Velhametsä

Velhametsä has moved

2007-03-21T15:48:00.000Z

Why I am not a Liberal

2007-03-02T14:40:00.000Z

Why I am not a Liberal

Note: I am using 'stereotypical' liberal opinions, which I reflect on here, and I'm well aware that these are by no means the opinions of all people who call themselves liberal. Here is simply a random collection of view points, which I've perceived to be fundamental to and dircetly connected to liberal thinking and which I disagree with from a meta-political and philosophical point of view. This is an absolutely biased analysis from an absolutely biased point of view, reader discretion is advised.

I am not going to go over specific examples or into extensive detail on individual topics such as gender equality, for example. I will apply a much more macro-level - meta-political - approach to the matter at hand.

One of the biggest bones I've got to pick with the 'liberal world view' is its illusionary detachment from the past, from the accumulated experience pf human existance, a break with humanity itself. I don't know about others, but I definately sense that the feeling or attitude that we've somehow managed to escape the past and that all has changed or is about to change, very soon, is inherent in liberal thinking. That what will follow is a brave, new world. I think this attitude may be derived from a lack of understanding, on an emotional level, of the past. Or perhaps its the otherway around, that this ideological break has lead to the inability to grasp the past of mankind, but I definately think there is a causal connection here. In any case, for these aforementioned changes to occur, for this new age to actually materialize as a heaven on earth, also humanity must change profoundly against its own nature. It seems, that liberals 'have faith' in humanity.

Liberals are more of the atheist inclination and should therefore perceive, that knowledge > faith. May be this faith exists exactly because the liberal finds the past incomprehensible, not in the way that he cannot cognitively understand what has occured, but that he doesn't understand the mankind that brought these events about. I will try to illustrate my point by example: no less than 50 years ago, pretty much everyone in our not-yet-so progressive societies could have been classified as 'racist' by present liberal thought. Now, by racist I don't mean discrimination and violence solely, but rather the prevailing ethnocentrism, the commitment to what liberals like refer to as "social structures", such as ethnicity, race, religious community, and so on. This kind of communal commitment and the set of morals derived from such a commitment are quite foreign to the individualist liberal perspective, and such 'racism' is as utterly foreign to liberal ideology as it is demonized as a concept by it. Now with this example, allow me to continue my argument. How then is the liberal to be able to find himself in the mankind of previous generations and thus link up with the immense, near-infinite human experience? The liberal wishes to see the human experience dismantled, the deconstruction of the human tradition, its removal from the present and future, viewing history as some distant, foreign country.

By making this artificial break with the past, the liberal fools himself into thinking, that he can cheat human nature, indeed escape it, because it represents such a foreign and incomprehensible entity from the view of the 'socially progressive' liberal, it represents something unwanted. A typical example of this attitude is the condemnation of historical events, such as the holocaust, the massacre of the native Americans across the continent, slavery, colonizations, imperialism and so on. While from a moral perspective such events could indeed quite justifiably be condemned, it is the invasion of politics into history, and the moralizing twist this politics gives to history, that makes these condemnations seem more like attempts to find forgiveness and salvation, for humankind. The past is literally condemned in hope that by condemnation ("confession"), a break can be made with the past and a fresh beginning is at hand (the "sins of man" have been forgiven). "We are a different world, a different mankind now" is the statement of this politicized history. Truly, it is the Messianic-historical self-flagellation, often manifested as White Liberal Guilt, that will absolve our sins.

Curiously, although liberals usually see themselves as pragmatic and and their beliefs as justified by science, taking pride in their 'scientific' approach to the world, they choose to ignore the natural laws, laws of human nature, that apply to us all. It is as if the liberal sees himself above and beyond such primitive restrictions imposed on by biology, evolution, genetics, and such. Homo economicus, the rational man. When discussing such matters as group identity, gender roles, religion, value systems, and so on, the liberal is quick to point out that these are in fact nothing but social constructs, invisible borders that govern our behaviour. And I'm sure they are right about this. Some go as far as admitting, that such constructs, from the perspective of human cultural evolution, are indeed present through-out the historical human experience, and could be described as being part of 'human nature'. Yet, for some odd reason, the liberal and the new and improved Homo economicus is beyond the reach of these laws of human nature, as if we would have suddenly, thanks to a couple of horrific, 'lesson-teaching' world wars, evolved beyond such primal paradigms.

By tearing down the old manifestations of these human traits, known as social constructs (such as religion, ethnic identity, gender roles, traditional family values, etc), the liberal thinks he is getting rid of the traits themselves! Humans have an inbuilt need to divide people into in-groups and out-groups, us and them to put it bluntly. If we deconstruct the social construct that is "us" (at the moment for example "English", "White", "Western", etc), the liberal reasons, we get rid of that primal expression of human nature. In actual fact the liberal is simply repeating the same human pattern. New manifestations of human nature and collective behaviour, brought on by liberal ideology, will replace the old value systems and other social constructs, but the liberal would pretend (or perhaps genuinly think) that these new manifestations don't exist, that their own value system and ideological divide into us and them isn't simply another cycle, rise and fall, of a certain "human culture", if you will. Because of this false pretense, the new social constructs are deprived of their communal, symbolic, even ritualistic, functions as providers of social cohesion, as the pillars of society. It deprives the culture of a common or communal mental and spiritual existance. The hollowness of such a value system is not something I feel attracted to. I feel that liberalism is fundamentally dishonest and 'denialist'. The liberal might desribe it with the euphemism of "optimism", as he has faith in human solidarity, social progess and a humanity itself. The Holy Trinity.

This is why I am not a liberal.

Today I went to get the paper. Because its friday, Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest daily, comes with its weekly 'tabloid', called Nyt-liite, a journalistic publication concentrating mostly on popular culture. In today's edition, a parliamentary candidate for the Green party, Jukka Relander, in response to Jussi Halla-aho and other critics of multicultural society , said:

"But liberal culture is not a multicultural culture, it is a cultureless culture."

Which it obviously isn't, but its nice to pretend. This sentence illustrates perfectly the schitzophrenia of liberalism.

Jussi Halla-aho runs for Parliament

2006-07-05T14:41:00.000+01:00

Jussi Halla-aho has made the decision to make a move into politics, something he persisted earlier he would not do. However, in an announcement made on his website on the 20th of June, he declared that he would be running as an independent candidate for the True Finns in the Helsinki voting district.

For those who are not acquainted with Mr. Halla-aho and his opinions should know that he is a fine writer with iron logic and a vicious sense of humour, the latter which he usually directs at the multicultist click with a vengeance. Until now, he has been satisfied with writing articles and publishing them on his website, but no more. I have been reading his writings and following his development as an internet persona for over a year now, and he has managed to gather a significant number of loyal fans during this relatively short period. Many have also experienced an awakening of sorts after finding his site, and his writings and the logic he displays in the has enabled many of us, who are critical of a multicultural society, to put our thoughts into a more coherent form. Now, the man is moving into politics, something he has been asked to do for quite some time by his eager readers.

It will be most exciting to see how he fares. He has all the potential to receive the necessary amount of votes to become a member of the Finnish parliament, but he needs to get his message out effectively. Finland, relatively unscathed by the multicultural experiment in comparison with the rest of Europe, has an insignificant opposition in the matter. As an individual, Halla-aho can accomplish little directly even as a member of parliament, but if he becomes popular enough, he can scare the major parties into adjusting their policies in fear of losing voters. Finns seem to be quite sceptical about multicultural society. In a survey 76% were of the opinion that there are enough or too many immigrants in the country, yet the issue is not on the agenda of any major political party. Why is this? It is because it is not seen as a major issue, people don't vote according to immigration policies. As a member of parliament, Halla-aho could change all that by showing the threat that Europe faces, Finland included. If and when immigration & integration policies become important for the average voter, even the major parties are going to have to take a more visible stand, and the current silent agreement will come to an end.

Many are counting on Halla-aho to be successful, myself included. It would be a break-through from a nationalist point of view as well as from the point of view of anyone, who wishes to preserve the welfare state, who wishes to preserve the security us citizens enjoy, and to preserve the trust that exists in society. Trust of officials, trust of government, trust of the next door neighbour. Trust within society between individuals and communities is absolutely necessary for a safe, secure and united society. Such trust derives from a sense of 'us', a feeling that the complete stranger on the bus, although you know nothing about him, shares your values, culture and sense of justice, and therefore it is safe to be around him. This organic social contract, that exists in culturally homogenous populations, is breaking down in all over Europe. As I mentioned earlier, Finland has so far been only lightly touched by the effects of multiculturalism in comparison, but that is why the time to act is NOW, in order to keep things that way. "Someone should do something" is a complaint often voiced. Mr. Halla-aho is doing us all a favour by being that often-mentioned someone doing something.

I also believe, that if Halla-aho does make it into parliament, he will be the founding stone of a Finnish opposition surrounding the matter of multiculturalism. So far, being the innocent maiden that Finland is, no such opposition exists.

As a side note, it will be interesting too see how successful Halla-aho is, because he is in his entirety an internet phenomena (so far, at least). It will be a most intriguing experiment of how powerful a tool the internet has become.

The impossibility of a multicultural society

2006-06-02T10:50:00.000+01:00

BBC News, a bastion of political correctness, has gone out of its way and published the following article:

Does diversity make us unhappy?
By Mark Easton Home editor, BBC News

It is an uncomfortable conclusion from happiness research data perhaps - but multicultural communities tend to be less trusting and less happy.

Research by the Home Office suggests that the more ethnically diverse an area is, the less people are likely to trust each other.

The Commission for Racial Equality has also done work looking at the effect of diversity on well-being.

Interviewed on The Happiness Formula, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips accepts that people are happier if they are with people like themselves.

"We've done work here which shows that people, frankly, when there aren't other pressures, like to live within a comfort zone which is defined by racial sameness.

"People feel happier if they're with people who are like themselves. But the question is: what does "like themselves" mean?"

Tapestry of life
To an extent, new immigrants are always seen as outsiders and threatening. It is not necessarily a matter of ethnicity.

The arrival of the Huguenots or the Jews into Britain brought significant social tensions which have largely disappeared.
Cultural difference eventually became woven into the tapestry of British life.

Globalisation has brought new challenges - a diversity of culture and ethnicity never seen before.
There have been fierce arguments as to whether social well-being is enhanced by celebrating difference or encouraging integration, even assimilation.

Trevor Phillips believes the debate has become dangerously confused.
"Our multiculturalism which started out as a straightforward recognition of diversity became a sort of system which prized racial and ethnic difference above all other values and there lies the problem."

So, if we want happy, stable communities, where should the balance lie between diversity and integration?

Trevor Phillips believes getting it right is vital: "We need to respect people's ethnicity but also give them, at some point in the week, an opportunity to meet and want to be with people with whom they have something in common that isn't defined by their ethnicity."

"If we can find a moment, an idea, an activity which takes us out of our ethnicity and connects us to other people of different ethnicities and if only for an hour in a week then I think we can crack this problem."
Social science is also trying to help make sense of the challenges.

Building bridges
In the jargon, they refer to the factors that bind similar people together in groups as "bonding social capital".

But it is argued that happy societies also need what they call "bridging social capital" - strong links between different groups.

"A society that has only bonding social capital and no bridging social capital looks like Beirut or Belfast or Bosnia, that is tight communities but isolated from one another."

So says Harvard professor Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community".

He argues that working out how to grow bridging capital is the great challenge for Western society.

"This is the crux of the problem. The kind of social capital that is most important for the success of a modern, pluralist, multicultural democracy - the bridging social capital - is the kind that's hardest to build.

"Therefore we've got to go about the task of creating new opportunities for people to make connections to people different from them.
When bonding social capital drowns bridging social capital, conflict is inevitable.

Shared values
Trevor Phillips believes we saw it all too clearly in the disturbances in the Lozells area of Birmingham in the Summer of 2005.

A tight-knit Asian community came into conflict with a tight-knit black community because, Phillips argues, the ethnicity that binds each community together is stronger than the links between them.

"You have two communities who more or less faced each other across a single road. They are communities which have high levels of internal bonding.

"But actually there wasn't and is very little bridging between these two communities and I think this is a perfect demonstration of what happens when people who are very different, look very different and think they are very different never touch, never interact."

What is required is a sense of identity that overarches creed, culture or ethnic background.

Nation states take different views on how this might best be achieved. The French model is to have a strict definition of Frenchness that, for instance, prohibits religious head-scarves in schools.

In the UK, citizenship ceremonies for new arrivals and lessons in schools are built around the ideas of shared values including an understanding of and respect for our democratic institutions.

Among those values is a tolerance of diversity and cultural difference.
But it is, perhaps, in sport that the efforts to build bridging social capital are most obvious.

Whether it be two football teams from different local communities breaking down barriers or an Olympic squad reflecting the multi-racial reality of modern Western society, competitive sport is seen as an important tool in binding together diverse nations and making people happy.

While the article highlights many problems and points out what has been obvious to see for many of us, it makes pitiful attempts to provide solutions typical of the new left. It basically says, that because a multicultural society is a society of diversity, diverse customs, diverse norms, diverse values, it is splintered. The problem will be tackled by creating an identity that "overarches creed, culture or ethnic background", effectively eliminating 'multicultural society'.

The positive thing about this article is the fact, that the topic is being discussed by 'respectable' media, in their own way of course. But if the BBC can get away with it, so should the rest of us.

Paris on fire, again.

2006-05-31T13:18:00.000+01:00

Rioters have taken to the streets of Paris once more, reminding us of the massive rioting that took place only last fall.

The BBC reports:

Paris suburb sees fresh rioting

The mayor's house is now under police guard following the riotingAbout 100 youths wielding baseball bats have fought French police in a Paris suburb, in the worst such violence since widespread riots in November.

The youths threw stones and petrol bombs at police in the town of Montfermeil overnight. They also hurled stones at the local mayor's home.

Seven officers were hurt in the clashes, which lasted several hours.
Police say the trouble began after the arrest on Monday of a young man suspected of assaulting a bus driver.

Three youths were arrested in the clashes, which left part of Montfermeil littered with broken glass and burnt rubbish, the French news agency AFP reported.

The home of Montfermeil's centre-right mayor, Xavier Lemoine, was stoned after he banned youths from gathering in big groups in the town centre last month.

The suburb lies next to Clichy-sous-Bois, the suburb which saw the first flare-up of rioting in November.

In the wave of riots last year, almost 9,000 cars were torched and 3,000 people arrested across France.

The message sent by the rioters is clear: these suburbs are ours, your French laws are no good here, this is Muslim country. Any increased police activity in the Muslim ghettos of France is met with rioting and violent resistance, and many of those suburbs are already de facto under Sharia law. Its not just police activity, but any presence of any form of the French state is not tolerated, including emergency services such as fire-fighters and ambulances. Every time the police or emergency services attempt to do their job, they are attacked by mobs weilding petrol bombs and baseball bats, and many of these so-called 'parts of France' are foreign colonies, where the authority of the French government is weak or nonexistant. These riots are not as much about social, ethnic, cultural or racial equality, as it is interpreted by the liberal media, but about power and control.

It might sound far-fetched, but is it really? Same trends can be noticed in Britain, where 40% of Muslims would like to implement Sharia in predominantly Muslim areas, or more recently, in Sweden, where a Muslim organization proposed different laws for Muslims and non-Muslims.

An excerpt from Paul Belien's excellent piece for the American Conservative, commenting on the rioting of the fall of 2005:

On Thursday night, Oct. 27, two teenagers, Ziad Benna (17) and Banou Traoré (15), fled into an electrical power substation in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. They were hiding from police who had entered the suburb to investigate a robbery. Why the boys fled and climbed over the three-meter fence of the power station is unclear. The result, however, was something every moderately intelligent schoolboy could have foreseen: they got electrocuted.

When the fire brigade arrived to retrieve their bodies, something happened that every moderately intelligent French politician could have foreseen. Neighborhood gangs attacked the firemen and police officers and went on a rampage, setting fire to dozens of cars. The same thing happened during the following nights, when schools, shops, and restaurants were also set ablaze. At first the media did not devote much attention to the rioting. These things happen every day in the predominantly immigrant and largely Muslim neighborhoods surrounding every major French city.

Only one week earlier Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy had declared in Le Monde: “Violence in French suburbs is a daily fact of life. Since the beginning of the year stones were thrown at 9,000 police cars and each night 20 to 40 cars are torched.” For some years, vehicle burning has been a favorite way to celebrate New Year’s Eve. If only 30 cars are set ablaze on an ordinary night and just 300 on New Year’s, the French police consider the situation to be “stable.”

France is not exceptional. Police officers and firemen are used to having stones thrown at them in Western Europe’s immigrant neighborhoods as a normal part of their daily routine. This is what Andrew Osborn of the British Sunday newspaper The Observer wrote after visiting Borgerhout, the largely Moroccan suburb of the Flemish city of Antwerp, in December 2002: “Outsiders aren’t welcome. ‘Go home before we beat your f------g white ass,’ is how one group of young men greet The Observer. Passing police cars are bombarded with a barrage of expletives and spittle.”

Here is what Rolf Landgren, a police officer in the Swedish town of Malmö, told Steve Harrigan of Fox News in November 2004: “If we park our car it will be damaged—so we have to go very often in two vehicles, one just to protect the other vehicle.” Fear of violence has changed the way police, firemen, and emergency workers do their jobs, explained Harrigan. There are some neighborhoods Swedish ambulance drivers will not go to without a police escort.

The following dispatch is from neighboring Denmark, where this October rioters burned down a kindergarten in Århus. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten witnessed how the fire brigade did not dare to enter the area. Private firefighters were sent in under armored police protection: “Falck, a private emergency service, sent a group of fire engines under police escort to the Kjærslund nursery. A window had been shattered at the back of the house, and the fire had been blazing, apparently caused by gasoline poured onto the floor and lit. Falck stopped on Viby Square, a couple of kilometers from the site of the arson attack, waiting for the police to turn up so they could be escorted to the nursery.”

What Europe is witnessing is the wholesale disintegration of society, the splintering of nations. Native Europeans have been far too slow in realizing the danger in introducing large numbers of culturally distant people into their societies. All models have faced failure, from the French model, which is heavy on integration, to the Swedish model of Multiculturalism. Integration can only work when the subject of integration has something to integrate into. A Moroccan in Beligum lives in a neighbourhood inhabited mostly by other Moroccans or North Africans. At what point is he meant to integrate into Belgian society? Many defend the riots by saying that they are a French tradition of sorts, which would imply that the rioters have most certainly digested the core principles of French culture. Well, riots may be more common in France, but what about Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Britain, Denmark? The riots all display the same basic elements: segregated Muslim neighbourhoods inhabited by angry Muslim youths (or "French"/"Danish"/"Swedish"/"German" youth as newspeak of today dictates), an incident involving the authorities and a violent reaction to the arrival of the authorities.

This same attitude is reflected in the Cartoon row: although Danish law dictates, that the press is free and as such it can publish pictures of Mohammed, the Muslims, who were angered by this, wanted to have Danes respect Islamic law, wanting to impose it upon Europe.

The future looks bleak in terms of social harmony in many major European countries. The worst part is, that so many are still trying to realize the fact that they've made massive mistakes and errors of judgement. The truth is slow to penetrate their ideological armour, and for Europe the clock is ticking.

How can this problem be solved? It is an extremely difficult question. The problem with this 'multicultural project' is that it is very difficult to reverse. Many nations in Europe can still avert the disaster, many must deal with it in their own manner. But so far, little action has been taken and relatively little attention has been paid to a problem, that will determine the future of Europe.

Sweden Democrats popular among ninth-graders - Rebellion or a sign of change?

2006-05-22T13:02:00.000+01:00

According to the south-Swedish newspaper Helsingborgs Dagblad, Sverigedemokraterna is popular among youth, or, as the researcher suggets, it might just be a sign of teenage rebellion. Here are some excerpts from the article:

"Every other ninth-grader does not know what party they would vote for in the parliamentary elections, or if they would vote at all, shows the extensive opinion research. At the same time the Sweden Democrats are enjoying great support. They became the most popular party among ninth-graders in Landskrona. However, the results should be interpreted carefully, say researchers."

"...However, of those who do know who they would vote for, many have chosen the Sweden Democrats. They would be the 3rd biggest party in North-Western Skåne, after the Moderates and Social Democrats. In Landskrona, however, they had the most votes out of all the parties with 16 per cent."

However, Jens Rydgren, a sociologist from the Stockholm university, does not think that this necessarily means those who chose the Sweden Democrats now would do so four years from now.

"-You have to interpret these results very carefully. When presented with a poll such as this one, which does not affect anything and the students being of that age, it could be a form of protest. They know which is seen as the 'naughty' choice."

Jens Rydgren thinks that no conclusions can be made before the reasons behind the votes and how they were cast are clear. It must be known what the results represent, he says, before reaching any kind of conclusion.

"In Ängelholm the Sweden Democrats received six per cent of the votes and seven per cent in Helsingborg. Among all ninth-graders that took part in the poll in Sweden, 12 570 persons in total, the support for the Sweden Democrats is at six per cent."

The study also shows, that politically activity in general is low among Swedish teenagers. The article also included this little gem: "If you ask Enes Ferhatovic, Diana Muriqi, Suada Racic och Sejla Kurtovic at Gustav Adolfskolan in Landskrona, the Social Democrats are the most popular party." You don't say?

Here are the results in diagram form. The lighter bars show the results for North-Western Skåne and the darker bars are the results for the whole country.

With over half of all ninth-graders being undecided or uninterested, and with such high support among the Sweden Democrats, it has become evident, that people are getting sick and tired of the current political establishment (this includes the media) and the direction the country is headed. It may have been a protest vote, a slap in the face for Persson and his cronies, or it may have been just for 'laughs'. The latter, however, seems unlikely to me. The Sweden Democrats had the best showing in Landskrona, is there a reason for it?

Here are some excerpts from an article I found it the same paper:

"Beaten, shot and mock-excecuted

Peter, 25, was beaten, mock-excecuted and shot 20 times by a gang of youths. It was only after two hours of terror that he managed to escape. He did not get any compensation from his insurance, the reason: he was intoxicated."
"Peter was on his way home from the bar Gringos in central Landskrona when he was knocked down from behind with a hard object. When he woke up, he was being dragged along a sand path, from Eriksgatan to a place protected from sight under a flight of stairs at Alléskolan. There two more persons appeared. The attackers encouraged each other on by yelling "svennejävel" [=Swedish devil] and repeatedly beat and kicked Peter while he was down on the ground. They even jumped on his back. If he didn't shut up, he would die.
-They ripped off my bealt and my shirt and took all my valuables - ring, necklace, bracelett, mobile phone and wallet.
But he refused to give the code to his bank account to the youth gang. Then one of the robbers sat on Peter, pressed a gun to his neck and said that he would excecute him. Then he fired three or four shots in quick succession.
-"Is this how it will end", I thought. But after a few seconds I realized that it was "only" a gas-powered pistol, for he fired several shots at a time. While it hurt terribly, I felt relieved." "

In the end, Peter was forced to give the code to his bank account, but not before he had no less than 20 lead pellets lodged in his body.

"Peter has had good help from a psychologist to deal with the event, but it will never be quite like before. Both him and his girlfriend are equipped with personal alarms and they plan meticulously how to get home in the evenings - to walk is not an option."

Perhaps it is a coincidence that this event took place in Landskrona, the same place where support for the Sweden Democrats is at its highest among teenagers, but I do not think so. The establishment continues to be unable to address this most serious of issues: the safety of its citizens, that they claim to represent. Already a number of 'Citizen Guards' have been established around Sweden because of the ever-growing violence, the incomptence and lack of trust of the police. The Citizen Guards have been reiceved positively by the vast majority of people, or so one could deduce from the feedback that Kvällsposten received after their article on one of such Guards.

The War Against the Swedes

2006-03-26T20:13:00.000+01:00

This is a war that is being waged, and has been waged for many years now, in all major Swedish cities. The truth of this conflict is denied, it is lied about and it is ignored. This war does not exist officially. The majority of the victims of this war are, as in so many wars, innocent civilians. In this case young Swedes.

Petra Åkersson has compiled a sociology report and conducted several interviews with young immigrant robbers. I found it surprising, that the results of this report were published in Dagens Nyheter.

I will not translate the entire article, but I will provide some excerpts, which anyone in touch with the reality of Sweden's present state regarding this 'situation' should not find surprising.

Åkersson comments her interviews:

"It was good that I used a tape recorder in my interviews because the answers I got were so remarkable that I had to listen to them many times in order to grasp properly what had been said. "When we are out in town and robbing we are waging a war, a war against the Swedes", was a frequent argument."

Some twisted ideas about power:

"The interviewees are boys between 15 and 17 years of age and one of them explains to Petra Åkersson what power means to him.

"For me it [power] is when the Swedes lie down on the ground and kiss my feet."

These attitudes are blamed on Swedish racism, which becomes evident when the cashier looks away instead of smiling when serving a customer of foreign background. Åkersson herself thinks that this "frustration" is the result of too many passivating benefits of the welfare state , among other reasons. While I agree with her conclusion, I am not surprised, that this is not seen as an argument against the current immigration policies, which have done more than their share in creating these problems, or "frustration" - and it is the ordinary Swedes who suffer. Young Swedes, who happen to own good mobile phones or look well-off in general, have become the subject of daily racially motivated attacks that rob them of their possessions and their dignity. Had you told some one twenty years ago, that in 2006, this will be a problem, no one would have believed you, at least not the ones insisting on these terrible policies which have made Swedes the subject of ethnic persecution in their own country.

Imagine for one moment, if you will, the following scenario: groups of young Swedes consistently and continuously robbing immigrant youths merely because of their ethnicity, and boasting about this in interviews. This is a commonly known fact for immigrant youths in major population centres. Now, imagine, would the response be the same as it is in this case, nothing?

Perhaps the problem is, that the country does not belong to the Swedes anymore. Anyone who thinks that is a racist. The elite in power does not care anymore for the Swedish people, nor for any other people for that matter. It is time Swedes took their country back.

Freedom of expression isn't free at all, it is achieved by action...

2006-02-13T21:27:00.000Z

...And lost by inaction.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. "
- Edmund Burke

The cartoons mocking Mohammed and Islam have caused such an international incident that it is hard to keep track of it all, and therefore, with my limited time and ability, I leave it into more proffessional hands. However, the waves caused by the rock cast into the pond are finally reaching even remote, little Finland. Via, Sweden, naturally.

The Finnish Nationalist organisation, Suomen Sisu, has published the disputed images as a protest to a severe violation of the freedom of expression by the Swedish authorities. Suomen Sisu announced on their website, that this was an act of solidarity towards the Swedish political party Sverige demokraterna, whose website was offline recently until the images were removed. The Web site was inaccessible when I wrote this article.

The largest daily of Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, commented the move as a follows (translation by me):

"Suomen Sisu, a self-designated nationalist organisation, say they published the images on their web site as a protest to the Swedish government. According to Suomen Sisu, the Swedish security police and foreign ministry shut the web site of the Sverige Demokraterna and their party newsletter, the SD-kuriren, after they had published the disputed caricatures.

However, the web site was shut only for a short period of time and were re-opened once the disputed image had been removed. The service provider, Levonline, shut down the site, not the Swedish security police or foreign ministry."

However!!

According to the Local, the case isn't as simple as Helsingin Sanomat makes it seem. According to them, the decision wasn't entirely up to Levonline as the citation above would suggest:

"The website of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) reopened on Friday morning, after the far-right party removed drawings of the prophet Muhammad. The site had been taken down by its hosting company after requests from Sweden’s foreign ministry and security service, Säpo."

Interesting...

"Söder had been contacted on Thursday afternoon by Levonline’s deputy CEO Anna Larsson, who told him that threats had been received against her company and its staff and she therefore wanted him to move his party’s website.

'It didn’t sound plausible that threats would have been made against a website hosting company and its staff – the threats should really have been made against us, who published the pictures, ' said Söder.

'I was later told by a journalist at Dagens Nyheter that [Larsson] had changed her story, and more or less admitted that the foreign ministry and Säpo had been applying pressure.'"

This is where it gets really interesting:

"Levonline’s Anna Larsson confirmed in an interview with Swedish Radio that the foreign ministry and the security service were behind the closing of the party’s website."

"Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds denied on Friday that the government had applied pressure on Levonline."

It would seem that someone is lying. And just by the way, Suomen Sisu is being investigated whether its publication of the images was illegal. Big brother is watching.

Denmark vs. Islam, continued...

2006-02-02T11:31:00.000Z

So, the proverbial excrement has really hit the fan. Massive demonstrations around the Middle-East, a French editor was sacked for printing the cartoons in France, several Arab countries have withdrawn their diplomatic representation in Denmark, Palestinian Islamist groups have threatened Danes and Norwegians and they are declared valid targests as are any diplomats from these countries. Muslims in Finland have joined the boycott and condemn Denmark and Islamists in London have threatened Denmark and said "see what happened to Theo Van Gogh". What happened to Theo Van Gogh, that we all know. It is the perfect example of the contradiction (one of them) of Islam: it is a Religion of Peace and Tolerance, but call it violent or treat it in a negative light, you will be stabbed/shot/beheaded in broad daylight. Or your nations citizens will be threatened with murder and your nations embassies will be threatened with bombings.

Now, according to the free Finnish newspaper Uutislehti Sata, the former Editor of the Danish newspaper Politiken, Herbert Pundik, suggested that a large Mosque should be built in Copenhagen to appease the Muslims. Mhm. Perhaps Munich is to host another infamous conference?

How can multiculturalists hope to live with large Muslim minorities within their societies, when it clearly limits the freedom of such societies, freedom being another foundation in the ideology of the multicultists? They don't, because certain freedom is intolerance, naturally, and the victims of such intolerants must be appeased by, let's say building a Mosque in the capital of Denmark. Logical?

Finnish Social Democrat and Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja was also quick to criticize Denmark. It seems that everyone is forgetting that the Danish government does not control the media, Denmark is country founded on Western Values after all. Why are they all forgetting this? It is understandable behaviour from the Islamic world, as they have it very differently, but that our very own European politicians, even the UN, are ready to limit freedom of expression to appease religious fundamentalists, it is absurd. It goes to show that they, too, have forsaken the values over which so much blood has been spilled. They are nothing short of traitors. Instead of teaching the Muslim world a lesson by standing by their principles, they continue their policy of appeasement, and the Muslims will get what they want, but it will not be enough and never will until we ourselves say "stop!".

So far Denmark and the Danish government has acted admirably. Hats off to them.

Support Denmark!

2006-02-01T17:13:00.000Z

Support Denmark by placing a banner on your website/blog

On the 30th of September 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. Mohammedans raised a storm of protest and two artists went into hiding after receiving death threats. Islamic organisations demanded an apology from the Danish government and the incident turned into a world-wide diplomatic issue. The OIC (the Organisation of the Islamic Conference), the Council of Europe and the UN all criticised the government of Denmark for not taking measures against the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen defended the freedom of the press and free speech and stated that any measures, if appropriate, could not be taken by the government but only by a court of law. Meanwhile in Islamic countries Danish flags are burned and Danish products are taken off the shelves. Several countries have withdrawn their ambassadors from Denmark and armed men attacked the office of the EU in the Gaza strip.

Long time, no see.

2006-01-24T22:36:00.000Z

Haven't written anything in a while, as I have been down-right lazy. Of course, real life gets in the way from time to time as well. It is about time for an update.

Let's begin with Sweden, who seems to be sinking deeper and deeper.

Deportations rise under "asylum amnesty" (the Local)
Published: 23rd January 2006 21:49 CET

Fewer than half of the asylum seekers whose cases are being dealt with under provisional immigration regulations will be allowed to stay, according to the latest forecast from the Swedish Board of Migration.

"If this is true, there's going to be trouble," said Ulla Hoffman of the Left Party.

Sweden's parliament voted in November 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.

Sunday was the halfway point for the provisional law and so far 5,794 cases - a quarter of the total - have been dealt with. In 83% of those the asylum seeker was requesting residency.

But the number of Migration Board approvals has steadily fallen since the law was introduced, and is expected to fall further. The Migration Board is first dealing with the applicants who best meet the residence permit criteria, so as time goes on, fewer are likely to be accepted.Up to 15,000 people are now facing deportation - for a second time. The Board predicts that 46% of the estimated total of 28,000 whose cases are being heard will be expelled.

But that contrasts with the political promise that "the majority will be able to stay", which the Social Democrats, Greens and Left Party agreed upon when the law was rushed through in the autumn.

"No, this is not at all what we agreed, said Ulla Hoffman to TT. The forecasts were not mentioned at last week's meeting with the government, said Hoffman, who promised trouble if they turned out to be accurate.

The Green Party's Gustav Fridolin was also involved in pushing the law forward, but he was a little more sanguine about the forecast.

"As the law was constructed, several different groups get a hearing. The Green Party's responsibility is to see that the families with children are able to stay," he said.That covers around 8,000 of the 24,000 people who have applied to stay in Sweden under the provisional law. 11,000 applicants are men or women who came to Sweden alone. Among the 5,632 people who have come forward after being in hiding, around 2,500 are single.

TT/The Local

As usual, it is the left and the greens, that come up with such absurd policies such as "the majority will be allowed to stay". On what basis should they be allowed to stay? If they don't fill the criteria, they will be allowed to stay because there is a quota of at least 51% that must be filled. So how do you go about deciding who gets to stay and who doesn't, when the candidates don't fill the requirements for asylum? This is the kind of leftist humanism, that is supposedly so enlightened when in reality it is the opposite: short-sighted, absurd and populist. Sweden is likely to reach the same status as Holland, with such large minorities, that the incentive to integrate into the 'mainstream' society is further diminished. Of course, the preservation of a society that would in anyway represent anything Swedish never was on the agenda.

Trying to monitor terrorist activities is racist:

Security police to hunt terrorists in Swedish schools
Published: 24th January 2006 14:09 CET

Sweden's security police, Säpo, is to broaden its fight against terrorism throughout Swedish society. With the help of informers in schools, the social services and associations, Säpo believes it will be able to track Muslim extremists who could be recruited to terrorism.

"We must have more contacts in these environments," said the chief of the security police, Klas Bergenstrand, in an interview with the newspaper Sydsvenskan.

Säpo is reacting to the experiences of terror attacks in Madrid two years ago and in London last summer. These attacks were staged by second-generation immigrants who lived apparently normal lives in Spain and the United Kingdom. The men behind the London bombings came from regular families in Leeds and Luton.

"Our goal is to find the people (in Sweden) who the English didn't find in Leeds," said Bergstrand.

"It's not the known and established networks which present the greatest risk when it comes to terror attacks. It's the other people who we haven't seen yet.

"But leaders of both of the schooling unions reacted strongly to the Säpo chief's plans as described in Sydsvenskan."I am very, very sceptical to the idea that we teachers, or others in the public sector, should act as informers," said Metta Fjelkner, chairman of the National Union of Teachers in Sweden.

"Säpo has its job to do, we teachers will teach and create a safe environment in the classroom.

"She expressed surprise that a political statement from the Liberal Party's Jan Björklund in the autumn now appears to have become reality without her union having been informed.

Eva-Lis Preisz, chairman of the Swedish Teachers' Union, was of the same opinion.

"Teachers have a big job, but it doesn't include being a police officer," she said.The director general of Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare, Kjell Asplund, also criticised the idea.

"My immediate reaction is to strongly reject it. This is not the role of the Social Services," he said."I don't really know how breaching confidentiality in this way would go down. There would have to be an unbelievably strong argument for this to be accepted by the National Board of Health and Welfare.

The Green Party and the Left Party also protested against Säpo's new approach. The Greens compared it to "a witch hunt" and the Left Party accused Säpo of encouraging a crime.

"The risk is that Säpo's measures create terrorism," wrote Leif Björnlod of the Greens in a press release.

"Säpo's plans are just as stupid, undemocratic and racist as the Liberals' earlier proposal," said the Left Party's Lennart Gustavsson.

So, tracking down and monitoring terrorist activities might encourage terrorism. It is also racism and comparable to the witch hunts. I would not be surprised if there was a major terrorist attack in Sweden within the next 5 years. I would also not have any problems deciding where I would point my blaming finger.

In other news, the Presidential elections in Finland are soon to reach their climax. The two opponents facing each other in the second round are Tarja Halonen and Sauli Niinistö. Here are some points Niinistö makes in an interview published in Helsingin Sanomat:

Facing each other now are the two sides of the old red-blue coalition, and two workers' presidents. Strange situation, don't you think?
-"Nobody is against anyone - there are only two competing candidates. Red-blue [the government model in which the Social Democrats and the National Coalition Party formed the base of the government coalition] is no overriding concept, any more than ‘red soil' [the coalition model - such as the present one - in which the main parties are the Social Democrats and the Centre Party]. They are technically descriptive words for a government coalition. I care about the whole nation, about all Finns and their well-being, and for that reason, I speak about work and workers. But class issues are a separate matter."

How would you reform the welfare society?
-"By making sure that the notion that well-being comes from a cashier's office would not spread more, because first something needs to be put in the cash box. I would like to bring this basic idea onto a healthy, common-sense Finnish foundation. If something is to be distributed, you first need to have something to collect."

How would you solve the problem of the ageing population?
-"Tarja Halonen said in her New Year's speech that we are not living at the expense of the future. She does not know the present situation. We are already living a the expense of the future. The state and the local authorities are running a deficit. It is being patched by selling assets. They used to call it drinking away the old house."

What kind of immigration policy do you support?
-"If people come here to work, then people should come here to work. If people come here they should completely accept the Finnish legal and social order. As people are accepted here, and perhaps even encouraged to come here, the responsibility of the recipient must be recognised. In refugee policy, I support some kind of an EU-level standard on what the prerequisites of being a refugee are. When this does not exist, I would recommend staying more or less in the middle of the soft-hard scale."

So, Niinistö is perhaps a little soft on immigration for my liking, but I think his values and his open-mindedness (compared to Halonen & co.) to new approaches and solutions is refreshing. Let us hope the Finnish people cast their votes wisely.

In the first round of the elections I was pretty sure (the power of faith!), that Niinistö and Halonen were going to continue in the second round, so I cast my vote for Timo Soini. A vote for Timo Soini was really a vote for the True Finns, as he had no chance of success, but he had plenty of air time to explain himself and the party. This also showed in the elections, as he ranked 5th, right behind Hautala, the candidate of the Greens, who are a much bigger parliamentary group than the True Finns are.

That's it for today, I will try to update more frequently in the future.

Nationalist Parties in Europe Join Forces

2005-11-20T13:22:00.000Z

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.

Looking for solutions, shifting the blame

2005-11-17T09:35:00.000Z

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.

'White Flight' From Holland

2005-11-14T18:26:00.000Z

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.

The Safe Suburbs of Sweden?

2005-11-14T15:12:00.000Z

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 Media Boss admits to biased reporting

2005-11-13T19:29:00.000Z

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.

Today, a focus on Sweden

2005-11-09T16:59:00.000Z

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.

The beginning of the end

2005-11-07T18:46:00.000Z

Senseless, brutal attacks. Fire and fear. Finally, after years of supporting the ideals of multiculturalism and wellfare-for-all the french state faces the enmy within itself.

Perhaps what Nicholas Sarkozy said can sum all that we think:

"The scum has to be wiped off the streets like dirt is wiped from the cobblestones with a high pressure cleaner."

Charles Martel, where are you?

2005-11-07T15:07:00.000Z

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.

Priests Protest Gay Blessings in Sweden

2005-11-06T12:55:00.000Z

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.

Suicide bombings planned in Holland

2005-11-05T11:50:00.000Z

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.

Swedish Crime Increasing Rapidly

2005-10-31T20:49:00.000Z

Police to prioritise 'everyday crime'

'Everyday' crime - non-violent crime such as house burglary and car theft - is falling in Sweden, but so is the police's ability to catch the perpetrators.Car theft has fallen 25% since 2000, while thefts of items from cars has fallen by 15% in the same period. Burglary has also fallen steadily since 1997.

This sort of non-violent crime has long been the bane of the Swedish police, with arrests made in just a few percent of cases.The National Police Board recently instructed local police authorities to toughen their stance and prioritise everyday crimes. By 2007, the Board says, the number of criminals charged in the category should be double the level of 2004.But after the first six months, things are not going to plan, with little evidence of positive trends, said Anders Tegsten at the National Police Board.

A key reason, he believes, is the increase in violent crime over the last twelve months which has taken up resources. In total, the reports of physical attacks increased 21% between 2000 and 2004. The figures for reports of rape have climbed just as dramatically. "In some months the priorities and resources have shifted and everyday crime does not have the same attention," said Tegsten.The clear-up rate for everyday crime is declined over the last ten years. Factors such as prosecutors' willingness to press charges for fewer crimes per criminal, despite the fact that they may be suspected of more, appear to be contributing to the fall.

However, from the beginning of the year a new law comes into force which is expected to dramatically improve the police's chances of solving more cases using DNA samples. Anyone held on reasonable suspicion of a crime will be required to provide a sample of their DNA, a move which Olof Egerstedt, head of the National Criminal Technical Laboratory, has called "a milestone in Swedish crime-fighting history".

"There are great opportunities, but there is a lot which needs to work in the police organisation for the law to have any significance," said Anders Tegsten.

I wonder why no explanations for the rising crime rate have been provided, not even the usual bullcrap that I'm accustomed to. I remember reading some time ago, that the dramatic increase of rapes in Malmö (if I remember correctly) was said to be because of increased willingness of women to report the crimes. None of that here. Anyway, whatever the cause, we can see Swedish society becoming a more violent and a more brutal place to live in. Perhaps it is because of all the racists in Sweden (Swedish racists, of course, who else)?

Anti-racism organisation faces funding cut

Despite the fact that no financial irregularities have been found at the Centre Against Racism, Sweden's Board of Integration wants the funding it receives from the state to be reconsidered.

The Centre, which is an umbrella organisation for the government's work against racism, hit the headlines in the summer after an investigation by daily paper Svenska Dagbladet. The organisation was accused of being wasteful with public money and of doing nothing since it was formed in the autumn of 2003. Indeed, the only high profile achievement of the Centre was its controversial criticism in April of the promotion of an ice cream which it deemed to be racist. It slammed GB Glace for associating its new 'Nogger Black' ice cream with black youth culture, including using graffiti-style writing in the ad.

Many representatives of the Centre Against Racism rejected Svenska Dagbladet's criticism but Minister for Integration Jens Orback demanded an inquiry into the organisation's affairs.

This has now been produced by an independent auditing firm which said that the accounting and financial routines "have generally worked satisfactorily". Nor did the firm see anything wrong with the Centre Against Racism's expenditure of 330,000 kronor on furniture and interior design at its 180 square metres of office space in central Stockholm, saying that it was "not in an especially luxurious style".

But at the same time, the auditor noted that board-level conflicts had negatively affected the Centre Against Racism's work. There was also criticism of some "technical errors in the book-keeping" and a lack of knowledge of its members.

In response, the Board of Integration has said that the state funding which the organisation receives is too large in relation to the work it is expected to do.The government has set aside a total of 5.5 million kronor for the Centre Against Racism for 2005. A more conclusive report on the organisation will be submitted in the spring of 2006.

Unrest in Paris continues

2005-10-31T12:45:00.000Z

France and in particular her capital city, Paris, is one of the worst hit areas of Europe by failed, flawed and irresponsible immigration policies, that are driven by an unrealistic and utopian ideology. Unrest in the immigrant-dominated suburbs continues:

"More violence rocks Paris suburb

Many cars have been gutted by fire during the riotsViolence has flared for a fourth night in a north-east Paris suburb, but not on the same scale as before.
Six policemen were injured and 11 people arrested in the latest confrontations between angry youths and police in Clichy-sous-Bois.

Police said one or more teargas canisters were hurled into a mosque from an unidentified source.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy is to meet the parents of two teenagers whose deaths sparked the riots.
Saturday saw hundreds of mourners pay homage to the teenagers by holding a peaceful procession in Clichy-sous-Bois, which has a large immigrant population.

The authorities denied rumours that policemen were chasing the two boys who were electrocuted on Thursday after entering an electricity sub-station.

Flowers now lie near the spot where Ziad, aged 17, and Banou, 15, died.
An official investigation into the boys' deaths is under way.
A third young man is seriously ill in hospital.

The BBC's Alasdair Sandford in Paris says many in the suburb do not believe the authorities' account that the two boys were not being chased by police.
Mr Sarkozy has promised to send special police units into difficult suburbs around France to stamp out violence.

But local people in Clichy accuse him of heightening the tensions with inflammatory language.
During Saturday's march in memory of the dead teenagers, there were calls for the government to tackle discrimination against immigrant communities such as theirs. "

My local newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, decided to jump to the conclusion that the boys infact had been chased by the police, before any investigation had been conducted. The argument of the mob must have been convincing.

They also, however, report that the clashes have obtained 'a religious touch' as there were reportedly tear gas cans thrown into a local mosque. The locals blame the police, and while the police does not outright deny these claims, they do no believe that the police were responsible. Reportedly, the opposition and various human rights organisations have criticized the French government, and claimed that the hardened measures against crime are to blame for these measures.

I find it all rather ridiculous; first of all, assuming that the two youngsters were chased by the police, I fail to see the implications of this. They were running from the police, which to me would indicate that there was a motive for this action. I suspect this motive was the fear of being caught. Now why do people usually not want to be caught by the police? When they have done something or when they are innocent? The function of the police force is to prevent crime and to catch criminals. If these youngsters were criminals, the police force would simply have been doing their job in chasing them. I understand and realize that it was very unfortunate that these teenaged boys were killed, but the police force is hardly to blame, unless the rioters want the police to stop doing their job. Is that what they want? The answer to that question might be tricky.

The article in Helsingin Sanomat states, that critics of the hardened policy on crime in the suburbs are saying that it has not solved any of the problems of the suburbs, that people in the suburbs face unemployment, poverty and have no hope for the future. The problem is that France has taken in so many migrants, that it is just simply beyond the point of the state being able to provide high living standards for everyone. Again the response of the media and the 'progressive' institutions has sent the message, that the rioters (=3rd world immigrants, probably mostly Muslim) cannot be held accountable for their acts, and that it is the native population (in this case the French) that are responsible. When nothing is expected of the immigrants and nothing they do is their fault, they will do nothing and everything, because they are not held accountable. France has allowed herself to slide into this position. Some think France is on the verge of civil upheaval. By looking at what is going on in Clichy-sous-Bois, one can only wonder what tomorrow will bring.

You think the Nordic is safe from Terrorism?

2005-10-29T11:52:00.000+01:00

Think again. Below are some recent news from a changing Nordic.

In Sweden:

The Local:

Published: 28th October 2005 18:26 CET
Swede "planned suicide attack"
Police in Sarajevo have said that the Swede held in the city on terror charges was to be a suicide bomber. On Thursday Danish police arrested four men who they suspect were to have helped him."In the apartment where he lived, a videotape was found on which the Swede and the other guy prayed to Allah for forgiveness, because they were going to blow themselves up," said journalist Mirsad Fasic at the Sarajevo paper, Slobodan Bosna.In its latest edition the paper, which says it has sources within the police, wrote that the Swede and the Turkish man who is also being held had lived in Sarajevo for a month and had moved between three apartments.As well as the video, police are said to have discovered 30 kilos of explosives, a belt for carrying out a suicide attack and weapons in a raid.The target for the attack is unknown.The Bosnian who rented out the last apartment to the men was also arrested a week ago but has now been released and is no longer suspected of involvement.The 18 year old Swede comes from a town in the west of Sweden, where he has been registered since the summer. He is thought to have been born in Serbia and moved to Sweden with his parents at the beginning of the 1990s.Slobodan Bosna reported that it was Sweden's security police, Säpo, which tipped off their Bosnian counterparts. So far Säpo has only confirmed that an 18 year old Swede is in jail in Bosnia."Other than that we have no comment," said information officer Jacob Larsson, who refused to say if there has been an investigation in Sweden into the 18 year old or if he has had contact with the suspected terrorists, all aged between 16 and 20, in Denmark. One of those is a Danish citizen and three come from unspecified countries in the Middle East."It is my firm belief that there is strong evidence that they were in the process of planning an act of terrorism," said police chief Jörn Bro in Glostrum, Denmark, to the news agency Ritzau.According to the police, the terror attack was to take place "somewhere in Europe and in the near future". Part of the material seized indicated that it was to be a suicide attack.The tip-off to Danish police came from Bosnia and Jörn Bro said there is a close link between the jailed Swede and the four in Denmark.After having initially declined to meet representatives of the Swedish embassy in Sarajevo, the 18 year old met Consular officials on Wednesday. However, the allegations against him were not discussed.

I think we all know exactly how Swedish this 'Swede' is. The Local, like many other media outlets, are careful about telling us more about the identity of the terrorist. People might assume that these occur more frequently within some ethnic and cultural groups than others.

In Denmark:

Suspected Suicide Terrorists arrested:

Four quiet, well-behaved teenagers were arrested in Copenhagen on Thursday, on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack. The boys, who are aged between 16 and 20, are all of Mid-Eastern descent and deeply devout Muslims. The police say that the action was planned for 'a European target within the near future', and some of the items found indicated that it was likely a suicide bombing that was in the works. Swedish newspaper Expressen reported on Friday that possible targets were the US or the British embassy in Sarajevo. The four arrested are described as inconspicuous and well-behaved young men. 'They are deeply religious and very responsible,' said Bro. All four are born and bred in Denmark, although only one has Danish citizenship. The police said none of them came from deeply religious families. Their friends and relatives had become bemused in recent weeks as the boys had begun to meet at various mosques to pray, adopting a radical tone that was worrying to some of their relatives.

Times are a-changing. These are some of the things we have to 'deal with' as Mona Sahlin once so well put it. Also innocent Finland was recently shocked by the existance of Terrorist-linked groups in the city of Turku. Norway is the home of Mullah Krekar, once (and still?) the leader of Ansar al-Islam. It makes me feel so much better to know that even Finland has finally become a truly multicultural dream land with its very own terrorist cells and everything.

The Working Man's president!

2005-10-29T11:33:00.000+01:00

The presidential candidates are starting their campaigning in earnest. Sauli Niinistö of the National Coalition made a bold move in his campaign recently by marketing himself as "Työväen Presidentti", a president of the working class.

This has angered and amused the left, and everybody else. Why? Sauli Niinistö is seemingly trying end the agitation between the supposed classes in Finland, he feels that we are all part of the Finnish working class, employers, employees, students, everybody. The left is angry, I think, because Niinistö isn't playing according to the rules. He should play the bourgeoise business man and let the left keep their monopoly on the working class, they must be thinking. The left wants to agitate the so called working class against the 'wealthy' segment of society, that is after all how they make their living. Perhaps the left are scared, that people will work towards a common Finnish future?

I find Niinistö's move to be refreshing, a welcome breath of fresh air into the presidential race, which seems or seemed to be over before it even started. Way to go Sauli.

Personally I am still unsure who to vote for. It seems so useless because Tarja Halonen has such a lead. I am split between Soini of the True Finns, whose views are closest to my heart, and Niinistö, who at least has a chance at the presidency. The voting is still many months away, ample time to reflect on the matter.

Finland and the Nordic: Just one big, happy family?

2005-10-26T16:04:00.000+01:00

I recently saw a program on the BBC with Mark Mardell, who was in Finland. It was interesting to see how outsiders viewed Finland as "one big, happy family" and "too good to be true".

Here are some excerpts from the BBC website:

-"TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?
It is one of the last bright, sunny, crisp autumn days in Finland before the snows arrive.
The children at the school we are filming at are almost too good to be true, blonde hair in neat plaits, full of energy but not too boisterous, amazingly well-behaved. Sometimes it seems the whole of Finland is like that - just too goody-goody to be believable. "

-"RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
In fact, I expect to see Messrs Brown and Blair pop up heavily disguised in blond wigs and snow shoes.
The mantra of these politicians is spoken quite naturally by every citizen here. They will tell you how it is important for the state to "invest" in children and how the high skills, hi-tech road is the only one to follow, and unfortunately that means high taxes.
I've lost count of the number of pamphlets I've read by New Labour politicians trying to recapture some lost spirit of Owenite socialism when people cared for each other and realised they had "rights as well as responsibilities".
Such stuff is again on the lips of ordinary Finns who do claim to see each other as part of a big family who have a duty to look after each other and give something back. "

-"Just how different Finland is comes to me after interviewing the prime minister in his rather lovely offices in a main square overlooked by a beautiful, white domed Lutheran cathedral.
I have a few "pieces to camera" to do, so put my bag containing files, personal organiser, keys and camera down by the steps into the PM's office. Foolishly I leave it there.
When I rush back in a panic three-quarters of an hour later, it's still there. Not only un-nicked but there's no cordon thrown around it, no police about to blow it up.
Last time I left my bag in Downing Street it not surprisingly caused a panic even though it had been through the full security system. Now that's what I call a different social model. "

Of course we in Finland have our differences and our problems, but it is quite striking to see the way in which we are seen from the outside, I did not expect a Brit to be so surprised.

However, after the general good feeling of having my nationalist ego stroked passed, I sank into some deeper thoughts that were aroused by the article. Basically my thoughts revolved around what makes us different, why we are different and so on. The kind of mentality described by Mardell is something which is, or at least until recently was, common in all of the Nordic countries. Has this changed, I thought, as some of us, such as Sweden, have become increasingly multicultural with a fading value consensus and increasing racial and religious tension and immigrant-related problems in general?

In todays edition of Helsingin Sanomat I found an article concerning the fact, that the immigrant gangs of Stocholm have stolen hundreds of millions of Swedish kronors this year alone. Also, not so long ago, following a riot between immigrant youth (mostly Syrian) and Swedish police in Södertälje, a police station was peppered with automatic rifle fire. This does not sound anything like the utopia described by Mardell, but it looks and sounds like an American tv-series. This just doesn't happen here in the Nordic countries, or so I thought. So what has changed in Sweden or what makes Finland different from Sweden? For starters, Finland has an immigrant population of about 2%, while in Sweden that number is five-fold. Yet, integration problems are also quite evident in Finland, and we can see what is going on in Sweden.

Finns have invested in their children, because they are the future. However, lately, there is the trend of investing in immigrants and refugees and counting on them to take us forward. I just don't see the same kind of dividends paying off from this investment. The Nordic society I grew up in, where there was a great sense of rights, but also responsibilities, is quickly eroding. I can only hope Finland would see Sweden as an example and learn from her mistakes. I can only hope that we will continue to invest in our children instead of investing in the children of others and that we will remain what we strived for so long to become. Sweden has sent us a clear message: multicultural society is not a happy one, or a united one. Integration and assimilation to a great extent is necessary, but Sweden is now faced with the dilemma of integrating hundreds of thousands of culturally (as well as ethnically) distant people, hostile to Swedish culture and society. Although I am not a big fan or any organized religion, I wish the victims of a failed utopian experiment to rest in peace.

Bookshelf of Doom - Part I

2005-10-24T23:50:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Bookshelf of Doom, your program for wicked and I-can't-believe-they-print-that books and their (short) reviews by myself.

Yes. Kabbalistic Nanotechnology. It's like "Sensorial Highway Patrol" or "Post Modernist Coffee Bunker", which actually means that yet again the pseudo-intellectual terrorist strike fear into the hearts of sane people worldwide. To quote from Amazon:

Two emerging technologies promise to transform the world in ways that will make the breakthroughs of the 20th century seem pedestrian. One has existed for less than 50 years and is called nanotechnology. The other has existed for 4,000 years and is called Kabbalah. On the surface, they seem to be divergent, even contradictory technologies. But in fact, they are complementary in the most profound ways possible. One promises to deliver a practical technology and a transformed world in the distant future. The other promises practical tools and remarkable changes now. In this book, Kabbalist Rav Berg isolates the common points of science and spirit to reveal the elusive path toward achieving humanity's noblest and most challenging aspiration - the manipulation of the physical world. The potential uses are staggering: pollution reversal, elimination of disease and genetic defects, eradication of poverty, microscopic computers faster than today's best supercomputers, and the indefinite extension of the human lifespan.

Er... yes. And isn't that Mr. Rav Berg a member (to keep it simple) of the Kaballah Centre, known for it's famous members (Demi Moore, Madonna...) or should I say "born-again jewish"?
It's amazing how Mr.Berg "isolates the common points of science and spirit to reveal the elusive path ... etc, etc, etc..." and you are now under the control of the space aliens. Do they actually think that people believe in this... oh wait, some people do.
The issue remains, apart any interpretation, that dumb (abnd sometimes just innocent or uninformed) people worldwide still are a great untapped market, waiting to be plundered, ahem, I mean "illuminated". Be it with a "outside" perspective (what is foreign usually attracts more attention or is "trendier" than the common and usual (read "your own culture").

Oh just wait until my own "Neopaganist Webdesigner's Guide" hits the shelves...

Geert Mak in Suomen Kuvalehti

2005-10-24T18:23:00.000+01:00

In the latest issue (21.10.2005) of Suomen Kuvalehti, which I happen to prescribe to, there was a thought-provoking article by Tommi Laitio about Dutch author Geert Mak, “one of the top names of the Dutch leftist intelligentsia” as SK describes him. Reading this article provoked all kinds of thoughts in me.

On the other hand, Mak condemns the killing of political figures and movie directors, the attacks against homosexuals and other issues related with Muslim immigration and integration in Holland, but as expected, the blame is laid squarely on the Dutch government and the Dutch nation. Holland has finally, after a long sleep of ignorance and denial, began to question whether a liberal multicultural society really is the ideal and the utopia it has been made out to be. As the article quite clearly states, votes for anti-immigration parties and politicians has been rising steadily in correlation with the number of immigrants residing in the country. This has also been going on in neighbouring Belgium, in Britain, France and all Western European countries I can think of that are faced with the same problem. Holland, however, the very epitome of a multicultural welfare state, has seen some of the worst problems. The murder of anti-immigration and particularly anti-Islam politician Pim Fortuyn, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the attacks on gays and lesbians, the fact that all politicians critical of the lenient immigration policies and of Islam (such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders) need body guards and live in secret hideouts, are issues that are all part of present day Holland and much of Western Europe in general. Of course, these are the issues that have been reported far and wide outside of Holland. However, in Holland, “newspapers report on an almost weekly basis of clashes.”

Mak, despite these incidents, wants to work towards compromise (something which he sees as a very typical Dutch trait) and reconciliation. He is against the sort of statements made by Ali Hirsi, questioning the compatibility of Islam and Western society. The integration problems are, according to Mak, because of savings in education of immigrants and immigrant housing. Also work with youths has been receiving less than adequate funding. Now, I wonder, do immigrants in Holland attend different schools than Dutch kids? Do they provide their own housing, and does their housing by the state differ from that of other poor Dutch people? Is the funding pulled specifically from immigrant districts and not from other districts as well? I would assume, resting on my humble knowledge of things, that the answer to most questions is more or less “no”. If the answer was "yes", I would be worried. Immigrants have exactly the same chances and opportunities as others do, and there most probably are support groups and other organizations intended specifically to help immigrants succeed and perhaps even integrate. I guess that is the problem, the immigrants are not privileged enough in Mak’s opinion. In my opinion, the blame cannot and should not be laid on the Dutch people (perhaps on the Dutch government for starting the mess) as there are a few phenomena which I can think of, that at least partially explain the situation and how it became what it is. Regarding school: When 2/3 of school-aged children in Amsterdam (according to the article) have an immigrant-background, what exactly are they meant to integrate into? Which society? I would guess that the majority of those children are Muslims, and they never need to leave their mostly Muslim surroundings, even when in Holland. Where is the need or indeed the incentive to integrate for them, when the society they are meant to integrate into is becoming the minority and already is so among their peers? As for immigrant housing and immigrant districts, I can see a couple of problems here: firstly, the phenomena of ghettofication is quite widespread in Western Europe. Immigrants of similar cultural backgrounds concentrate in one area, and so that area becomes an immigrant district. These districts and communities then develop in the way that they open shops selling items they are used to, they open Islamic schools and mosques, further isolating themselves from mainstream society. There is no integration there, it is splintering Western European societies into “us” and “them”. Unemployment in these districts is typically high, as is crime and much other deviance. Then the issue is blamed on lack of funding. OECD recently blamed Swedish policy for creating these ghettoes and that they are the cause of high immigrant unemployment in Sweden. What do you, in all honesty, imagine would happen if Swedish municipalities did not allow immigrants to move from one location to another, but forced them to stay in the housing they had been provided with? Dutch districts have ‘surprisingly’ survived better without all these ill effects. As is typical of people such as Mak, he points out the problem (which him and his likes are responsible of creating) but offers no solutions.

Geert Mak, who was active in a leftist student organisation in the 1960’s and 70’s, does have the sense to admit, that “the greatest mistakes of those times was the underestimation of national identity and leadership.” What has changed, I wonder? Mak also thinks that politicians are making the situation worse by talking about it, which quite a typical view of multiculturalists, as far as I have gathered. As a matter of fact, Geert Mak seems to have some real issues with freedom of speech and freedom of opinion, which becomes evident in the article: “The problems become worse, when freedom of speech is being interpreted as the right to say what you want. You can’t say what you want.” I think that’s funny, because I was under the impression that within certain limits, you could do exactly that; say what you wanted. If these forbidden things are being said by public figures, how come the law has not come crashing down on them in our politically correct societies? Perhaps they are within their legal rights (for the time being) in expressing their doubts and criticism? If they are within their rights, does Geert Mak think that freedom of speech should be limited further?

Geert Mak also makes the usual, nonetheless arrogant, statement, that basically things have come to this point, there is no going back and that its time to deal with it. How it angers me, that the same people who are ruining/have ruined the safe, peaceful and European welfare state are now telling us to deal with it. Mona Sahlin, former Swedish minister of integration is known to have said "Like it or not, this is the new Sweden", the same person that also stated Swedes (at least those critical of multicultural society) are envious of immigrants, as they have a culture and a history, unlike the Swedes. How do these people get into national governments? “We grieved the permanent ending of the homely and secure Holland and of our era based on optimism,” Geert Mak writes in his new book. Just to top things off, Geert Mak makes the statement that in reality the Dutch have not been tolerant, they have been indifferent. “In real tolerance there are also limits. Some of the greatest victims of our indifference have been Arab women,” Mak goes on. The Dutch carry a heavy burden, when they seem to be the root cause for the misery in the world. It has been exactly the likes of Geert Mak, that have so fiercely resisted any attempt to implement any means to actually integrate hundreds of thousands of culturally and ethnically completely foreign people into Dutch society. Sounds like a task doomed to fail, but they made it so much worse.