IN MEMORIAM PFC. MENCHACA, PFC. TUCKER, SPC. BABINEAU

Please, pray for these men and their families.



To the left, Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Oregon, to the right Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, Texas. Both abducted, tortured, and probably beheaded by Muslim terrorists. I was unable to find a photo of Spc. David J. Babineau, 25, of Springfield, Massachusetts, who was the driver of the Humvee in which the three men were on patrol and who was killed in the attack at which the other two were kidnapped.

This is the nature of the enemy the West is up against:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The bodies of two U.S. soldiers found in Iraq Monday night were mutilated and booby-trapped, military sources said Tuesday. Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker went missing after a Friday attack on a traffic control checkpoint in Yusufiya, 12 miles (20 km) south of Baghdad. The sources said the two men had suffered severe trauma. The bodies also had been desecrated, and a visual identification was impossible -- part of the reason DNA testing was being conducted to verify their identities, the sources said.

An organization which calls itself "Mujahedeen Shura Council", allegedly an umbrella group for AQ in Iraq and four organizations of Sunni terrorists, claimed responsibility for the callous act:

"We announce the good news to our Islamic nation that we executed God's will and slaughtered the two crusader animals we had in captivity," says the claim, reportedly from the Mujahedeen Shura Council, a group linked to al Qaeda. "And God has given our Emir, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, the good fortune of carrying out the legitimate court's command in person."

Cowards. Sexually frustrated illiterates. 7th-century Wife-Beaters and Child Molesters. Cruel, stupid, uncultivated, unshaven, unwashed Untermenschen and yes, if believe there are occasions when one can use this dreadful word. I'm thinking e.g. of what happened to Wesley Batalona, Jerry Zovko, Michael Teague and Scott Helvenston. I'm thinking of the swine who preferred to self-detonate in the middle of 7- and 8-year old children getting candy from a GI.

America is a nation of 300 million and a GNP of 11 trillion. It fields the world's most awesome military, equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry. It is a beacon for all those who cherish freedom, the "pursuit of happiness" and healthy self-development.

What are you going to do? Are you going to cut and run for cowards who are so spectacularly incapable of beating your troops in face to face combat they have to resort to butchering a few hapless tied up and powerless prisoners? Are you going to cut and run for this vermin, like Murtha and Kennedy want you to do?

Or are you going to stomp these cockroaches to death?

The choice should be obvious.


MFBB.

ZZZZZZZ.... AUSTRIAN EU PRESIDENCY ALMOST OVER....ZZZZZZZZ.....

We’re almost halfway 2006 now, and who’s nuts enough to read MFBB’s EU posts knows what that means: time for another EU summit!!!

Yes indeed, one of those fancy EU leadership thingies is that, while legislative power is in the hands of the EU Parliament (just like legislative power in the States is in the hands of Congress), the executive power is shared by two entities: there’s the EU Commission, led by José Manuel Barroso, which has a four year term and which is responsible for the day-to-day decisions, and then there’s the EU Presidency, which rotates among the EU member states in six-month periods, and which is supposed to set out, and implement, the strategic guidelines. During the first half of 2006, Austria had the EU Presidency, as I'm sure you noticed.

(............................)

Hey, come back! I got some nude, uh, new Diane Lane pics yet! It was only a "graptje"! (Flemish slang for joke - MFBB)

But it's true. I’m hitting 41 this summer and have seen already quite some EU Presidencies, but I can’t recall none which was so boring. Appointing Scott McClellan for EU President for six months would have been more fun. And the two-day summit (15 and 16 June) they’ve just concluded the show with in Brussels was just as dull (the photo shows Austrian PM Wolfgang Schluessel , center, with to the left Austrian FM Ursula Plassnik and to the right Commission Chief Barroso). Actually, the only thing that sticks with me about Austria at the EU helm is that poster campaign in January with these larger-than-life photos of Bush, Queen Elizabeth and Chirac fornicating. Btw, QE and Chirac are Europeans, but why Bush? Answer: 21st Century Artists' logic, ya know. The last sane artist, Hopper, dropped dead back in 1967 already. But I digress. The next EU Presidency, till 31 December 2006, is for Finland and judging from their performance at the Eurovision Song Festival, there's hoping the EU won't look like a dead hippopotamus by year's end. Btw, did you know that "Finns" spelled backwards sounds as "sniff"? Mu ha ha ha.

OK, that summit. The 25 were mainly still blathering about the EU Constitution. That is to say, with all the focus that has been on France’s “NON” and Holland’s “NEEN” of last year, you might think the whole of Europe has rejected the Constitution. Well, that’s actually quite far from the truth. In fact, of the 25 member states 13 have already ratified it, while two more are close to ratification. Of course, in a number of countries the Constitution did not pass by popular referendum and the parliaments ratified it. This happened, a.o., in the Union of Soviet Socialist Repooplickers of Belgistania. For me, being an Outlaw, voting was a moot point anyway. Notice that, although a slight majority is thus in favor, only one country’s “NO” is sufficient to stall the general adoption of that dreadful 500-page document as the European Constitution.

Now, if I say “blathering” it’s mainly between two blocs, the bloc which wants to see the EU Constutuon approved asap and move on towards further integration and the bloc which wants to take a break, take a deep breath and consider what to do next. As the situation is now, the EU can expand further to 27 countries, and almost certainly will, by accepting Bulgaria in 2007 and Romania in 2008. After that, there's no legal basis provided by the existing Treaties anymore to allow for further expansion. If you wonder why that should be a problem, well, the existing treaties provide for one Commissioner ("Minister") per country, and so Barroso's Commision (the EU's "day-to-day gumint so to say), is 25 Ministers strong. But apart from Bulgaria and Romania there are still six other countries waiting in the wings: Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia and... Turkey. Since adding six more ministers to the EU Commission would make it unworkable, there's a general consensus already that after Bulgaria and Romania not every country will have an own commissioner. For distributing these key posts among the smorgasbord of nationalities there have to be rules. And these rules have yet to be established. These were some of the topics discussed at this latest summit, utterly boring I guess for non-Europeans, but that's what you get when you try to make work a supranational entity with a lot of fierce egos. It became also clear on this summit that, while accession talks with Turkey have started, the Turks are by far NOT on board yet – phew. Actually, in the most optimistic scenario access is only for 2015 or so, and even then I don’t really see it happen. Barroso said on this summit that "it (Turkish membership) will be a very difficult task". Oh yeah, if there's any Turk out there reading this, you may be interested to know that if someone had asked me back in, say, 1984, whether you guys could come on board, I'd have answered you could right away, no problem. Anno 2006 however, with a closet islamist like Erdogan in power, and the Turkish population already here growing ever more islamist itslef, I say njet, definitely.

Basically, right now I can see only one tangible development, and even then it’s about a real small country: Slovenia, a nation about the size of Israel (20,273 sq. kloms, that’s 7,827 sq miles) and with just under 2,000,000 inhabitants. Capital Ljubjlana. The photo shows the famous Lake Bled, a must see when visiting this tiny but very beautiful nation. More info and nice pics here. Slovenia, not to be mistaken for Slovakia, was the very first republic to break free from the artifical construction which was Yugoslavia, in 1991. There was a brief “war” with about 100 KIA between the young republic and the federal Yugoslav army, but nothing comparable to what went on later in Croatia and Bosnia. Already prior to the rift, Slovenia was the most wealthy part of Tito’s realm, it got through the troubled nineties unharmed, and is today fairly prosperous.

Well, Slovenia will join the so-called Eurozone on the 1st of January, 2007, as the 13th country. It is the first of the 10 new EU members to meet the criteria of the so-called “Stability Pact", which outlines the conditions for access to the Eurozone and thus adoption of the euro as currency (photo shows the biggest note in use, the 500 EUR one. Worth about 600 bucks). To cut a long story short, the Stability Pact states that eurozone members must have a budget deficit of less than 3% of the GDP, a public debt not exceeding 60% of the GDP, as well as low inflation and interest rates. Note that Lithuania’s candidacy for adopting the euro was rejected only because its inflation was considered too high – a bit of a sham, since it was only slightly higher than the benchmark (see also this table). In fact, some neighboring countries supported Lithuania’s bid, as did the European Parliament itself. But the EU ministers of Finance were adamant. Ludicrous imho – the two biggest member states, Germany and France, violated the budget deficit rules last year and were not punished.

Slovenia's current currency is the tolar. Under normal circumstances, the EU Finance ministers will on July 11 establish the exchange rate between the tolar and the euro, and then the Slovenian Central Bank must prepare the task of distributing 155 million euro coins and 42 million bank notes by January 1, 2007. Brings back memories of how our currency, the Belgian franc, was replaced with the euro, some four years back already. One euro was set to equal 40.3399 Belgian francs. The actual replacement, from a technical POV, went quite smooth. Getting used to a totally different money scale is less evident however. To this very day, most Belgians, when confronted with a purchase, especially an important one, mentally do the math and quickly calculate what a euro price stands for in BEF.

Slovenia has more to offer than postcard images, btw. Finland may have Nokia, but Slovenia has Gorenje. I fear that over there in the States Gorenje is still unknown, but this brand of electrical household appliances is conquering Europe by storm. Its modern main factory, with more than 8,000 employees, is set among rolling hills and cozy villages an hour's drive outside the capital Ljubljana. It churns out more than three million fridges, cookers and washing machines yearly, the grand majority of it for export throughout Europe. Qualitywise it's a match for established values like AEG, Siemens, Bosch, Smeg etc., and they are at the forefront of the altest developments, with brainy washing machines, state-of-the-art steam ovens (all the rage in Eurowonderland now) and so on. Lately they have begun focusing on design too. Capitalism works, you know.

OK. I promised it.



You will agree that it's better to start with the Austrian EU Presidency and end with Diane lane than the other way round. MFBB for Radio DowneastBlogo, Old Europe, over and out.


MFBB.

BEATRIX, QUEEN DUMB OF HOLLANDISTAN

Guess the fact that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch MP of Somali origin, was as good as expelled from the Netherlands two weeks ago did not go unnoticed on the other side of the Atlantic. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is scheduled to leave for the United States in September, where she will be working for the American Enterprise Institute. If she stays alive long enough, that is. Her new movie Submission 2, on the position of gays in muslim societies, is coming up and some don't like it. Now, if you put your fingers in your ears, shut your eyes and sing loudly LALALALALALALALALALALALA!!!! for about a weekend, you may be able to temporarily restore the illusion that Holland is still just the country where pot smoking gay married couples with children can peacefully pedal along on their bikes over the dykes enjoying the sights of tulipfields, windmills and the likes.

But it gets increasingly difficult, take it from moi.

During the first week of June the Dutch Queen, Beatrix, widow of the late Prince Claus, visited the Mobarak Mosque in The Hague. With its fifty-one years it's the oldest mosque in The Netherlands. The brand of Islam practiced there is called Ahmadiyya-Islam. Like Shiite muslims, Ahmadiyya-muslims are not allowed to shake hands with women, or even touch them, with the obvious exception of their wives. Women are deemed less than men in Islam you know, and these chaps don't mind showing it. Anyway, in comes Zhe Kween, puts off her shoes and is given a guided tour of the mosque. "Out of respect for the muslim faith" she doesn't shake hands with the Imam or any other male muslim. However, there is still hope to save her filthy kuffar soul since as a consolation prize she is given a fancy leatherbound Koran, see photo. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Holland Anno 2006.

To add insult to injury, the Dutch PM, Jan-Peter Balkenende, praised Queen Beatrix for the “example of religious tolerance” she gave by not shaking hands. How this dork ever got his government so far as to send a light brigade to Iraq is beyond me. He must have been very ill when he pushed for it. As usual, there was but one reaction of sanity among Dutch politicians, when Geert Wilders, the center-right, anti-immigration MP who has by now been living for almost 2 years under round the clock protection from bodyguards, decried in Parliament how "greatly irritated" he had been by the Queen and the Prime Minister, who "under the pretext of tolerance are selling out Dutch values such as the equality between men and women."

Wilders, btw, is a fella who wants to:

* amend Dutch Constitution so that it states that the dominant culture in The Neterlands is that of the judeo-christian and humanistic traditions
* stop the building of new mosques for a period of 5 years
* stop the establishment of new islamic schools for a period of 5 years
* stop immigration for a period of 5 years
* forbid preaching in another than the Dutch language
* introduce minimum penalties (right now "small" criminals get sweets, a porn dvd and are "released" with a fatherly thump on the shoulder and after having promised that they won't never do it again on that day)
* impose more severe maximum penalties
* strongly lower taxes
* strongly reduce the size of government and the whole public sector
* abolish the European Commission and the European Parliament
* stop development aid (not emergency aid however)and abolish all trade barriers with developing countries


In short, I gather that if Geert didn't have a name which must sound awful in English, as well as a horrible hairdo (ashblonde, Mozartlike), he could be GOP nominee for the 2008 Presidential Elections. Instead, the man is constantly surrounded by bodyguards since he regularly receives death threats from islamic radicals and extreme leftists, and as a consequence has to live on secret locations. Ironically, one and a half year ago one of these was a modified prison cell in a military camp, Kamp Zeist, a place also used to temporarily house illegal immigrants.

Actually the whole business is too insane for words. There's almost not a week going by without reports of roundups of radical islamic youths, findings of explosives and troubling news of salafist mosques acting as hate factories. Hirsi Ali gets expelled, much to the joy of extreme leftists and islamic organizations. Top rightwing politicians like Jozias Van Aartsen and Rita Verdonk need bodyguards to move about and are driven around in armoured mercedeses. A site like Dutch Disease Report, which was something like a local LGF, is mysteriously shut down. And then Queen Beatrix enters a mosque and won't shake hands with muslim males, thereby acknowledging her own inferiority. In Bending over and Royally lifting the Robe, Beatrix is actually stabbing one of her own ministers in the back: Rita Verdonk, nicknamed Iron Rita, of the pro free market VVD and responsible for immigration and assimilation. Two years ago Verdonk addressed a gathering of imams and when offering her hand to one was greatly insulted since the chap refused to do so because of his faith. Afterwards it became clear that half of the imams attending Verdonks speech did not understand Dutch. On April 26, 2006 the incident was repeated when Mrs. Verdonk, when she wanted to hand out a certificate proving the successful attendance of an assimilation course to the imam of Zoetermeer, again was explained that said imam could not shake her hand because of his faith. Duh. There should be handshaking chapters in assimilation courses.

Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal offers an interesting take when he compares the Dutch Queen's willingness to meet with, and submit to, members of a faith which denounces her own gender as inferior, with her unwillingness to meet with members of Vlaams Belang, the Flemish bulwark against the islamization of Belgium:

In truth this “tolerance” of Beatrix is a sham, which is proved by the fact that in 1982 she refused to visit a group of radical Orthodox Jews because they... refuse to shake hands with women. And there are others whose hands the Dutch Queen will not shake. Politicians from Belgium’s largest party, the Vlaams Belang, learned today that they will not get to see the Dutch Queen during her official state visit to Belgium next month. While in Brussels Beatrix will meet members from all the parties represented in the Belgian Parliament except the VB. This allegedly “far right” party aims for the independence of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of the country, and many of its members feel Dutch rather than Belgian. However, the VB also opposes the “islamization” of the country and voted against bills legalising abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and other legislation which the Belgians copied from the Dutch.

Belien is correct. By coincidence, last week a client of mine, who happens to work at the Royal Palace in Laken, disclosed some of the preparations that are being made to make this Dutch Royal Visit to Belgium a success. There will be a huge gala dinner and he estimated the number of guests at 250. That means that not only the Dutch Royals are coming over but the "better" part of Dutch politics as well. In short, it's gonna be a jolly good camaraderie of the fine fleur of Dutch and Belgian royalty and the establisment. The pariahs of the VB are not allowed though.

Thus, no handshaking for Imams out of respect for Islam.
No handshaking either for the VB, but this time out of disrespect for coming up for our civilization.
We are doomed.


MFBB.

UPDATE:

40% of Moroccan youth in The Netherlands rejecs democracy.

A study of the CRES, the Centre for study of Radicalism and Extremism, found that 40 percent of Moroccan youth in The Netherlands reject western values and democracy. Six to seven percent are prepared to use force to defend Islam. The majority are opposed to freedom of speech for offensive statements, particularly criticism of Islam. CRES's Director, Mr. Buijs, said on Wednesday that the government must provide alternatives for Salafism, a contemporary movement in Sunni Islam that seeks a return to the 'pure Islam' of the days of Mohammed. Salafism is a gaining ground in the Netherlands and Buijs said the government must do more to stimulate a more pluralistic form of Islam.

THAT's the answer!!! The government must do more!!! I know what the Dutch government should do!!! Print im-me-di-a-tely millions and millions of assimilation courses!!! Every last one of them to be personally signed by Queen Beatrix!

And, uh, maybe they should not include the shaking hands chapters. Just a thought you know...

DIANE LANE IS LIKE GOOD WINE.

Back in the ole days when MFBB made a real huge sport of not successfully chasing gorgeous broads, he sometimes found solace in movies. Although I’m not a real filmfreak I do consider myself some kind of connoisseur, which means I saw quite some which are not generally considered mainstream. Some were real jewels and scandalously underrated (while a lot of mainstream is scandalously overrated), others just deserved to linger on in Eternal Pelliculoid Limbo. Some 20 years ago I saw one I'd rate between both categories: Rumble Fish (1983), by Francis Ford Coppola. Saw it on VHS, that is. Don’t even know if it first came out in theatres over here. Rumble Fish got some genuine film noir gravitas, but altogether it's more about style than content. The story line is extremely thin, for one thing. Rebel with no cause whatsoever Rusty James (Matt Dillon) tries to live up to the reputation of his older brother “The Motorcycle Boy” (Mickey Rourke), who just returned disillusioned from a meditating trip to California, and doesn’t want to take up the thread where he left it, as a motorized gang leader. There’s a bit of rummaging with hot chicks in a lakehouse here, an awful lot of pseudoexistential babble there, and at the end Rourke gets himself killed by a cop for trying to release a stupid bowlfish in a pond. Big deal. I have no clue how Rumble Fish was ever received in the States, but for some reason, among movie aficionados over here, it acquired cult status, find that silly or not.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

One of the broads in RF was a very young Diane Lane, as Rusty James’ girlfriend Patty. And I provided this intro just to have a starting point for showcasing – tadaa – a remarkable evolution! In Rumble Fish, Lane is just sexy on 17 – not much else, and even then we get to see zilch, since the film is almost exclusively shot in black and white and there’s an awful lot of smoke, fog and shadows. In short, although I noticed her name I was not particularly impressed. Today I’d have called her a non-blonde bimbette. Pretty, but the draught of blotting-paper. Yup, that’s her on the poster. Btw, notice how young Matt Dillon looks? Saw him too in Crash of last year? Well, you have grown that older too. As did Nicholas Cage and Laurence Fishburne, who co-starred in RF. I'm not counting Dennis Hopper. He looked like an old wreck back then already.

Then, in 1992, I watched Knight Moves.

And that was a frikkin disaster. There’s a big chess tournament in a small town on an island somewhere off the coast of Washington. Then a couple of horrendous ritual murders happen. The prime suspect is chess grandmaster Peter Sanderson, played by Christopher Lambert. Lambert, as you may or may not know, is a guy who had one real good movie, Highlander (1986), but after that it was all downhill. Anyway, in Knight Moves it doesn’t help when it comes out he lied about an encounter he had with the first victim. Still, police can’t nail him, and resorts to engaging a psychology student, Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane, Mrs. Lambert at the time) to try to get into Sanderson’s brain.


I don’t remember anymore how it ended, it was too bad. The one thing that lingers on in MFBB’s mind though is – who’d have thunk it??? – the steamy sex scene between Lambert and Lane in a hotel sauna. For the faithful BlowneastDog readership I include a clip from it to the right, but as you can see I kept the best part(s) for myself, hehe. Anyway, after Knight Moves Mrs. Lane had sunk in my opinion pretty much the way Bush’s approval ratings sank this spring, only, unlike in the latter case, I didn’t think there’d ever be a rebounce. I even thought she looked fuglier than in Rumble Fish. Yeah ladies, I know. Men.

It’s 2000, and MFBB, in the meantime finally having succeeded in chasing down a gorgeous broad nice lil Polish girl, goes to the movies with his newlywed to see The Perfect Storm!

Lo and behold, there’s Diane Lane!!! Hmmmm, there’s wrinkles in her face, and sometimes she looks a lil bit scrawny, but otherwise she don’t look bad… not bad at all. Sure, for some reason she knocks her fiancé Bobby, played by Mark Wahlberg, a blue one during banging time, and MFBB just hates female to male violence (for good measure, vice versa too, absolutely, but a man who gets brushed off by a woman, that’s so… uh… my mind has trouble coping with that, you know… OK, I'm disturbed. I admit). I include the movie poster in German: “Der Sturm” means just “The Storm”, for some reason the perfectionist Germans decided to dispense with the prefix “perfect”. Notice, to the left, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Have you got that too, every once in awhile wondering whatever happened to this or that promising actor/actress?

Anyway, The Perfect Storm, despite the prominent presence of George F*cking Looney, was very good imho. But the curious thing was that I did not remember it just for the real good story, but for Diane Lane as well, who had unexpectedly reappeared on my radar. The still to the right shows her listening to a fisherwoman’s tale as the boat her fiancé is on – the “Andrea Gail” – forever leaves the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, forward to its inevitable rendezvous with a killer storm.

And recently my wife forced me to watch Must Love Dogs (2005), a Gary Goldberg vehicle about divorced fortysomethings in search of Mr. and/or Mrs. Right. Lane is Sarah Nolan, a preschool teacher whose family does the googling for her. John Cusack is Jake, a sailing aficionado who gets a helping hand from his lawyer. Yawn, but did Lane look goooooooooood!!! More wrinkles than in The Storm, but golly, you'd almost think it's that what makes her sexy! Or else it's the discrete décolletés? Yeah, that'll be it. A good advice from Outlaw ladies: if there's anyone among you on a Seduce and Destroy Mission right now, watch Must Love Dogs. Men Love Décolletés ya know. I'll even go deep... uh, further. DON'T make it sumpin you could park a Humvee in. But offer a tantalizing eyeful and when you see the chap on the other side of the candlelight is getting lost in transpiration assume an attitude as if the subject you're talking about is as far from sex as Ted Kennedy from Mental Sanity. Bingo, you got the bloke in your pocket, a guarantee from MFBB. OK, in the pic to the left Diane has taken that eyeful a bit to the extreme, but you get the picture. I certainly did.

We conclude this series with a final photo of Ms. Lane, who truly understands the art of looking sexey without looking like Spears Britney. Btw, the last two photos come from Ex-Donkey Blog, run by Gary, ex-Democrat who hails from somewhere in New England. Actually, it's Gary's excellent Diane Lane Archives which got me to write this post! Go say howdy to the man!





Now WHO sez women can't round Cape Fearorty and still look DAMN attractive hmmmmmmmm?


MFBB.

YOU DON'T MESS WITH BOMBS OF 500LBS

The Beast is dead. Le Monde on the other hand is sorry:

"La mort d'Al-Zarkaoui, une "bonne nouvelle" qui ne résout rien."

In English: "The death of al-Zarqawi, a "good news" which will solve nothing."

But then, I guess Le Monde is written for those famous Fwench youths. Also nice, Hamas' reaction:

...but in a statement faxed to Reuters after Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air strike north of Baghdad on Wednesday,it said it mourned the Jordanian-born insurgent as a "martyr of the (Muslim Arab) nation". "With hearts full of faith, Hamas commends brother-fighter Abu Musab ... who was martyred at the hands of the savage crusade campaign which targets the Arab homeland, starting in Iraq..."

I don't know if Zarkman was a martyr of the muslim arab nation, but what I do know is that he martyred a lot of arabs in the muslim nation: on August 29, 2003 some 100 in Najaf, including Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr Hakim, on March 2, 2004 some 180 plus in coordinated attacks on Shia mosques during the Ashura ceremonies, on September 14, 2004 47 police recruits in Baghdad, on December 19, 2004, some 60 in Najaf and Karbala, using car bombs, on November 9, 2005, another 60 in his own homeland, Jordan, etc. etc. etc.

In short, a nice brother-fighter. Somebody learn those Hamas nutters the meaning of the word irony. Btw, keep those EU checks coming.


MFBB.

UPDATE:

Zarqawi lived briefly for some ten minutes after the strike, was put on a stretcher, and tried to get off it when he realized he was surrounded by US personnel, says Major-General Bill Caldwell:

"He was conscious initially, according to the U.S. forces that physically saw him," Caldwell told Fox. "He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realizing it was U.S. military."

Heh heh. Sweet.

TRIBUTE TO A FALLEN MARINE

This tribute is for Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, from El Paso, Texas, who was 20 at the time of his death in Haditha, Iraq. He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, the 1st Marine Regiment (3/1), of the 1st Marine Division. A brave and inspiring trooper who distinguished himself in Fallujah, Terrazas was killed in action on November 19, 2005, while conducting combat operations in Haditha, in Iraq's al-Anbar province.

Rest in peace, Lance Corporal Terrazas. You will not be forgotten.

Semper Fidelis.


MFBB.

6 JUNE 1944 - D-DAY.

On June 6, 1944, 156,000 American, British and Canadian troops landed on the shores of Normandy in an attempt to wrest control of Western Europe from the Nazis, who occupied it since early summer 1940. From west to east there were five landing sectors, designated Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword, of which the first two were assigned to American forces and the other three to British and Canadian forces, although small contingents from many countries also took part in the operation. Opposing them was the German Seventh Army, which provided the infantry backbone for the redoubtable beach fortifications known as the Atlantikwall. The Omaha sector, or Omaha Beach, as it is better known, by far proved to be the toughest theater of the day. Troops from the famous US 1st Infantry Division (the Big Red One) and the untested US 29th Infantry Division (Blue and Gray), as well as a couple of Ranger battalions, were tasked with establishing a bridgehead on Omaha, and as fate would have it, it was here that they were not only faced with very strong coastal defences but also with a fearsome adversary in the form of the German 352nd Infantry Division.

The men in those landing craft which made it ashore and had the misfortune to land opposite machinegun nests were wiped out. Those who landed between forts found themselves pinned down on the beach in the middle of minefields. Preparatory bomb runs meant to neutralize or at least soften up the defenses had curiously achieved nothing. "War is Hell", as Sherman put it, and hell it was certainly on that grim day in June. Little by little small teams, using Bangalore torpedoes to carve a way through the minefields, were able to advance towards the bunkers, which were then neutralized in heavy hand-to-hand fighting with ample use of flamethrowers and grenades. At the end of the day, Omaha Beach was American territory. But at what a cost! More than 3,000 casualties (some sources say 3,881), of which officially 1,000 were KIA. Omaha proved to be the toughest landing ground. Overall casualties on all five beaches were some 10,000, of which roughly 2,500 were killed. The losses were heavy... but the allies were ashore, and although the Germans would not acknowledge it and keep on fighting for eleven long months more, June 6, 1944, was the irreversible point of no return towards their destruction. Had they been able to throw the invaders back into the sea, they might have been able to stall the Russian summer offensive and consolidate a position in Continental Europe so unbelievably strong that the Allied will to break the Nazi power might have faltered. They might have accepted the status quo, and not have dared to risk the A-bomb on Germany itself for fear of reprisals against the occupied countries.

Instead... the landing succeeded.

Reading about the sacrifices makes me numb and pensive. I am not a war junkie and I am always very reluctant to use the word "glory" in an Omaha-like context. But for some reason I keep reading stories like the ones about Omaha beach. The least noble reason I can think of is that I feel a certain fascination for these times when a life meant nothing - I have always wondered how the knowledge that every minute can be your last affects the human being.

The noblest reason I can think of is that we have an obligation to not forget the sacrifices of men who gave life and limb so that others could be free. Shelving their stories and forgetting those who gave all means burying them a second time. Reading their stories brings once again back their forgotten names, which in a way, is a meager, but nevertheless substantial substitute for lives tragically cut short.

Remember those heroes.


MFBB.

HOARY JOKE OF THE WEEKEND (TOLD YOU THEY WERE DUMB)

Last weekend, June 3, 4 and 5, the French Trotskyists held their yearly family gathering in Presles, north of Paris, and the fantastic crew of NoPasaran! managed to sneak in, UBooting as you have never seen!!!

"Karl Marx Tent"? "Women's Liberation Lane"? "Political Town"? "European Workers Lane"? "Toilets"? Yes, that's right. I must be at the annual celebration of Lutte Ouvrière, France's Marxist-Trotskyist party aka Workers' Struggle.

Oh and, attention! We're talking here about the French Trotskyists, NOT the French Communists!!! Although, of course, in the end it all boils down to semantics (and a similar body count numbering in the millions....)

If you visit NoPasaran! regularly, you will know that one of the posters there is a certain Erik Svane, who is actually a Danish-American freelance journalist who also seems to be eking out a living as an actor. Erik and his pal mingled among the Guevara-T-shirt-clad loons, with Erik wearing this shirt, and apparently nobody noticed who was really on Erik's chest!!!



But the best is yet to come! Lutte Ouvrière's strongwoman and perennial candidate for the French presidency, Arlette Laguiller, was naturally also at the gathering. Miss Laguiller, on the barricades ever since France's war in Algeria (which she of course opposed) really started to put a mark on French politics in 1974, when she became the leader of that year bank workers' strike which began with actions of employees at Crédit Lyonnais. All her political life she was an ardent adversary of capitalist mechanisms and the free market, and she is also an accomplished writer who produced a.o. the following masterpieces:

* "Moi, une militante" (I, a militant, 1973)
* "Une travailleuse révolutionnaire dans la campagne présidentielle" (A female worker in the presidential campaign, 1974)
* "Il faut changer le monde" (The world has to be changed, 1988)
* "Paroles de prolétaires" (Words of Proletarians, 1999)
* "Mon communisme" (My communism, 2002)

ROFL!!! I don't know how he did it, probably she was momentarily stunned by the good looks of our Nordic warrior, but that evil Erik Svane managed to get on the same photo with Laguiller, the French Trotskyites' candidate for the 2007 Presidential elections, with his Reagan T-shirt on AND holding his latest book in his hand!!! It's "La Bannière Etalée", in which he points out, like Revel did, that French anti-Americanism really has much deeper grounds than occasional loathing for a Republican US President.



I don't want to downplay Erik's writing qualities, but maybe he should get Madame Laguiller another book.


MFBB.

MEMORIAL DAY

Fellow blogger Luc Van Braekel lives in Waregem, where there is a "small" American cemetery. It's called "Flanders Field" and contains 368 graves, all from US Army and Army Air Corps personnel. In the middle of the cemetery stands a memorial with a small chapel inside (credit photo: Luc Van Braekel). Luc has a sober yet informative post here, where he describes, a.o., how a flight of four F-15E's flew over Waregem yesterday in "Missing Man formation" to commemmorate the fallen. Among those who attended the ceremony were US Ambassador to Belgium Tom Korologos (who assisted L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq for some time), Lt. Gen. Edward Hanlon jr., US representative to NATO in Brussels, federal minister Renaat Landuyt and Supreme Court judge Erik De Rijcke. One year ago Luc had a post on Memorial Day too, and from that post I'm borrowing the following poem, since I think it is as beautiful as it is thought-provoking. It was written in 1937, the year when the memorial on the photo was inaugurated, by a Cpt. Archibald MacLeish, who was a famous poet in the tradition of the Great War Poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and John McCrae, and, being a man of literature, quite fittingly made it Librarian of Congress. MacLeish's poem is a tribute to his brother, Kenneth MacLeish, a US Army Air Corps pilot who was shot down and killed by German gunfire in 1918 near the coastal town of Nieuwpoort. The title of the poem is "Memorial Rain". The following is but a small quote:

MEMORIAL RAIN

Ambassador Puser the ambassador
Reminds himself in French, felicitous tongue,
What these (young men no longer) lie here for
In rows that once, and somewhere else, were young...

All night in Brussels the wind had tugged at my door;
I had heard the wind at my door and the trees strung
Taut, and to me who had never been before
In that country it was a strange wind, blowing
Steadily, stiffening the walls, the floor,
The roof of my room. I had not slept for knowing
He too, dead, was a stranger in that land
And felt beneath the earth in the wind's flowing
A tightening of roots and would not understand,
Remembering lake winds in Illinois,
That Strange wind. I had felt his bones in the sand
Listening [....]

In the gripe rain
The wind coiled glistening, darted fled,
Dragging its heavy body: at Waereghem
The wind coiled in the grass above his head:
Waiting - listening...

God damn us if we ever forget.


MFBB.

A TEXT FORBIDDEN AND CARTOONS ALLOWED PLUS OTHER STORIES.

GIVE US WEAPONS.

From the desk of Paul Belien

(Friday, 21 April 2006)

On the videofootage you see them standing like predators alongside the wall at Brussels Central Station, scrutinizing the passersby for an easy prey they can finish off. Joe Van Holsbeeck turned out to be the victim, but it could just as well have been (fill in your own name here), or (the name of your children). He who has the misfortune to be selected, stands no chance. The predators have teeth and claws. The predators have knives. As children, they have learned at the yearly sacrificial feast how to cut the throat of warmblooded animals. We get sick when we see blood, but they don't. They are trained, they are armed. We cannot even possess pepperspray. They have butchery knives and know how to use them. We are the herd-animals, they are the beasts of prey. The herd-animals themselves have allowed the beasts of prey in their biotope. Our political, spiritual and intellectual herdsmen have led us to believe that this would be an enrichment for our society. Indeed, by allowing predators among herd-animals our herdsmen would be able to realize the heavenly Utopia on earth, the multicultural welfare state wherein, as the Bible says, the lion would peacefully lie down alongside the lamb. That is why we have cherished the vipers on our chest, trusting that if we would nurture them peacefully, they would not bite us, grateful for the milk that we would serve for free. But they interpreted our kindness as weakness. The scoundrels, who have gotten everything in our society: free education, child allowances, social security, murder today our children for an mp3-player.

According to Cardinal Danneels this is our fault, because we are indifferent, because in a Western, materialistic society an mp3-player is worth more than a human life. When Joe Van Holsbeeck was murdered and again: we are all Joes, because it could have happened to all of us, no one from the thousands of commuters, the herd-animals passing daily through Central Station, intervened to protect Joe, thus the flaming indictment of our herd-cardinal. That is why he thinks we are indifferent. We are indeed indifferent, but for another reason than Danneels, this false shepherd, this grave-digger of Catholic Flanders, thinks. Our indifference is apparent from the fact that for so many years already we keep submitting to the yoke of the criminal predators and the brainwashing of their accomplices, our political, intellectual and spiritual false shepherds. It is time that we lay down our indifference, that we kick the predators out and choose other shepherds. When suicide terrorists commit an attack in Israel, the Israelis take on their parents. With bulldozers they flatten the houses of their families.

Maybe our indifference is most characterized by the fact that we let the parents of the underage, murdering criminals alone, that we continue to let them benefit from our social security, that we do not destroy their houses and do not deport them as a punishment for the criminal offspring they have planted in our midst. Probably our indifference appears from the fact that the "xenophobic" Vlaams Belang gets only a quarter of Flemish votes and not 75 per cent, because this means that only one in four Flemings wants to stop the predators lurking around the Flemish herd, while three quarters remains indifferent. Most certainly our indifference appears from the fact that we allow ourselves to be led like a patient herd towards the slaughtering-table, while after Joes murder and the scandalous sermon of our shepherd we neither stormed the Central Station, nor Danneels' Palace. We stay honest and indifferent. For 17-year old Joe is not the first victim. Towards the end of January, in the Heyvaertstraat in Molenbeek a 16-year old black boy was stabbed down. Five Moroccans let him bleed to death because he refused to pay them 30 euros for a cell phone these predators had earlier stolen elsewhere. The murderers were never arrested, they walk freely through Brussels, just like the killer of Patrick Mombaerts. Shepherd Danneels did not open his mouth for this black boy, he has not preached against the "indifference" of the authorities who do not even search for these murderers, nor has he preached against the town council of Molenbeek which for days neglected to clean up the huge dried-up bloodstain in the Heyvaertstraat. What is a life worth (and certainly the life of a black boy killed by Moroccans) in the multicultural Utopia of Guy Verhofstadt and Godfried Danneels, where the lambs who object to lions lying down near them, are scolded for racists? Not we are indifferent. The authorities are, and the police, the government and the church. What we see today is betrayal of the people by state and church. Once Wilfried Martens shouted: "Give us weapons!" In a democratic state the government must protect the citizens against the predators. If the state cannot or will not carry out this function, the citizens have the right to arm themselves. He who goes to Brussels without pepperspray is a fool. He who counts on politicians for his protection is as good as dead.

The above text, written by Paul Belien, appeared on The Brussels Journal's website on April 21, 2006, at which time it was still unknown that the perpetrators of the murder of Joe Van Holsbeeck were not Moroccans, but Poles. You can agree or disagree with Mr. Belien, but fact is that there have been a number of gruesome killings by Moroccan teenagers, that "small" criminality among Moroccan youth is rampant and that in the immediate aftermath of the killing Mr. Belien apparently reacted in a very emotional (and for him unusual) tone. Personally, I think that his column risks to stigmatise the whole Moroccan community, which still counts, I assume, a solid number of decent individuals. That said, I do think Moroccan parents need to show (much) more responsibility in raising their (male) offspring. Too many criminal young brats roam the streets at night unchecked, where they do no good, to use an understated understatement.


Two weeks ago, the CEOOR, the Belgian Government's Thought Police, sometimes referred to as Center for Equal Opportunities and Oppositon to Racism, and led by Lavrenti Beria lookalike Jozef De Witte, demanded Mr. Belien remove the article in question from The Brussels Journal. If you click on this link, you will see the header "Artikel verwijderd" - Article removed - with a brief explanation from the hand of Mr. Belien. It appears the CEOOR threatened to prosecute Mr. Belien on the basis of article 1 paragraph 3 of the Anti-Racism Law of 30 July 1981, "inciting hatred against a group on grounds of nationality or ethnicity".

Thus Mr. Belien, married and having five children to feed, complied; and he requests the readers of TBJ not to quote or reprint his column, "so as not to infringe on his author's rights and not to expose themselves too to prosecution by the CEOOR."

Outlaw Mike, declared an outlaw by the Belgian State in 2004, has chosen not to heed his call and give the Downeast readership a sample of the (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) state Belgium has become. If Beliens writings are outlawed only the outlawed can publish Beliens writings.


For good measure, I will now include two cartoons which appeared this spring on the website of the Antwerp-based AEL, or Arab European League, a radical muslim youth movement led by former (?) Hezbollah terrorist Dyab Abu Jahjah, a Lebanese extremist who was able to enter Belgium in the nineties through a phoney marriage with a poor sod of a girl from Bruges, Peggy Paternoster. While the Club of Lunatics currently in charge of the USSB is in a permanent delirium about how wonderful multicutlural diversity is, Mr. Jahjah holds a slightly different view. Among other things he is of the opinion that assimilation is "cultural rape". Also, he would like Arabic to become the fourth official language of Belgium. But I'm digressing here; the cartoons shown below are a (belated) reaction of the AEL to those lame Danish watercolors, you'll remember. Enjoy 'em:



Reaction from Jozef De Witte and his GEDAPO CEOOR:


(...f-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-r-t-t-t...)


You get the picture. It's a wonderful world over here in the Ole Europe. Oh, and btw, did you know that Hugo Chavez visited Londonistan? He was hosted a lunch by the socialist Londonistan mayor Ken Livingstone, you know, the fella who asked Jewish reporter Oliver Feingold whether he was a German war criminal or a concentration camp guard, and who thinks Bush is "the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties". Cut Red Ken some slack here people: I bet that when he accused Chimpy McBushHitler of corruption, Hugo hadn't informed him yet about the escapades of his compadre Lula's government, back in Brazil. Uh, Lula leads a socialist government, but that must be a koinsidens. While I am at it, Mr. Livingstoned also thinks that the Communist dictator Mao Zedong's bloody regime was justified because it ended the ancient Chinese practice of binding women's feet. Mao Zedong, you remember, was the chap who killed 70 million of his subordinates and wretched the lives of, duh, 600 (?), 700 (?) million more. Oh man, I'm digressing again. Where was I? Right, Hugo in London. Hugo and Ken got on very well together!!! Hugo may not know about Mao yet, but it seems he knows that much more about Bush's dirty laundry list, hmmmmmmm? Why, he called for your genocidal president to be imprisoned. Also, he thinks you should not worry too much about 9/11, since "the twin towers of the World Trade Center consumed more energy than do some entire countries in Africa", dixit the Venezuelan President. I suppose he means the ones with a socialist government. Btw, did you know that the Spanish Socialist Party, the PSOE, just recently introduced a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of simian apes in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings." The PSOE's justification is that humans share 98.4% of their genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

Actually, the Spanish Socialists aren't that dumb you know. Consider it a strategic move to counter the catastrophic demographic evolution in Spain, where the spermatozoid falls mainly in the abysmalvoid. After granting chimpanzees, gorillas et al human rights, why not grant 'em voting rights and make them full citizens of Espana to neutralize the senoritas' somewhat off-kilter fertility rate of 1.1 kiddie per lifetime? Actually, when I look at some members of Zapaterlains gumint, to say nothing of Bambi himself, I wonder whether those sneaky bastards aren't trying to get their bill passed post factum.



This is MFBB reporting for DowneastBlog in Europe, the biggest Open Air Funny Farm in the Vhurld. Only the lunatics are in charge and the sane ones get locked up.



MFBB.


P.S.: credits for the photos: the one of Mr. Belien as well as the one of Jozef De Witte is from Luc Van Braekel's website, LVB.net. Luc is, as you may know, TBJ's webmaster. By coincidence he has a post right now about the CEOOR and its latest campaign, "Dirty Hetero". The pic with the gorilla and the bonobo in front of The Tower Bridge I got via LGF, and the Zapatero photo below is from Barcepundit.

THE INQUISITION AND PAUL BELIEN.

Brussels Central Station is, as its name implies, a busy node in Belgium’s railway network. On working days, some 140,000 plus government employees, businessmen, EU cadres, tourists et al pass through its Central Hall, and at any given time there’s easily hundreds of people present. On April 12, 2006 one of them was 17-year old Joe Van Holsbeeck, who, together with a friend and while listening to his mp3-player, was waiting for a girlfriend. At some point two young males approached them. After some chit-chat one of them grabbed Joe’s mp3-player, which Joe instantly tried to take back. Thereupon the thief suddenly pulled out a knife and violently stabbed the young man five times, after which he and his accomplice disappeared in the crowd. Young Joe Van Holsbeeck, who received one stab just near the heart, died at 21.00h in the Saint-Peter Hospital. Even though I feel that highlighting this murder is necessary in order to explain some of what is going on in Belgium, I can't get rid myself of the feeling that I am not honoring Joe's remembrance in the appropriate way. Forgive me for that.

Vicious crimes like that are – luckily – still relatively rare in Belgium. But theft, robbery, rape, damaging property, carjacking, steaming, you name it, is rampant. Unfortunately, the majority of these crimes are committed by young North African second- or third-generation immigrants. In Belgium, that means Moroccan youths. It should come as no surprise then that around 60% of inmates in Belgian prisons are not from native Belgian origin, the majority of them from the so-called Maghreb countries - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. In order to keep the multicultural dream alive, Belgian MSM tries very hard to shuffle this unpleasant reality under the carpet, and if any ethnicity of the perpetators does come out, there’s always a heir of psychologists and university profs at the ready to be interviewed to explain that the main cause of the higher criminality rates is “kansarmoede” – literally “chance poverty", or lack of possibilities [to succeed in our society]. Personally, I would certainly not dismiss the race factor, and I even think that latent racism in Europe is (much) bigger than in the States.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that in my opinion, the root cause for social exclusion among young North Africans lies in their own culture. While a lot can be said about European racism vs (especially) muslim immigrants, the topic of the very real reciproke racism is taboo. Young arab males in, say, Amsterdam, consider themselves some kind of Herrenvolk vis-à-vis the native youths, whom they regard not only as kafirs, but also as weak and decadent. And while a lot can be said about a lack of job opportunities for immigrants, why is it that mentioning the lack of work ethics among immigrants is not done? Listen, it is an established fact that tax controllers in Brussels are threatened when they put their nose too deep in the books of (bleep) shops. It is a sorry truth that the notorious VAT carrousels are most often found in (bleep) businesses. Hey, I meet employers who complain about shaky absent minded workers of (bleep) ethnicity during Ramadan. I am very sorry, but I MUST mention that the value of a handshake to seal a deal means jack shit in (bleep) communities. Likewise, it IS true that appointments are not kept and bills not paid the way they should when Belgians do commerce with certain (bleep) nationalities. I DO regret to mention, but I feel I MUST, that teachers in schools with a lot of adolescents of (bleep) origin, burn out in a couple of years. And so on and so on and so on, ad nauseum. I hear and see too much to not suspect some real Big Kernel of Truth in certain allegations. I wish it were different, I truly do. But I have to conclude it is not. Period.

To cut a long story short, when the news of Joe Van Holsbeeck's murder broke, the ethnicity of the perpetrators was not only on everyone's lips, this view was initially enhanced by a number of factors: Joe's friend thought they were North Africans; everyone who had witnessed the murder thought they were North Africans; the grainy video images released one week later showed young males apparently of North African complexity; the office of the Brussels public prosecutor accused two North Africans etc. etc. etc. Even the muslim community itself assumed they were, which says a lot about how they view themselves.

This is when Paul Belien, The Brussels Journal Chief Editor, wrote an op-ed on his site, which was subsequently copied and printed in several leading Belgian newspapers. Those of you familiar with Mr. Beliens work know that his writings are sober, well thought-out and easily readable. They also put Mr. Belien firmly in the conservative camp, something quite inappropriate in "Old" Europe and also the reason why he is not on the payroll of any of Belgium's newspapers and/or magazines. He is, after all, that fascist from the Wall Street Journal, you know. It also doesn't help that Mr. Belien is the only Belgian journalist to have acquired name and reputation on yonder side of the Atlantic, and it certainly doesn't help either that he is married, has five (yes, FIVE) children and - the horror - has the audacity to call himself a Christian.

Mr. Beliens op-ed was titled "Gives us weapons" and for once, presumably because of the gruesome murder, unusually emotional. The Belgian Thought Police has now forced him to remove it, but MFBB has the key excerpts for you:

... The predators have teeth and claws. The predators have knives. As children, they have learned at the yearly sacrificial feast how to cut the throat of warmblooded animals. We get sick when we see blood, but they don't. They are trained, they are armed. [...] We are the herd-animals, they are the beasts of prey. The herd-animals themselves have allowed the beasts of prey in their biotope. [...] Maybe our indifference is most characterized by the fact that we let the parents of the underage, murdering criminals alone, that we continue to let them benefit from our social security, that we do not destroy their houses and do not deport them as a punishment for the criminal offspring they have planted in our midst.... It is [also] the authorities, the police, the government, the church which is indifferent... [...] In a democratic state the government must protect the citizens against the predators. If the state cannot or will not carry out this function, the citizens have the right to arm themselves. Whe who goes to Brussels without pepperspray is a fool. [...] He who counts on politics for his protection is as good as dead.

I have decided to post as many excerpts from Mr. Beliens column as I could still gather left and right, with the inevitable result that I dishonour the author's flowing prose. A collection like above sounds somewhat like a rambling hatefest, but I can assure you that in its complete original form it was a powerful piece of prose. Now, those of you familiar with Mr. Beliens work will conclude that it was a very emotional post, and if you are unaware of certain aspects of Belgium's wonderfully multicultural diversity you may think it's on the brink of a hatefest. But keep in mind that at the time it was written the author was still assuming - like everyone else - that the perpetrators were North Africans and that the majority of crimes in Belgium is committed by people from that community - it's a naked fact.


But there is more. See e.g. how he emphasizes the muslim religious ritual of slaughtering "warm blooded animals" - sheep. Well, I don't know if you got these chaps in the States too, but over here we have this outfit which calls itself GAIA and which is an organization coming up for animal's rights. Now hold it, you can be absolutely sure the guys and gals flocking to such organizations stand a much better chance to belong to the Lefto Fruitcake Department than to appear on The Weekly Standard's subscription list. And I would rate chances that they are Bush aficionados about as likely as McCain becoming POTUS in 2008. But when it comes to stop unnecessary suffering of animals, I'm quite sympathetic. I'm not a vegetarian - guess I'll never be, since nature obviously mades us omnivores and I'm not contemplating to go against that. But I fully agree that when animals have to be slaughtered for human consumption, precautions should be taken that they die without suffering.

Well, guess what? On January 10, 2006 GAIA demonstrated in front of the office of the Muslim Executive, the organization supposed to perform a liasion function between the Belgian government and the Muslim community here. A club of jolly good fellows, btw. The reason? Every year the Muslim slaughterfest turns out to be a horrific bloodbath. Belgian law forbids illegal slaughtering, and every year provides for several large-scale facilities where muslims can legally cut sheep throats. Belgian natives breaking the law face severe penalties. Not so the Belgian Muslim community however: the notorious Brussels Parti Socialiste bigshot Emir Kir estimates that only one in ten of the sheep slaughtered during Ramadan meet their end in one of the fancy Belgian State compounds. Oh, and Belgian law dictates too that the animals have to be anaesthetized - too bad for our foor-footed friends when they meet their ends at the hands of true fidels. Likewise, Belgian law forbids that the sheep's paws are tied. Funny, I read about a GAIA guy who witnessed the arrival of a bunch of paw-tied wool suppliers in Ronse, objected to it and was threatened physically. Yeeeeeeeaaaaah, tell me all about it.

Where was I? Oh yeah, GAIA protesting in front of the Muslim Executive's HQ. It was a nice show, see pic. Several of the placards read: "Muslim Executive, Respect The law". On others was written: "Illegal slaughterings - the Muslim Executive is responsible". Reaction of the Muslim Executive: the week later they sued GAIA for "inciting to racial hatred and religious uproar". Now is it just me or are there elsewhere people who have noticed that when muslims in western countries are demanded they respect the laws and customs of the country involved, increasingly turn to using that country's legal apparatus to silence the objectors?

Are you still following? Amazing. So, Mr. Belien was apparently very pissed off by yet another perceived act of criminality from the (bleep) corner and blew off some steam via his keyboard. The way I see it, what really pissed of the PC crowd over here, is that he dared to say that if the state cannot protect its citizens, they have the right to defend themselves. In EUtopia, where the State officially replaces God that is BLASPHEMY!!!

Shocker, one week later.

The perps were not North Africans.

They were Poles.

Stormclouds gathering over Paul Belien. Oh yes, over that evil collection of Vlaams Belang Nazi stormtroopers too, but we'll come to that later.

Yet another shocker.

On May 11, almost exactly one month after the gruseome Joe Van Holsbeeck killing, 18-year old Hans Van Themsche shaved his head bald, bought a gun, ventured on Antwerps streets, shot and gravely injured a woman of Turkish descent and killed a two-year old white toddler and her 24-year old nanny from Mali. It was a horrible crime which shocked the entire country. Very soon the press found out that Hans Van Themsche's father helped fund the Vlaams Blok and that he had an aunt who is an MP for the Vlaams Blok's successor, the Vlaams Belang. And all hell broke loose. It did not help that the perpetrator himself was not a member and did not even attend VB meetings. The Vlaams Belang was the culprit and the origin of a climate of hate which made young men like Van Themsche act against foreigners in such callous ways.

There is a lot to be told about this story and I will try to elaborate on it later, but one thing at a time. Suffice to say that right now the Vlaams Belang is under attack from all directions, and the authorities have finally found a big stick to clobber it to death. Last Friday, the Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht even went as far as to say that those who voted for Vlaams Belang bear responsibility too for the murder in Antwerp. Personally, despite the fact that the madman shot a white baby too, I would indeed describe the crime as a racist act. Is the VB responsible? In my opinion, no. The party's discourse is polite. To claim that it calls for murdering foreigners, as many in Belgium now do, is insane. What it does do, is point to really grave problems caused by immigrants and denounce that nothing is done about it. But are racists inside the VB responsible? I would answer that a "possible" or "yes". Remember, I have never denied that the VB has murky origins. Even though I would describe the party today as "clean" and its leadership as decent I will not be so foolish as to claim that there are no white supremacists with evil views. Young Hans van Themsche may have been influenced by these people. But I will never, NEVER accept that the party itself is responsible, and intend to provide solid proof on this blog that their discourse does NOT exhort to violence against foreigners.

But back to Paul Belien. How the VB is now beleagured from all sides would be a bridge too far within the context of this post, how Mr. Belien is prosecuted may just seem doable yet at the end of a long story. As I wrote earlier, Mr. Belien has been forced to remove his post, see quotes above, from The Brussels Journal. A number of good posts circulate in te blogosphere about this scandalous event, amongst others one from fellow Belgian blogger Maarten Schenk over at Live from Brussels, but a real good short and telling one can be found at the excellent French blog No Pasaran:

Paul Belien, social and polical commentator and blogger is being attacked for his opinions and analysis. Today Father Johan Leman, a Catholic priest of the Order of Saint Dominic (the inquisition order) and a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, has joined the chorus. Father Leman is the previous president of the CEOOR (Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism), the inquisition center of the Belgian government. In today’s news broadcast on the national radio he says that the CEOOR has been negligent because it has not already started prosecutions against me.

Mr. Belien is being threatened with prosecution under the law for supposedly being part of a neo-con conspiracy, led by Daniel Pipes (whom until then he had no contact with) and the Danish journalist Flemming Rose who became known for publishing the Muhammad cartoons. They are accused of wanting “to anger radical but also moderate Muslims into violent action.”

In short non-conformity is attracting what amounts to offending the thought police. It is Cuba with crappy weather along with a priest - a sort of liberation theology type - who has no problem taking orders from a rather more earthly accomodation to human failings rather than taking wrong to be wrong, and right to be right. All drawn through a non-moral process motivated entirely by turning the other cheek, without it ever becoming an example of resolution or an demonstration of grace. The don't want to reason with anyone - they want him in the dock for not thinking like they do.

In other words, the law is being used to silence speech, and to promote the narrowing of the parameters of discussion as it relates to any notion the left backs.

In 1567, Philip II, son of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, who was a zealous prosecutor of Protestants, sent the notorious Duke of Alva into the Netherlands at the head of a 10,000 strong army, with unlimited powers for the extirpation of heretics. Upon arrival he instantly erected a tribunal which soon became known to its victims as the Blood Council, to try all persons deemed as such. During the six years of his reign, between 6,000 and 18,000 people were executed for the mere fact of dissenting with his Uebercatholic Majesty Philip II. Alva imprisoned the counts Egmont and Hoorn, the two popular leaders of the dissatisfied Dutch nobles, and had them decapitated even though they were opposed to the Protestants.

450 years later, we have luckily not yet returned to the point where those who dare to oppose the True Faith are beheaded - if you exclude certain theaters in the Middle East and the occasional slaughtering of Dutch dissenters. But it is certain we are already down a very slippery road to such an extent that those who dare to contradict the dogmas of the Politically Correct cabals are silenced. Today, a man is forced to remove his opinion under threat of prosecution so that others cannot take notice of it anymore. Think about that opinion and its wording what you want, but the author does have points. Is it too premature to assume that in 10 years, one gets imprisoned for the same facts? And is it too premature to assume that when Europe will indeed have become Eurabia - God forbid - that person will be brought to death?

Given the fact that even church authorities in Europe are now pandering to the demands of islam, and an overwhelmingly leftist establishment almost happy to fulfill the dhimmi role, one can only hope that the West's only strategic game to avert the global danger of militant islam - the US led enterprise to install democracy by force in the muslim world - will succeed. Don't count on the UN. Much less the EU. Count on the GI.


MFBB.

HAPPY ARMED FORCES DAY!!!

To everybody who is serving, or has served, in whatever branch of the US Armed Forces, be it Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force or God knows what: thank you, and congratulations with your outstanding accomplishments! I sleep better because I know you are out there.




Your sacrifices are not in vain, nor will they be forgotten. God bless America.


MFBB

PRELUDE

Some background and some facts.

Belgium will have municipal elections in October 2006. All through fall 2005 and spring 2006, polls showed a consistent surge in the support for the Vlaams Belang, Flanders (and Belgium’s) biggest party. Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), founded in 1977 as Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc), is only kept from power through a colourful but increasingly ineffective hodgepodge coalition of all other parties, a shaky construction dubbed the cordon sanitaire. That does not mean that the VB is the sole opposition and all other parties are in government. It does mean, however, that government and opposition parties alike have agreed among each other never to cooperate with Vlaams Belang, this on the grounds that the VB is a racist, xenophobic and hatemongering party. The hidden, bigger truth is that the VB is to be kept from power because one of its goals is an independent Flanders – which is the real explanation why the most ardent adversaries of the VB are the Wallonian parties, especially the Parti Socialiste (statistically, every last one of Flanders 6 million inhabitants yearly pays some 2,000 EUR – roughly 2,200 US$ - to keep the Wallonian semi-communist state afloat) and, naturally, the Belgian royals – for obvious reasons! To explain why the VB is indigestible for the Flemish socialists is that it is pro-family, pro-life, anti-gay marriage, anti-gay adoption, anti-immigration AND that it has a relatively strong Catholic wing, counting a.o. party heavyweights like MP’s Gerolf Annemans and Irish born Alexandra Colen – the journalist Paul Belien's wife.

It is true, as I have said before on this blog, that the origins of the VB are murky. It saw the light in 1977 as a house of malcontents leaving another, now defunct Flemish nationalist party, the Volksunie (People's Union). One cannot deny that those were the streetfighting days, nor that Flemings sympathetic to Nazism found shelter in it. How did this come about? Within the Belgian federal framework, right up to this very day, Flemings have ALWAYS been second-rate citizens – even though rich Flanders, now with a GDP almost as big as Sweden’s – provides the real horsepower for the Belgian economy. Not without some justification, one might joke that the Flemings were/are Belgium’s Shiites, while the Walloons were/are Belgium’s Sunnis. The struggle for recognition of the rich culture of Flanders and its language, Flemish (which relates to Dutch like American English relates to British English) inside a francophone Belgique has been long and hard, and on two occasions important organizations of Flemish activists have, in vain hopes of getting from under the Wallonian yoke, sided with a party they should have avoided: the German invader, both in World War I and in World War II. In 1914-1918 the German occupier had his Flamenpolitik, promising a degree of Flemish independence and a.o. a Flemish University in Gent. In 1940-1944 the Germans went further and extracted apart from political cooperation military cooperation: enough Flemings were drafted to finally form a Waffen SS infantry division, the 27th Waffen Grenadier “Langemarck”. In both conflicts, opportunistic Flemish populists got themselves used for unsavoury purposes for a bait, Flemish self-rule, which all to soon proved illusory – the German yoke simply replaced the Wallonian, and it was much worse. The awakening after the armistices in 1918 and 1945 was hard, and left the country with a body of embittered Flemish nationalist outcasts.

In the seventies, such various groups of Flemish Eastern Front veterans – tough men who had seen the endless steppes and proudly worn the typical shoulder patches with the Flemish Lion on a Feldgrau sleeve, almost inevitably flocked to the new political formation promising once more glory for Flanders: the Vlaams Blok, as it was called then and until 2004, when the party was banned by Belgium's politically correct establishment and it quickly had to take another identity as the Vlaams Belang.

But whether they went to Russia to fight Bolshevism or not, whether they were proud Flemings or not, I am sorry to say that among these men were convinced Nazis too, and they left their mark on the young formation. They were not in a majority position, but they were unmistakably there. And so nazi rhetoric from time to time surfaced, as well as references to white supremacy and contempt if not hatred of other races. Needless to say, back in those days I would never have joined the VB. But as time went by and problems caused by immigration could no longer be ignored nor explained by native racism – in other words, those problems also had, and have, their origin in a deliberate refusal of (part of) the immigrant community to assimilate – the VB gained credibility. And while it was long really only a two-theme party – Flemish Independence and anti-immigration – it gradually acquired enough political maturity to have a say in other socio-economic matters. Figures of much greater intellectual and moral standing, sick and tired of the left’s self-deprecating discourse packed in woolly messages, gravitated to the party. At the turn of the millennium, the VB had in the eyes of many, certainly Joe Average in the street, gained sufficient decency and credibility to partake in Belgium’s political life. Which is why polls reveal time and again that the average Fleming, even though he keeps voting for other parties such as the VLD or the Christian Democratic CD & V, has no objection to VB co-governance in some federal or regional coalition. It’s the leaders of those and other parties, self-declared True Democrats, who stubbornly keep ignoring "the will of the people".

I have long been a member of the once center-right liberal party VLD, pro free market, but with a rather loose attitude on ethical matters. When in 2004 this party not really objected to granting non-Belgian citizens the right to vote in municipal elections I broke with it, and joined the VB - the vets here may remember that. In The Netherlands too, the Lunatic Left granted this right to people who do not even WANT to acquire Dutch citizenship, and the result is that the ever shrinking native Dutch populations in Hollands big cities – Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, now find themselves de facto under foreign rule. In Belgium, with 10.3 million people vs Hollands 16 million, we do not have such powerful concentrations in the cities yet – but the critical treshold is approaching and islands of Islamic self-rule, like Molenbeek, are an established fact. Everybody knows the tipping point is approaching – the Socialists know it, and actually they count on the immigrant vote to replace the lost votes of native working-class Belgians, their traditional electoral base, whose votes went either to the VB in Flanders or to the Front National in Wallonia. The VB knows it too, which makes it literally a race against time for the party to become strong enough to force the other parties to abandon the Cordon Sanitaire and weigh on decisionmaking, e.g. by reversing the municipal voting rights.



Not only has the VB profiled itself over the years as pro-family and pro-life – its ads frequently show families consisting of married moms and dads (wedding rings!) plus a few kids, it is also a strong proponent of a Flemish Leitkultur. Put simply, the VB is very hunky dory with immigrants preferring, say, couscous over Belgian fries at home – but the Flemish National Anthem, Vlaanderen de Leeuw, will always be sung in Flemish, NOT in Moroccan. This too, this flat rejection of multiculturalism, has earned the VB the hatred of not only the leftist parties and the centrist parties who have more or less submitted to the false mantra of multiculturalism, but also of the media, the unions, and the gazillion of socio-economic government-installed organizations meant to “reach out” to the poor oppressed categories of unwilling-to-learn-Flemish-even-though-living-here-for-forty-years immigrants.

To cut a long story short, for the truly overwhelmingly leftist Belgian political, cultural, and educational scene the Vlaams Belang is THE DEVIL INCARNATED. State-owned television regularly offers “enlightened” profs and various “intellectuals” forums to explain to the brave but oh-so-dumb Belgian why this party should be abolished. The written media have over the decades become leftist bulwarks to the extent that even business publications like the once renowned Financieel-Economische Tijd are now infested with anti-globalization aficionados and overripe May 68-ers.

It’s against this backdrop that you have to understand the mood among these groups as the prospects for yet another brilliant VB victory in the fall elections seemed excellent. In early April 2006, all parties other than the VB began to seriously feel the heat, and here and there mayors, fearing unworkable town and city councils, began to speak out against the cordon sanitaire, only to be rebuffed violently by their party chiefs. With mounting anger and frustration, the Belgian Prime Minister, Guy Verhofstadt, whose coalition of liberals and socialists accumulated scandals upon blunders took notice of the ever stronger showing of the VB in regular polls.

Then came, in mid-April 2006, the Joe Van Holsbeeck murder.



MFBB

STATE OF THE UNION.

Just a quick post. I'm sorry, but I just don't feel in the mood for an elaborate one.

a.) NORWAY:

Previous center-right government shoved aside. Now being run by an insane collection of Leftists, Greens and extreme leftists under PM Jens Stoltenberg. Openly anti-Israel, openly submitting to radical islam inside Norway itself.

b.) FRANCE:

Crumbling. Current government racked by scandals and impotence.

c.) THE NETHERLANDS:

Unbelievable, but turning even more to the left. Of course, this move is to a large extent explained by the immigrant votes, which go overwhelmingly to leftist parties. They just managed to chase Ayaan Hirsi Ali away, in September she comes your way. Islamist organisations and leftist parties are trumpeting this as a victory.

d.) SPAIN:

Socialist government trying to pass a bill that will give human rights to apes. On the brink of regularizing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. Fertility down to 1.1 child per woman.

e.) DENMARK:
Bastion of sanity. Unfortunately, Denmark is but a small country.

f.) ITALY:

Now under an (ex?) communist PM, Romano Prodi. Senate Chairman is a communist. President is an (ex?) communist.

g.) GERMANY:

Shaky center-right government. Delicate balance between socialists and centrist christian democrats.

h.) BELGIUM:

Now rapidly turning into a DDR-state. Currently a witch hunt against the Vlaams Belang party is in full swing. Serious attempts to cut off its finances, it is even considered by some parties to outlaw the party altogether. A gruseome double murder case by a skinhead is used in a grisly way to put the blame on the VB. I have never, NEVER before witnessed such a level of vile machiavellism. Not feeling sure for my safety myself.

i.) THE UK:

Tony Blair under great pressure even from within his own party. In the lcal elections the conservative party under new leader David Cameron scored quite well, but the guy is a closet greenie. If Blair quits next year, forget your ally. All over the UK, hundreds of AQ individuals and cells are waiting to come into action.


All over Europe, the alliance between the left and Islam becomes ever more clear. In my own country I am dumbstruck that high church officials have opened the churches to mainly muslim asylum seekers, who promptly turn the churches into mosques. Necessary reforms in Social Security to make the industry competitive again are thwarted by the all-powerful unions. Population aging dramatically, never before has fertility been so low. Faith has gone. Unassimilating muslim masses gaining control of the streets.

For God's sake, keep America strong. Don't let the left win. Support your president.

KEEP THE LEFT FROM POWER!



MFBB

I'm sorry, but the events in Europe as a whole and in my own country in particular are extremely depressing.