Socialists Lead Condemnation of Anti-Islam Demo on 9/11

While already in the process of 'fisking' captioned news item on the official website of The Socialist Group in the European Parliament to shreds, I concluded with a certain tired melancholy that one doesn't actually know where to begin.

As a supporter of the SIOE, personal insults on the basis of Socialists' "beliefs" aside, let's restrict ourselves for the moment to the main conclusions:

1. The European Socialists are claiming the lead in the "international support" for the SIOE 9/11 demo ban by their ideological colleague, the Mayor of Brussels. They do so by reaffirming their "belief" that "intercultural dialogue is the best way of dealing with the sources of fundamentalist terrorism" - a discourse they propose to conduct with a cultural and religious section of society (Muslims) who "have no relation whatsoever" with said "fundamentalist terrorism". Why then have the dialogue, about its "sources", in the first place? This circular reasoning doesn't make sense and begs for a rational clarification!

2. The Euro Socialists' claim to leadership of the condemnation and ban of the Stop Islamization Of Europe Demo has been well noted. They have now become the official political Owners of the subject, on the continent.

3. This week alone there were two thwarted terrorist attempts, one in Germany and another in Denmark, both of which were totally 'unrelated' to the Religion of Peace. In the face of such a seriousness situation, the Socialists seem to be leaning rather heavily on their "belief". Actually it's rather inadequate, considering authorities' first duty: assuring the safety of the population.

4. The Socialist Group leader's title wouldn't be unbecoming the Head Boy of a local Scouting Club, but that doesn't stand in the way of launching some serious investigations. Later in the letter, belief makes place for conviction: "Like you, we are convinced that the people behind this demonstration want above all to stigmatise a community for dark racist and xenophobic reasons as is proven by the readiness to lump Islam together with fundamentalist terrorism."

It's quite obvious how Mr Schulz has convinced himself of the above, but one thing is for sure: his vigorous research didn't extend to visiting the SIOE's websites or the reading of SIOE press releases. But then, he didn't have to, did he? 'Lumping' is all the proof required for vile accusations and the withdrawal of democratic rights. Hey, let's lump some more! All Socialists are paternalistic authoritarians!

- "Stop Islamization of Europe" HQ
- "SIOE England: No Sharia Here"

Sign the petition!

* Racism is the lowest form of stupidity! Islamophobia is the height of common sense!
* No Sharia Here!
* Democracy not Theocracy!
* Enough is Enough!

Update: Osama bin Laden has just issued another ultimatum to America, as is required by Sharia Law: convert or die. "There are two ways to end the war in Iraq: "The first is from our side, and it is to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you. The second way, is to reject America's democratic system and convert to Islam." The stage is set for the next major assault. Let's face it: appeasing them (hope that word isn't too lumpy) won't help. Pretending the Islamic fanatics aren't a threat doesn't either, nor the belief that the American administration is at fault.

The Mill Paradigm

The secret that the West is a Liberal dictatorship still isn't out. For the penny to drop it needs some distance, like it needs an outsider to make you aware you've developed a nasty habit. I have long been reluctant to make this statement: to Classical Liberals/Libertarians it is an oxymoron, an impossibility given the mutual exclusivity; today even the ultra Left Dutch Greens appreciate that Liberalism stands for freedom, so how can it possibly constitute a dictatorship?

The problem is that Liberal morality is cast into laws - to the point of even becoming 'human rights' - and foisted onto the world at large, thereby criminalizing rejectionists; whether they're hapless grannies objecting to being mooned by gays for homophobia, or gays protesting against imams who call for them be cast from minarets for Islamophobia, or priests criminalized on both counts.

This happens in reaction to Islamic modernophobia, and under pressure from activists and their advocates in the European Parliament and elsewhere, at the expense of the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. It cannot go on like this. Practising U.K. barrister Neil Addison in "Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law" provides the first comprehensive survey of legislation concerning religion in diverse areas such as criminal law, discrimination, employment and harassment, and charts the growing role of courts.

In "The Impossible made Possible: the Dictatorship of Liberalism" and "EU Phobia: more Crimes against the Ideology!" I posited that Christianity was the basic source of morality at the time Liberal thought developed and it is consequently built into the philosophy. By no means were Liberalism and Christian values ever mutually exclusive, until - not that long ago, Leftist Liberals swapped the Classical values for Socialist ones (here's Dr Sanity's invaluable chart once more). Among the proponents is a brand of fanatical atheists who have adopted selections of John Stuart Mill's Liberalism, minus the wisdom, conditions and restrictions, plus the virulent Marxist zeal. Classical Liberalism's founding philosophers are turning in their graves.

The disrobed Mill paradigm has also been adopted as the life-style of choice by the Liberal populace in general, whether they are aware of it, or not. The basic principle seems to be just tailored for current epoch: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant".

This licence for radical individualism is popularly the sole and sancrosanct moral rule governing Western society today: do as you please, as long as you don't hurt others. It seems simple and sound, but it is selective shopping, as Mill added the restriction ".... accepting the consequences of your actions". But these are usually left for others to deal with.

It is hard enough for sages to foresee the lengths and breadths of their actions; the consequences for ourselves, and moreover the consequences for others are often near impossible to fathom. Therefore, what Mill would have us add, are the Victorian virtues of a sense of responsibility and prudence. Mill: "It was better to be Socrates discontented than a fool satisfied." Well, we all know what happened to those graces: given the psychological effect of the nanny state - acting as a perpetual baby-sit to pick up the pieces - preventing people from maturing into fully fledged human beings, attaining their full potential.

Mill's popularly practiced, disrobed principle - to which added the sole modern restriction of consent by the persons involved - implies no one has the right to interfere, or to pass moral judgment. Analyzing the latter, British doctor and writer Theodore Dalrymple came to the conclusion that this actually means that "the highest form of morality is amorality". Isn't it fun how selective shopping in philosophy can turn wisdom into vulgar popular social dross: 'mind your own d#*% business!', 'who the f#*% is the Pope?'

The same doctor Dalrymple in "Our Culture, What's Left of It" sketches us the postmodern life in Britain's slums. It doesn't take much imagination to turn that reality - of which the real victims are the children - to be generally true for the whole of north-western Europe. The postmodern society isn't yet willing to accept their moral bankruptcy, to be reminded of life, before Christianity made its civilizing influence felt.
Here's a picture of Mill and his wife: oozing approval of so much permissiveness, don't they?

But back to our Liberal Dictatorship and the values it has proclaimed universal human rights: on whose 'Authority' have they done so [1], if I might reciprocate that pregnant question?

Paul Belien, editor of Brussels Journal and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute in a column in the Washington Post on 23rd May, "Europe's Culture War" describes the interface between the Left Liberal values - now 'moral law' across the European Union and guarded by the European Court of Human Rights - and classical Christian values: abortion rights and gay rights.

Let me state on a personal note that the times homosexuals were rather fun, are long gone. What is left is blind activism, hysteria, fallacy, and beyond hedonism: decadence and degeneration, pure and simple. These gay rights centre on the allowance of annual street parties in each and every given capital city, displaying all that Roman orgies also had to offer, minus the style.

More seriously, gay activism fights for legal rights to adopt children and same sex marriage, which is already accomplished in many Western countries. The argument against, that they constitute an infringement on family values, are not accepted by gay activists on the grounds that these are Christian values, which don't apply to them.

Would the argument that children have no say in the matter - their inability, given their age, to express consent - cut any ice with them in the matter? The argument that a child needs role models, two parents, one of each gender, I won't even mention in the light of the Liberal dogma. Would the argument that marriage is originally a religious institution perhaps destroy their appetite for state-sanctified same-sex nuptials? Or could it be, that this is exactly the reason they want these rights in the first place: usurp, pervert and destroy?

Liberals have long denied the existence of the slippery slope. Given the developments in the matter of abortion and partial birth, it can be safely said - as suspected - that this is dog food. Where is the line that must not be crossed, if not life itself? As per Ann Coulter's elemental query, if you don't believe in God, what keeps you from committing mass murder?

The next item on the moral erosion program will be the sanctity of children: pederast activists are already working to swap consent - which presently stands between them and the legalised act - to read "understood to consent, unless otherwise is indicated"! Governed by the perverted Mill paradigm that everybody simply must answer to his or her personal urge, they now try to convince themselves and others that their heinous attentions are a matter of 'nature', society's revulsion caused by 'nurture'. Just when you think it cannot possibly get any worse, it just did!

There is no good reason at all why we shouldn't find the European Parliament's agit prop bus in the streets of Moscow and Latvia in a few years time, delivering that message in the name of just the next unequal group requiring emancipation at the expense of the powerless.

I am resting totally assured that some Left Liberals are presently in danger of bursting a brain capillary from sheer indignation at so much reactionary moralising! They should realize that the most common failure of Roman pagan society was their inability to make the protection of the innocent and vulnerable a matter of morality. We are reverting to those violent times, but that wouldn't be a problem, would it - any culture being the same as any other ...

God in the Gutter, Allah at the Altar

Despite objections from the Liberal parties and requests not to go ahead with the exclusive meeting of the eighteen "Friends of the EU Constitution", called for by Luxemburg and Spain - the latter currently led by the political and cultural equivalent of Attila The Hun - in an opening speech in Madrid, Spain's Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos argued that any revised Constitution should be extended to include more European objectives (?), rather than pared down to just institutional reforms.

Delegates from the eighteen countries that have ratified the EU constitution, plus its strong supporters - Ireland and Portugal - gathered in Madrid to outline their positions on the future of the European treaty and to "help the German presidency to collect the positions, to help finding a way out" of the current limbo. In line with the motto of the meeting and the key idea to be highlighted in the forthcoming statement - "Por una Europa Mejor", for a better Europe - Mr Moratinos reiterated that the current treaty is an "excellent document".

Apart from the usual underhanded way of conducting EU business, the "excellent document" is a re-hash of the existing treaties and charters, plus lots of wool produced by a committee of political has-beens, minus the good proposals and ideas. How the EU deals with its own values is exemplified by the extra-curricular "meeting of the friends" and how they run roughshod over the French and Dutch vetoes. In an EU Observer article the word vetoes is indicated between inverted commas, as if these were not real, but only a sort of constructed coincidence, having no real value in the legal sense. But the contrary is the case and these attempts at invalidating it are an indication of the legal relativism that is current in Brussels politics. I'm still wondering what part of "Non" and "Nee" they did not quite understand.

The vetoes are what the Constitution would make impossible, if adopted: for any one country to obstruct the deals the others make, and an end to (mostly Thatcherite) opt-outs. It is also at this point that the negative side of the EU would start to outweigh the positive: it would no longer be a benign, voluntary "occupation" by foreign powers offset by economic benefits, but a dictatorship by the majority, violating members' principle right to self-determination and sovereignty: it will prove to be self-defeating and its adoption will mark the end of the European Union and its efforts for peace in the absence of power politics on the continent.

The proposed Constitution is also an effort of creating a future in which moral truth has no role in governance. Like the VVD Dutch Liberal Party, it doesn't pass moral judgement, equating Christianity with cannibalism and Colin Powell with Robert Mugabe. It will impose a anti-theist French style laïcité [1] on public life, thereby violating its own declared moral commitment to tolerance.

The single thing that the patch-work of member countries have in common - a culture based on the Judeo-Christian civilizational enterprise built on the ruins of classical Greco-Roman values, is being denied to the point of stretching science to prove a rather immature purpose. The question can be asked: are a people who deny their own history worthy of a future? This isn't a time for wisdom and visions, but for polarization and transition. That is why the desert call to shelve the constitutional project for the moment, is wasted on "the friends". European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso's EU 50th anniversary birthday list calls for all but roots, although he does invoke the Catholic founding fathers, who we may wonder cover their heads in disappointment over such cultural barbarism.

Thanks to the relativist Christophobia of the anti-theist state [1] and in consideration of a comment yesterday on Dr Sanity's blog: "By all means, accept reality ... your grandchildren will be Muslim. Allahu akbar!" (yes, the gloves are off), the future is likely to be characterised by "God in the Gutter and Allah at the Altar". But we shouldn't despair: salvation may yet come in the guise of two former communist countries and new P.C. irritants, the Czech Republic and Poland. Perhaps after the last Western baby-boomer has packed it in, the New Europe may yet be able to snatch some of the bankrupt assets away from the Gates of Vienna.

I specifically would like to hear the views of new Europeans. They are heartily invited to post their comments.

The Impossible made Possible: the Dictatorship of Liberalism

To the list of subjectivist sins we can now add a reverse of Greg Koukl's Tolerance Trick: The Tolerance of Intolerance. A (regretfully anonymous) commentator on Thursday 12th, to a post on the plight of Christians in the Middle East on the blog Setting the World to Rights wrote as follows:

Relativistic thinking leads to a peculiar problem. If one person cannot judge an other's behavior because he does not live in his skin and cannot see through his eyes, then how should disagreements be settled? If each antagonist's conflicting idea about what each will do is determined by equally valid but differing perspectives, then a philosophy that starts out sounding tolerant to each, devolves into a philosophy that supports conflicting patterns of behavior, otherwise known as violence. By uncritically accepting the Islamists perspective that Westerners are "Christian Crusaders", no doubt in the name of being tolerant, the Archbishop (ed. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams) unwittingly accepts the legitimacy of the consequences of that worldview, namely the massacre of Christians -- surely the height of intolerance. The Archbishop, like relativists who argue similarly, adopts a morally inconsistent and therefore morally wrong position: the tolerance of intolerance.

... for which we are no end grateful!

In the world of paradoxes and oxymora created by the relativist world view I yesterday even had to conclude that the impossible has now become possible. What keeps bothering me no end is the case of Rocco Buttiglione. Let me not repeat the whole sordid matter: a biography and links to media articles on the case can be found on the site of the Acton Institute.

It was of course the politically correct E.U. at its worst, having elevated subjectivism to the officially prescribed policy for all member countries. I'm just wondering what my old hero, philosopher and former E.U.commissioner Frits Bolkestein would make of it. We cannot know, as he doesn't seem to blog.

It is of course a case that would make any follower of genuine Liberalism, in the classical sense of De Tocqueville and John Locke, shudder at the mere thought, the latter two probably turning in their graves as well. I know my mother does.

I was a member of the Dutch (classical) Liberal party VVD (not to be confused with the left wing Liberal D66) when Frits Bolkestein was leading it with great moral courage. Mr Bolkestein at his inauguration stressed the need to come to a discussion in the party on ethics and morality. It never got off the ground, there being a wing that subscribes to "unlimited liberty as long as nobody else gets hurt" and the banning of "preaching moral values", a hint at the fully fledged relativism of current date. The subject at some point even became a real taboo. It was - in the end - also the core reason for me leaving the party.

Since there's an element, described by some journalists with a turn for the caricature, as "beer tap liberalism" - a branch of Liberals not particularly interested in the inner thoughts and workings of the doctrine itself - they know little of De Montesquieu who remarked on the American Constitution that it worked as it was embedded in a Christian society, and John Adams who said that the American Constitution was made "only for a moral and religious people". Alexis de Tocqueville has commented that "despotism may govern without faith, liberty cannot" and Liberal theorist John Locke noted on civil society that it was Christianity that gave his doctrine foundations and strength.

Contrary to how it is seen at present, I think that for at least a number of the great Liberal philosophers from the age of the Enlightenment, it never was the idea for society to become "radically enlightened" (secularized, science and reason only considered possible outside the faith), in the sense that Christianity, as the original source of reason, science and natural philosophy, was seen by them as an obstacle to the Liberal ideal. Above quotations are proof to the contrary.

Pope Benedict XVI in his book "Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures" proposes that we adopt the reverse of an axiom from the age of the Enlightenment, when an attempt was made to understand and define the essential norms and morality by saying, these would be valid etsi Deus non daretur, even if God did exist. The reverse advising the atheist to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist.

It is valuable advice from men who in wisdom and knowledge are light-years removed from today's pseudo scepticism and sophistry that in fact has led to a form of politically correct crypto- totalitarianism, that hasn't the foggiest notion or even awareness of a nasty by-product of democracy, the dictatorship by the majority.

But in line with the paradox of The Intolerance of Tolerance, it is the Dictatorship of Liberalism that is at the core of "The Case Buttiglione", a case with more victims than Mr Buttiglione and the E.P. alone: it marks the death of classical Liberalism as we knew it. (It stands to reason, when basically totalitarian parties start calling themselves liberal.)

Give yourself a merry Christmas and sign the petition for the life of Salah Choudhury today!

Yesterday I received the following from the European Parliament and in all honesty, I'm impressed!

quote

We acknowledge receipt of your message and in response to your inquiry we would like to inform you that the case of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, a journalist who advocates dialogue between religions and recognition of Israel, is highlighted. He was arrested in November 2003 and is in danger of being condemned to death for sedition at his trial, which is due to open on November 13th. The European Parliament resolution on Bangladesh calls for a review of his trial and for his acquittal.We would like to invite you to read Eropean Parliament (EP) article from 16th November 2006 on this matter, available on this web page of the EP: For further reading we suggest the European Parliament resolution on Bangladesh. You may also wish to get in touch with your MEP. Contact details can be found on this page. We hope that this information will be of use to you.

unquote

Let's also hope this does Salah Choudhury's trial some good.
The petition can still be signed here. The counter stands on a mere 3330! Come give yourself a merry Christmas and sign the petition today!