SAMEDI NUIT CHANSONS FRANCAISES.

First, a 1981 hit by Belgian singer Jo Lemaire, considered one of the best female singers of my country. "Je suis venue te dire que je m'en vais" [I have come to tell you I'm leaving - MFBB] is actually a cover from the original by Serge Gainsbourgh, the notoriously flamboyant French poem, actor, director and composer. Although active since 1979, this song catapulted Jo Lemaire to stardom in western francophone countries, Canada included. These are the early eighties, and you know what that means - synthesizer pop.





One of my all-time favourites, "Il est cinq heures, Paris s'éveille." [It's five o'clock, Paris wakes up - MFBB] by the dandyish French singer and composer Jacques Dutronc. In my heart I have always had a soft spot for this song, both for its simple yet incomparable lyrics painting an evocative image of the City of Lights beginning another day, and for its stirring flute (by Roger Bourdin) and bass play. Dutronc stands somewhat apart from the great French chansonniers Brassens, Bécaud, Ferré, Piaf, Dassin, and the sole Belgian one, Jacques Brel. Indeed, Dutronc's music, especially the early songs, show American and British infuences.






MFBB.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER (5)

For the first time since 2002, Belgian ground troops participated in an operation against the Taliban in Afghanistan's north. Around 50 paratroopers of Tielen-based 3 Para Battalion, the Paracommando Brigade, together with an ANA (Afghan National Army) battalion, cleansed an area of Taliban fighers. The para unit is part of a so-called OMLT team (Operational Mentoring and Liaison), and its principal task is training ANA units. In this operation however the paras patrolled alongside the Afghan soldiers in a war zone. In the week between April 21 and April 28, 50 suspected Taliban fighters were rounded up. Small in scale though this operation is, it is unique in the sense that this is the first time that Belgian troops are getting engaged in ground combat. A small battalion-sized unit has been guarding Kabul airport since 2002, and a demining squad has been active in Kunduz embedded with the Germans there for almost as long, but both missions take place under so many caveats - "thanks" to our former Minister of Defense, André Flahaut, that they cannot be called combat missions. No sooner had the news of this operation leaked out, or the socialist and green opposition lashed out against Belgium "getting sucked into a lost conflict". Check out this video.

You see the socialist Dirk Vander Maelen and the greenie Wouter De Vriendt, both of them scared shitless that taliban terrorists might actually get hurt as a result of Belgian involvement in Afghanistan. Their efforts to grill the current Belgian Defense Minister Pieter De Crem in parliament on the matter proved fruitless however - De Crem nicely warded off whatever objections they made, and angry as they might be, both SP.a and Groen! are in the opposition now. I have been a keen follower of domestic politics since age 16 or so, and I am now 43, and it strikes me what suddenly becomes possible when socialists and greens are out of power. And I'm not only talking defense matters.


MFBB.

STUPID NEWS OF THE DAY.

A recent article in Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf:




Translation:

"MUSLIM SCRATCHES NAKED WOMAN OFF BILLBOARD.

From one of our correspondents.

AMSTERDAM- Amsterdam Police has recently had troubles with a pious muslim who scratches with his bare nails lingerie ads off billboards.

On the billboards, sexy ladies advertise for lingerie brand Sapph. The man, Tarix Abdullah, says that he acts "out of respect for God". He says he normally bears no grudges against women, but does indeed if they wear nothing more than a slip and bra. "I do it to protect the women and children who cross the street here. Soon women will think they have to dress like that to please men. If they follow God's way, more precisely the way of Islam, we can steer clear of the danger", Mr. Abdullah was quoted as saying.

Amsterdam police is aware of the action, but hasn't intervened yet. Sapph's ceo is "shocked"."

Duh. Steering women clear of danger huh. Another explanation might be that Mr. Abdullah wondered if, by scratching away certain items, he might not unearth the real thing. Anyway, over here at DowneastBlog, we absolutely have no problem whatsoever with women wearing only slips and bras. And to prove it we post the following pic:





THERE Mr. Tarix Abdullah!!! That will TEACH YOU!!!!!. Try to scratch that away!!!


MFBB.


P.S.: Downeastblog suggest Sapph for its female leadershi, uh, readership. Vandevelde is okay too.

THE BRUSSELS JOURNAL'S FJORDMAN ON WHY WE NEED GERMANY...

And yet again a brilliant article from The Brussels Journal's Fjordman...

"I’m tired of people who are busy losing this world war because they are still obsessed with the previous one, which ended generations ago. Anti-Nazism has mutated into a permanent witch-hunt on an imaginary enemy. The notion that “neo-Nazis” constitute a prominent group today is nonsense. The most dangerous people by far are those running the European Union, who are busy dismantling European civilization and enlarging the borders of the EU to include the Middle East and North Africa, those flooding their own countries with tens of millions of Muslims and other hostile aliens without consulting the native population. This makes the EU the largest criminal entity on the planet, preoccupied with destroying an entire continent, dismantling the greatest civilization that has ever existed and replacing the native population with others. I have described this in my book Defeating Eurabia, which is available online.

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut thinks that “Europe does not love itself.” He says that it's not forces from outside that are threatening Europe as much as the voluntary renunciation of European identity, its wish of freeing itself from its own history and traditions, only replaced by human rights. The EU isn’t just post-national; it’s post-European.

Next to the EU, the most dangerous people are the Leftists all over the Western world who are waging a Jihad to destroy their own civilization and have teamed up with Muslims to achieve this goal. Unlike neo-Nazis, these people are not only far more numerous but socially accepted and disproportionately represented in the media and the education system, where they systematically silence “racist” dissenters by destroying their livelihoods and reputations. They use an imaginary “far-Right” threat to crush people they don’t like.

According to Dr Aidan Rankin, “anti-Fascism” is the new Fascism. The so-called anti-racists and Multiculturalists are aggressors with totalitarian leanings; the people they unfairly attack are victims of a failed social experiment and one of the greatest betrayals in history:


“Progressives (as they invariably call themselves) use accusations of racism and fascism as excuses to bully and oppress impoverished white communities and isolate them in racially based ghettos. For white liberals, anti-racism becomes a form of auto-racism, directed at members of their own race who are deemed to be socially inferior. It is, in other words, a new type of snobbery and social exclusion […]. Their ideology allows for no concern for individuals, except for attack or denunciation. This contempt for the individual, the white, male worker in particular, allows the anti-fascist to reconcile two contradictory demands - for civil disobedience (including violence) and for the massive extension of state power […]. [They operate] by appealing to more basic psychological impulses of fear, envy and hatred. Anti-fascism shares with its alleged opposite a belief in the cleansing or redemptive power of violence. They share as well an obsessive preoccupation with race.”


A supposedly “tolerant” nation such as Britain is becoming more and more totalitarian the more “diverse” it gets, and I sometimes suspect that was the whole point. The fact that prominent groups can despise Christianity, destroy free speech, practice widespread censorship and ideological indoctrination, hate capitalism, promote the concept of the all-encompassing state and support other known Nazi policies while denouncing their opponents as “Nazis” only demonstrates that most people no longer understand the real nature of Nazism. “Discrimination” doesn’t necessarily lead to gas chambers. We discriminated quite sensibly in the past against allowing Muslims and other obviously hostile groups to settle in our lands. I would feel quite comfortable with re-instituting that kind of “discrimination.”

In the United States, the host D.L. Hughley at TV channel CNN stated that the Republican Party looked like “Nazi Germany” because a majority of their members are white. Being a “Nazi” today means “being born white and standing up for yourself,” nothing more and nothing less. In fact, you don’t even need to stand up for yourself; merely being white and still breathing is sufficient for some...."

To think that TBJ has such brilliant minds like Takuan Seiyo, Tiberge, Belien, Bertonneau, Millar, Handlery, Landen, Van Laenen, Fjordman and so many others working together, striving together, producing compelling essays, defending what must be defended, giving their utmost best...

... and knowing that over there in La La Land, a pompous egotistic narcissistic idiot called Charles Johnson is pulling all the strings he can find to smear these brave and decent European flag-bearers...

... that hurts.

But I'm glad I'm on the Right Side.


MFBB.

NO, IT ISN'T JUST YOU.

Regular reader Joanne provided us with a link to a damn good article by Gerald Warner in The Daily Telegraph. I don't know if I would have used the "damn good" qualification if there had "only" been the 100-day avalanche of bad to mediocre measures taken by America's Apologizer-in-Chief. But now that, in recent weeks, the nuttiness has gone crescendo and indeed, is morphing into downright scary stuff, I think "damn good" is nothing short of the truth.

"If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

That is why he opened Pandora's Box by publishing the Justice Department's legal opinions on waterboarding and other hardline interrogation techniques. He cynically subordinated the national interest to his partisan desire to embarrass the Republicans. Then he had to rush to Langley, Virginia to try to reassure a demoralised CIA that had just discovered the President of the United States was an even more formidable foe than al-Qaeda.

"Don't be discouraged by what's happened the last few weeks," he told intelligence officers. Is he kidding? Thanks to him, al-Qaeda knows the private interrogation techniques available to the US intelligence agencies and can train its operatives to withstand them - or would do so, if they had not already been outlawed.

So, next time a senior al-Qaeda hood is captured, all the CIA can do is ask him nicely if he would care to reveal when a major population centre is due to be hit by a terror spectacular, or which American city is about to be irradiated by a dirty bomb. Your view of this situation will be dictated by one simple criterion: whether or not you watched the people jumping from the twin towers.

Obama promised his CIA audience that nobody would be prosecuted for past actions. That has already been contradicted by leftist groups with a revanchist ambition to put Republicans, headed if possible by Condoleezza Rice, in the dock. Talk about playing party politics with national security. Martin Scheinin, the United Nations special investigator for human rights, claims that senior figures, including former vice president Dick Cheney, could face prosecution overseas. Ponder that - once you have got over the difficulty of locating the United Nations and human rights within the same dimension.

President Pantywaist Obama should have thought twice before sitting down to play poker with Dick Cheney. The former vice president believes documents have been selectively published and that releasing more will prove how effective the interrogation techniques were. Under Dubya's administration, there was no further atrocity on American soil after 9/11.

President Pantywaist's recent world tour, cosying up to all the bad guys, excited the ambitions of America's enemies. Here, they realised, is a sucker they can really take to the cleaners. His only enemies are fellow Americans. Which prompts the question: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?"

You betcha.


MFBB.