The Golden Gate

I’d like to make a request. Let’s stop calling for Hamas to acknowledge Israel’s “right” to exist. Let’s stop associating the delegitimization of Israel by various bodies (such as the WCC, PC-USA, most British lefties that read Comment Is Free) by asking why these idiots think Israel is the only country that has no “right” to exist.

Let us point out, as Menachem Begin did, that Israel exists. She exists, and she needs no special acknowledgement from a bunch of terrorists, anti-Semites, and Israel-haters. She existed long before any of us having these arguments was born. She will exist long after all of us are gone.

You can see the rest of it here.

Over at the Gates of Vienna [the place to go for in depth analysis on all things Islam and our struggles with its global aims] the Fjordman has filed a report on the EU with a call for its destruction in order to save Europe. Here is a taste:

The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation”. As critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people do not even know of their existence. A federation is of course a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.” The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.” Booker and North calls the European Union “a slow-motion coup d’état: the most spectacular coup d’état in history,” designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so in public.

In 2005, an unprecedented joint declaration by the leaders of all British political groups in Brussels called for PM Tony Blair to push for an end the “medieval” practice of European legislation being decided behind closed doors. Critics claim that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s supreme law-making body, which decides two thirds of all Britain’s laws (and the majority of laws in all Western European countries), “is the only legislature outside the Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba to pass laws in secret.” As one of the signers put it: “We still have this medieval way of making decisions in the EU; people hide behind other member states, and blame them. It increases people’s sense of cynicism, but what we need is some straight talking.” According to British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan, this is how the EU was designed. “Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval. So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion.” “Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic.”

But be sure to read the whole thing.

UPDATE: this is good news:

Many adults in the Netherlands hold strong views on the way Muslims adapt to the European continent, according to a poll by Motivaction released by GPD. 63 per cent of respondents believe think Islam is incompatible with modern European life.

And they would be correct. And god help us all if modern European life is altered to accomodate Islam in its current form.

Cox and Forkum have this post that is worth a peek. Here is the ‘toon:

Here is an excerpt from the text of the post:

It has been sobering this past week watching some of my “woollier” colleagues (in Vicki Woods’s self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is “multiculturalism”. Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, “Tradition! Tradition!” Boris’s plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I’m not sure I’d bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish ‘n’ chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They’d adopted so many trees we couldn’t see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I’ve said before, you can’t assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is. ….

I would say that while I think that the typical way multiculturalism is applied or advocated has its own pathology, simultaneously, there are things in all cultures to be honored. It may be their ideas, it may be their architecture, it may be their belief systems. It is not multiculturalism per se that is the real suicide bomb, but the advocating of multi-cult for multi-cult’s sake without really taking a look at results in the world of each culture that is. It is the pathologies of cultures that should be unflinchingly condemned while simultaneously embracing the beauty and health in them. it is, again, a both/and, not an either/or.

I could write all day about that, and hope I have the time to in the future.

Has another Great piece out:

First the terrorists of the Middle East went after the Israelis. From 1967 we witnessed 40 years of bombers, child murdering, airline hijacking, suicide murdering, and gratuitous shooting. We in the West usually cried crocodile tears, and then came up with all sorts of reasons to allow such Middle Eastern killers a pass.

Yasser Arafat, replete with holster and rants at the U.N., had become a “moderate” and was thus free to steal millions of his good-behavior money. If Hamas got European cash, it would become reasonable, ostracize its “military wing,” and cease its lynching and vigilantism.

When some tried to explain that Wars 1-3 (1947, 1956, 1967) had nothing to do with the West Bank, such bothersome details fell on deaf ears.

When it was pointed out that Germans were not blowing up Poles to get back lost parts of East Prussia nor were Tibetans sending suicide bombers into Chinese cities to recover their country, such analogies were caricatured.

When the call for a “Right of Return” was making the rounds, few cared to listen that over a half-million forgotten Jews had been cleansed from Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, and lost billions in property.

When the U.N. and the EU talked about “refugee camps,” none asked why for a half-century the Arab world could not build decent housing for its victimized brethren, or why 1 million Arabs voted in Israel, but not one freely in any Arab country.

The security fence became “The Wall,” and evoked slurs that it was analogous to barriers in Korea or Berlin that more often kept people in than out. Few wondered why Arabs who wished to destroy Israel would mind not being able to live or visit Israel.

Go and read it all for it is good.

Winds of Change has a roundup of all things GWOT related. I like how the post is broken down by region/continent.

According to Instapundit this is a regular occurrence at WOC.

Niall Ferguson on Live8:

Between 1975 and 1984, real net aid from the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development to Sub-Saharan African countries grew at a rate of nearly 8 per cent, two and a half times faster than in the past 10 years. Yet African growth was 2 per cent a year, compared with more than 3 per cent since 1995. With the exception of the compulsively optimistic Jeff Sachs - Bono’s new best friend - most economists today acknowledge that higher growth in Africa will only come when there is real political reform in countries such as Zimbabwe, and real peace in countries such as the Congo.

Will Live 8 put pressure on Robert Mugabe to step down? Will it put pressure on Congo’s warring factions to lay down their arms? Hm, that’s funny; those demands don’t seem to have made it into Sir Bob’s manifesto. And it’s easy to see why not. It’s so much more satisfying for the Jellybys to make believe that Africa’s woes are the responsibility of those “eight (white, terminally uncool) men” who lead the G8 countries…

via Logical Meme

The Live 8 Concerts are all over the media and the blogosphere. Josh Trevino over at local outlet Politics from Left to Right gets it just about spot on:

It is instructive to look back twenty years to Live Aid, Geldof’s original bright idea for mass mobilization in Africa’s service. That concert was meant to focus attention upon, and bring donations to, the cause of Ethiopian famine relief. In this, it was an immense success: but where it failed was in its assiduous avoidance of the very causes of the famine in question. It is not enough to say that we now know that the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s was a classic terror famine purposefully perpetrated by Haile Mengistu Mariam’s communist regime; this much was known then. Mengistu’s forced resettlements, population transfers, and manipulation of food stocks was in the long communist tradition of genocide by starvation, and would be instantly familiar to its past masters Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. All the aid in the world, in the absence of a change in a government policy explicitly meant to inflict such suffering, had the moral quality of a care package to Auschwitz. [...] Surely ending famine would have been preferable to merely feeding its victims? Surely feeding its victims is best done without aiding its perpetrators?

Read the whole thing.

An interview on the eve of the G-8 Summit that I tremendously enjoyed reading.

Hat Tip: Instapundit