The UK and Scandinavia Counterjihad Summit

Now I can tell you the news. The Baron has been in Copenhagen for the last few days. Today he is attending the UK and Scandinavia Counterjihad Summit, organized by the Center for Vigilant Freedom and hosted by SIAD, Exile, Steen, and other members of the Danish blogosphere.

Because of the previous experiences of SIAD (Stop the Islamification of Denmark), none of this could be discussed ahead of time. In the past, when SIAD’s events were publicized in advance, groups of leftist thugs known as “Anti-Racism Squads” broke up the meetings by physically attacking SIAD members and injuring some of them.

So the Counterjihad Summit was organized without advance publicity. In addition, there was strict security, and the location was known only to the leaders of SIAD. In attendance today is an international group:

• Danish bloggers and anti-jihad operatives;
  
• leaders of the UK chapter of the Center for Vigilant Freedom;
  
• members of a Swedish political group;
  
• several Norwegians (including our own stalwart Fjordman);
  
• Paul Belien* of Brussels Journal; and
  
• the Baron and one other American representing CVF.

The whole event transpired just because the Baron couldn’t keep his ideas to himself. During an online meeting of the directors of CVF back in February, someone raised the topic of dissatisfaction among the members of the Danish chapter of Vigilant Freedom. The Danes were fed up with all the talk; they wanted some action.

“I have an idea,” the Baron piped up. “The Brits are doing so well right now — what we need is a meeting between the Brits and the Danes. It should happen in Denmark. That will really energize the Vikings.”

As usual, it was decided that since the Baron dreamed this up, it was going to be up to him to organize it.

That night he sat down with his list of Scandinavian contacts and began to put his plan into operation, emailing possible participants. The leader of SIAD, Anders Gravers, responded enthusiastically. He offered to arrange the venue and the security. Exile, as a British expatriate living in Denmark, spans both of the major groups, and was persuaded to be the co-ordinator. The word spread through the blogging network, and other guests, including Fjordman, Steen, and Paul Belien, were invited.

The Baron did not expect to be able to attend this meeting. After all, it is expensive to travel to Denmark, even this early in the season. However, his new job started in the interim, and an anonymous donor sent him some money specifically for the trip. This constellation of good fortune seemed auspicious, and I insisted that the Baron start looking for his passport.

So for the last couple of days he’s been traveling in Denmark and staying with people that he had previously known only in cyberspace. His visit has become a reunion with the Scandinavian commenters from Gates of Vienna, some of whom are also meeting each other in person for the first time.

The Baron has been seeing the Viking sights, drinking good Danish beer, and testing out his newly-acquired (and very rudimentary) Danish on his Scandinavian colleagues. I hope they aren’t laughing so hard they choke on their snaps. At least it’s them listening to it, and not me.

The meeting is underway now, and the Baron has probably given his speech. Presuming he stuck to the text he labored over before he left home, here is what he said (mercifully in English):
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I’d like to thank Fjordman for starting this process — if it hadn’t been for him, I would never have considered Muslim immigration in Scandinavia.

I’d like to thank Exile and Aeneas for taking charge of the Danish and British ends of this event. A big thank-you to Anders for our meeting place and the food, and for inviting in our partners from Germany and Sweden.

I’d also like to thank Skjoldungen, Phanarath, and Zonka for being such stalwart supporters of Gates of Vienna. I’d like to thank Steen for his services to the Danish blogosphere, for his excellent photography, and for putting me up in his apartment. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Paul Belien for his courageous work at Brussels Journal. And I’d like to thank all of the rest of you for being here.

The only other time I was ever in København was almost forty years ago. Remember 1967, the “Summer of Love”? We lived in England then, and came here on holiday. I was sixteen and my brother was nineteen. While our parents visited the museums and saw the sights of København, my brother and I slept all day. Most of the night we went to the Tivoli Gardens and other places where young people gathered. The only sights we saw involved Danish girls and miniskirts.

To my delight, I found out that I was old enough to drink beer here. So my brother and I learned exactly two Danish words: “to øl”.

Anyway, it’s great to be back.

In the decades since, as I looked back on my visit to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the three countries all but merged in my mind. To an outsider they seemed so similar. It wasn’t until much later that I learned how distinct Denmark is.

That realization began a few years ago, after we started our blog, Gates of Vienna. Dymphna — my wife and co-blogger — discovered Queen Margethe’s book. Such a refreshing viewpoint! What a commonsense approach! How could this Queen say such politically incorrect things?

Then there was Lars Moller, that Danish soldier with the UN forces in Bosnia. When he was fired upon by the Bosnian Serbs, he decided that breaking the rules of engagement in order to destroy the enemy was not such a bad idea. How warlike of him! Who did he think he was, a Viking? Didn’t he know that he was supposed to be engaged in “peacekeeping”?

When a young woman named Ghazala Khan decided to marry a man her family disapproved of, her young brother salvaged the family’s so-called “honor” by shooting her in broad daylight. And how did the Danes react to this brutal murder in Slagelse? Did they ship the boy away for a few months in juvenile detention? Were the local imams invited in for more “dialogue”? No. The whole family paid for the crime. The worst of them will be deported when released from prison. That is justice. That is the true rule of law.

And, above all there was the Mohammed Cartoon crisis. That’s when I really began to see the depths of the Danish character. I learned two things: Danes won’t back down, and they won’t be bullied.

The more you learn about the Danes, the more you like them. Danish commenters — many of whom are here tonight — came over to our blog and wrote with intelligence and humor.

Reading Phanarath or Kepiblanc would make me say to my wife, “Ha! You gotta love those Danes.”

They seemed more like Americans than the British do. Heck, they seemed more like Americans than most Americans do!

And then I discovered Holger Danske in his stronghold. When I read the stories about Holger, the Danish national character was revealed. Yesterday Skjoldungen and Steen took me to the cellar under Kronborg to see the ancient warrior himself, and I have just one thing to tell you:

Holger Danske vågner.

[Holger Danske is stirring.]

Denmark’s hour of need has arrived, and Holger Danske is honor-bound to awaken and defend her.

Actually, the Danes seem to be doing pretty well on their own. It’s the entire Western world that needs Holger.

He is an archetypal Scandinavian, but he also represents a peculiarly northern strain of industrious liberty. Denmark just happens to be the place he chose to dwell.

His character is spread throughout the countries who owe their cultural origins to northern Europe and the British Isles. We are all Men of the North.

As I have often said, the fundamental issue at stake is liberty. This means the right of people to live without interference from the state, and to live under the rule of law — governed by legislation enacted through their own consent.

The biggest threat to our rights comes from the Demonic Convergence — the evil combination of the powerful socialist state, the poison of multiculturalism, and the violent intolerance of Islam.

When a liberal democratic state requires its citizens — in the name of an intolerant religious “tolerance” — to accept into their midst a dangerous and violent political ideology disguised as a religion, then this liberal democratic state has gone off the rails. It has become what Kepiblanc called a “seppukultur”, a culture of self-negation. It is the perfect storm of Postmodernism — liberal democracy deconstructing itself.

Radical Muslims all over the world have made their intentions clear. Like Hitler, they do not hide their agenda. They post it on the internet, broadcast it on their television stations, and shout it from the pulpits of their mosques on Friday afternoons.

Islam’s goal is simple: a worldwide Caliphate. Muslims aim to expand Allah’s reign to include the entire planet. Those who resist will be destroyed, and the rest will live in servitude. The Islamic Paradise will have no competitor, no doctrine other than the Koran and the Hadith, and no law other than the Shariah.

This plan is well-documented in multiple sources. It is something that everyone in the West should already know. Those not deafened by political correctness do know. All the rest are sleepwalking towards the cliff.

This is not to say that all Muslims hold such extreme views. There are moderate Muslims who support democracy and freedom of religion. But the media, academics, and politicians of the West have chosen Wahhabism to represent all of Islam. It is not yet clear whether the so-called moderate Muslim is willing to risk his neck and his family to stand against the murderous fundamentalists.

These zealots are a threat to all of us who love liberty.

There are three factors at work here: demographics, the failure of Christianity, and the flood of oil money that funds global terrorism.

So what is to be done?

I have said repeatedly: we are on our own. This is fundamental. Our political leaders no longer act in the best interests of the people they supposedly serve. Self-interest, short-sightedness, and corruption guarantee our continuing decline.

The driving force behind our political impotence is the character of the elitists who control the media, the bureaucracies, and the academy. We can trace its origins all the way back to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, for good or ill, is our inheritance.

But, ultimately, it doesn’t matter where it started. We’re stuck with it. Those people in power who claim to act in our interest do not represent us. They are out of touch with average people. They are immune to common sense.

A major part of the problem lies with the media, but the very nature of media is changing. Gutenberg, meet the internet!

We are devising alternatives to the mainstream media. We are constructing new systems for collecting and diffusing information. We are changing the way news is discovered, reported, and acquired by ordinary citizens.

That’s why I’m here. The 910 Group — now called the Center for Vigilant Freedom — is one of those changes. CVF is not an alternative news outlet — we are an entirely new form for the propagation and dissemination of information.

The idea is not that everyone should join Vigilant Freedom — heaven forbid! That would make us just another huge and impotent bureaucracy. The 20th century has demonstrated the useless and immovable inertia of bureaucracy.

No, we are a network of networks. Anders and Ted are here to represent their respective organizations. Vigilant Freedom exists to coordinate their communications with others and their actions on behalf of the Counterjihad.

There is no chain of command — nor will there ever be — in Vigilant Freedom. No party line. No one in control of what happens. Our unity and mission arise from a common goal: to resist the Jihad in all its forms. Anything else is details.

One way you know that something new is happening is that nobody is making any money at this. Bloggers don’t make money by blogging. What little Gates of Vienna takes in from advertising and donations was spent getting me here tonight. The 910 Group has virtually no money.

Yet look what we have done. Look what Anders’ people are doing. Counterjihad groups have sprouted from the seed of dissatisfied individuals with computers and internet connections. With few operating costs, and at a speed that can only be the envy of traditionally-organized activist groups, we can spread information and mobilize for action.

The next big action will be the protest in Brussels on September 11th. SIAD and Akte Islam initiated the effort, and communicated with a British group to help plan it. The word spread through Gates of Vienna and the 910 Group to lots of other internet outlets, and now the plan has grown to include parallel actions in Australia, the United States, and Canada.

This will be a big event. The process was bootstrapped out of nothing by an interlinked group of like-minded individuals.

In other words, us — and people like us, dissatisfied with the heritage of the Enlightenment, and determined to move past its last vestiges.

Denmark started it. We’re all involved, but Denmark is the model, and her outspoken Queen says what we need to hear. In matters that count, the Vikings have become the model for the Western world.

My reason for coming here is to help leverage Danish efforts so that they can have an effect far beyond South Jutland and the Kattegat. I want to make sure the Danes continue to punch above their weight. My job is to hold a megaphone up in front of Anders and Steen and Mikael so that their Viking bellow can be heard across the entire European continent and beyond. Even a blogger can hold a megaphone.

You Danes are used to being Danish, so it’s no big deal to you. You can’t see how inspiring you are. You don’t realize how moving Holger Danske can be for people who don’t have a single drop of Viking blood in their veins. Holger is the Guardian of the West.

This seed we have planted will take at least two generations to bear fruit. I won’t be here to see it mature. But that is our job for future generations: to plant what they will harvest.

So we need to realize we are in it for the long haul, and we need to be prepared for the rough times ahead. Parts of Europe will descend into civil war in the relatively near future, and the way that we have lived for the past sixty years will be gone.

You and I are part of the process of this change. None of us individually is significant — I’m just a computer programmer with some outlandish right-wing political ideas. By himself, each of us is unimportant.

But, in the aggregate, what we do is important. How we communicate is important. How we organize our actions: that’s what’s important. Our leaders no longer represent us, so any efforts to defend our civilization have devolved to ordinary people like us.

If we are in tune with what average, everyday, well-meaning Westerners know in their hearts to be true, then maybe our grandchildren will know success.

I’d like to leave you with a thought from Wretchard, the proprietor of the blog known as The Belmont Club. Wretchard is a Filipino mathematician who was educated at Harvard on a scholarship and is now living in Australia. He’s our blogfather, the reason that Dymphna and I decided to start Gates of Vienna.

In this quote Wretchard is talking about one of the recent scandals involving photoshopped images.

He says, “There are some who are shocked, shocked at the act of a private person musing out loud about what seems like a staged photograph. ‘How dare you, how dare you raise these questions?’ Yet to those who grew up on the Internet, this attitude is puzzling in the extreme. It’s as natural as breathing, a wholly different tradition.”

Wretchard continues, “There must be hundreds of sites out there saying I’m a jerk. So what? This blog is just a meme, that’s all. I am nothing. I don’t even have a name. There must be zillions out there who disagree with my ideas. But so what? If my ideas are wrong they’ll die. If they are right, not even I can stop them. Scary when you think of it.”

That sums it up: If our ideas are wrong they’ll die. If they are right, not even we can stop them.

Thank you, and good night.


*At the last moment, Mr. Belien was detained from leaving Brussels due to strikes by workers at the airport. There is a possibility that the group has been able to patch in an audio connection with him so that he could participate in the discussion. --D