Bloodthirsty Liberal

And I thought the European elections meant a return to socialism.

Silly BTL:

Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn warned rivals and reformers Sunday that “the time for fear has come” after exit polls showed them securing their entry in parliament for the first time in nearly 40 years.

“The time for fear has come for those who betrayed this homeland,” Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos told a news conference at an Athens hotel, flanked by menacing shaven-headed young men.

“We are coming,” the 55-year-old said as supporters threw firecrackers outside.

According to updated exit polls, the once-marginal party will end up winning over six percent of the vote and sending 19 deputies to the 300-seat parliament on a wave of immigration and crime fears, as well as anti-austerity anger.

Exulting in the apparent breakthrough, Michaloliakos quoted Julius Caesar: “Veni, Vidi, Vici” — I came, I saw, I conquered.

Michaloliakos said his party would fight against “world usurers” and the “slavery” of an EU-IMF loan agreement which he likened to a “dictatorship”.

“Greece is only the beginning,” he shouted at reporters….

Oh Europe, again? Today Santorini, tomorrow Mykonos and Lesbos! Maybe you should turn into Eurabia after all. You might behave yourself under a Caliphate.

Who do you think the Golden Shower party means by “world usurers”, by the way? One has one’s suspicions, doesn’t one?

It’s not farfetched or outrageous to say that Obama would like to model the USA after European socialist states: ObamaCare, limitless welfare (which increases in good times as well as bad), ignoring the day of fiscal reckoning, confiscatory taxation, etc. (Heck, remember the conversation we reported the other day where an administration official attending the Nobel ceremony noted that in any other country but the US, Obama would get 70% of the vote?)

Let’s look at what else comes with that:

One of the curious things about modern politics is that the Jewish Question is never far from the surface. That this is true in places without Jews like Indonesia and Saudi Arabia is not surprising. But consider the state of British politics.

The upcoming election for the mayor of London pits the affable Tory incumbent, Boris Johnson, against a former mayor, Labor firebrand Ken Livingstone. An outspoken socialist who spent decades as a party activist, council member, member of parliament and then mayor from 2000 to 2008, Livingstone is famous for championing of public transport over private automobiles, as well as for securing cheap oil for London buses from Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

All mayors of major cities have foreign policies but Livingstone’s animosity towards Israel and the Bush administration is unusually pronounced. In 2003 he called Bush “’the greatest threat to life on this planet” and in 2005 he effectively blamed the London bombings on the US war in Afghanistan and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Livingstone’s calling a Jewish reporter “a concentration camp guard” and recent remarks that Jews are too rich to vote for him in the upcoming election have raised a few eyebrows but have not put him out of the race (although recent questions about tax-dodging and having secretly paid a mother of an unacknowledged child from public funds might yet.)

These slaps at Jews have been matched by his public embrace of radical cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi and mayoral patronage of the equally radical Islamic Forum of Europe, which received a million pounds to build a new headquarters.

And he’s the nice guy!

The pandering at the heart of George Galloway’s stunning return to parliament was even more blatant. A campaign leaflet made his pitch bluntly: “God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not… Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for. I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if the other candidate (Labor candidate Imran Hussain) in this election can say that truthfully. I, George Galloway, have fought for the Muslims at home and abroad, all my life, and paid a price for it. I, George Galloway, hold Pakistan’s highest civil awards.”

Livingstone’s campaign and Galloway’s reelection demonstrates several things about the state of politics and society in modern Britain. First, it is possible to be elected to parliament solely on the basis of religious appeals in Muslim majority districts. But these appeals also have a very real material side, namely the patronage that will flow into community, read religious, organizations.

Second, there are essentially no limits to inflammatory rhetoric, especially when directed at the United States, Israel or Jews. The British establishment and electorate have long tolerated or downplayed Galloway’s rhetorical and practical support for dictators ranging from Saddam to Qaddafi to Assad, his incitement against Israel and Jews, along with his breaking of international sanctions on Iraq, from which he took money as part of the UN “oil for food” scandal, and his theatrical convoy supplying money to Hamas.

That’s right, the wholly discredited and roundly despised George Galloway won another seat in Parliament.

And he’s got company:

Livingstone and Galloway are distinctively boorish but their eagerness to lash out against Jews and Israel is shared with other leftist politicians and parties around the world. Israeli injustices take their breath away, and local Jewish communities and individual Jews irritate them endlessly.

Galloway’s parliamentary colleague Jeremy Corbyn, a member of both the Labor party and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, is obsessed with Israel, as is Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge, who famously opined that Israeli doctors should disprove allegations of having stolen organs from Haitian earthquake victims.

…

Sigmar Gabriel, chairman of the German Social Democratic Party and a likely candidate for chancellor, recently denounced Israel’s “apartheid regime.”

And those are just the elected officials! There are also the cultural figures, led most notably by Günter Grass.

And this fellow, we mentioned the other day:

The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, who made anti-Semitic remarks suggesting a connection between Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik and Israel’s Mossad, drew criticism not only in Israel, but also on the pages of Scandinavian newspapers.

Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet published in October an article by journalist John Faerseth, who attended one of Galtung’s lectures at the University of Oslo, where he outlined his doctrine in front of a cheering crowd.

Throughout the article, Fearseth slams Galtung, who is dubbed “the father of peace studies”, saying the “findings” on which he bases his theories against Jews are “dubious” at best.

Norwegian magazine Humanist published a correspondence between Galtung and Fearseth, in which Galtung claimed, as he did several times in the past, that the Jews control world media.

Fearseth wrote a response article together with a Dagbladet reporter, in which they called Galtung a provocateur who uses his authority to “incite classic anti-Semitic propaganda.”

Meanwhile, the editors of Humanist published a special column in which they expressed their reservations over Galtung’s article, explaining why the magazine chose to give him a platform to spew his hate.

Well, that last part sounds reasonable enough. I’d like to read more spewed hate. When can I look forward to the gay-bashing article, the editorial call for ethnic cleansing, the provocative piece on the superiority of some people over others based solely on skin color? We’ll condemn them unanimously, of course, but if Galloway gets a platform, I want a whole dais, complete with styrofoam columns.

Anyway, good for those Norwegians who condemned this.

Now, will they condemn this too?

The Anti-Defamation League has slammed Noway’s prime minister over failing to condemn anti-Israel slogans at the country’s May Day event.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, head of the governing Labour Party, was silent in the face of official anti-Semitic and anti-Israel banners.

Marchers at the event’s parade held banners proclaiming 11 official slogans, including “Israel = Apartheid” and “Boycott Israel!”

Stoltenberg did not comment about the slogans, though he was the featured speaker at the May Day celebration of the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) in Bergen.

“It is extremely troubling that given the nature of these anti-Israel slogans, their official status at the parade, and the fact that they were written about by newspapers days before the event, Prime Minister Stoltenberg still participated and did not speak out against these vile, offensive statements,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.

Politicians, academics (albeit it “peace studies”), labor—even the press. All dominated by the Left, and all riddled with Jew-hatred. If anyone would care to dispute or disclaim, I’m all ears.

Speaking of all ears, is this coming soon to a president near you?

Wrong choice, eh?

THE HAGUE – Dutch Nazis who died in World War II will be commemorated this year alongside their victims, at the national memorial ceremony in Amsterdam.

The homage is to be paid in a poem written by the 15-year-old relative of a Dutch SS soldier who died on Germany’s Eastern Front.

The boy’s poem, “Wrong Choice,” speaks of his great uncle, who “sought to escape poverty and dreamed of a better life,” but “chose the wrong army and wrong ideology.” He “needs to be remembered too,” on May 4, Dutch Memorial Day, the poem states.

The boy who wrote the poem is scheduled to publicly read it on Dutch Memorial Day at the Dam Square during a ceremony attended by the Dutch army’s top brass, war veterans and members of the royal family of the Netherlands.

Representatives of the Dutch Jewish community said they would not attend the ceremony unless the national memorial committee, Nationaal Comite 4 en 5 mei, scraps the poem.

“It is wholly inappropriate to compare the consequences of a wrong choice with the death of partisans, Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime,” said Ronny Naftaniel, director of the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation on Israel. “According to the same logic, Adolf Eichmann could also be commemorated as victim one day.”

- Aggie

I can’t get this scene out of my mind. A friend had just returned from Spain, raving about how they are so superior to the US. They have all sorts of new buildings, a new transportation system, they work fewer hours… That was then.

Spain’s sickly economy faces a “crisis of huge proportions”, a minister said on Friday, as unemployment hit its highest level in almost two decades and Standard and Poor’s downgraded the government’s debt by two notches.

Unemployment shot up to 24 percent in the first quarter, one of the worst jobless figures in the developed world. Retail sales slumped for the twenty-first consecutive month as a recession cuts into consumer spending.

“The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government … Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions,” Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said in a radio interview.

Standard and Poor’s cited risks of an increase in bad loans at Spanish banks and called on Europe to take action to encourage growth.

Huh. That’s probably why I haven’t heard much about Spain lately. However, someone else I know told me that you can buy a beach front, 3 bedroom house, new construction, for something like $30,000. Could that be true? Maybe we need a second office, BTL?

- Aggie

The history of the US’s involvement in the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries is well-documented and common knowledge.

Other countries, not so much [via Jungle Trader]:

The slave trade once made the people of Nantes rich, but the French city covered up its dark history for decades. It recently erected a memorial to the victims in a project believed to be the first of its kind in Europe. But the effort to shed light on the Continent’s role in the 18th century slave trade with Africa and the New World has not been popular with some residents.

In the 18th century, cruelty had poetic names, like Le Prudent (“The Prudent”), La Légère (“The Light”) or Les Trois Maries (“The Three Marys”). The ships, named in the hope of a good voyage or baptized with Christian first names, were part of a brutal business between Europe, Africa and America: the slave trade. During a period of approximately 400 years, at least 13 million people were transported under horrendous conditions from Africa to the colonies of the New World.

The northwestern French city of Nantes played a central role in what has been described as the largest forced migration in global history. Although the city’s merchants came late to the lucrative slave trade, long after the Portuguese, Spanish and British, over the course of the 18th century the city on the Loire River became a central hub of the Atlantic triangular slave trade — and with it the most important port city in France.

Over 40 percent of the French slave trade was carried out via the city, with around 450,000 men, women and children abducted from Africa to America. According to curator Marie-Hélène Jouzeau, who is responsible for the city’s historical heritage, it wasn’t just the major merchant families who specialized in the business. “The entire mercantile community was involved, and the whole region profited from it,” she told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Late last month, and with little fanfare in the international press, Nantes officials opened the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, which the organizers claim is unique in Europe.

…

“A kind of memory work,” is how Nantes Mayor Jean-Marc Ayrault describes the monument, with which Nantes is openly confronting its past. “It’s an invitation to reflect on a dark chapter in the history of our city,” he says.

Nantes had long suppressed the brutal origins of its wealth. A collective silence covered up the fact that the prosperity of the city’s great families, like the Michels, Montaudouins and Sarrebourse d’Audevilles, not to mention the splendor of the city’s architecture, were built on the slave trade.

Awfully grande of you for acknowledging your role, France. Your self-congratulation is merited. Funny, though, that when I toured the Loire with my family last summer, they never mentioned the role of bondage in the obvious wealth of the region. Isn’t that just like the Europeans? Oops!

And next time Reverend Wright and his ilk want to run down the US of KKKA for its original sin of slavery, I hope he brushes up on his French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and a Babel of West African languages so that he can dish out the insults in all the tongues of all the nations that participated in African slavery.

Les poulets de France reviens de nicher. (Or some such.)

Yesterday, we learned that being a senator was beneath Obama (or at least having to listen to Biden in the Senate); today, we learn that even being President isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:

But amid the bad news and pressures of late 2009, the trip unexpectedly passed like a brief, happy fantasy for the president, a Nordic alternate reality where citizens were learned and pensive, discussions were thoughtful, and everyone was a fan. “It wasn’t hero worship,” said one adviser who accompanied them. “Okay, it was.”

For one day, the Obamas lived in the dream version of his presidency instead of the depressing reality. At meals and receptions, they mingled with the members of the Royal Academy – government officials, academics…

The trip spurred a thought the Obamas and their friends would voice to each other again and again as the president’s popularity continued to decline: the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader. The president “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.” [President Obama's old friend] Marty Nesbitt told [another old friend of Obama] Eric Whitaker indignantly.”

Does it even occur to people who say, think, or write such a thing that the reason his popularity is declining (to the extent that it is) is precisely tied to his popularity among Europeans? He wants to remake the US in the image of European socialism. No wonder he’s popular in (that antisemitic enclave) Norway; and no wonder he’s less so here.

But the real issue seems that he doesn’t get universal love. Any detractor seems a detractor too many. How can you people not see his brilliance, his articulateness, his cleanliness? Obama’s popularity is actually higher than it should be, given the moribund economy and his renunciation of certain campaign promises. He still probably stands a good chance of being reelected. What’s his problem? We don’t have a peace prize to offer an unworthy candidate; we just have the Oval Office. And we gave that to him, unworthy as he is of that too.

But I’m still stunned that we can get revelations like this out of a published book. Surely, some in the press have read it. (I wouldn’t, but it’s their job.) Did it occur to none of them that this is an interesting and very telling anecdote?

Flies, of course:

Anti-Israeli anarchists fought police at airports in Brussels and Paris after being denied permission to fly to Israel Sunday. Several were arrested.

Air France, Lufthansa and British Airways previously announced the cancellation of more than 400 reservations. The anarchists threatened to sue the airline companies.

The “fly-in,” which has been hyped by mainstream media and particularly those in Israel hoping for demonstrations that would embarrass the Netanyahu government, so far has been a disaster for promoters.

Only a handful of activists managed to land at Ben Gurion Airport, several of them having arrived on an El Al flight.

Shall we meet a Jew-hater or two? Hold your nose:

Dear God, woman, is that a baby you’re carrying, or a third breast?

I’m reminded of Les Miserables for some reason, only these mangy dogs are plus miserable, not less. Which one’s Cosette?

Or hogs, porkers, swine, etc., if you prefer:

It has been said many times in recent months that we aren’t Greece. Now it will start to be said that we aren’t Spain. Both propositions are certainly true. (For one thing, Spain elected its socialist government in 2004, thus getting a head start on us.) But if we compare America’s debt crisis to Europe’s as a whole, how do we stack up?

…

The populations of the two entities are almost exactly the same, so the U.S. debt is larger on a per capita basis, too. Really, is it going too far to ask how an administration that put the U.S. in such a deep hole can have the temerity to seek re-election?

You had to know Mark Steyn would pipe up:

There are about 313 million Americans, 330 million or so in the Eurozone (ie, excluding the United Kingdom). So, if you do a direct US/Eurozone comparison it’s $15.1 trillion over here, $10.8 trillion over there, which means at the present rate, in another seven or eight months Americans will be 50 per cent more indebted than the Euros. And I would say that even that understates it, since most Continental nations have far more centralized governments while ours is a purely federal debt excluding another $3 trillion or so in combined state and local debt.

They have another advantage: Whatever you think of these guys, from Dublin to Madrid to Athens they’re talking austerity and cuts. Over here, the ruling party has no plan, no plan to come up with a plan, lots of plans to keep spending more more more – and a leader traipsing round the country offering only hack demagoguery against the only plan on the table.

Feel better?

PS: Steyn sees my PIIGS pun and raises me. His post is titled “Euroweenies!”

Europe is still Europe

A British MP says he fears for his life after receiving death threats for defending Israel in an exchange with a constituent.

The Conservative MP for Henley, John Howell, has been offered police protection for meetings with voters after an email exchange with the constituent was posted online.

He has also been forced to remove the details of his district offices from his website.

Pro-Palestinian activist Harry Fear, from Watlington in Oxfordshire, sent Howell an email on March 10 asking what he was doing “to see that Israel halts the military actions that are taking place in defiance of international law and basic human decency.”

A photograph of a building exploding accompanied the email with a caption stating: “Only a few hours ago, Israel felt it necessary to inflict this destruction and death on the [Gaza] Strip.” The photo was in circulation back in 2009 and is completely unrelated to recent events in Gaza.

Responding to the email, Howell said: “And what is your position, Harry, on the 100 rockets which have landed in Israel over the weekend?” Fear posted the question, together with the MP’s reply, on his blog and Facebook page. He included the MP’s contact details and instructed people write to Howell “civilly, expressing discontent with his conduct.”

The Conservative MP said he received around 30 emails; some were “worrying.”

“There are a huge number of emails from pro-Palestinian and Arab fanatics, some from the UK and some clearly not, some equally threatening,” Howell said.

One email said: “You will suffer the consequences of this corruption and callousness.”

There was also a series of emails from some calling himself “Jihad Alshamie,” who told him: “It is people like you who deserve to die.”

“The last thing I want to appear as is a drama queen, but you have to take seriously a threat when it says, ‘I would like to see you dead,’” Howell said.

“It is not just a question of me, it is my family and my staff. All it takes is one person out there who is weird enough, with a distorted view of life, to make an attempt to carry this out.”

In 2010, Labor MP Stephen Timms was stabbed at a constituency meeting by Roshonara Choudhry, who was said to have been inspired by radical websites, for his support of the Iraq war. She was found guilty of attempted murder and jailed for life.

Last year, members of the Muslims Against Crusades group made death threats against Conservative MP Mike Freer for his support of Israel, when he visited constituents at a north London mosque.

“I have been helped by the House authorities in Parliament, who are assessing the level of risk, and also by Thames Valley Police, who have provided extremely good security advice. If I feel at all unsafe there can be a policeman with me at a surgery [district office],” Howell said.
….
Continuing to pursue the issue, Fear said that the MP’s response was “deeply disturbing” and “latently abusive,” as Howell “did not extend me the professional practice (or even human courtesy) of writing a proper and serious reply.”

Fear has sent a complaint to Parliament and the Conservative Party. He has also sent the correspondence to The Guardian and The Independent.

Hatred is easy to create and very difficult to diffuse. Europe has always had problems with Jew hatred (to put it mildly), and now we see that when someone stands up to it, even in a period of peace in democracy in the host country, that person is threatened with death.

- Aggie

Note the lower case h.

Is it in Germany?

The German city of Frankfurt on Sunday elected its first Jewish mayor since the Holocaust. Peter Feldmann became the first Jewish mayor of any major city in the country, in fact, receiving 57 percent of the vote.

Feldmann, 53, a member of the Social Democratic Party, won the election against the incumbent mayor. He will take office on July 1.

The new Lord Mayor-elect has visited Israel in the past; from 1979 to 1980 he learned the science of gardening in the Jewish State. He then returned to Germany to complete a degree in political science at the University of Marburg, later becoming a lecturer at the institution.

…

He has described himself as a “liberal Jew.”

Frankfurt’s previous and only other Jewish mayor, Ludwig Landmann, was a member of the German Democratic Party and served as head of the city from 1924 to 1933. He, too, considered himself a “liberal.”

We’ll let that pass. But though I think Jews (and everyone else) are done a disservice by liberalism, it does not in and of itself presage a (lower case) holocaust.

How about Gaza?

A man who murdered a female relative in a Gaza hospital last Friday is claiming the murder was to preserve “family honor” to “escape judicial punishment.”

The Palestinian Authroty amended its laws to end leniency for so-called honor killings in Judea and Samaria in May 2011, but the law has not been changed in Hamas-run Gaza.

The Gaza-based Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights said reduced sentences – a maximum of 24 months in jail for severe crimes like murder – had made “honor” crimes “prevalent in the Palestinian society and has resulted in opening the door for undermining the principle of the rule of law.”

Ooh, that sounds pretty holocaust-esque, at least if you’re female. But this sort of thing has been going on for years. The only thing that’s changed is that the world has noticed, and some people are complaining.

How about France?

“Jews are being attacked all the time,” she said.

“Children, in the buses, in the Metro, going to school, coming from school, couples in the street – this is just an unbearable situation. And we are talking about France, we are not talking about some kind of jungle. This is one of the main countries of Europe.”

As Aggie and I have been telling you guys for six years now. But if France is so unbearable, you can always try Frankfurt, Germany!

And snuff films are definitely a hot medium.

As a companion piece to the post below, Caroline Glick:

The exhibitionism common to all the men’s behavior makes it obvious that that their attacks were not the random actions of isolated crazy people or lone extremists. All of these killers were certain that they were part of a global movement that seeks the annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of the Western world and the supremacy of jihadist Islam. And they were convinced that their actions served the interests of this movement and that they would be viewed as heroes by millions of their fellow Muslims for their killing of innocents.

THIS SITUATION is bad enough on its own. But what make it truly dangerous are the West’s responses to it. Those responses together with the crimes themselves expose the depraved and perilous nature of our times. And they show that Merah’s death can bring no closure to this story.

There are five interrelated aspects to the West’s response to these crimes and the jihadist reality they expose. The first aspect of the West’s response is denial.

Time after time, Merah and his ilk throughout the Western world show us who they are and what they want. And time after time, the Western elites, and even much of the Jewish leadership, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their cries of murder and calls for the destruction of Western civilization.

In the case of Halimi’s murder, for instance, Paris police refused to view his abduction as a hate crime. Despite the fact that Fofana and his followers called Halimi’s family and recited Koranic verses while Ilan screamed out in agony in the background, the Paris police treated his disappearance as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom case.

Even after Ilan was found naked at a rail heading with burns on more than 80 percent of his body and died en route to the hospital, it took French authorities over a week to admit that he had been the victim of an anti-Semitic crime.

…

As David Horowitz wrote in a recent article at FrontPage magazine, Jewish student leaders at places such as the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill prefer to attack messengers like himself, than accept the inconvenient truth that Muslim student leaders on campus with them support the annihilation of Israel.

Ignoring and denying the openly expressed aims of jihadists like Merah is of course only part of the problem. The second aspect of the West’s effective collusion with these killers is Western elites’ justification of their crimes.

After initially pinning the blame for the Toulouse massacre on Nazis, when French authorities finally acknowledged Merah’s jihadist identity, they also provided his justification for murder. Speaking to reporters, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant gave us Merah’s name and his excuse at the same time.

Gueant told us that Merah was associated with al-Qaida and he was upset about what he referred to as Israel’s “murder” of Palestinian children.

It should be unnecessary to note the simple truth that Israel doesn’t murder Palestinian children. Palestinians murder Israeli children.

But then, if Merah got his news from the Western media there is a reasonable chance that he wouldn’t know that.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was rightly condemned by Israeli political leaders this week for her equation of the actual massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse with the imaginary massacre of Palestinian children in Gaza. But she is not alone in this behavior. US President Barack Obama engaged in similarly outrageous libels when during his speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 he compared the Holocaust with Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

And the line separating these libels from actual incitement is often hard to find.

French television, which Merah no doubt often watched, is notorious for crossing it. It was France 2 that gave us this century’s first anti-Semitic blood libel with its October 2000 tale of Muhammad al-Dura’s alleged death at the hands of IDF soldiers.

The France 2 story was exposed as a fraud by an appellate court in Paris in 2008. The appellate court overturned a lower court’s libel ruling against Internet activist Philippe Karsenty who wrote on his personal website that the al-Dura story was a hoax.

The appellate court viewed France 2′s unedited footage from the scene. That footage showed al-Dura moving after the France 2 cameraman had declared him dead. The footage led the court to overturn the decision of the lower court that had found Karsenty guilty of libel.

Apparently the same French establishment that now declares solidarity with France’s Jews is unwilling to part with the al-Dura hoax that incited the spilling of so much Jewish blood in the past decade. Last month, France’s Supreme Court overturned the appellate court’s ruling and ordered it to retry the case.

As far as the Supreme Court of France is concerned, the appellate court had no right to ask France 2 to provide evidence that its story was true. According to the court, the unedited footage which proved the story was a blood libel should never have been admitted as evidence. The truth should never have been permitted to come to light.

IN ADDITION to denying, justifying and inciting jihadist violence, Western elites and authorities also engage in facilitating it and, after the fact, excusing it. In the case of Merah, although details are still unclear, it has been reported that he underwent jihadist training by al-Qaida in Afghanistan and was apprehended by Afghan authorities.

Despite his ties to al-Qaida, either US or French military authorities decided he should be sent back to France even though he clearly constituted a danger to French society.

Moreover, according to media reports, French authorities knew that he was dangerous and still failed to apprehend him. They had been informed that at least on one occasion, Merah sought to radicalize a 15-year-old Muslim boy. And yet, he was allowed to remain at large.

As the mother of the teenager said, “All these people had to die before they finally arrest Mohamed Merah. What an enormous waste. The police knew this individual was dangerous and radicalized. I complained to the police twice about Mohamed Merah and tried to follow up several times.”

In the US, Hasan’s colleagues and commanders knew of his sympathy for jihad and his connections to jihadist leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. And yet they promoted him to major and sent him to Fort Hood.

The West’s complicity with these jihadist crimes doesn’t end with their perpetration.

After failing to acknowledge that Halimi was abducted by jihadists who murdered him because he was a Jew, French authorities conducted his murderers’ trials behind closed doors. Hidden from public scrutiny, in their first trial, Halimi’s killers were given pitifully lights sentences. Fofana was rendered eligible for parole within 22 years. It was only the outcry of activists within the French Jewish community that caused French authorities to hold a retrial.

In Seattle, Haq’s first trial for his attack on Seattle’s Jewish Federation was declared a mistrial. Seattle’s mayor and media went out of their way to present Haq as mentally ill. The prosecution failed to seek the death penalty and didn’t bother to present the records of Haq’s phone conversations bragging about his crimes until his second trial.

Together, the behavior of proud jihadist warriors of the West like Merah, Hasan, Haq and Fofana, and the depraved silence, indifference and complicity of Western elites with their jihadist aims, form the physical and moral landscape of our time. And it is because of this evil mix of perpetrators and enablers that Merah’s death is not a victory of justice.

If I still have your attention, let me re-refer you to a piece I linked to the other day. The Obama State Department is conducting “stealth” outreach programs to European Moslems, often to the dismay and resentment of the host countries themselves. Those countries, France included, are trying to wind up the tangled tentacles of multiculturalism, while Obama and his rich donors (masquerading as diplomats) reach out and stroke the aggrieved parties. But as Glick amply demonstrates, it is we who are being played, not they.

Our coveted Ya Think?™ Award may be out of the reach of many, but almost anyone can be a PUTZ (the relevant section starts at 2:26 and runs for about 3 mins)

BTW, if you have some spare change, you can send it to Latma, who does this sort of thing brilliantly. Caroline Glick explains:

This week’s episode of the Tribal Update, the news satire show produced weekly by Latma, the Hebrew language media satire website I run we bring you Count Von Snobbenberg presenting the EU PUTZ award to Catherine Ashton for her extraordinary statement comparing the massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse to the imaginary plight of Gazan children.

…

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you are in the United States and would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page for the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write “Latma” in the box marked “designation.”

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