End of Issue #15

Any Questions?


Editorial and Rants

Dutch to Deport Own Islanders

May 22, 2005 - From: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1622160,00.html

The Dutch government has become involved in a row with its Caribbean territories after threatening to deport immigrants from the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba who fail to get jobs, writes Peter Conradi.

Concern about immigration has helped to fuel Dutch opposition to the European constitution.  A poll yesterday showed 63% will vote "no" in a referendum on June 1 - with commentators describing defeat as a near certainty.

Rita Verdonk, the integration minister, said people aged 18 to 24 from the Caribbean islands who did not find a job or study within three months of arriving in Holland would be sent home.

Many young people from the islands wrongly took the Netherlands to be "the land of milk and honey", she said.  "They think that when they get off the plane, scooters and mobile phones will be waiting for them."

Talk of deportation has caused outrage in the islands, which are considering a legal challenge.  It's absurd and unfair," said Carel de Haseth, an adviser to Etienne Ys, the prime minister of the Antilles.

The Dutch government's move reflects an increasingly tough stance on immigration following the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, the right-wing politician, in 2002.

Besides immigration, the referendum campaign in Holland has been dominated by concern over the size of the country's contribution to the EU budget, antipathy to the euro and hostility to plans to admit Turkey.

Unlike in France, the result of the referendum - the first to be held in Holland on an issue related to Europe - is not binding.  But Jan Peter Balkenende, the prime minister, has been campaigning hard for a "yes" vote.


European Civilisation has Sown the Seeds of its Own Decline and Fall

Gerard Baker, June 03, 2005

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, at precisely the moment the French were angrily delivering their resounding "non" to Europe's would-be nation-builders, I happened to be in Istanbul, in the genial company of a transatlantic crew of foreign-policy thinkers.

As the boat on which we were having dinner bobbed gently up the busy Bosphorus, it struck me that this was not a bad place from which to contemplate the latest European crisis.  The waters that mark the very end of Europe provide a useful historical context in which to consider, what is for some, the End of Europe.

Out here, beyond the lights winking from the grand mansions that hug the Asian shoreline, begins the vast land mass into which the founders of Western civilisation poured in search of treasure and conquest.  Millennia later, to the demoralised successors of those same enterprising Europeans, the traffic seems all the other way.  Asia offers only threat, not promise; the future one of outsourced telemarketers in India and offshore manufacturing in China.

From here, too, at a more mortal crisis in Europe's history, the Ottoman Empire stretched to every point of the compass, around the Black Sea, across the Middle East, into North Africa and deeper and deeper into a collapsing Europe.  Today, it seems that the Caliph's successors are reclaiming that territory, only this time moving more or less unopposed towards their goal.

These twin threats -- the economic challenge of fiercely competitive globalisation and a political challenge to the culturally deracinated, splintering societies -- are driving Europe into debilitating turmoil.

Interestingly, these threats converge again today in modern Turkey, an economically dynamic nation of 70 million Muslims, whose hopes of ending centuries of geographical ambivalence and joining the European club were dealt a final shattering blow this week.  More important, though, it was these two forces, which lay directly behind respectively the French and Dutch "no" votes, that have intensified the mood of crisis.

In their different ways, the two referendums were surely symbolic events, marking the culmination of a decade or more of European disintegration and decline.

It is probably no accident that this process began just as Europe reached the pinnacle of its achievements.  Forty-five years after the Second World War, continental Western Europe could plausibly claim to have created a kind of postmodern nirvana -- a half-continent-wide zone of unparalleled prosperity, cushioned by an apparently permanent peace among some of the most historically murderous peoples on Earth.

Under its expensive welfare programmes, paid for by a high level of productivity in traditional manufacturing industries, Europeans enjoyed a pampered life.  With the Soviet threat gone, this accelerating prosperity further encouraged them to renounce the idea of war and military coercion, and they settled down to enjoy an assured future ascendancy.

By the beginning of the 1990s, with America in apparent decline, it seemed a reasonable bet that this extraordinary model of economic and political success would become an example to the world.  But external and internal forces were already undermining this paradise.

In economics, the forces of globalisation unleashed by an emergent Asia and an information technology revolution were reviving the American economy and giving birth to new, dynamic competitors.  This speed-of-light competitive world of the microchip and flexible capital markets would require nimbleness, and an end to the protections that seemed to have helped Europe to become the success story of the 1980s.  The Anglo-Saxon economies, in response to their own economic crises of the 1970s, had prepared themselves for this new world with painful but necessary reforms.

But Europe looked inward, not outward.  Instead of focusing on what was needed - American and British-style labour reforms, tax cuts and deregulation -- Europe embarked on a quixotic exercise.  It sought to weld a dozen or more disparate countries into an unbreakable economic union, all settled snug and warm under the fraying comfort blanket of expensive welfare systems.

In the political field too, even at its zenith, Europe had been surrendering the tools that had given it peace and harmony.  It owed its years of peace not to some solemn intra-European comity but to the hard steel of US firepower, primed to defend Europe from the Soviet Union.  But by the early 1990s, having shed its bloody past, Europe had lost the moral will as well as the capacity to face down new threats at home and abroad to the freedoms it cherished.  European governments cut defence budgets and embraced peace as a strategy.  This malaise was clearly evident in the Balkans in the early 1990s, where murderous inter-ethnic strife was cheerfully tolerated for years.

When its American ally was attacked in September 2001, Europe gamely offered to reciprocate for US protection in the Cold War, but most European nations lacked the military resources to turn that promise into anything more than tokens.

Then in Iraq in 2003, confronted with a tyrant who had repeatedly thumbed his nose at the international system that Europe supposedly revered, it instinctively recoiled, and a softened-up intellectual elite turned on the Americans instead.

At home, the same moral relativism, bred by years of pampered prosperity, was creating its own destructive forces.  Again, egged on by intellectual elites, Europeans were encouraged to despise the civilisation that had nurtured them.  The nation state was pronounced a hateful anachronism that had to be replaced by a pan-European superstate.  The West's defining values of enlightened tolerance and freedom were not superior to anyone else's.  Crime was the fault of its own unfair societies.

Immigrants who came to its countries were not to be forced to live by its own rules but by theirs, even if that meant "honour" killings and jihad.  The effort to produce tolerant, multicultural societies resulted in the paradox of radical liberal democracies such as the Netherlands enthusiastically nurturing forces at home that sought to destroy the freedoms in which they were being incubated.

This week, voters in France and the Netherlands sounded the alarm.  Characteristically, while the Dutch seem to have got the message about the social costs of its ruinous ultra-liberalism, the French have got the wrong end of the stick and want to escape from globalisation behind high walls of social protection.

But the challenge is now upon Europe.  The longer it puts off the inevitable reforms -- economic, social and political -- the harder it will get.  And if it chooses to defer a real response for ever, the greatest civilisation in the history of the planet will simply continue to sink beneath the waves of its own economic irrelevance and moral ennui.

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.


According to $2600 Magazine, these people don't exist, they are completely fictional.  Sheesh.  Do their ramblings sound familiar at all?

Muslims Will Rule America and Britain, Jews Are a Virus Resembling AIDS

May 20, 2005 - From: http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_7000.shtml

Palestinian Friday Sermon by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris: Muslims Will Rule America and Britain, Jews Are a Virus Resembling AIDS

The following are excerpts from a Friday sermon on Palestinian Authority TV.  The preacher is Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris.  PA TV aired this sermon on May 13, 2005.

Ibrahim Mudeiris: Allah has tormented us with "the people most hostile to the believers" the Jews.  "Thou shalt find that the people most hostile to the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists."  Allah warned His beloved Prophet Muhammad about the Jews, who had killed their prophets, forged their Torah, and sowed corruption throughout their history.

With the establishment of the state of Israel, the entire Islamic nation was lost, because Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and because the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers.

You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world.  The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations.

Ask Britain what it did to the Jews in the early sixth century.  What did they do to the Jews?  They expelled them, tortured them, and prevented them from entering Britain for more than 300 years.  All this was because of what the Jews did in Britain.  Ask France what it did to the Jews.  They tortured them, expelled them, and burned their Talmud, because of the civil strife the Jews wanted to spark in France, in the days of Louis XIX.  Ask Portugal what it did to the Jews.  Ask Czarists Russia, which welcomed the Jews, who plotted to kill the Czar - so he massacred them.  But don't ask Germany what it did to the Jews.  It was the Jews who provoked Nazism to wage war against the entire world, when the Jews, using the Zionist movement, got other countries to wage an economic war on Germany and to boycott German merchandise.  They provoked Russia, Britain, France, and Italy.  This enraged the Germans toward the Jews, leading to the events of those days, which the Jews commemorating today.

But they are committing worse deeds than those done to them in the Nazi war.  Yes, perhaps some of them were killed and some burned, but they are inflating this in order to win over the of the media and gain the world's sympathy.  The worst crimes in history were committed against the Jews, yet these crimes are no worse than what the Jews are doing in Palestine.  What was done to the Jews was a crime, but isn't what the Jews are doing today in the land of Palestine not a crime?!

Look at modern history.  Where has Great Britain gone?  Where has Czarist Russia gone?  Where has France gone - France, which almost ruled the entire world?  Where is Nazi Germany, which massacred millions and ruled the world?  Where did all these superpowers go?  He who made them disappear will make America disappear too, God willing.  He who made Russia disappear overnight is capable of making America disappear and fall, Allah willing.

We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again.  The day will come when we will rule America.  The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world except for the Jews.  The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history.  The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews - even the stones and trees which were harmed by them.  Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews.  The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.