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Free Speech ? Use it or LOSE it ! 'Some' of the people who wish to speak with you, may be a danger to you. But 'all' of the people who would stop you listening, are a danger to you. Sean Bryson  A full list of all of the articles on this website The DEFINITION of a WHITE SUPREMACIST !?!?
 "The concept of envy — the hatred of the superior — has dropped out of our moral vocabulary … The idea that white Christian civilization is hated more for its virtues than its sins doesn’t occur to us, because it’s not a nice idea. … Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. –Joseph Sobran (Sobran’s — April 1997)"
I want and believe in self determination for my people |
From https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/europe-terrorism-migrants-debt-crisis TERRORISM, MIGRANTS, AND CRIPPLING DEBT: IS THIS THE END OF EUROPE? Some things about Paris never change. One November evening in the Place André Malraux, near the Louvre, I noticed a couple in their late middle years who were waiting on a traffic island to cross to my side of the street. They were obviously headed to the lines building up at the security check outside the Richelieu theater, where The Father, by August Strindberg, was playing. She was in her 50s, trim and elegant in jeans; he was a little older, a big man with tousled hair. Suddenly she reached up to touch his cheek and kissed him on the lips with a passion that, it has to be said, is unusual for their age. Even in the city that produced Rodin’s The Kiss and Robert Doisneau’s Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville, the gesture was surprising. When I caught her eye and she smiled shyly, I knew that this kiss was special and, in all its life-affirming tenderness, was a kind of defiance of the barbarities that had taken place 10 days before at the concert hall Le Bataclan and the restaurants Le Petit Cambodge and La Belle Équipe, among other venues, where 10 ISIS terrorists slaughtered 130 people who were out enjoying themselves, just like this couple. So, she was celebrating life, her love for her big bear of a partner, culture, and being on the streets of the City of Light. In many ways Paris has changed profoundly since the attacks, and along with it so has Europe. There have been large-scale atrocities on the Continent in recent years—in Madrid, London, and at the Charlie Hebdo offices, in Paris, in January of last year—but in the aftermath of this one there is a realization that Europe, its cities, and all those institutions predicated on unending peace are now vulnerable to bewilderingly rapid developments. It is, after all, only about 18 months since most of us first heard the names ISIS and ISIL. Europe is beset by so many crises that it can be hard to remember them all. In rough order of prominence, they are: homegrown terrorism, the largest migration of people since World War II, sovereign debt, doubts about the euro’s viability, the rise of extreme right-wing parties such as France’s National Front, Russia’s menace to its western neighbors, growing Euro-skepticism (especially in Britain, which may easily vote to leave the European Union in a forthcoming referendum), the election of hard-line governments in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Catalan independence movement. Many of these are related—the sovereign-debt crises and doubts about the euro, for example—but they have combined over the last two years into a perfect storm which, with the notable exception of Germany’s Angela Merkel, has shown Europe’s leadership to be wanting in both speed and imagination. owhere are the shock and change in Europe after the attacks better represented than in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, which went into total lockdown when it was discovered that its Muslim quarter of Molenbeek had produced some of the November 13 killers. I arrived in Brussels on the Eurostar at night to find only homeless people and camouflaged military on the streets. It was as if the Belgian Army were policing an insurgency in some distant, indigent colony, not guarding a city that also happens to serve as the de facto capital of the European Union. I dined in the empty Le Petit Boxeur, which I mention because it was the only restaurant I found open. I walked the spookily deserted streets, visited the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, which announced in a panicky notice on the door that it was closed because of the THREAT LEVEL FOUR, and toured the feared Molenbeek neighborhood, where business seemed to be going on pretty much as usual, with all the cafés open as well as the stores selling North African clothes and exotic fruit and vegetables. This is exactly what ISIS wants: to shut non-Muslim Europe down, to close the schools and places of culture and have people trembling in their beds, which, to be fair, was what ordinary Belgians were saying. I watched a debate on local TV in which mystified citizens questioned an official on the exact difference between Threat Level Three and Threat Level Four. He had to confess that he had no idea. After 24 hours, I had had enough and decided to leave. At the station, there were more armed police and soldiers than passengers, and the train to Paris was patrolled by five police officers with automatic weapons, which was understandable, given that this was the line where a heroic intervention by three unarmed Americans, including two servicemen, and a British businessman prevented a terrorist attack last summer. The reverberation from the November attacks was still evident 10 days later in Paris, especially around the shrines of remembrance set up at the attack sites in the 10th and 11th Arrondissements. Parisians had set their face against this thing and were grimly determined to own their streets and restaurants again. And it was here the penny really dropped for me about the change in Europe, when I read the sentence that the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, let slip to foreign-newspaper reporters as he warned that France must prepare for more attacks: “We have forgotten,” he said, “that history is fundamentally tragic.” Such fatalism is extremely rare among modern European politicians. Ever since the European movement began, in the 1940s, spearheaded by Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, the basic operating principle of the project and its leaders has been an almost cultish optimism. For at least two generations, Europe’s highly educated, Financial Times-reading mandarins assumed they could inoculate the Continent against every possible contingency with ingenious layers of bureaucracy and legislation. But Valls came right out with it: history cannot be defied by rules and regulations, or by institutionalized wishful thinking. His implication, I believe, was that France and its European Union partners needed to think anew, and act anew. It is worth recalling the original optimism of the European movement after World War II, here articulated in the spring of 1948: We must proclaim the mission and design of a United Europe, whose moral conception will win the respect and gratitude of mankind and whose physical strength will be such that none will dare molest her tranquil sway … I hope to see a Europe where men and women of every country will think of being European as of belonging to their native land, and wherever they go in this wide domain will truly feel “here I am at home.” These were the words of Winston Churchill speaking at the inaugural Congress of Europe in The Hague, and they may surprise his Euro-skeptic heirs in the British Conservative Party, some of whom favor what is known as “Brexit”—Britain’s exit from the E.U., in order to reclaim control over laws made in Brussels and to end the right of people from E.U. member states to work in the U.K. SEA OF HUMANITY DOUBT IS THE COMMODITY IN GREATEST SUPPLY AMONG EUROPE’S LEADERS AT THE MOMENT. The Schengen area is the magnet that drew more than a million refugees and migrants during 2015, for it allows a person to travel, for example, from Sweden’s frozen North to the heel of Italy without ever showing his or her passport. Britain, incidentally, never signed on to the agreement and has kept its border controls, while Greece has no contiguous frontier with the other members of Schengen. As a result, migrants have to go through the Balkans to reach the other Schengen countries. The last time I knew for certain that I was witnessing history was on the night of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 26 years ago, perhaps the most optimistic moment in Europe’s postwar era. Today, this trek of the needy and desperate through Europe’s hopelessly undefended borders may not be as cinematic as the images of people tearing down the wall between freedom and dictatorship, but it is every bit as transformative, and it does now threaten the “tranquil sway” of the Continent. In another example of the new European realism, Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the European Commission and the former foreign minister of the Netherlands, voiced his deepest fears. “The challenge to the European project today is existential,” he said before the Paris attacks. “The refugee crisis has brought that to light. What was unimaginable before now becomes imaginable, namely the disintegration of the European project.” Doubt is the commodity in greatest supply among Europe’s leaders at the moment, and when someone as sober and experienced as Frans Timmermans questions the future of the E.U., we should take notice. Disorientation is common, too. You can never be exactly sure what you’re seeing, or where you stand on an issue such as migration and the refugee crisis, which inspire fear and compassion in equal measures. For example, it is a real possibility that among the smiling and incredibly polite young men on the dockside in Mytilene there were ISIS sleepers—two of the Paris terrorists, traveling under the names M al-Mahmod and Ahmad al-Mohammad, entered Europe via Greece—and yet also compelling are the scale of the migration and the anxiety and suffering within it. The arrivals on Lesbos alone during 2015 numbered nearly half a million, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.). So many have drowned trying to reach Europe that the island’s morgues and cemeteries are full with corpses that may never be identified. My guide on Lesbos, a volunteer aid worker named Alexandra Tzanedaki, told me that refugees sometimes take the precaution of writing a message to a loved one, together with their personal details, on the orange life jackets provided by people smugglers. Because the E.U. promised Turkey $3.2 billion in aid to reduce the flood of refugees from its camps, the number of boats eased while I was on the island, which will be an inconvenience to the people smugglers, who charge a basic $1,600 for the three-to-five-hour trip. Some rough math is worth doing. Revenue from one rubber dinghy with an average of 65 occupants is $104,000. According to the interactive update published on the Web by the U.N.H.C.R., 448,000 arrived on Lesbos in 2015 by sea. Using the basic fare, this comes to a total revenue for 2015 of about $717 million. With that kind of money at stake, the people smugglers will not allow themselves to be inconvenienced for very long. This is not about just refugees from Syria’s civil war. At a feeding station run by Greek volunteers in the shadow of Mytilene’s castle, I discovered young Moroccans, Tunisians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Ethiopians, and one man from Mali. An entire generation seems to be on the move. You are struck by their good nature and the resourcefulness that propels them across continents. There is also acute loneliness on the long road into Europe. I met a charming Afghan man of about 20 who was giving half his free meal to a gang of friendly dogs. He told me he did this every day simply for the company. Demographics, poverty, and communications are driving economic migration. According to the research group Youthpolicy.org, young people aged between 15 and 24 constitute about 20 percent of the populations in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. Because many are poor, they cannot marry—half of men in the Middle East between the ages of 25 and 29 are single. They have little money and few ties; however, they do have the Internet on their phones (an indispensable item on the road), and they know about the wealth and opportunities of Europe, and these are what put them in a dinghy, even if they have never seen the sea before. But there are other enticements—one people-smuggling Web site is reported to have promised speedy asylum procedures in Sweden, “free blonde Swedish girls,” and accommodation in a luxury hotel. The idea of the Continent’s southern frontier, the Mediterranean Sea, also changed in the European mind during the course of 2015. What was a pleasure ground for the last half-century became a place where thousands drowned and vacationers found themselves springing from beach towels to help refugees. Worse was the horror across the sea from Italy, in Tunisia, where a lone gunman killed 38 people, including 30 Britons, who were sunbathing on the beach. Along the North African coast, in Libya, black-masked ISIS executioners beheaded 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian migrant workers and then filmed the sea running red with blood. f Europe is the world’s bloodiest continent, the Mediterranean is historically its most violent body of water. Atrocities are nothing new to its past, nor are mass migrations. As far back as the late Bronze Age, when a mysterious collapse in civilization occurred, perhaps due to climate change and drought, the eastern Mediterranean swarmed with “the Peoples of the Sea.” The Mediterranean’s great French historian, Fernand Braudel, wrote of the catastrophe: “Its history is extremely complicated, but can be reduced to a number of quite clear patterns, a kind of geography of human migration.” Peter Frankopan, head of the Centre for Byzantine Research at Oxford University, and the author of the acclaimed The Silk Roads, underlines the point that Europeans are ignorant of the history and culture beyond their own Mediterranean borders. “Europe does not have a past that can be understood in isolation to Asia and Africa,” he says. “And yet we have done all we can to try to seal ourselves off: we spend no time teaching the history, languages, or cultures of peoples who inhabit the shores of the Mediterranean…. We are now paying the price for the relentlessly blasé attitude.” That story about the Peoples of the Sea from more than 3,000 years ago tells us what lies ahead for Europe in the 21st century, if the Middle East and North Africa are rendered uninhabitable by global warming. POST-BELLUM While Britain, of course, stayed out and kept the pound, Greece, in 2001, joined eagerly. The country’s tax revenues would never have sustained its spending, and when the financial crisis hit, it had to ask the E.U.—in effect, Germany—for successive bailouts. It is some irony that, while the euro issue rumbles, the two countries are now handcuffed together in the refugee nightmare. Things did work fairly well in the good times, yet when the enormous problems of the last 18 months arose, the E.U. was found wanting in its response to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and in such things as border security, the exchange of intelligence among security agencies, and the collection of data from the movement of people within the Schengen area. The last, however, looks as if it’s being fixed, as the European Parliament has dropped its objections to the sharing of passenger data among E.U. members. The public despaired and simply retreated from the European ideal to celebrate the virtues of their own national states. Euro-skepticism is growing throughout the E.U.’s 28 member countries, particularly in Britain and the Visegrad Group (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic). Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, openly evokes the ancient clash of civilizations between Christendom and Islam. But much more worrying is the success in France of the National Front (F.N.), which gained 28 percent of the vote in the first round of December’s regional elections. In the second round, right and left united to keep Marine Le Pen’s party out of power. The great fear that swept through the Continent focused on the threat from within, from suburbs such as Molenbeek, in Brussels, and St. Denis, just outside Paris’s Périphérique, and urgent questions were asked. How come the jihadists of November 13 were allowed to move so freely across the Schengen area to carry out their atrocities? How had the intelligence agencies failed to spot them? The silence that meets these questions says one thing: Europe cannot protect its citizens, let alone defend its borders. Walking round Molenbeek and St. Denis, you are aware of the distinct Arab character of the stores and cafés, and there are people selling watches and counterfeit perfumes on the street. I was struck by how close yet remote these two obviously Muslim neighborhoods are to the institutions and history of Europe. Molenbeek is only a 10-minute drive from the center of Brussels, where Eurocrats and politicians dream of integration and harmonization programs. The apartment in St. Denis where three terrorists, including one of the Paris organizers, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, were killed in a seven-hour gun battle is a five-minute walk from the great Basilica of St. Denis, the birthplace of the European Gothic style and once the burial place of French kings. Europe ignored what was going on beneath its nose, possibly because it did not give a damn about these young men of Arab descent, but also because the nihilistic religious fantasies of ISIS were in some way beyond the secular imagination of modern Europeans. In Paris, I met my friend and the publisher of the Éditions Denoël imprint, Beatrice Duval, for coffee on the morning when President François Hollande led France in a service of homage to the victims of the attacks, at Les Invalides. We talked of the coruscating wit with which young Parisians—who had been the main targets of Abaaoud’s gang—reacted to the attacks on Facebook and YouTube—such as the young woman who tweeted hilariously after being shot in the behind at Le Bataclan and the YouTube video that spliced an interview with the man who owned the terrorists’ hideout in St. Denis with a hammy French comedy. She mentioned the widespread suspicion of young men of Arab descent and the unbelievable fact that, in St. Denis, Sharia “scholars” actually held a meeting to discuss under what circumstances a wife merited a beating from her husband. And, yes, she knew people who might vote for Le Pen’s National Front. What they would be supporting is a manifesto that is both anti-European and discriminatory. Le Pen says she would withdraw from the euro and the Schengen Agreement, reduce legal immigration from 200,000 to 10,000 people per year, deny automatic immigration rights to spouses, give priority to French citizens in matters of housing and employment, and provide many more police officers and prison cells. If Donald Trump were French, the National Front would probably be his party of preference. A lot of French people are finding the package attractive, entirely forgetting that it fits ISIS’s agenda of breaking up the E.U. and exacerbating racial tensions in a country of 64 million people with a population of about five million Muslims. ISIS and the F.N. even share a hatred of Jews, though since Le Pen detoxified her father Jean-Marie’s party, it is far less overtly anti-Semitic. One poll suggested that she might just beat Hollande in a second-round runoff in the presidential election in 2017. If that proves to be true, ISIS leaders will mark a great victory. Her triumph would be an even graver threat to the stability of the E.U. than the possible withdrawal by the U.K., which could happen around the same time. No date for the U.K. referendum has been set, but Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to place the results of negotiations with E.U. leaders before the British public by the end of 2017. Either one of these developments would be catastrophic for the E.U.: it could not survive both. EURO-CRASH? Refugees and migrants have been beaten and mistreated along the routes into Europe, it is true, but there have also been countless acts of kindness—for example, in Austria, Germany, and also Serbia, which is not known for its love of Muslims. Officers in the Italian Coast Guard have risked their lives to save drowning refugees from North Africa, and a woman in Sicily set up a guardianship scheme to help young, vulnerable African boys. I heard suggestions that the people of Lesbos should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for their response to the crisis. On its beaches, I encountered locals who waited in waders for the migrant dinghies, sea-rescue experts from Spain with high-powered Jet Skis, a cook from Malaysia who brewed up soup in a scruffy waterside camp, and a Greek concert pianist who had canceled his engagements to remain organizing the reception on the beach for as long as he was needed. The instinctive goodwill of hundreds of people is moving. Most impressive of all was a Greek psychologist named Anna Panou, a delightfully pretty and courteous young woman, who works for Médecins du Monde at the Moira refugee camp, dealing with the problems of young people who are on the road alone. The repetitive pain of her job is something to behold: part of the work is to accompany people to the morgue so they can identify loved ones who drowned on the crossing. Maybe the E.U. is more resilient than any of us suspect, but the problem is not only institutional. Throughout its history, Europe has failed to integrate successive influxes, with the result that people of different ethnic origins have stuck together in clumps. Resentment builds both inside and outside these shuttered communities. While European culture offers much to its people, it has never successfully created a melting pot, and that finally may be its biggest problem. “Europe is facing its destiny,” said Manuel Valls, and it is little wonder. It is very hard to be positive about much in the E.U.’s reaction to the events of 2015. Its institutions are basically unfit to respond in the way that a nation-state does, ruthlessly prioritizing the safety of its citizens and the integrity of its borders. If reform does not come quickly, that wonderful, grudging affinity will be at an end, and Europe will return to its old ways.
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