t overly affect the vote. I can’t cast one myself, but were I a Brit, I’d be voting “LEAVE” wholeheartedly.

Categories: BREXIT, Britain, Civilization jihad, Europe, European Union, Islamic invasion, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Obama's America, Sharia law
Tags: BREXIT, Britain, Civilization jihad, Europe, European Union, Islamic invasion, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Obama's America, Sharia law

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