Posted tagged ‘European values’

Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen

March 29, 2017

Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen, American Thinker, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, March 29, 2017

(Please see also, Pope Francis Tells EU Leaders: Populism Is ‘Egotism.’ — DM)

Instead of fighting and becoming angry, we light candles and turn off the lights in tall buildings. We vow to fight a nonspecific theory called “terrorism” instead of protecting our borders from whom and where it is precisely coming. In response to the terrorism in our cities, we call for even more multiculturalism and appeasement. We have become the pitiful we, pathetic, because of Barack Obama’s repeated sermonette of: “That’s not who we are.” Whenever suggestions were made for the urgent need to monitor some of the mosques or the young men most likely to commit future terrorist acts against us, Obama would declare: “That’s not who we are.”

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The fear and scrambling of citizens in London a few days ago was a humiliating scene, wherein a powerful city and its entire government came to a halt because of one man, an Islamist with an axe and a truck. We have seen similar things happen in other major Western cities. Humiliating the West is one of the primary goals of militant Islam. It is a victory for their deity, as demonstrated by the ubiquitous shouts of “Allahu Akhbar” prior to the terror act, a time-worn declaration of Islamic victory and humiliation of the infidel. The multiculturalists do not see it as a humiliation against us, for the us — an us with an identity — is no longer important or recognized by them. In contrast, those on the other side killing and reshaping us have a confidence and pride in their identity.

Instead of fighting and becoming angry, we light candles and turn off the lights in tall buildings. We vow to fight a nonspecific theory called “terrorism” instead of protecting our borders from whom and where it is precisely coming. In response to the terrorism in our cities, we call for even more multiculturalism and appeasement. We have become the pitiful we, pathetic, because of Barack Obama’s repeated sermonette of: “That’s not who we are.” Whenever suggestions were made for the urgent need to monitor some of the mosques or the young men most likely to commit future terrorist acts against us, Obama would declare: “That’s not who we are.”

When it comes to Islamic terror or shariah imposition, Obama and other globalists preach a type of defenselessness and impotence: something we have to abide. For many liberals, virtue signaling, the epitome of vanity, is more important than saving lives, even the lives of their countrymen.

Heroic people, however, know exactly who they are: They are those who defend their country and families from terrorism, death and injury. People with an identity know who they are and thus fight for it. Transnationalists don’t… and, with sophistry, try to stop others from doing so.

As uber-multiculturalists, these globalist leaders are making a nation’s accommodation to Islam, and the incorporation of Islamic ways and demands, the litmus test of multicultural compliance. Islam is their fast-track tool for transforming Western societies and is being catapulted by them into religious and cultural stardom. It is being romanticized as the new global commonality and outlook, a catchall for all that is right-minded and progressive. By being the new “victim” of Western intolerance and oppression, Islam is automatically elevated and ennobled as something enlightened and most tolerant, especially by those abandoning and running from their Christian ancestry and upbringing and seeking an exotic system in which to pour all their utopian and rebellious yearnings.

Many in the political class demonizing Americanism and nationalism are celebrating transnationalism, which is being pushed today by global multiculturalists. Until now, Western countries retained with pride their distinctive culture and norms, while recognizing and enjoying the varied qualities found in nations different than their own. Transnationalism is radically different. It wishes to denude each Western country of its uniqueness and severely marginalize that segment of the population wishing to preserve and live by the historic values and customs of their country. It is banal uniformity on a global scale, often a consequence of embarrassment and repudiation of anything overtly Christian or Old Testament.

Transnationalism takes power away from a country’s people and imposes laws and norms from above by an almost interchangeable global ruling class which treats its country’s patriots as malcontents and second class, as “unenlightened” citizens entitled to fewer freedoms than anti-nationalists or preferred minorities. The ruling class has more sympathy and identity with the ruling class of other countries than with citizens of their own country. It is cosmopolitanism run riot, so that American liberals, for example, feel a kinship more with Parisians than those from Peoria.

Whereas until very recently, highly patriotic leaders were chosen to lead countries, under the mantle of transnationalism leaders are advanced who downplay and characterize as “extreme” the patriotic members within society. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in America, Angela Merkel in Germany, as well as the Scandinavian and Flemish leaders, the EU and the Hague, are representative of those in an expanding political class and club who see their power deriving from a global multiculturalism that marginalizes conservative voters to ineffective fringes.

These leaders reinforce and aid each other by speaking to voters beyond their own country. They speak of the need of voters elsewhere to elect those candidates who will be part of a globalist order and fraternity upon which rests the “guarantee of peace, harmony, prosperity, and environmental purity”. Transnationalism is the age-old universalist and socialist dystopia come true, just under a new nomenclature. Those opposed are labeled xenophobic; those questioning open borders are labeled racist. No one has a right any longer to an opinion except those issuing leftist, transnational creeds. These accusations, the name calling, are some of the most powerful weapons in the globalist arsenal.

Many making the accusations of xenophobia live in rarified societies and neighborhoods or in high-end and fashionable apartment buildings with security guards and doormen, immune from the consequences of Open Borders, loss of manual jobs, overseas nation-building, and the harmful effects arising from perfunctory background checks and superficial vetting.

It is not American nationalism that warrants our alarm, rather transnationalism and fierce multiculturalism. In the name of faux morality and twisted tolerance it seeks to erase the identity, touchstones, and values that made us who we are. It imperils our future.

Pope Francis Tells EU Leaders: Populism Is ‘Egotism’

March 25, 2017

Pope Francis Tells EU Leaders: Populism Is ‘Egotism’ BreitbartThomas D. Williams, Ph.D., March 25, 2017

(Thank you, your Holiness, for your humble words of religious political wisdom. We will stop being populists, respect our all-wise unelected bureaucrats and our elected but powerless EU Parliament. We will do as you and our other betters command us. Amen.

Oh well.– DM)

Getty

Solidarity is “the most effective antidote to modern forms of populism,” Pope Francis told European Union leaders Friday, in a politically charged speech denouncing nationalism as a modern form of selfishness.

In his address to more than 20 European heads of state assembled in Rome for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome that marked the beginning of the European Economic Community (EEC), the Pope advocated a stronger, consolidated Europe against the rising tide of populist movements.

(Video at the link. — DM)

The pontiff contrasted solidarity, which draw us “closer to our neighbors,” with populism, which is “the fruit of an egotism that hems people in and prevents them from overcoming and ‘looking beyond’ their own narrow vision.”

As a number of European countries prepare for important national elections pitting neo-populist leaders against mostly established, left-leaning parties, the Pope took an unusually overt stand in favor of a Eurocentric vision of the future of the region.

“There is a need to start thinking once again as Europeans,” Francis said, “so as to avert the opposite dangers of a dreary uniformity or the triumph of particularisms.”

“Politics needs this kind of leadership, which avoids appealing to emotions to gain consent, but instead, in a spirit of solidarity and subsidiarity, devises policies that can make the Union as a whole develop harmoniously,” he added.

This union will only be lasting and successful if the common will of Europe “proves more powerful than the will of individual nations,” Francis said, quoting the Prime Minister of Luxembourg.

France will hold its first round of elections on April 23, followed by a second round on May 7. The latest polls show the Socialist candidate Emmanuel Macron just one percentage point behind the Eurosceptic front-runner Marine Le-Pen, who presently stands to win 25 percent of the first round of voting.

Meanwhile in its federal election slated for next September 24, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel of the center-left Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will face off against Martin Schulz of the Social Democratic party, as well as the small but growing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Merkel’s CDU is part of a strong coalition that includes the Christian Social Union (CSU) as well as the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Despite Merkel’s ebbing popularity, she is still the current favorite for the fall elections.

In Italy, although a date for the next general elections has not yet been set, a new survey this week put the Eurosceptic 5-Star Movement at 32.3 percent of the vote, five and a half points ahead of the ruling center-left Democratic Party (PD). The poll also put found that the right wing populist Northern League party would currently take 12.8 percent of the vote, ahead of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia at 12.7 percent.

In his address Friday, Pope Francis described Europe as strongest when it “refuses to yield to fear or close herself off in false forms of security,” asserting that “her history has been greatly determined by encounters with other peoples and cultures.”

Europe’s history, he insisted, “is, and always has been, a dynamic and multicultural identity.”

While recognizing that “one frequently has the sense that there is a growing ‘split’ between the citizenry and the European institutions, which are often perceived as distant and inattentive to the different sensibilities present in the Union,” Francis nonetheless continued to advocate for a strong European Union over a shift toward greater decision making at the national level.

“Today the European Union needs to recover the sense of being primarily a ‘community’ of persons and peoples, to realize that ‘the whole is greater than the part, but it is also greater than the sum of its parts,’” he said.

A Week of Terror and Diversity in Europe

March 24, 2017

A Week of Terror and Diversity in Europe, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 24, 2017

On Saturday, Ziyed Ben Belgacem pays a visit to Orly Airport in Paris. He grabs a female soldier from behind and grapples for her rifle while holding a pellet gun to her head. He warns the other soldiers to drop their rifles and raise their hands.

He shouts, “I am here to die in the name of Allah … There will be deaths.”

He’s mostly right. It’s the plural part he gets wrong. The soldier goes low. Her friends shoot him dead. But he’s not entirely wrong either. There will be deaths. Even if they aren’t at Orly Airport.

French Police go on to investigate the motive of the Tunisian Muslim settler. His father insists that he wasn’t a terrorist. The media rushes to blame drugs for his attack. It reports widely on the drugs in his system rather than the Koran found on his body. No one asks if he was on drugs or on Jihad.

Ziyed Ben Belgacem had been in and out of prison. He was known to the authorities as a potential Jihadist and had been investigated for “radicalization” back in 2015. He had been suspected of burglaries last year and had been paroled in the fall. The system had failed all over again.

Prince William and Kate had been in Paris meeting with victims of the Bataclan Islamic terror attack. They returned to the UK, but media reports emphasize that the latest attack wouldn’t change their plans. But the UK was no refuge from Islamic terror. Not even Westminster Palace was.

On Wednesday, Khalid Masood, a Pakistani Muslim settler, rents a car in a town near Birmingham from an Enterprise rent-a-car shop sandwiched between a Staples and a beauty salon offering walk-in eyebrow waxing. Over a fifth of Birmingham is Muslim and by the time the bloodshed was over and Masood was in the hospital, police raided a flat over a restaurant advertising “A Taste of Persia”.

Because diversity is our strength.

Masood’s victims were certainly diverse.  The men and women he ran over or pushed off Westminster Bridge included Brits, Americans, Romanians, Greeks, Chinese, South Koreans, Italians, Irish, Portuguese, Polish and French. That is the new form that diversity takes in the more multicultural cities.

The victims are diverse. The killers are Muslim.

Prime Minister May spoke of it as a place where “people of all nationalities and cultures gather to celebrate what it means to be free.” But not all nationalities and cultures. Some come there to celebrate what it means to kill infidels for the greater glory of Allah. Just as some pray for London and others pray for the flag of Islam to fly over Westminster Palace.

Khalid Masood, like Ziyed Ben Belgacem, had been in and out of prison. Like France’s Tunisian Muslim terror settler, the UK’s Pakistani Muslim terror settler had been investigated for “violent extremism”.

Nothing came of it.

For thirty years, Masood went in and out of prison. And one fine day he rented a car and began killing. He was on the radar, but nothing was done. And now some are dead and others are wounded. And the politicians who could have prevented it give their speeches and celebrate the magnificent diversity that filled hospitals with the citizens of a dozen nations.

“As I speak, millions will be boarding trains and aeroplanes to travel to London, and to see for themselves the greatest city on Earth,” Prime Minister May declared, throwing in a pitch for tourism. “It is in these actions – millions of acts of normality – that we find the best response to terrorism.”

Come to London. Stroll and see the sights. You probably won’t get Allahuakbared to death. And if you do, the best response is a million acts of normality, apathy and denial.

Mayor Sadiq Khan vowed that after a brief vigil, it would be “business as usual”.

He was right.

On Thursday, Mohammed, a Tunisian Muslim tries to drive a car through a pedestrian mall on a major shopping street in Antwerp. It was right around the anniversary of the Brussels bombings in which Moroccan Muslim settler terrorists had killed 32 people and wounded 300.

And a year later it was business as usual.

On Wednesday, King Philippe had dedicated a memorial in Brussels titled, ‘Wounded But Still Standing in Front of the Inconceivable’. “We have to stand up and say ‘no’ to those acts that are not believable, that are not bearable,” its sculptor insisted.

But the seventh King of the Belgians had a somewhat different message. “It’s the responsibility of each and every one of us to make our society more humane, and more just. Let’s learn to listen to each other again, to respect each other’s weaknesses,” he said. “Above all, let us dare to be tender.”

The Tunisian Muslim driving into a pedestrian mall did not dare to be “tender”. He didn’t respect the weaknesses of a society that tolerated him.

Belgian soldiers deployed for the anniversary spotted him. The police gave chase.  Pedestrians scurried out of the way. The Muslim settler from France was taken into custody for endangering the public. It is hoped that the arrest was made in a properly tender fashion.

Police found a riot gun, knives and fake passports in his car.

The Antwerp police chief said that Mohammed had been known to the police and had been involved in the illegal possession of weapons in France. But official reports blamed the drugs and alcohol in his system. Like fellow Tunisian Ziyed Ben Belgacem, he wasn’t a terrorist, just a drunk and a junkie.

The police urged everyone to keep calm and return to normalcy. Everything was being done to ensure the safety of Antwerp residents and tourists.

Business as usual.

Meanwhile the Antwerp Town Hall had gone from flying British colors in solidarity with the victims of the London attack to worrying over an attack at home.  Just as William and Kate had come from terror in France to terror at home.

British authorities claimed that they foiled a dozen terror attacks last year. There are arrests for terror plots in France and Germany. Every week there is either a terror plot or a memorial for the last terror attack before we are told to go on with our million acts of normalcy.

Some days the terrorists screw up. They pick what they think is an easy target, but she refuses to let go of the rifle. Or they overestimate how much alcohol and cocaine they need to nerve themselves up to kill and die. Other times they get it right. Or right enough. And the news flashes around the world.

Somewhere along the way it wasn’t life that became normal, but terror. And the insistence on normalcy just normalizes the terror. A week with three terror attacks across Europe is no longer extraordinary. We have come to expect that there will be men trying to stab and run us over from Paris to Antwerp to London. And we have come to expect another Islamic terror plot targeting Kansas City, Miami, Columbia, New York, San Bernardino, Boston, Tampa, Dallas, Rochester, Springfield and any city.

We don’t know when or where the next attack will come. But we know whom it will come from.

The question is what are we going to do about it? We can pretend to be baffled the next time some Jihadi with a rap sheet taller than the London Eye and longer than London Bridge goes on a killing spree. We can nod our heads while the politicians throw a vigil and encourage a million acts of apathy.

Or we can end the flow of future terrorists and deport the existing ones.

Because they can’t run us over if we don’t let them in. They can’t bomb us if we don’t let them stay.

We can listen to King Philippe and “dare to be tender”. Decades of such tenderness are what led us here. Or we can dare to make the hard choices that will make us and our children safe for generations.

Saturday. Wednesday. Thursday. How many more days will it take?

Leading German Philosopher: ‘If you Oppose mass Immigration You’re Extremely Backwards’

February 6, 2017

Leading German Philosopher: ‘If you Oppose mass Immigration You’re Extremely Backwards’ Gatestone EU, Willem Cornax, February 6, 2017

Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher, recently dubbed the “young god of philosophy“. He starts his interview with the Dutch website Brainwash.nl by saying:

 “The problem of the refugee crisis is not the refugees. It’s us. (…) The idea of a million Muslims coming to Europe sounds terrible for someone with the mindframe from the 16th century.”

The mass influx of refugees should not be questioned because it “is based on Enlightenment.” Government documented refugees are not a threat to someone with a 21st Century mind frame. Why? Let Gabriel tell you:

“…this shouldn’t be threatening for a very simple reason. These people have rights. These rights are laid down in various constitutions (treaties) and if you deny these people the rights that they have you are thereby undermining European values.”

As for Merkel inviting refugees to come in:

“It is not that Angela Merkel is so nice and moral and lets all the refugees in to help poor people because the Germans were evil in the past and now we should be nicer. (…) She is just doing her job.”

That is the Nuremberg Defense. Nazi officials used it at the Nuremberg trials to deflect (personal) moral responsibility for committed atrocities.

Surely there are better arguments to comfort victims of terrorism, rape, sexual assault, abuse, murder, harassment, theft, burglary by people documented as refugees. Luckily, Gabriel himself provides an argument to soften the pain:

“The fear of the other is the fear of ourselves. The fear that we Europeans do not trust our European values. Our European values are universal and that is the biggest achievement of modernity, Universalism. And that Universalism is threatened, or so we think. But the threat to universalism comes from within. It doesn’t come from the outside.”