An article I picked up at The Brussels Journal and which has also been featured on several places around the blogosphere. I thought it more than appropriate to feature it on this blog as well.

Far Right Parties in Europe Join Forces

From the desk of Paul Belien on Thu, 2005-11-17 20:54

Nationalist parties from seven European countries convened in Vienna last weekend to join forces. The “patriotic and nationalist parties and movements” signed a so-called “Vienna Declaration” calling for a stop to immigration in the entire European Union and the defence of Europe against “terrorism, aggressive islamism, superpower imperialism and economic aggression by low-wage countries.” The parties also reject the European Constitution and demand that “geographically, culturally, religiously and ethnically non-European territories in Asia and Africa” will be excluded from joining the European Union.

The participants were invited by the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and included Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National from France, Alessandra Mussolini’s Azione Sociale from Italy, the Spanish Alternativa Española, the anti-Hungarian Great Romania Party, the openly anti-Semite Bulgarian party Ataka, and Belgium’s largest party, the Vlaams Belang. The Italian Lega Nord, the Danish People’s Party and Poland’s governing Law and Justice were not present but are said to have sent their greetings.

The parties agreed to create a European contact group with a permanent office in Vienna. They also plan to hold annual conferences together. Their main aim, however, is to create a common group in the European Parliament. From 2009 onwards the European Union, which will be joined by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, will allow only pan-European parties to stand for the European elections. This is forcing right-wing parties, with often widely divergent views, to cooperate on a common platform.

Up till now the animosity between Jean-Marie Le Pen and FPÖ leader Jörg Haider had made international cooperation impossible. Le Pen and Haider each regarded themselves as the leading figure of the European nationalist right. Last April, however, the FPÖ split and Haider founded a new party, the BZÖ. With Le Pen growing older, Filip Dewinter, the charismatic strongman of the Vlaams Belang (VB), is generally seen as the new man to lead the European nationalist right.
Dewinter, who has been a close friend of Le Pen for years, told the Austrian press on Monday that Haider had always been his “great example” but that he had been “disappointed” in him: “He is no longer the Haider that I knew.”
Within Dewinter’s own VB, however, there is dissatisfaction about the plans for international cooperation. The VB is a party which strives for the independence of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium. It is the largest party in Belgium, which has forced all other parties to team up against it. Polls predict that the VB will continue to grow. This might make it impossible for the other parties to form a coalition in 2009 – something which might very well lead to Belgium falling apart.

The VB, however, is made up of various groups who agree on the mutual aim of Flemish secession and in their opposition to multiculturalism, but not on economic issues or on ethical values. There is also a conservative Anglo-Saxon oriented wing in the party that would rather collaborate with the British Eurosceptics than with the continental far right. The party Council, the highest authority within the party, decided two years ago that the VB would not enter into alliances with any foreign political parties.

It is certainly a promising start, however it remains to be seen how this co-operation will work-out in practice. Many of the policies of these parties are contradictory to each other, and it has long been the habit of European Nationalist parties to multiply by splitting. However, it certainly a move in the right-direction and I hope other European parties join the coalition to end the cultural self-annihilation.

Weeks of watching France's culturally enriched suburbs has sparked some discussion on multicultural society and how it ought to work. The failing states of Western Europe and their leaders are looking beyond their borders for answers and for models to follow. Obviously they themselves must be doing something wrong, because there is nothing to indicate, that multicultural society itself could be defunct? No, the answer is out there. What are we doing wrong, they ask themselves.

When race-riots were ravaging Birmingham last month (again), many Frenchmen said "no, no mon ami, you are doing it all wrong" and praised their own model 'of equality'. Ironically, soon after, the biggest riots France, and indeed Western Europe, have seen in decades broke out. First the streets of Paris were burning, then the streets of every major French town and then it spilled outside of France into neighbouring Belgium and Germany, to some extent. Now it was the turn of British politicians to praise their own model. Even the Swedish PM, Göran Persson, felt confident enough with the Swedish model to criticize the French government. "He said that the Liberal Party's warning that the same thing could also happen in Sweden was "unnecessary". Of course it could not happen in Sweden, even the Germans are looking at Sweden in awe. "The Rinkeby model" is a freshly coined term, and is being praised as the model for French and German suburbs. We all know about the safe, well-ordered and de-segregated suburbs of Sweden. We also know, that employment, the root cause for the rioting in France, is nearly non-existant among immigrants in Sweden. Or is it? So why could the riots not happen in Sweden? Or, in the not so distant future, in Finland?

Even Finland has been receiving praise from abroad, but perhaps that praise is more justified, as not counting the spree of muggings this autumn, things have remained calm in Finland, were around 2% of the population are immigrants. Perhaps Finland is different in some other way? The nations of Europe are desperate for solutions, desperate for answers for a problem that irresponsible immigration policies and utopian ideologies. disconnected from reality, have helped create. I say that the first step would be truly open discussion of all the factors, not merely the racism of us native Europeans.

Dutch desert their changing country

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Hague

(Filed: 11/12/2004)

An exodus of native-born Dutch in search of a new life abroad has reversed immigration flows for the first time since the post-war era.

Last year more people left the Netherlands than arrived as migrants or asylum seekers, even though unemployment remains low at 4.7 percent and per capita income is higher than any major country in Europe.

Lawyers, accountants, computer specialist, nurses, and businessmen are lining up for visas to the English-speaking world, looking to Australia, New Zealand and Canada as orderly societies where people have the space to breathe.

Above: Ellen and Peter Bles are planning

to leave their home near Tilburg for Perth, Western Australia

The new wave of "middle-class flight" has quickened this year following rising ethnic violence and crime committed by and against immigrants, and in response to fears that social order is breaking down. In the first six months there was a net outflow of 13,313 people.

They are disengaging from a multicultural experiment once hailed as the model for the world but now stretched to breaking point. They are also escaping traffic jams and chronic over-crowding.

Requests for visa information have exploded since the murder of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film-maker and acerbic critic of Muslim views on women.

An all-party report by the Dutch parliament this year concluded that the country's immigration policy had been a failure, leading to sink schools and ethnic ghettoes.

The Netherlands has been transformed in barely 30 years from a tight-knit Christian society into a polyethnic state, with three million people of immigrant background.

Well, what can I possibly say. Although I can understand the actions taken by the Dutch refugees, I condemn them. They have a duty, in my opinion, to change what is wrong with their country and not flee and forget about the problems. That is how this situation came about in the first place, remember? Its time the frustration at the situation would take a constructive turn. We need to stop running from our problems.

Here's an article I picked up at Fjordman's excellent blog, who picked up the original article (in Swedish). The Translation is the courtesy of a Swedish site called Watch, definately worth checking out.

"Pekgul leaves suburb because of violence"

"Nalin Pekgul, well-known social democratic advocate of suburbs with a high concentration of immigrants, is leaving her own suburb Tensta because she thinks it has become to insecure. Tensta has become too dangerous for the children, she says. ... She says to P1 Studio Ett that the reasons why she wants to move is the increasing violence and the religious fundamentalism in Tensta. The triggering factor was an incident in connection with the Tensta Market earlier this autumn, when a man was hurt by gunshots close to the family's apartment. "I was on my way home with my son. There was blood everywhere. It's not funny for an eight-year old to have to see something like that," says Nalin Pekgul. According to rumours, the man survived because he wore a bulletproof vest. A circumstance which also worried Nalin Pekgul. "I understood then that many are wearing bulletproof vests here. What has happened here, I wondered. Is this Tensta? I must have missed what has happened here the last years."

Nalin Pekgul says that she avoids to arrive home late in the evening nowadays. "Someone always has to meet me at the subway station if I arrive home late," she says. ... Nalin Pekgul, who is a Muslim herself, has also noted that fundamentalistic variants of Islam are growing stronger in Tensta. Her children come home and wonder why their mother don't wear a hijab or why their family don't go to the mosque. They also have heard that Muslims are better than Christians. "I don't like it when my son comes home and says that 'Mom, we Muslims don't lie, but Christians do, because they don't have God.' He hasn't got that from us. We had not reckoned on this religious fundamentalism," she says. Nalin Pekgul and her family are now looking for an apartment in a more mixed area, with both immigrants and ethnic Swedes."

And so the break-down of law and order and the disintegration of Swedish society progresses, little by little. When will 'critical mass' be reached? Perhaps that thin red line has already been passed long since? Are we powerless to stop the development or at least solve it in a peaceful manner? Will it be 'solved' at all? Many questions, and the only answer is, that time will tell.

Growing Islamic fundamentalism, as mentioned in the article, will make the Nordic nations increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attacks as well as a base for terrorist organizations. How mass-immigration, which Europe has been and continues to be the subject of, can be seen as a solution to anything, such as low-birth rates and an aging population, is beyond me. It can only be a temporary 'solution', even if it paid off. If we expect that the new-comers will continue to have high birth-rates in the future as well, then we are admitting that we expect the native population to become a minority within its own country at some point. This is already facing many major European cities during the first half of this century. Why is this desirable? When will we become convinced, that a multicultural society is in no way a 'better' society? How many failed experiments must we witness with our own eyes? Why must we, the natives of the land, accept being the subject of increasing attacks and harrassment from people who supposedly are our guests? Why must our women be more afraid at night?

Why must we create ethnic strife and tension where none existed?

French TV boss admits censoring riot coverage

Claire Cozens in Amsterdam
Thursday November 10, 2005

One of France's leading TV news executives has admitted censoring his coverage of the riots in the country for fear of encouraging support for far-right politicians.

Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service LCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been "excessive" and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.

Mr Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.

"Politics in France is heading to the right and I don't want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television," Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

"Having satellites trained on towns across France 24 hours a day showing the violence would have been wrong and totally disproportionate ... Journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you're broadcasting," he said.

Mr Dassier denied he was guilty of "complicity" with the French authorities, which this week invoked an extraordinary state-of-emergency law passed during the country's war with Algeria 50 years ago.
But he admitted his decision was partly motivated by a desire to avoid encouraging the resurgence of extreme rightwing views in France.

French broadcasters have faced criticism for their lack of coverage of the country's worst civil unrest in decades. Public television station France 3 has stopped broadcasting the numbers of torched cars while other TV stations are considering following suit.

"Do we send teams of journalists because cars are burning, or are the cars burning because we sent teams of journalists?" asked Patrick Lecocq, editor-in-chief of France 2.

Rival news organisations today questioned the French broadcasters' decision to temper coverage of the riots.
John Ryley, the executive editor of Sky News, said his channel would have handled a similar story in Britain very differently.

"We would have been all over it like a cheap suit. We would have monstered the story, and I didn't get the impression that happened in France," he said.

This is very much in line with media elsewhere in Western Europe, although this is perhaps the clearest case I've seen. The hush-hush mentality surrounding immigration-related issues is once more clearly witnessed. In Holland it was thought as necessary to discuss what goes on in Guantamo bay, even when it would add fuel to the flames of Islamic extremism, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali is criticized for adding fuel to the flames of right-wing extemism.

That media believes it has some sort of responsibility to control peoples' political views is beyond me. Because they think showing what was going on might change the way people think, it shouldn't be shown? I think it is their job to show us what is going on so that we can ourselves form an opinion, whatever that opinion may be. If coverage is one sided and omits certain factors, I think that could be called indoctrination. And that is what is going on, at some level, in most of Western Europe.

We live in a societ that prides itself on freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of opinion. Indoctrination on the other hand is something we know from studying totalitarian regimes. This sort of indoctrination may not be state controlled, but it certainly is not disaproved by the current leftist political elite that has put us on the road to multicultural paradise.

Confidence in police at new low

Swedish crime victims’ confidence in the police has fallen to a record low, according to a new survey on people’s attitudes towards the public services, but Justice Minister Thomas Bodström has dismissed the survey as "crackpot".

The Swedish Quality Index (SKI) interviewed people who have had close contact with public services such as the police, health service and education service.

Dentists were given high points by the survey, with private dentists scoring higher than the state-run Folktandvården service. Patients gave dentists a score of 75 on a scale of 1-100.

Victims of theft and violent crime gave the police a score of 49.4. This was the second year in a row that confidence in the police has dropped. Crime victims have lower expectations of the police than users of any of the other public services, the report says.

“This is extremely serious and indicates that their service simply isn’t working,” said Jan Eklöf at the Stockholm School of Economics.Increased dissatisfaction with the police is due to the fact that too few crimes are solved, Eklöf argues.

But Justice Minister Thomas Bodström slated the report, saying it was comparing apples and pears.“This is a crackpot survey. You can’t compare pulling out a tooth to investigating a crime,” he said.

The police have always done badly in SKI’s annual reports – they have had the bottom placing since the mid-nineties – although this year’s score of under fifty percent is a new low. “I am the first to admit that the police should be better, but I don’t set much store by comparisons such as this,” Bodström said to TT. He pointed to a series of surveys by the SOM Institute at Gothenburg University, which often show high levels of public confidence in the police.

But Stefan Strömberg, the National Police Commissioner, said he too the report’s results seriously.“It is regrettable that we don’t get better scores,” he said.“This is something that we are working on, and we hope to get better results in the future.

”Strömberg said the police’s capabilities for solving ‘everyday crimes’ were improving rapidly, and efforts in crime prevention would also have an effect.


It should come as no surprise to anyone, that peoples' confidence in the Swedish police is not very high, when 26/27 rapes in Stockholm remain unsolved, and violent crime and rapes are increasing rapidly in Sweden as a whole. The Swedish police force has become increasingly unmotivated to fight crime, and are faced with ever-growing crime rates and they are becoming targets themselves, when a police station in Södertälje was fired at with automatic gunfire. After this incident, Swedish police, not the Muslim youths, were blamed for being insensitive, and for not having enough police with immigrant background. The problems in Södertälje have continued since the riot and the shootings (my translation):

"The police increase security measures around the family in Södertälje whose car was set on fire on saturday. The fire is linked to the daughter's report of sexual harrasment, which resulted in riots in the district of Ronna some weeks ago.."

And yet, according to Anders Lago, Chairman of the local municipal governing body, says that the Syrians of Södertälje are among the 'well integrated' groups.

In other news, Swedish politicians have done the unthinkable, again. The 'best' bits (again, my translation):

"With 150 votes for and 39 against, the Swedish parliament voted yes for the nee temporary asylum law, which is intended to give the illegal refugees in Sweden a new chance to stay in Sweden legally."

I cannot see the logic in giving those who break the law a second chance, while sending away those who were stupid enough not to break the law and go into hiding. Indeed, they should have known that the law rarely applies to them in the same context, as it does to others.

"Rojas warned, that the refugee agreement can further increase alienation, which in turn could lead to a similar situation in Paris. This lead the Left Party's Kalle Larsson to say, that he was not so sure anymore whether the Swedish parliament is free of anti-foreigner parties or not."

Typical, that is all I can say. Trying to suggest that there could possibly be problems with ethnic tension is obviously a very racist thing to say. Culture/Ethnicity/Skin colour does not matter. Yet, Swedish police have too few of immigrant background working among them.

If rioting was to break out in Sweden, similar to that going on for the second week in France, then it is reassuring to know, that Prime Minister Persson knows how to deal with them:

Swedish PM slams French government over riots

Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson has criticised the way the French government has handled the unrest in the country.

"They have chosen a confrontational route and it is hard to see how it will become a dialogue," he said. Persson reserved his strongest criticism for France's interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who described the rioters as racaille, or 'rabble'.

"I'm surprised by the choice of words, at the start and as things went on. There is an implacability in the attitude towards the situation and I don't think it will lead to a dialogue," said Persson.

"There is justifiable criticism of French society and you don't confront this with the sort of expression Sarkozy used," he continued to a group of journalists in Stockholm on Wednesday.

The Prime Minister said that he was not willing to review the French government's method of handling the unrest, but at the same time criticised the decision to send in a powerful police presence and to introduce a state of emergency:"It's clear that if you resort to emergency legislation then it's naturally very dramatic, the like of which I haven't seen in Europe in the last 30-40 years. It feels like a very hard and confrontational approach.

"Persson said he sees what is happening in France as a warning to the rest of Europe of the tensions that are built up as a consequence of poor integration policies and lingering unemployment since the slump of the 1990s.

"It does not mean that the rest of us should think we don't have a problem, that would be far too arrogant," he said.

"But obviously a simple thing like the fact that young people in France do not have the option of a study loan means that a great many are shut out from what, today, is necessary for moving on in society, namely further education."However, he said that the Liberal Party's warning that the same thing could also happen in Sweden was "unnecessary".

"Rather than being in any way self-righteous, we should be vigilant, so such warnings are not needed. The vast majority recognise that this is a serious situation," he said.

Persson also rejected the idea of more local police as a "first step" in Sweden.

"It could be a method that works, but I don't believe that's the way we would choose in Sweden. For us it is about working on the opportunities for education. To start sending out signals about strengthening the police is to break with the political line we have chosen to follow," he said.

Here is an article on the issue in English:

Asylum "amnesty" passes

Sweden's parliament on Wednesday voted to give asylum seekers whose application has been rejected a second chance to obtain a residence permit.

The law, which is valid until March 31, 2006, concerns rejected asylum seekers whose deportation order was not carried out due to conditions in their home countries, as well as families with children who went into hiding in Sweden after having their applications were refused.

The Swedish immigration authority, Migrationsverket, said an estimated 20,000 people will now be entitled to file new applications, which is currently not allowed under Swedish law.

The government said the move would not guarantee all immigrants a legal status automatically, but opposition politicians and immigration officials said it amounted to a mass amnesty for those in hiding or awaiting deportation.

"It is a big problem that a growing number of people are living outside society," Barbro Holmberg, minister for immigration, told parliament before the new law, which is to be a temporary measure, was adopted.

"We are now breaking a deadlock and a vacuum in which our society and many people have landed in," she said.

mmigration officials quoted in Swedish media said they had orders to each process an average of 3.5 asylum requests per day, or one every two hours, with the aim of clearing the application backlog by the end of March.

Currently a decision on each application can take several months."Even our bosses say this is an amnesty law but we're not allowed to call it that," one official told Dagens Nyheter.

Another said that cursory checks on criminal records would still be possible, "but we can't conduct any investigation".Holmberg would not be drawn on how great the chances of success were for asylum seekers taking advantage of the new rules, and advised illegal immigrants to remain in hiding until the law comes into force next week.

But she said it was important that rejected applicants be deported swiftly "so our asylum system retains its credibility".

Politicians from the centre-right opposition claimed the law would make it easier for criminals to gain residency, and could even draw illegal immigrants from other European countries to Sweden in the hope of gaining a visa.

AFP

Sweden, wake up.

Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands

November 6, 2005

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. -- as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ''like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,'' as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ''Martel'' -- or ''the Hammer.''

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they'd won, they'd have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. ''Perhaps,'' wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, ''the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.'' There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was ''an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.''

Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. ''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''

What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.

I don't know what to make of all this. What can France and much of Western Europe do anymore, but to wait until the situation gets utterly out of control? Are we to witness the disintegration of former nation states, later turned into splintered multi-ethnic states? Can the problem be solved peacefully? Can we ever go back to a European society without so much ethnic tension?

Luckily Finland can still choose to avert all this and remain a homogenous society. Unfortunately, very few public personas, not to mention politicans, seem to be willing to avert from the path chosen by France. For some reason these failures are never because of multiculturalism itself or too much immigration, it is either because we, the Europeans, are not open-minded enough, or then the immigrants don't get enough benefits, trapping them in the ghettos, or then they get too many benefits, passivating them and ultimately, trapping them in the ghettos.

If we, the Europeans, are not welcoming and open and tolerant and whatnot enough, even with all of our education (some might call it indoctrination) aimed towards making us open, tolerant, accepting, welcoming, etc, then how are the immigrants so free of these blames of racism? Many of the new comers have next to no education, but of course it would be impossible for them to be racist. And if they were, surely it is our fault for not being welcoming, etc, etc enough. Perhaps some prejudices exist, because there is some sort of basis for them, just may be? Perhaps the fact, that apparently 'discrimination', 'racism' and 'prejudice' is still so rampant among us Europeans is a sign, that multicultural societies are doomed to disintegrate, or at least segregate (if not legally then in pracitce)? Why do we even have to try, when it has already proven so difficult? Why exactly must the nation state be done away with?

The European nation state is not an outdated model for governments in Europe. I can only hope, that people around Europe will open their eyes as a consequence of these events, instead of blaming themselves for it (as is the habit). Europe is in need of a wake-up call.

For further reading, I would suggest The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, by Theodore Dalrymple.

Swedish priests reject gay church blessings

More than 400 Swedish Lutheran priests have posted an Internet message distancing themselves from an official Church decision to guarantee same-sex partners the right to religious blessings of their civil unions."We believe this decision is not in accordance with the order of communal life and marriage as revealed in the Word of God defining it as a relationship between man and woman," said a website statement.

"The Word of God does not authorise us to bless another type of relationship among couples," said the signatories, distancing themselves from the Church's new official position.

On October 27, the Lutheran Church said it would guarantee same-sex partners the right to religious blessings of their civil unions.

"The Church board has been given the task of working out a system for these homosexual partnership blessings ... The system will go into effect during 2006," said a spokeswoman.

Sweden's current law gives gay couples the same rights as married couples, but while the public commonly refers to gay unions as "marriages", they are in the eyes of the law officially called "partnerships".

The Church decision was taken at a congress by a majority of 160 delegates to 81 against, with eight abstentions.Pastor Yngve Kalin published a "priest's statement" on his website on November 1st denouncing the Church decision.

By Friday evening, 416 priests had added their names to the site in support of the statement.


While I am neither a believer or a homo-hater, I really fail to see exactly why homosexuals want to be married in a church, blessed by the representatives of a religion, that is anti-homosexual. Christianity considers homosexuality to be a sin.

I see this only as another attack on traditional western culture, and attack on the very corner stone of Western Civilization; Western Christendom. There is an assault going on, on all fronts, against traditional values, customs, traditions, beliefs and everything that can be associated with Western and European civilization, and the assault is being conducted in the name of many different things. However, the attacking party is the same without exception: the so called 'progressive circles', the modern left and all the values (or the lack thereof) associated with them.

They are striving for a splintered society, it would seem. Of course, I don't think they are doing this on purpose, I think most of them genuinly believe that the world will be a better place thanks to their actions. I think that they aren't able to see the consequences that their actions are having and will have in the future.

HS reports, that radical islamists have been preparing strikes against Dutch politicians and the Dutch intelligence service. Besides the immediate implications (lost lives, damage to property, etc), I think this threat is a very serious threat to democracy and a free society. Already such politicians as Hirsi Ali and Wilders have to remain discreet about their whereabouts and be protected by bodyguards where ever they go.

Although Dutch law condemns such behaviour, I think it has sent a pretty strong message to 'dissenters', to those of us who don't buy into the idealist view of a peaceful multicultural society, the destruction of the nation state and the notion of Islam as a 'religion of peace' and 'tolerance'. Although we can publicly say what we feel about these issues, in places like Holland (and many other places in W. Europe), we become immediatly targets. An atmoshpere of tension and fear is hampering dissenting views from being presented, and it hampers democracy itself.

I think the choice is clear:

a) A multicultural society, rife with ethnic tension and conflict, suppressed freedoms of speech, expression, opinion and assembly (in order to prevent any provocation and escalation of the conflict)

or;

b) A safer, more homogenous society with more freedoms.

Nationalism, besides being a view of how society should be in our opinion, is also a practical solution.