Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/23/2011

Pastor Terry Jones has finally burned a Koran. A trial was held in a small church in Florida, and the book was found guilty of crimes against humanity. The sentence was carried out by dousing the Koran with kerosene and burning it in a metal pan. Muslim outrage is already pouring in, and Hezbollah says the Obama administration is responsible, since it dared to permit such a blasphemous abomination on American soil.

Meanwhile the war in Libya is going… well, it’s hard to tell how it’s going. The participants are still arguing over a command structure, with the Italians threatening to withdraw the participation of their bases if command is not transferred to NATO. Prime Minister Berlusconi is hedging his bets with Moammar Ghedafi, just in case his old friend the Colonel manages to make it through this difficult period.

In other news, the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa is swamped with new refugees from North Africa. The UN has ordered the Italians to move some of them to other locations, and a group is even now being shipped to a larger facility in Sicily.

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

Thanks to AC, C. Cantoni, Diana West, DS, Erick Stakelbeck, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, KGS, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

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.

Palestina Libre!

The Demonic Convergence, Installment #4,881

Nothing exemplifies the practical merger of the Red Revolution and the Great Jihad better than the issue of “Palestine”. I picked out the images below from various Communist and Anarchist websites, just to give you an idea of the depth of collaboration that goes on between the Left and the Mujahideen.

First, the vanguard of proletarian revolution in Latin America wields his bayonet on behalf of Hamas:


Next comes an Islamized and cartoonified Che:


And a detail from Picasso’s Guernica, updated for the great Progressive cause of our time:

Embracing the Madrassa

Russia is moving towards the establishment of a consolidated state-controlled Islamic education system. Like the sharia court system in the UK, state madrassas in Russia seem to be the government’s way of recognizing an existing trend and controlling the foreign — and possibly subversive — elements that enter the country with the madrassa teachers.

The Russians are experiencing the same dilemma faced by all non-Muslim countries when confronting Islamic infiltration: official recognition of certain elements of sharia law creates a de facto Islamic state, at least in part.

Below is a brief report on the topic from Asia News:

Muslim Leaders Call for an Islamic Education System in Russia

The supreme mufti Talgat Tadzhutddin proposes to introduce a comprehensive network of schools, from madras to academy: so we can attract other Muslims from the West.

Moscow (AsiaNews / Agencies) — Making Russia a centre for Islamic education that will attract Muslim students from the West. This is the proposal of the supreme mufti of the Spiritual Council of Russian Muslims, Talgat Tadzhutddin, who suggests creating a network in the Federation of Islamic institutions, from the madras to the academy through universities.

“This is an important strategic objective because in this way we are no longer dependent on foreign Islamic universities,” said Tadzhutddin during a meeting March 19 in Penza between the spiritual leaders of the Volga region and Grigory Rapota, Special Representative of the Russian President in the area.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/22/2011

The news feed is light tonight for some reason — maybe some of our regular tipsters are away on an equinoctial holiday. I doubt they’re swimming in the sparkling surf and basking in the sun of the Barbary Coast, however — chances are they chose a different destination.

The air war in Libya continues, with more of Libya’s military assets being bombed by NATO forces. An American jet had mechanical trouble and crash-landed in rebel-held territory, but the pilot and co-pilot ejected safely and were rescued. Anti-aircraft fire was heard over Tripoli.

Col. Muamar Qadhafi continues to be defiant, and made a televised speech in which he said, “I do not fear storms that sweep the horizon, nor do I fear the planes that throw black destruction. I am resistant, my house is here in my tent… I am the rightful owner, and the creator of tomorrow. I, I am here! I am here! I am here!”

I’m going to miss the Man of Many Spellings when he finally exits from the stage of history. There’s no one else quite like him.

The news from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan is cause for optimism. All six reactors now have electrical power, and the effort to restore their cooling systems can proceed. The situation continues to stabilize, despite several new earthquakes, including a couple with magnitudes of 6.6.

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

Thanks to AC, C. Cantoni, Fausta, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

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.

“No Matter Where Islam Goes, The Problem Will Come”

Below is a video with an audio track taken from an Australian talk radio program. In it you’ll hear EDL leader Tommy Robinson interviewed by an obviously sympathetic Aussie radio host. Mr. Robinson demonstrates once again his detailed grasp of the issues surrounding the Islamization of England.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for YouTubing this video, and to Aeneas for the original tip and most of the photos:

Why Multiculture Will Always Fail

Nicolai Sennels’ latest guest-essay concerns a topic that has greatly preoccupied Western European leaders in recent months: the failure of Multiculturalism.


Why multiculture will always fail
by Dr. Nicolai Sennels

Several leading European politicians have now declared the multicultural project dead and impossible to implement. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has concluded that the “so-called ‘multikulti’ concept — where people would ‘live side-by-side’ happily — did not work” (BBC, 17. October 2010). Merkel said straight out that the attempt to build a multicultural society has “utterly failed”. British prime minister David Cameron (BBC, 5 Feb 2011) and French president Nicolas Sarkozy (The Telegraph, 11 Feb 2011) quickly followed suit and declared multiculturalism a “failed” effort. Cameron added that the “UK needed a stronger national identity” and Sarkozy argued that “We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.”

As a psychologist who has had hundreds of immigrants as clients, my conclusion is that the multicultural society will always fail because it is contrary to the fundamental psychological principles that are needed for building healthy communities. This basic psychological principle concerns identity — national identity. As quoted above, Cameron and Sarkozy reached the same conclusion.

National identity

For a society to succeed, its citizens must be able to unite around common core values. The most fundamental values are national identity and a wish for fellowship with one’s countrymen. National identity means that you feel like a Dane if you live in Denmark. Fellowship means that similarities — first of all the fact that you live in the same country — means more than differences, for example religion, color, or country of origin.

National identity and the feeling of fellowship increase work morale, taxpaying morale, morale in relation to social services, and respect for the country’s laws in general. People who experience themselves as part of the community will feel that they harm themselves if they harm the community. National identity is also important for respect towards the nation’s authorities.

The sense of community is crucial to the quality of life for us “pack” animals, and common core values are the foundation of the mutual trust and mutual helpfulness, openness, understanding and respect among the population. People who are deeply divided on core values and who want the community to evolve in completely different directions simply feel less fellowship with one another.

When people identify with a culture whose values are not rooted in the nation’s indigenous culture, this identification happens at the expense of identification with the greater community. The step towards acting in violation of the community’s interest is therefore shorter, which is one of the reasons for the dramatic over-representation of certain immigrant groups in crime and unemployment statistics.

Multiculturalization of a society, therefore, leads to an increased need for control, prohibitions, police, and tougher sentences in order to prevent internal factions from cheating or committing crimes against the community. Multicultural societies thus move easily towards a less democratic and more fascistic condition. The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt concludes in hindsight: “The concept of multiculturalism is actually incompatible with a democratic society. … If one asks, where in the world are multicultural societies functioning, he quickly comes to the conclusion, that multiculturalism can only exist peacefully within strong authoritarian states.” (Hamburger Abendblatt, 24 Nov 2004).

Anti-culture

Fortunately, immigrants from almost all over the world have been able to accept and identify with our basic Western values. There are a few problems with organized crime and demographic clumping among immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe but it has never became a threat to society.

Despite certain success stories and role models, one culture has proved impossible to integrate sufficiently, namely the Islamic one. Muslim culture and religion have demonstrated some inherent self-protective mechanisms which makes Muslim immigrants resistant to external influences from the host culture.

What we are dealing with here is a culture that in the most important areas — including true democracy, free speech, equality of women, and tolerance towards other faiths — has changed very little or not at all since it first appeared in a medieval clan society 1,400 years ago. It is almost unbelievable, given how much the rest of the world has changed during that time. The unfortunate combination of excessive Western tolerance and a lack of flexibility from the Muslim culture’s side has resulted in a kind of cultural osmosis, where Western values have not yet been able to penetrate the Islamic world while Islamization diffuses from the Muslim community into non-Muslim societies.

Intercepted Arms for Hamas

I posted last week about the shipload of Iranian weapons that was intercepted by the Israeli Defense Forces en route to Hamas in Gaza.

Below is an IDF report about the boarding of the ship and the discovery of its cargo:


More videos are available at the IDF’s YouTube channel.

Sex, Gender, and Civilization

In one of our comment threads last night, latté island requested an open thread on a specific topic:

I’d also like to see a discussion about social issues such as women’s and gay rights, and how that relates to the counterjihad and Western renewal. Since Dymphna is busy writing something else, why don’t we have a topic without a whole essay, or a guest essay, or whatever. It’s long overdue. To save time, it could read something like: Women. Gays. The West. Discuss. We all have lots to say, we don’t have to wait for someone to write a whole essay.

You asked for it, you got it. Discuss.


I’ll just put in my own two cents before the food fight starts in earnest.

All the rights that women have or might want to have — or the rights held by anyone else, for that matter — do not trump the rights of the larger community. When any given personal right, if fully exercised by large numbers of people, threatens the existence of the community or the culture at large, then that right is forfeit.

It’s unfortunate, but true: your right to do X without restriction is worthless if the simultaneous practice of X by millions of people leads to the destruction of society. Then the barbarians — who summarily execute people who practice X — take over, and the whole question becomes moot.

In the case of women, such issues might include voting, abortion, contraception, etc. Many other practices have been added to the list of modern “rights”: the autonomy of children, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, bestiality, satanism, you name it.

An argument over any given right would do well to examine whether the full implementation of that right would tend to destroy the culture that permits it.

OK, check all your weapons at the door, and then have at it.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/21/2011

The German newspaper Der Spiegel has broken a major news story about American soldiers in Afghanistan who wantonly killed civilians, fabricated stories about being attacked to justify the killings, and photographed themselves with the bodies as with trophies, occasionally hacking off fingers and to keep as souvenirs. The newspaper published three of the photos, and NATO commanders in Afghanistan are warning their troops to prepare for the backlash. Coming on the heels of the war in Libya — is it a coincidence that Germany opposed action in Libya? — this looks like it may cause President Obama a major headache.

News from Libya has pushed Japan out of the headlines, so it’s worth noting that the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant continues to stabilize. Electricity has been connected to two more reactors, and the spikes in radiation are gradually dropping. Quietly, without a big fuss, the Japanese are taking care of the problem.

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

Thanks to AC, C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, CSP, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Mary Abdelmassih, Nilk, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

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 Triumph of the Loons

Two years into the reign of the Messiah, I thought it couldn’t get any worse. Especially in foreign policy — after the Cairo speech, and all the bowing, and an iPod for the Queen, and the cozying up to Chavez, how could it possibly get any worse?

Well, it has. Barack Hussein Obama’s foreign policy didn’t just crash and burn; it dug itself ten leagues deep into bedrock and pulled in the topsoil after itself.

And it’s not just Obama, nor all the other Democrats. The administration’s operation in Libya has been a notable occasion for bipartisan lunacy. A major chunk of the Republicans have drunk the ha-ha water and jumped into the bottomless pit with their Commander-in-Chief.

And it gets worse. I opened up a conservative opinion website this morning — I don’t want to embarrass it by naming it — expecting to find a refreshing change from the MSM, but alas! ’Twas not to be. I kept scrolling and scrolling, and everybody more or less agreed: “Obama has finally done something right. Maybe for the wrong reasons, but at least he’s going to get rid of that evil sumbitch Khaddafi.”

Their position wasn’t fundamentally different from that held by many of the opinionators at Huffington Post and Daily Kos, whose knee-jerk pacifism has mysteriously gone into remission. I took a look through their op-eds — there weren’t many; most of them weren’t discussing it — and the general attitude seemed to be, “Well, I’m not sure this is the best idea in the world, but, gee, it’s for a good cause…”

There were occasional voices of sanity on the right, of course. Frank Gaffney, for example, and Diana West, who described the Libyan action with meticulous accuracy as “making the world safe for jihad.”

In Congress, opposition to the Libyan caper is confined to hard-left Democrats and what used to be considered the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party. Regular Republicans — the kind who get re-elected fourteen times in a row and attend the same dinner parties as establishment Democrats — are not all that bothered about it.

Yes, Sen. Mark Kirk wants Congress to vote on something that he otherwise basically approves of. And Sen. Dick Lugar wants “more details”.

An Intellectual Misconception

The brief article below (originally published at Politically Incorrect) is the introduction to a forty-minute interview with Ulrich Schlüer. Mr. Schlüer is a member of the Swiss People’s Party and a staunch critic of the European Union.

JLH has translated the piece, and includes this note:

Readers of Gates of Vienna will remember that the Swiss just passed a punitive act against forced marriage, which has been followed up quickly by the German Bundestag. This is the lead-up discussion to an interview on criminal law and money matters with Ulrich Schlüer, who is a member of the Swiss executive council, and with a representative of the Bavarian branch of the new party Die Freiheit.

I suspect some EU bureaucrats may soon be seriously worried about Switzerland.

Many thanks to JLH for the translation:

Schlüer: the Euro is an Intellectual Misconception

Ulrich Schlüer is a member of the National Council for the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and a money market expert. He is a rock-hard opponent of the EU and describes with a clarity rare among politicians the serious mistakes being made due to the socialistic character of the EU. He considers it to have been a fundamental error to force differently structured economies into the artificial construct of the EU.

In the interview with PI, he does not disguise his clear opinions: “No one in the EU is by far as competent as Germany.” In his opinion, however, productive citizens are being severely disadvantaged in order to finance a bloated socialist state. Many of these producers are leaving Germany for this reason, including going to Switzerland. “We have immigration of Germans like we have not had for decades.”

Ulrich Schlüer is also in favor of Switzerland leaving the IMF, since untold billions have already been paid out for mismanaged European countries like Greece and Ireland. He see the Euro massively threatened by future devaluation. That is why he is just now bringing the SVP an initiative for the creation of a “gold frank.” which could be “an interesting refuge currency” for investors. This gold frank — according to his thoughts, it would come into the market in different versions with different amounts of gold — would be a medium for an orderly departure from the Euro.

They’re Telling Us Very Clearly

Below is another excellent report by Erick Stakelbeck at CBN News. This one concerns the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the first of the Muslim Brotherhood front groups established in the United States. Despite the listing of the MSA as an affiliate in good standing of the Holy Land Foundation — the MB “charity” convicted in 2008 for its support of Islamic terrorism — the MSA is widely regarded as a normal mainstream religious organization, as if it were the Muslim equivalent of the Methodist Youth Fellowship.

In his report Mr. Stakelbeck outlines the history of the MSA, and takes a brief look at some of the former leaders of the MSA who went on to illustrious careers in Al Qaeda.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for YouTubing this video:


See the accompanying article about the MSA at CBN News.

The Curious Civilization

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.


The eminent scholar Toby E. Huff in late 2010 published his book Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective, which inspired this essay. He was also the author of the modern classic The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West.

When the pro-Chinese English scholar Joseph Needham investigated the history of science among the Chinese he was eventually forced to conclude that “one can hardly speak of a developed science of physics” in China prior to modern contact with Europeans. It lacked the systematic thinkers that one encounters in the history of mechanics in medieval Europe, where there was an established tradition of arguing with Aristotle’s conceptions of motion. These include names such as Philoponus, Buridan, Bradwardine and Oresme, who all contributed to developments that culminated in Galileo’s work. In China there was no Galileo, nor Kepler’s laws of celestial motion which formed the basis for Newton’s great synthesis.

The cosmological outlook of the Chinese organically linked the Earth, and above all the royal family, to the Heavens and the spirit world. The misbehavior of officials, it was thought, and especially of the Emperor himself, might result in famines, earthquakes, droughts or other natural disasters because they had displeased the spirit world. Similarly, anomalies in the heavens were taken as portents of the future and might predict future events that should be known only to the Emperor. For this reason, there was a powerful inclination in Imperial China to keep sky watching confined to the official bureaucracy under a veil of secrecy.

Chinese astronomical theory was never very sophisticated compared to that of the ancient Greeks, not to mention that which developed in modern Europe after the Scientific Revolution, but on a strictly practical level they had a rich tradition of celestial observation that was directly related to calendar making. As Huff asks, why didn’t the arrival of the telescope with Jesuit astronomers have the same fructifying effect on scientific inquiry there as it did in Europe?

The number of stars accurately catalogued by European astronomers more than tripled through the use of the telescope during the seventeenth century. Yet despite the fact that Western European eyeglasses by the sixteenth century had been exported in significant quantities to the Middle East and as far east as China, Asians did not conduct experiments with such glass lenses leading to their own construction of telescopes. What is even stranger is that after Asian nations had been introduced to the European telescope in the 1600s they were surprisingly slow in using it to gain new astronomical insights. Huff’s provocative suggestion is that they suffered from what he terms a curiosity deficit vis-à-vis Europeans.

The Middle East had a very ancient tradition of making glass for decorative purposes. The region had also produced theoretical studies of optical phenomena inspired by ancient Greek works that were superior to those of East, Southeast or South Asia. Yet after Muslims were confronted with European glass lenses they made almost no creative contributions of their own. Apart from some limited interest in using telescopes for military purposes or for spying on the infidels, there was little response to this new European device in Islamic-ruled lands:

The Sharia-Ban Map

The map below is adapted from Mother Jones, of all places. It charts the attempts to ban sharia from state law in the USA.

The original map was quite low-quality, so I created a new one that might be a bit more readable in a blog-post format. The Mother Jones piece was published on February 11, so this list may be somewhat out of date:

Passed: Both Tennessee and Louisiana passed variations of the American Public Policy Alliance’s “American Law for American Courts” legislation in 2010.

Working on it: Alaska; Arkansas; Arizona; Georgia; Indiana; Kansas; Nebraska; Oklahoma; South Carolina; South Dakota; Texas; Wyoming.

Tried but Failed: Florida; Mississippi; Utah.

The distribution of sharia-opposing states is interesting. Sad to say, my own state is not included among those that are at least attempting to ban sharia.

With the exception of Indiana — how did it get in there? — and the libertarian-minded states of the far northern Midwest, which are mysteriously absent, the Islamophobic states seem to cluster in the heart of red-state America.

Bear in mind that the most effective sharia ban — one that won’t get overturned by the nearest panel of federal judges — is one that never mentions Islam or sharia. “A body of foreign law that is contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America” — that’s the sort of wording we need.

Here’s what Tim Murphy at Mother Jones had to say about all this: