Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/31/2012

Olli Rehn, the economics czar of the European Commission, has warned that the euro may disintegrate if the current hemorrhaging in Greece and Spain can’t be stanched. There have been massive withdrawals of euros from Spanish banks, with more than €68 billion leaving the country last month. The interest rate on Spanish bonds has risen dramatically.

In other news, artists, entertainers, and other non-fundamentalists in Tunisia staged a sit-in today in front of the Constituent Assembly building in Tunis. The demonstrators were protesting Salafist attacks on secular people, including one on a female journalist, who was beaten by a Salafi for not covering her arms in public.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Diana West, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Insubria, Jerry Gordon, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

The BBC Uses the “M” Word — But CNN Doesn’t

These two videos uploaded by Vlad Tepes illustrate how two major media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic dance around the issue of Islamic violence and misogyny.

The first is a CNN report about the plight of women in Afghanistan. Throughout the entire report, Christiane Amanpour never once mentions Islam or shariah when discussing what happened to these female victims of Islam. It’s simply “domestic abuse”.

As Vlad says, this isn’t reporting, it’s apologetics.

Warning: The footage of a hideously scarred young woman in this clip may be disturbing to sensitive viewers:


The second video breaks new ground for the BBC: it actually refers to the rapist of the Sikh girl in Luton as a Muslim. The fact that the victim was a Sikh seems to have given the Beeb permission to forego “Asian” and call a spade a spade.

A Witness Stands Down

The defense team in the trial of Anders Behring Breivik has built a carefully constructed a political show trial with the full co-operation of the Norwegian system of “justice”. Yet over the past few days the architecture of this judicial farce has been crumbling at an astonishing rate.

Numerous “expert” witnesses have either refused to testify or have been excused by the court. The most recent to extend his polite regrets is Fjordman.

Here’s the report from Document.no, as translated by ST:

Fjordman pulls out
by Hans Rustad

The list of witnesses shrinks: the latest to decline is Peder Nøstvold Jensen, alias Fjordman.

After some back and forth, there was talk that Jensen would testify via Skype. He has been abroad for some time, far away from Norway.

Now Fjordman has said that after the recent increasing complications he has decided to refuse to testify in any form.

Also: Mullah Krekar and Hanne Nabintu Herland no longer have to give testimony.

In related news, Fjordman sends this note about his recent correspondence with a leftist newspaper — is there any other kind? — in Norway:

Spaghetti Bolognese: A Casus Belli?

The following account of events in Italy since the recent earthquake was originally published (in German) at SOS-Österreich. Many thanks to Hermes for the translation:

Italy: Muslim revolt over “Spaghetti Bolognese”

ROME (Novopress) — Violence, Islam, contagious diseases… a concentrate of all problems of the multicultural society has emerged in a few days in the refugee camps of Emilia-Romagna (in the region of Bologna) after a horrendous earthquake ravaged northeastern Italy. The preferential treatment of immigrant victims added to the sharpening of the situation.

In spite of all their goodwill, the Italian volunteers were simply rolled over by events. Last Thursday the Vodafone company wanted to distribute free telephone cards in the San Felice Sul Panaro camp in the province of Modena. There a scuffle took place among North African immigrants, during which one of them pulled out his knife and stabbed one of his fellow countrymen.

On Saturday a big revolt broke out in the same camp as an Italian voluntary worker served a Muslim girl a dish of spaghetti Bolognese. Those in charge of maintaining the civil order in the camp explained that everything had simply been a mistake: “The worker gave her the wrong meal by mistake.” But the Muslim girl began to cry, summoned all of her family members, and accused the managers of the camp of having purposefully insulted Islam. The help of the plain-clothes security personnel was needed to restore peace.

“We sincerely did not expect to meet such problems when we applied for the job in the camp of Emilia”, some voluntary workers from Trentino explained.

In two occasions, the disinfecting of a tent inhabited by North Africans was necessary because they suffered from an infection of skin mange. After having been disinfected twice by a special team from Venice, the tents finally had to be destroyed and thrown away by the San Felice team, because neither the Venetians nor the Tridentines were ready to accept more responsibilities regarding the issue. The scabrous Maghrebians were taken to a hospital.

According to a local newspaper: “The behavior of the north Africans puts the nerves of the other victims under great pressure,” but mainly of the native victims, who have lost everything. “We had been evacuated from our homes to this place here next to the camp,” a young couple complains. “We are from San Felice, but we receive no meals, because those are reserved for the inhabitants of the camp. One should also deal with the emergency situation we are in.”

However, they were very happy to be served spaghetti Bolognese.

“Diversity” Top Down or diversity Bottom up?

Spring Fundraiser 2012, Day Three
Despite the wear and tear, I love our Fundraiser weeks. It’s a bit like a holiday, or Old Home Week. For one thing, donors often send an accompanying email message in addition to their note at the bottom of the Pay Pal form. Also, it forces me to do a post every other day, even on the days I’m sure I “can’t”. I’ll admit that if the every-other-day schedule went on for an extended time, you’d be reading some wacky essays here.

This fundraising business has its own learning curve, at least the way we do it. The Baron, as usual, does the heavy lifting while I write half the posts and all the acknowledgements. It works!

Sticking to our chosen subject can be a problem some days, as can remembering the point of all this: to raise money for the coming quarter so that we can keep Gates of Vienna open. So far so good: even though it does seem magical at times.

For this particular bleg I’m hoping to hear from some of our lurking Anonymouses who stepped out of the silence to make their point that the demographics fabricated by those Lefties in Norway regarding our audience were just that: convenient fictions. The personal prosperity many of you described gave me great hope for this particular bleg.

To those of you who wrote to put the lie to the ugly prevarication coming out of Norway, I ask that you step up again, this time with financial help. If your anonymity is a concern, send cash. Several of our donors have done just that for years and their money has never gone astray — they let us know when they mail it and we let them know as soon as it arrives in our post office box. And before the unfriendlies fire off an obvious salvo, let me save them some time: yes indeed, we do indeed pay taxes on our donations.

Norway — just to pick any old totalitarian democracy — is a good example of faux “diversity”. Diversity by government decree would be funny if it weren’t so crippling to the people who are forced to live within that framework.

Fjordman catches flack from the government-supported jornolists when he does fund-raising to take care of his own expenses. Those hacks are oblivious to the deep irony that their jobs are paid for out of the taxes gathered from Fjordman and others like him. These government workers are so deeply ignorant of life outside their sheep pen they can’t comprehend the reality for others, for people with real jobs, for people who are unemployed or underemployed or living with a disability. They “celebrate” diversity yet they move in the limited circles of their government-run environment which ensures they’ll never have to actually experience anything close to what they preach. Even if someone left the cage door open, do you think they’d leave? It’s a scary world out there with the grown-ups.

Islamic Slavery is Alive and Well in Bosnia

Further update, in response to various commenters:

Yes, you’re right; this story does seem a bit peculiar. If you read the full text as posted at Vlad (the last time I checked, the Pravda story was down again), the Muslim aspect of the case depends on the perps’ cousin being a Muslim. Hmm.

And let’s not forget the source — the Russians have a row to hoe with respect to Bosnia and Serbia. “There’s no izvestia in Pravda, and no pravda in Izvestia,” as they used to say in Soviet times (“There’s no news in The Truth and no truth in The News”).

But I’ll leave this stand as-is for the moment. Y’all can send me any significant further updates if they come in.


Update: The Pravda article has now mysteriously reappeared.


According to the following article, a Muslim husband and wife in Bosnia kept an underage German girl as a slave for years under bestial conditions.

The story was originally published in the English-language version of Pravda, but has since been pulled. One wonders why Pravda pulled it…

Fortunately, Vlad Tepes preserved a copy of it before it was pulled:

Muslim slavery in the center of Europe

Several days ago, the world was shocked with the news from Europe. A family couple from Bosnia and Herzegovina had been keeping a young German woman as their slave for eight years. The victim of family violence is now 19 years of age.

The Bosnian couple – Milenko Marinkovic, 52, and his wife Slavojka Marinkovic, 45, – were torturing and starving an underage girl, whose name was Karla. The girl would be raped by other men on a regular basis.

It was the couple’s neighbors, who called the police. One of them said that he saw Marinkovic harnessing the girl to a cart and whipping her, as if she was a horse. The couple made the German woman come into unnatural relations with dogs – just out of sadism, Austrian portal unzensuriert.at said. The victim was kept indoors. The woman was not allowed to communicate with other people at all. She had to eat the fodder that her masters would give to their pigs.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/30/2012

Christine Lagarde, the General Director of the IMF, caused a stir recently when she said that the Greeks should stop complaining and just pay their taxes. Now it has emerged that Ms. Lagarde earns almost €400k per annum and pays no taxes whatsoever. Her status as an employee for a trans-national institution exempts her from taxation.

Nice work if you can get it.

In other news, as part of his latest skirmish in the War on Obesity, Mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to ban large sugary drinks in New York City.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, DS, Fjordman, JD, JP, Steen, The Observer, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Raceless Rape Exposes BBC Deceit

As reported in last night’s news feed, a large crowd of Sikhs gathered around the police station in Luton yesterday to protest the way the police handled a rape of a teenage Sikh girl by a Muslim man.

British Freedom chairman Paul Weston has some thoughts on this latest incident of culturally-enriched sexual predation in Britain. The essay below was published earlier today in a slightly different form at the British Freedom website.


Raceless Rape Exposes BBC Deceit
by Paul Weston.

It takes quite a bit of self inflicted torment and anguish within the traitor class at the BBC to make me feel sorry for them, but their take on a recent rape case in Luton has almost managed to achieve this. Almost… but not quite.

The BBC can never honestly admit that what they routinely refer to as “Asian rape” is actually Muslim rape, leading more realistic observers to wonder how they would report a rape case when the perpetrator was an Asian Muslim and the victim an Asian Sikh/Hindu/Chinese/Thai etc etc.

Well, now we know the answer.

Luton police in talks over Sikh protest is the BBC headline, with the following excerpts taken from their article:

Police have said they are talking to community leaders following a protest by hundreds of Sikhs at a Luton police station……about 250 people gathered at Buxton Road on Tuesday over an allegation that a young Sikh woman had been sexually assaulted.

“Before the protest, senior officers had attended the Gurdwara in Dallow Road to meet Luton Sikh community leaders to explain the investigation into the report of an assault on Monday…after considerable negotiation with representatives from the group, who were invited into the police station to talk, the protesters left at 11pm.

A 19-year-old man charged with common assault in connection with the allegation is due in court later.

I can just picture the turmoil and consternation within the spinning brains of typical BBC propagandists here. One imagines that hours of high level conferences were held at BBC HQ; hours of inward looking incomprehension as reality overtook their desperately manufactured fantasy of Asian rape rather than Muslim rape; hours of the ever-deepening awareness that their entire liberal meme of multicultural lies and evasion was shortly to be exposed as just that.

“Honestly, how can these damned Muslims be so stupid?” drawled the Armani clad, classless, public school and Oxbridge educated Tarquin Toolightly, Chief Commissar of the BBC’s Diversity and Community Cohesion Unit. “How can they expect us to keep covering for them if they start raping Asians? Why can’t they just stick to raping white girls? This puts us in a very embarrassing situation. We can’t possibly headline the story with Asian man rapes Asian woman! We would end up looking like idiots!”

Freeing the Culturally-Enriched Captives

At the moment Norway is experiencing a series of labor strikes. Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer sends two articles, one of them translated, about the strikes and their consequences.

The translator includes this note:

These strikes take place on a fairly regular basis. While they are going on the entire country pretty much comes to a standstill, and most of the time the consequences of these industrial actions make the average citizen want to pull his hair out.

The translated article deals with the immigration detention centre at Trandum, where some of the staff are walking out on Wednesday ‘forcing’ the management to release some of the ‘clients’.

First, some excerpts from The Local about the strike by public sector workers (is there a private sector in Norway?):

Norway public sector workers were called out on strike on Thursday after salary negotiations broke down, affecting schools, day care centres and prisons.

Thursday’s strike action is the first in three decades by public sector workers in the country.

Up to 30,000 of Norway’s 600,000 state and municipal employees were taking part in the strike, according to a tally by the NTB news agency. That number was expected to increase unless the different unions can reach wage settlements with central and local governments.

[…]

The different unions however had demanded that their members receive the same increase as in the private sector, which they said was nearly 4.3 percent.

“The government cuts us off with worse wage development than for employees in the private sector. That is unreasonable,” Arne Johannessen, chief negotiator for the Unio union representing teachers and day care workers, said in a statement.

Some 8,500 of Unio’s members were taking part in the strike, affecting schools and day care facilities across the country, except for in Oslo, where negotiations continued.

[…]

Police, customs authorities and prisons were also affected, forcing for instance all prisoners at one prison to be transferred to other facilities, NTB reported.

The second (translated) article is an account of the effects of the strike on the asylum center at Trandum:

Must release detainees currently being held at Trandum as a result of industrial strike action

128 police officers from the Immigration unit of the Norwegian police (PU) have been chosen to take part in an industrial strike action on Wednesday morning. Of the 128 police officers, 42 are currently assigned to the immigration detention centre at Trandum, which means that an undisclosed number of foreign nationals being held at the centre will have to be released.

A Diversity of Finches

Spring Fundraiser 2012, Day Two
We’re now into the second day of our quarterly effort to raise operating funds. As mentioned yesterday, the topic for this bleg is Diversity. Dymphna kicked it off last night by looking at demographic diversity, both among our readers and among our donors.

What other diversities are worth looking at?

Well… There is a diversity of birds outside my window here in the upper room of the North Tower at Schloss Bodissey.

I don’t mean right now, of course. It’s the middle of the night, and the weather is so stormy that not even the whippoorwills are willing to brave the sturm und drang out there. But during the middle of the day I can sit here and watch the phoebes flit back and forth outside the screen as they tend to their nest at the top of the drainpipe. Every now and then they fuss loudly at the squirrels that run up and down the nearby oak tree.

Besides the phoebes, we have at least two pairs of crows, innumerable sparrows, lots of wrens, a few cardinals, some bluebirds, a nuthatch, the odd pileated woodpecker or red-headed woodpecker, very rarely a goldfinch, a half a dozen rowdy chickadees, a mockingbird, and an occasional brown thrasher at the edge of the woods. During the winter we have juncos, with robins filling in for them during the summer. Once a year, when the fruit ripens, our juneberry tree is full of feasting cedar waxwings — the only time we ever see those reclusive oddballs.

When the cat is out on the lawn, the birds tend to retreat. But the rest of the time our yard is a chittering, squawking aviary. This is the sort of diversity that appeals to me.

It’s not the kind of “diversity” we’re supposed to celebrate, however, even though the “natural” aspect of the idyllic view from my window would probably earn it the seal of ideological approval from the PC PTB. No, a diversity of finches is not enough.

How about a diversity of national currencies? Would that help?

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/29/2012

A tribal council in eastern Afghanistan has condemned four women and two men to death for immoral behavior. Their crime was to dance together at a wedding, violating a law requiring segregation of the sexes. The council ruling says that their behavior constitutes “fornication”, and they may thus be killed at any time. The four women are in custody, but the men escaped and ran away.

In other news, hundreds of Sikhs have gathered in protest outside the police station in the English town of Luton. They are angry at the way police handled the rape and beating of a teenage Sikh girl by a Muslim man. The protestors have staged a sit-down outside the station, and the police say they are negotiating with them to try to resolve the situation. Members of the English Defence League are reportedly participating in the protest.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to A. Millar, CSP, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, JD, Jerry Gordon, JP, KGS, Mary Abdelmassih, Steen, The Observer, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Watch Out Where You Point That Thing!

The trouble in the Lavapiés quarter of Madrid began after a police officer asked to see the papers of an illegal street vendor from Senegal. A group of Africans took exception to this treatment of their comrade, and that’s when things went sideways…

Many thanks to our Spanish correspondent Hermes for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling of this eyewitness video:


Below is the accompanying ABC.es article, also translated by Hermes:

The local police open an investigation into the shots in Lavapiés

It will be a formal procedure, the results of which will not be made public

The local police have opened an internal investigation in order to throw light on the circumstances of what happened yesterday in the quarter of Lavapiés when one of the agents who carried out the detention of an illegal vendor shot twice into the air in order to disperse a group of Africans who were insulting the police after one of their mates was arrested.

According to the information given by a spokesperson for the local police, this kind of investigation is opened whenever an agent opens fire with his service weapon. It is an internal proceeding carried out by the police force of the town hall, the results of which are not made public.

The incident was being heavily commented on today in the neighborhood as well as on the Internet, where the news and the video of the two policemen arresting the suspect, and the clash between them and the immigrants, were published yesterday by ABC reached a wide audience.

Integration Camps in Vienna

Forget concentration camps — they’re so 20th century! The latest craze in Vienna is for “integration camps”, which help prepare Austrian citizens for the future by requiring them to adapt to the various cultures of their country’s immigrant population.

The tone of this program is playful, but the organizers’ underlying purpose is deadly serious. Many thanks to Hermes for translating this article from Krone.at:

Daring artistic activity

‘Integration camps’ for Austrians in the middle of Vienna

A spectacular project will take place in Vienna in the next days. A group of artists will put up “integration camps” in the city as part of the Festwoche [Festival Week]. Only for Austrians, of course. According to the promoters, in these places people will be able to heal their phobia about minorities. The FPÖ is in outraged.

This satirical action goes under the name “Austrians, do integrate!”. It was created by the Viennese artists’ group “God’s Entertainment”. “We turn the debate about integration interculturally upside-down”, the creators of this initiative say. “After all the dominant culture, the courses on integration, and the language courses which our fellow immigrant citizens have to comply with, now we call on the natives to do the same thing. We invite them to at last be part of the big, complete and perfect Austria.”

To begin with, an evaluation of the need to adapt is to take place in the camps, and at the same time each participant will also be evaluated to determine which kind of integration program he needs. “Pack A” covers the “low requirement”. In this case, the course lasts just a few hours. “Pack B” lasts at least a full day and (according to description) for a complete beginner on integration there’s the “Pack C”, which lasts 2-3 days.

Headscarf training, forced marriage, halal slaughter

Foreigners of various origins are supposed to be in the camp to instruct. “We have Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, colored Africans, Turks, Kurds, Gypsies and Germans”, the organizers say. At the beginning, one deals in a playful way with problem-solving strategies. “If required, there will be offered also headscarf, forced marriage and home slaughter training”, the operators explained with a wink.

Her Adversaries Have Become the Master

Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, fell to the Ottoman invaders 559 years ago today, on May 29 1453. With its fall the Roman Empire came to an end.

Many thanks to Anestos Canelides for this tribute to the brave defenders of Constantinople.



In memory of the loss of Constantinople to the Christian world
May 29^th 1453

by Anestos Canelides

Prologue: Constantinople! O Constantinople!

“How lonely is the city that was full of people! How like a widow is she, who was great among the nations! The Princess among Provinces has become a slave!” — Lamentations 1:1

The battle raged within the gates, on the high towers; the trenches swam deep in blood.^[1]

A lone refugee, who had taken flight on a Venetian galleon wept at the unfortunate sight of Constantinople, shrouded in flames. A reflection in her teardrop captured the black smoke rising like the dark hand of death over the city’s blood-drenched streets.

These Hellenized Romans were forced to flee from their ancient capital just as during the Trojan War the innocents of the house of Priam had fled the proud city built by Neptune.

Smoke arose from the ruined ground while the city’s inhabitants fled in different directions ^[1] from the pursuing Turkish hoard.

Her teardrop, in slow motion, gently struck the salty waters of the Marmara Sea causing tiny ripples to form in the still water, moving towards the four corners of the Earth. Like the ripples the refugees of the vanquished city fled with winged feet to foreign lands. In those last hours of the siege, the valorous right arm of the Emperor Constantine Palaeologus XI held his sword high in defiance of the Turks, who were swarming through the city’s broken walls.

The Left-Wing Media Filter

The guardians of Norwegian “justice” overseeing the trial of Anders Behring Breivik have decided it’s safe to broadcast the testimony of Øyvind Strømmen directly to the public, but not that of Bruce Bawer and Fjordman, whose words will have to be filtered by loyal media lapdogs first.

The Oslo court has destroyed what little credibility it had left with this nakedly political decision.

Many thanks to our Norwegian correspondent The Observer for translating this article from Document.no:

The peculiar practice of explaining and giving evidence

The court has decided that the testimony of the experts witnesses subpoenaed by the defense, such as the testimony of Øyvind Strømmen, Lars Gule and Matthias Gardell, can be broadcast, but not the testimony of Bruce Bawer and Ole Jørgen Anfindsen.

This basically means that so-called expert witnesses and political activists will have the opportunity to give their personal assessments of political opponents directly to the public, while those whom they criticize, in this case Mr. Bawer and Mr. Anfindsen, are not granted this privilege. Mr. Bawer and Mr. Anfindsen have to rely on journalists who are critical and even hostile to their political views to correctly report their testimony.

The explanation that the court has chosen to justify such a decision with is that it fears that Anders Behring Breivik will seize the opportunity to make offensive remarks during the testimony of Mr. Bawer and Mr. Anfindsen.

The court has decided that the media will be allowed to broadcast the testimony of the following expert witnesses:

A Diversity Diversion

Spring Fundraiser 2012, Day One
As regular readers know all too well, we have a fund-raiser week every quarter of the year. These blegs have some theme or other — often a topic which has become umm…“topical” in the previous few weeks. The fundraising goes (usually) from one Tuesday to the next. The first day announces our theme; subsequent days each have a single Fundraising Post which deals — more or less — with the chosen theme (some days hewing a bit closer to this goal than others). Meanwhile, business goes on as usual. The news reports, cultural enrichment atrocities stories, guest essays, translations, videos, etc. appear as we’re given them or as whimsy dictates. We usually stay within the bounds of our mission statement but not always.

So. The First Day of the Fundraiser announces our theme. Subsequent daily Fundraiser posts expand on that theme. In addition, the dailies have a report on the various states and countries that showed up in the Donors’ Circle for the previous day. Everyone likes to check on the status of their own home place.

Sometimes we forget to make the Fundraiser Post of the Day more obvious to our readers. I mean, it’s obvious to us since we’ve been pondering it in the previous weeks, but our signal to you is rather low. A long-time reader in California wrote me the other day to thank us for our blog. As good as it is, he said, he also had the feeling we were Mr. Magoos when it came to monetizing our product.

Mr. Magoo??! Precisely!


I hadn’t though of him in years, but our California reader captured the essence of our problem: it is utterly essential to have our readers’ donations if we are to continue to keep the Gates of Vienna open. When the Baron went unemployed our advisor told us firmly that we had to fundraise and we had to do so consistently, once a month. We talked her down to once a quarter, and so it has remained ever since. Even after all this time and practice, though, we’re still not terribly adept. I have been known to write a Fundraiser post and neglect to mention fundraising at all. Yes, I did stick to the theme for that quarter, but it was as though I were expecting you to somehow apprehend the money part just by seeing the theme.

Dear me. The only thing wrong with our life as Magoos is that we’re not independently wealthy cartoon characters like Mr. M. However, the Baron’s computer eyesight resembles the original Magoo more closely every year. And he continues to display that benign optimism which first attracted me.

So this is Day One of the Second Quarter’s Fundraiser and we are asking that you donate whatever you can afford to keep this project going. We get by with a lot of help from our readers.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$£££££££££€€€€€€€€€€ — sorry, those are the only currencies I know. However, if other designations show up in PayPal, I’ll consult this chart.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
When we sat down to talk about this Fundraiser the idea of diversity came quickly to mind.

I mean both real diversity in the true sense of that word and also the sadly more usual faux diversity which currently hampers and restricts the thinking of many otherwise rational people.

Remember those horror stories about the ancient Chinese custom of binding women’s feet to make them more eligible for the marriage market? The p.c. forms of diversity are like that: they bind and constrict the minds of the intelligentsia in order to make them marketable. What use intelligence if no one will hire you because you think wrong thoughts? Besides, political correctness is a virtue in and of itself. If “everybody knows” then there is no need to bother your pretty little head about some thorny issue; the subject is “settled”. Consensus has arrived; the tedious bother of having to unpack all your ideas and rummage through them to find something suitable can be safely jettisoned.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/28/2012

Local politicians as well as members of the Dutch parliament were critical of the way Amsterdam police handled the Sharia4Holland demonstration on the Dam last Saturday (see last night’s report). Reacting to the criticism, police have now arrested the Islamic zealot who threatened the “Roman dog” Geert Wilders.

In other news, managers of some of Europe’s largest funds are divesting themselves of euro-based assets, in anticipation of a possible Eurozone crash. Meanwhile, after Greek depositors withdrew an estimated 25% of their money from banks, Greek police warned the general public that withdrawing their money was a bad idea, since it would then become more vulnerable to theft.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, JP, Steen, VladTepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Among the Criminal Asylum-Seekers

The following news video from Swiss TV describes the increase in violent crime that has accompanied a large increase in the number of asylum-seekers in Switzerland. Predatory criminal gangs of North African origins — some armed with bazookas — have become part of the landscape in some cantons.

Many thanks to Hermes for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Below is the accompanying article from Tagesschau, also translated by Hermes:

Special police units against criminal immigrants

The number of asylum seekers increased more in 2011 than it has in the past nine years. Criminality also increased. Various cantons have therefore taken measures.

The increase of asylum-seekers was 45% in 2011 — a total of 22,551 persons, primarily from North Africa, sought asylum in Switzerland. The numbers in countries with a makeup similar to Switzerland’s are considerably lower. In The Netherlands the number was 11,500 last year, in Norway 7,500.

The cantons have responded to this increase with special police units. In the canton of Geneva, for example, an anti-criminal brigade was created because theft increased by a third in the inner city.

Remembering Our Dead

As a first-generation American growing up in Florida as part of a small Catholic ghetto, I have no childhood memories of Memorial Day. Back then the population of the state was about two percent Catholic. That bit of demographic trivia sank in at the time because it explained why I knew every single “Catholic” house on the streets I walked between home and school; such knowledge was just part of the experience of being ‘different’.

The nuns who taught at our school were evenly divided between off-the-boat young Irish women and native-born Americans. The latter were more at ease and often less harsh. The former were often scared, and they suffered horribly in those black wool habits. Looking back, I am in wonder at the level of their courage.

The priests in our parish were another matter, though: Irish immigrants, every single one of them. Our monsignor was originally from Dublin and he personally traveled to the seminary in Maynooth to recruit many a newly minted priest for work in Florida. I’m sure he painted a rosy picture while leaving out the most salient fact. So when August arrived, those poor fellows often became quite sick when high summer lay like a weight over all of us (air conditioning as an assumed ‘right’ didn’t arrive until I was in high school).

[My mother endured her own trial by fire when she arrived in Florida, straight from Canada in late May and eight-plus months pregnant with me. Conceived in Toronto, born in Florida — I would still prefer Canada. By the age of ten, the weather and intellectual climate seemed so abysmal I was already considering how to get out of Dodge. I knew we could never afford college (and no one told me about scholarships), thus the only other way over the fence I could imagine was marriage to a nice Yankee. Which I did on turning twenty.]

We never avoided Memorial Day commemorations — being part of America was important — but since this one fell outside the boundaries of the school year there were no opportunities for the nuns to put us to work making iconic flags or memorizing relevant poetry for the occasion.

As I recall it wasn’t an observed holiday where my mother worked, either. Her boss was from Lebanon and he barely looked up for Christmas, much less something as nebulous as Memorial Day. Thus Mother never felt deprived of something she’d never known. Had it been a big deal in Florida, she’d have made sure we went through all the rituals and ceremonies — becoming an “American” was forefront in her mind when it came to our education.

Saudi Arabia Buys Oxford

In his latest essay, Paul Weston examines the ongoing process of Islamization in Britain as realized through the financial subversion of its universities by the Saudis and other wealthy Muslim donors.


The British once built glorious structures in our varied colonies and did so in order to project imperial power architecturally. But after we retreated within our own borders and invited in the Third World, so we in turn are now subjected to foreign statements of imperial power. This is very apparent in the ancient university city of Oxford, home to the massive Oxford Islamic Centre.

This building occupies the majority of its three-acre site and appears to have been constructed slap-bang in the middle of the colleges’ sports fields. The dreaming spires of Oxford have some serious competition here — the architectural projection of Islamic supremacy simply has to be seen to believed (go to Google maps and enter “Kings Mill Lane, Oxford.” The lane serves as the northern border of the site).

The Oxford Islamic Centre gained Royal approval recently, a landmark event celebrated by Prince Charles, a noted admirer of Islam who is apparently impervious to the reality of Islam’s core tenets. The Islamic centre, built at a cost of some £75 million, was funded by a number of hard-line Islamic states, most notably Saudi Arabia.

Between 1995 and 2008, eight universities — Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, University College London, the LSE, Exeter, Dundee and City accepted more than £235 million from Muslim rulers and those closely connected to them.

The donors tell us the Islamic Centres of British Universities merely want to promote an understanding of Islam, but Prof Anthony Glees, a man who has studied the rise of Islamic extremism in our universities, suggests their real agenda is rather different. He argues that they promote an extreme ideology and act as a form of propaganda for the Wahhabist strain of Islam within universities. They push, he says, “the wrong sort of education by the wrong sort of people, funded by the wrong sorts of donor”.

If this is true, why on earth are we allowing these Islamic centres to built, and why on earth are we allowing the construction costs (and one assumes the associated back-handers) to be funded by people and states linked to supremacism and terrorism?

Saudi Arabia has spent around 90 billion petro-dollars funding the growth of hard-line Wahhabist ideology in the West, yet Saudi Arabia is also a country that bans crosses, Bibles and any Christian teaching within its borders. Our much vaunted multicultural tolerance seems to be just a one way street to oblivion. Or, to put it more bluntly, we are being played for Dhimmi fools.

Fjordman: Why We Need the British Freedom Party

Fjordman’s latest essay has been published at the British Freedom website. Some excerpts are below:

In the spring of 2012, the British Freedom Party officially began working together with the English Defence League (EDL) street protest movement. Two senior EDL leaders, Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, joined the Executive Committee of British Freedom. The two organizations will cooperate, but nevertheless remain separate.

As British Freedom declares in its mission statement, “The objectives of the British Freedom Party shall be to defend and restore the freedoms, traditions, unity, identity, democracy and independence of the British people, to establish full sovereignty over all our national affairs by restoring the supremacy of the British Parliament, to withdraw from the European Union, to promote democratic British patriotic principles, to promote the social, economic, environmental and cultural interests of the British people and to preserve and promote the ancestral rights and liberties of the British people as defined in the British Constitution.”

At the website Gates of Vienna, British Freedom leader Paul Weston, a brave and eloquent English patriot, picked a random week in May 2011 to provide a detailed description of the utter financial, moral, legal and cultural rot that is modern British life. Law-abiding citizens are fleeced by thugs as well as their own government, while immigrant gangs spread fear in the streets. The UK, like most Western countries today, has virtually abandoned its border controls and is being flooded by a tsunami of global mass migration. Britain has become a place where real crime goes nearly unpunished whereas thought crimes against the Multicultural order are dealt with harshly.

Paul Weston warned back then that “Although it just a snapshot, it outlines a country, a government and a people whose civilisational timeline is now measured in years rather than decades or centuries. We are no longer serious about the serious matter of survival. We have nowhere to turn and no one to realistically represent us. Britain, as Lawrence Auster constantly reminds us, is a nation of the living dead.”

Ansar al-Din Targets Spain

The mujahideen of North Africa are again threatening the Iberian Peninsula. They have renewed their vow to reclaim the lost territory of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), a goal that has obsessed the Ummah since Islam was driven from Iberia in 1492.

Our Spanish correspondent Hermes has compiled a report on the topic based on Spanish-language sources. It focuses on a terrorist group called Ansar al-Din, which is now planning attacks in Spain.


Ansar al-Din Targets Spain
by Hermes


Snapshot of the website in which the group threatens Spanish cities
Spain has been threatened again by jihadists from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

Ansar al-Din controls Mali and has gained territory thanks to the weapons stolen in Libya

Ansar al-Din, a Salafi jihadist group which maintains an alliance with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has again pointed out Spain as top target. Ansar al-Din controls the north of Mali and Timbuktu. It has become powerful by of being one of the groups which obtained the largest quantity of weapons from the Libyan arsenal after the fall of Khadafi. The threat against Spain came with a photo in which the Salafists showed boxes of weapons and explosives with the seal of Misrata, stolen from the headquarters of Khadafi

Ansar al-Din (the defenders of the Islamic religion) has published a statement which was intercepted by the State Security Forces, and in which they point out four Spanish cities as targets: Granada, Valencia, Seville and Cordoba. The text of this statement explains that “they want to free these four cities which were once governed by Muslims”, and “restore Al-Andalus”.

Apart from the marked targets, which once again are Spanish, this group gives concern to the police because it has become powerful through acquiring so much weaponry from the Libyan arsenal after the fall of Khadafi. The threat against Spain arrived with a photo which the Salafists took of themselves on a truck full of explosives stolen from the headquarters of Khadafi in Misrata.


Terrorist photographed with the weapons stolen from Misrata
The State Security Forces engaged in the fight against the radical jihadists give total credibility to this new statement from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. After having intercepted and studied it, the conclusion remains the same: Spain is one of the top targets of the terrorist organization, and that AQMI remains one of our most significant menaces.

For her part, the government representative in Andalusia, Carmen Crespo, did not give much importance to this issue and pointed out that “what the government is concerned about is to work in order to ensure that the Islamist groups will not be able to take action, either in Spain or the rest of Europe.”

In this way, she said that the State Security Forces “investigate and are very aware in order to detect any cell or person involved”. According to her, this statement “has little to do with the reality in the country”, because “Spain is Spain, and here everybody has his/her place, because we welcome people, but what’s clear is clear.” Finally, she remarked that the government “is working to prevent the actions of the radical Islamist groups, and work is being done regarding investigation and prevention.”

AQMI still has its headquarters in Mali

AQMI still has its headquarters in Mali. The lawless desert of Mali is the main bastion of the Salafists, who have been maintaining their bases and training camps there for decades. There’s concern that AQMI has rearmed itself with weapons and explosives from Libya, which they have begun to use in countries such as Nigeria and in attacks against Christians. The route they followed in order to carry the weapons was Libya-Niger-Mali, and they were moved by road on trucks.

Fjordman: The Crackdown on the European Counterjihad

Fjordman’s latest essay has been published at FrontPage Mag. Some excerpts are below:

One of the experts on contemporary Islamophobia subpoenaed in the trial against Anders Behring Breivik is the Norwegian writer Øyvind Strømmen. Prior to this case he was virtually unknown, but he has enjoyed a tremendous career boost thanks to Breivik’s evil acts, and is now hailed as a “leading expert” on the Counterjihad, a claim which triggers roars of laughter from those who actually know this movement. A lucky opportunist, Strømmen sells his books by labeling me a dangerous “Fascist.” He says very little about real problems caused by mass immigration to Western countries, but a great deal about how evil any opposition to mass immigration is.

Strømmen also had an article published in the prestigious American magazine Foreign Affairs, a journal published by an influential foreign-policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR usually supports the line that Islam is not a problem in itself, only certain “militant Islamists.” Writing there about what he termed “violent Counter-Jihadism,” which he linked to Breivik’s mass murder, Strømmen concluded that “It is crucial that law-enforcement authorities and intelligence agencies better understand the true relationship between the words and ideas of Internet-based counter-jihadists and the real-world violence they seem to have inspired.”

The official line promoted in the mainstream media, for instance by Mina Hauge Nærland in the newspaper Aftenposten, is that I am an “extremist” whereas Strømmen is an expert on extremists. It is unclear how he earned this title just by reading a few blogs, however. I’ve seen former US President George W. Bush multiple times on TV. Does that make me an expert on Bush, to be consulted by the press and the police?

A Viennese Waltz With Iran

A controversy has arisen recently in Austria about a statement made by its defense minister, Norbert Darabos. Mr. Darabos managed simultaneously to be dismissive of the Iranian nuclear threat and disparaging about Israel’s attempts to defend itself.

JLH has translated two media articles on the topic, and our Austrian correspondent AMT sends this introduction:

Norbert Darabos, a member of the Croatian minority in Austria, leads a tough life. The historian, who calls himself a staunch anti-fascist, never wanted to end up as the minister of defense, especially since he skipped military service as a conscientious objector.

Darabos has always been extremely loyal to his party — the Social Democrats — and as the party’s secretary general he was in charge of the election campaigns back in the mid-2000s. His dream was always to be appointed interior minister, but fortunately this post went to the Conservatives. So he was appointed minister of defense, a man who had never held a weapon or seen the inside of a tank. Never mind that. The ministry of defense held promise nonetheless for Darabos. Who cares that he had no clue? Nowadays it is not important to have a clue, but to hold power.

So far, it’s been a rollercoaster ride — downhill all the way. Blunder after blunder has accompanied him. However, because the rest of the government is just as incompetent as he, his incompetence almost turned into competence. Only just.

Last week, Mr. Darabos seemingly felt the need to attack Israel’s foreign minister Lieberman. What bit Darabos to induce him to say these words will never be known. However, apart from the Austrian government’s immediate distancing, one wonders what would have happened if Heinz-Christian Strache had had the gall to utter this. (Strache, by the way, instantaneously rebuked Darabos and sided with Israel, saying that Darabos’ words were “an affront to Israel, a country with friendly ties to Austria and whose existence is jeopardized by external foes.”)

God help Austria if Darabos were to become the next foreign minister, as some MSM commentators are currently predicting.

The first piece is an op-ed from Die Presse:

If the Defense Minister Wants to Defend His Country, He Should Resign on the Spot

by Christian Ortner

Norbert Darabos is downplaying the second holocaust which Iran officially announced this past weekend. Such a person cannot stay in office here.

With admirable candor this past Sunday, the official Iranian news agency “Fars” removed all doubts about what Iran thinks of its Jewish neighbors in the Near East.

The agency quotes chief of the general staff, General Major Hassan Firuzabadi: “The Iranian nation stands by its intention to completely annihilate Israel. The Zionist regime is a cancer which must and will be excised.”

There are two possible interpretations. Either Mr. Firuzabadi was the victim of a terrible translation error — which Europe’s anti-Semitic Left constantly maintains in such instances — and actually was joking with “Fars” that he would love to have wild sex with a luscious young Israeli woman on the beach at Tel Aviv.

Or… the official agency translated correctly what the highest military figure of the Islamic regime of Iran told his numerous listeners: that — as President Ahmadinejad has always said — the Islamofascist dictatorship would really like to carry out that Holocaust which they otherwise deny happened.

Luckily, Israel can breathe easy. The reason for that is Norbert Darabos, a social-democrat military strategist famous in all of southern Burgenland. Just one day before the general major’s pronouncement of the desire to extirpate Israel, Darabos declared in this newspaper:

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/27/2012

According to The New York Times, the Obama administration hopes to arrange a Yemen-style transition to a new government in Syria. The U.S. president reportedly plans to outline his idea to Vladimir Putin when they meet next month, suggesting that President Bashar Assad might be eased out of power without the complete destruction of his regime.

In other news, unemployed Tunisians are desperately trying to cross the border into Algeria, where they hope to find work. The would-be immigrants cite the lack of job opportunities and the “absence of government” in their home country as reasons for their migration.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Barry Rubin, C. Cantoni, Derius, DS, ESW, Fjordman, Insubria, KGS, McR, Steen, WM, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Those Pesky Rape Waves — Now in London

I can’t file this article under “cultural enrichment”, because the Metropolitan Police make no reference to the ethnicity of the perps in their statistics on rapes reported in their jurisdiction. However, given the explosion of Third-World immigration to Britain in the last few years, and given the statistical data on rapes in other major European cities, it’s hard to believe that there is no connection between the celebration of diversity in London and the dramatic rise in reported rapes.

What makes this BBC article interesting is the almost word-for-word correspondence between the explanations given by police in London with those coming out of Oslo — that is, the increase is due to the greater willingness of women to report rapes. It’s as if the Metropolitan Police were reading their script from a playbook translated directly from the Norwegian.

If they continue to follow the Scandinavian script, they may start to cite global warming as a causative factor in the increased incidence of rape in London.

Recorded Rape Up 53% in London

There has been a 53% rise in recorded rape in London over the last four years.

In the financial year 2008-2009, there were 2,177 reports of rape to the Metropolitan Police.

But by 2011-2012, that had jumped to 3,334 cases. Some 667 prosecutions have been completed, 369 of which were successful.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman claimed the rise was due to victims feeling more confident about coming forward.

He said: “We believe this rise in recorded crimes is partly due to an increase in victims coming forward to report rape and sexual assaults.”

The statistics are from the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS said a further 661 people have been charged from the year 2011-2012, with court cases yet to be completed.

Sharia4Holland Lashes Out

Earlier tonight we posted a subtitled video of a Sharia4Holland/ Sharia4Belgium event at the Dam in Amsterdam. Below is the accompanying article from De Telegraaf, kindly translated by our Dutch correspondent H. Numan. The translator’s comments are enclosed in square brackets:

Sharia4Holland lashes out

Geert Wilders filed a complaint, according to the police. On Friday a speaker [for Sharia4Holland] on the Dam in Amsterdam called Wilders “this dog of the Romans” with whom “we will deal with” once The Netherlands has become a Muslim state. Also he advised to take warning “from the case Theo van Gogh”.

Sharia4Holland wants to implement sharia law in The Netherlands.

Police in Amsterdam-Amstelland and the public prosecutor started on Saturday their investigation of statements made by members of Shariah4Holland.

A Salafist Spy in North Rhine-Westphalia

The German security services in North Rhine-Westphalia have been infiltrated by a Salafist, who was assigned the task of observing his… ahem… extremist co-religionists. This fundamental breach of operational security has caused a stir in the German intelligence community.

Below are two articles from the German media about the case. The first, from Der Spiegel, was translated by JLH:

Security Services Uncover a Salafist in Their Own Ranks

May 6, 2012
North Rhine-Westphalia


The ministry of the interior classes the case as very serious: According to a newspaper report, security services in North Rhine-Westphalia have uncovered an Islamist in their own ranks. The police officer is said to be an adherent of the Salafists — and had clear access to secret documents.

Essen: As a police officer, a suspected adherent of Salafism is said to have had access to secret papers of the state’s security services. The West German General Newspaper reports that the Duisberg police commissioner was suspended. In the interior ministry, the case was classed as “very serious,” because the 31-year-old man was used in the security services and deployed, for example, to observe radical Islamists.

He had worked for the security services for half a year and had been assigned to the Salafists, among other things, It was easy for the man to gain access to confidential documents. The newspaper reports that the interior ministry is now examining whether the man’s inside knowledge could have consequences for pubic safety, and whether practical countermeasures would be necessary. The policeman’s connection to the Salafists only came to light when he turned up at an information booth which was displaying Salafist hate writings.

According to the report, a disciplinary action was brought against the officer. He was accused of placing Islamic sharia above free, democratic, constitutional law.

“Extremists have not lost anything with the police and the security services”

North Rhine-Westphalian interior minister Ralf Jäger said: if the accusations should be confirmed, the policeman would be let go. “Extremists have lost nothing so far as police and security services are concerned,” the SPD politician explained. The police president of Essen, Stephania Fischer-Weinsziehr, said she was expecting the man’s discharge from his civil service appointment. According to the report, this would be the first work prohibition for a Salafist in Germany.

The radical religious group had attracted attention recently through street battles in Bonn with sympathizers of the right-extremist party Pro-NRW. Further, an internet video circulated in which a jihadist praises the violent protests of Salafists and calls for the murder of opponents of Islam and journalists.

Police and security services also showed concern at a project of the Salafists, in which the radical Islamists are distributing free copies of the Koran. Salafists — which about 5,000 Muslims in Germany declare themselves to be — claim to be the defenders of Islam who must protect their religion from infidels.

Picture caption: Salafist with copy of Koran (in April in Offenbach). The intelligence services are alarmed.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Sign in picture: Read! in the Name of Your Lord Who Created You. (At least one cabaret comedian has noticed that the German imperative form is also an English plural…)

The second article, from WAZ, was translated by Hermes:

“Sharia is the Only Solution to Topple Democracy”

The spokesman for Sharia4Holland in this video speaks very crude, barely understandable Dutch.

To him, the monument on the Dam — honoring the Canadian veterans who freed The Netherlands — is the axis of evil, a monument that all filth of The Netherlands gathers around.

After the Dutch section, the notorious Ilford firebrand Anjem Choudary steps up to hold forth for a while in English. A counter-protestor is arrested in this clip, and I’m told that one of the Sharia4Belgium people was also arrested.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for subtitling and uploading “Sharia on the Dam”:


A full transcript of the translated portion is below the jump:

The Arab Siege of Constantinople

This coming Tuesday, May 29, is the 559th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople. The following essay by Anestos Canelides provides an overview of previous Islamic attempts to conquer the capital of the Eastern Empire.


The Arab Siege of Constantinople: A Summary
by Anestos Canelides

“Whilst we were around the Prophet (saw) writing he was asked, ‘Which of the two cities will be opened first, Constantinople or Rome?’ He (the Prophet Muhammad) answered, ‘The city of Heraclius will be opened first!’”

In both the late 7th and early 8th centuries AD the Arabs attempted to fulfill a prophecy by their late prophet Muhammad and seize the Christian city of Constantinople, but failed miserably. They were thwarted by an ingenious new weapon that frustrated the Arab Muslims’ attempt to seize the Roman (Byzantine) capital.

The first Arab siege in 672

In 672 AD the Saracens (Muslims) advanced towards the city of Constantinople. They sailed up the Hellespont and into the Marmara Sea, capturing Roman territory only fifty miles across the water from the city. From there the Arab invaders began to fortify principal territory to use for a land bridge in their attempt to seize the city. In 674, two years after their arrival the siege began. The majority of previous attacks on the Roman capital had come from the land, but the Arab siege would arrive from the sea.^[1]

The Arab ships carried heavy siege engines and huge catapults with which they could bombard the city’s fortifications and create breaches to gain access to the city. The fortifications on the Golden Horn (a small sea channel) and the Marmara Sea were prepared for the assault, but the defenders’ new weapon would further strengthen their defense. Through the genius of its inventor the defenders were able to thwart the Arab attempts to subdue the city. Created by an architect and chemist named Kallinikos from the Syrian city of Heliopolis, this new “weapon of mass destruction” would truly save the Romans from the Muslim threat to their faith and culture.^[1]

Greek fire

This new innovation in warfare was called Greek fire. Its composition was such a well-guarded secret that to this day its formula is unknown, and can only be speculated about. Combustible material had long been used in warfare when Kallinikos introduced the secret of this new weapon he called “wet fire”. It is believed that quicklime was an ingredient, since water played such an important role in its combustion. Sulfur and naphtha were also probably key ingredients.^[2]

This mixture was projected from copper tubes with the aid of siphons and pumps. It ignited on contact with the sea water or the moist sides of enemy ships.^[2]

The Mecca Pride Parade

In his latest video, Pat Condell enlarges on his earlier remarks about Saudi Arabia. Warning: Mr. Condell uses mildly salty language here and there in this clip.


Hat tip: Steen.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/26/2012

Cultural enrichment season has arrived in full force in the Mediterranean. A boat carrying 54 Somali migrants, including women and children, was rescued off the island of Lampedusa. The refugees have been shipped to a holding camp in Porto Empedocle.

In other news Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti has volunteered to mediate between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, to help them iron out their policy differences on the Eurozone crisis.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Hermes, Insubria, JD, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

The Abdo Verdict

As mentioned in last night’s news feed, on Thursday a federal jury in Texas convicted Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo of plotting a terrorist attack against a restaurant near Fort Hood.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this news report from a local TV station in Austin:


Below is an article about the Abdo conviction filed yesterday by Reuters:

U.S. soldier convicted of bomb plot near Texas Army post

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - A jury on Thursday convicted a U.S. soldier of attempting to build a bomb and use it to blow up a restaurant near the Fort Hood Army post in Texas to get revenge for the suffering of fellow Muslims in the Middle East at the hands of the military.

Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo, 22, was arrested last July after a tip from a gun store owner who became alarmed by Abdo’s befuddled attempts to purchase smokeless gunpowder and weapons.

Abdo was also convicted of attempted murder of U.S. officers or employees, and four counts of possessing a weapon to commit a violent crime. He faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced on July 20.

Abdo travelled from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to the army post in Fort Hood, where Major Nidal Hasan is charged with killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting spree.

Abdo had been granted conscientious objector status for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars because of his Muslim faith.

Cross-Burning in Slovenia

The following report about anti-Christian vandalism and “street theater” was sent to us by a correspondent in Slovenia.


Christophobia: The second cross-burning in Strunjan, Slovenia

by Andrej Turjaški

In the MSM we were able to read the information that on Thursday, 10th May 2012, the cross on the hill overlooking Strunjan was burned for the second time. Dean Verzel and the photographer Goran Bertok carried out the same act ten years ago, but were acquitted in court.

This time Dean Verzel teamed up with Andrej Medved, a philosopher and poet, who recited his poetry at the burning cross. “The cross does not symbolize spontaneity and freedom but hierarchy, subordination, dullness. Therefore it is a sign that has to fall. And with it every god, which is like petrifaction of fire” says Medved’s song. It continues: “The burning of the cross and the fire are active anarchy, like realized active poetry. And the one who awakens dangerous anarchy is always its first victim.”

Dean Verzel stated: “This was not an attack on the Christian religion. This was only an apparition. Every religion could understand my actions.”

Act of Christophobia

The time of this cross burning hints it was deliberately planned action to raise religious intolerance and degradation of religious symbols. This year Strunjan will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Marian apparitions, and the church dedicated to them. In advance of this anniversary, religious people restored the cross last year. It was raised by seamen and fishermen in 1600 to safeguard them at sea.

The Left Sets the Narrative

Michael Coren and Robert Spencer exchange views about female genital mutilation, the suppression of human rights under Islam, and other related topics.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this excellent clip from SUN TV:

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/25/2012

A federal jury in Texas convicted Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo of plotting a terrorist attack against a restaurant near Fort Hood, in revenge for the actions of the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some accounts suggest that Islamic beliefs may have played a part in Pvt. Abdo’s intended attack.

In other news, early returns in the Egyptian presidential election indicate that the Muslim Brotherhood candidate received the largest percentage of votes. He and another Salafist combined reportedly accounted for 47%, not an absolute majority, but still an impressive showing.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Barry Rubin, C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JP, Nick, Takuan Seiyo, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

A Reverse “Camp of the Saints”?

From the website of the Austrian newspaper Der Standard comes this unusual article about young Spaniards migrating to Algeria in search of a better life.

Many thanks to Hermes for the translation:

Fleeing across the Mediterranean Sea: An upside-down world

There are no jobs to be offered by the Spanish employment offices, that’s why four young Spaniards tried to look for chances in Algeria.

During my daily reading of the Algerian press, I stumbled upon the following story. It deals with the “harragas”, the name given in Algeria to those young people who have no documentation and look for chances far from their home. But read it for yourself:

Spanish Harragas caught in Oran

Who would have thought?

This information has its importance and does not remain unnoticed, because it’s about harragas… Spanish harragas which were recently caught by the Algerian coast guard along the western coast.

Chile on the Fjords

The news story below is a reminder that “cultural enrichment” is not restricted solely to the glorious infusion of Islamic culture into the West. It includes any and all immigration to our nations from far-flung countries with their rich, diverse tapestry of unique cultural practices.

This particular case involves a Chilean immigrant to Norway who became a bit rowdy on a tram using a sharp-edged instrument. His request reminds me of the classic definition of chutzpah: “Someone who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan.”

This guy stabbed three ticket inspectors on a tram in Oslo earlier this year, and now wants to be released from jail so that he can apply for political asylum — because he’s likely to face “persecution” if he is deported to Chile after doing time in Norway.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Many thanks to our Norwegian correspondent The Observer for translating this article from Aftenposten:

Stabbed three ticket inspectors, demands to be released so he can apply for political asylum

The 38-year-old stabbed three ticket inspectors on a tram in Oslo. Now he wants to be released so that he can apply for political asylum.

He attacked the inspectors with a knife when he was caught without a valid ticket on January 5 this year at Solli Plass in Oslo. The man now believes that an asylum center is a more appropriate location than a prison cell.

The Chilean national claims that he faces potential persecution by the authorities in his native country if he is deported after serving his sentence.

The three ticket inspectors sustained minor stab injuries to their thighs.

“Escape risk”

Oslo City Court believes that a voluntary stay at an asylum center would increase the chances of the 38-year-old fleeing the country.

Cultural Enrichment: Money is no Object!

Regular readers will remember Eskild Pedersen, the Coward of Utøya and the leader of the AUF (youth division of the Norwegian Labour Party), who escaped the massacre last July by allegedly ordering the ferry to carry himself and a few selected others away from the island while all those teenagers were being slaughtered by Anders Behring Breivik.

Mr. Pedersen is back in the news, countering the latest report from the SSB (Statistisk sentralbyrå, Norwegian Bureau of Statistics) about the net negative costs of immigration. His reaction: “Cost doesn’t matter! Immigration must take place!”

Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer has translated part of an article from E24 about Eskild Pedersen’s views on immigration. The translator notes:

There is something very Stalinistic and nauseating about Pedersen. His arrogance and his super-inflated self image are mind-boggling, to say the least.

The translated excerpts:

Pedersen: “Completely irrelevant”

Leader of the AUF, Eskil Pedersen has not yet seen the report, but he has read about it in the newspapers.

He considers the question of whether immigration results in a profit or a loss as irrelevant and uninteresting.

“There are many ways to pit different groups against each other. I have read several studies that claim that gays are more productive than heterosexuals. The gays are highly educated, creative and have well-paid jobs. Nevertheless, it is meaningless to try an estimate how much heterosexuals are costing society,” Pedersen says.

He hopes that this comparison can be somewhat of an eye-opener for those who call for a detailed cost analysis of immigration.

“Yes; I do believe that if a heterosexual is confronted with such a comparison he or she will see how unfair such an analogy is. Similarly it is meaningless to estimate how much immigration is costing Norway,” Pedersen says.

“Norway is going to comply with its obligations to people who are on the run regardless of the cost.”

Wants to double the intake of UN processed refugees

Pedersen and the AUF is of the opinion that Norway should accept far more UN processed refugees than we do today.

“Today we receive about a thousand processed refugees each year. This number should initially be increased to 1,500, or even better doubled. These refugees are the most disadvantaged people in the world living in refugee camps in developing nations, and whom the UN has specifically asked its member states to resettle,” Pedersen says

“What do you think of Siv Jensen’s claim that we don’t need skilled immigrants because we have numerous Norwegians on disability benefits who want to rejoin the workforce?”

Esposito Visits Utopia

I just received this email from a reader in the southern Swedish city of Lund:

John L. Esposito is visiting our city right now, and I just listened to a ten-minute interview with him. He did not mention you, but talked about Robert Spencer and his latest hostile book about fictitious Mo. And The American Thinker — the USA’s most racist blog — he also talked about.

His task is, as usual, to pour rose-scented oil over Islamophobia.

He quoted Breivik’s Manifesto several times, and acknowledged that he was proud, as a Breivik-enemy, to have had a whole page of the manifesto dedicated to him.

After the University of Lund, he travels southwards to Rome in order to enlighten politicians there.

He is 72 and still well-kicking.

The Euro as Atonement

Thilo Sarrazin is causing controversy again in Germany, this time with a new book about the euro. As a former banker he knows his topic thoroughly, and is shaking up the establishment with his contrarian viewpoint.

Many thanks to JLH for translating this article from Junge Freiheit:

Sarrazin: There is a Nexus of Euro and Holocaust

Thilo Sarrazin has defended his theory of a connection between German save-the-Euro policy and German guilt for WWII. An obligation to Europe was derived from German guilt, said Sarrazin in an interview with Zeit. “There is a nexus of Euro and Holocaust.”

As an example of this, Sarrazin quoted the Italian writer Eugenio Scalfari who wrote some weeks ago in Zeit: “If Germany should pursue a financial policy that allows the Euro to crash, then the Germans would be responsible for the collapse of Europe. After two World Wars and the Holocaust, that would be the fourth sin. Germany must now assume its responsibility for Europe.”

Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt made a similar argument at the SPD party convention last September, says Sarrazin. He said quite clearly: “It cannot be that — only 70 years after the last World War, and according to this reasoning — we are expected to pay for the debts of other countries; and that is exactly what the Eurobond, for instance, amounts to.”

The Psychopathology of Islam

Michael Coren and the Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels discuss the inherent psychological differences between Muslim immigrants and their European hosts. These differences contribute to the immigrants’ criminal behavior and their lack of integration into their adopted countries.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:


Nicolai Sennels is a psychologist and the author of “Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s experiences with the Copenhagen Municipality”.

Previous posts:

The Brain Rot of White Socialists

A trenchant comment by Laine on one of yesterday’s posts about Norway is worth reproducing here in its entirety. The text has been edited slightly for punctuation and clarity:

Even if you grant the leaders of Scandinavia their false belief that immigration is needed to keep up the tax base and staff to support elderly non-workers, we’re left with the question: what kind of mental midget and/or ignoramus looks around the world and decides to import the culture with the worst work and education ethic, and that is unassimilable due to a supremacist colonist ideology in tandem with a unique legal system sharia that contradicts Western law?

And why does the average Scandinavian keep re-electing such suicidal fools after noticing that the newcomers are not emptying bedpans in nursing homes but lolling about on Welfare making mischief such as rape and vandalism and more parasites hostile to education?

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/24/2012

Belgian health minister Laurette Onkelinx was upset when the visiting deputy health minister of Israel refused to shake hands with her. He represents the haredi Torah Judaism party, whose orthodoxy forbids touching members of the opposite sex.

In other news, about 15,000 Muslims will be at this weekend’s 37th annual convention of the Islamic Circle of North America in Hartford, Connecticut. The main topic of discussion at the meeting will be how to defend freedom of religion and thereby counter Islamophobic opponents of sharia.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Insubria, JP, Mary Abdelmassih, McR, Nick, Steen, TV, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

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