In the meantime, the Belgian wing of four F-16 fighter bombers operating from Kandahar Airfield is into its fifth month. Currently, the personnel manning the planes and the ground crews are drawn from the Kleine Brogel-based 10th Tactical Wing, a "Flemish" unit (the first shift was from a "Walloon" wing, the 2nd Tactical Wing). It's very, very hard to obtain hard information about the operational deployment of the F-16s. Contary to the 2006 operation, this time it's a fighting mission which means the planes are called in not only for reconnaissance and "scare" flights but also for CAS (Close Air Support). If necessary they can be embedded in an OEF mission.
One of our Herculeses resupplying the Kandahar detachment. Typically, a C-130 is uploaded and gone again in about 35 minutes, I suppose in order to avoid the attention of Taliban rocket attacks. These old workhorses from the 15th Transport Wing still perform extremely well and have seasoned and through and through experienced crews. While they will be around for some time yet, their successor has already been chosen, the Airbus A 400-M. As good as the good ole Herc is/was, this successor will represent a quantum leap in performance, what with e.g. a maximum payload of 37 tonnes (vs the 20 tonnes or so for our C-130 H's).
The photo shows a trooper working on an Iveco Light Multirole Vehicle (LMV), say a European variant of the Hummer. Belgium has ordered 440 of these Italian vehicles, with an option for a further 400. They replace the dangerously vulnerable Bombardier Iltis jeeps, with which a.o. the Canadians have had some nasty experiences. The LMV on the photo belongs to the small Kunduz detachment (including a demining squad), embedded with German troops in Afghanistan's north. Currently, Belgium has four commitmments in Afghanistan: the small 300-strong battalion guarding Kabul International Airport (a task it has been performing since 2002), the Kunduz detachment, the fighter bombers in Kandahar (the sole fighting mission) and, since mid-January, a team of instructors also in Afghanistan's north training an Afghan National Army (ANA) battalion. When the latter mission will be fully operational in mid-March, the total of Belgian military personnel in Afghanistan will be about 500. Still a far cry from the Dutch contingent, but finally, from a distance of about three kilometers, the Belgian contribution is starting to look like something halfway decent. It is ironic that, with finally our F-16's bombing and strafing Taliban positions and instructors patrolling alongside ANA soldiers in war zones, the US's new administration will likely scale down its efforts in Afghanistan (forget an AF "surge"). And elsewhere.
Over at The Brussels Journal, Takuan Seiyo is up to his seventh installment in the "From Meccania to Atlantis" series. As always, it is a must read. An exerpt:
It was a town of peaceful ethnic neighborhoods and eateries, and exotic, for America, churches like the Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral. It was charming, beautiful and diverse. But not “diverse.” San Francisco is “diverse” now. And this is what it means:
In Vertigo, the character Scottie Ferguson, played by James Stewart, is a police detective who once dreamed of becoming Chief of Police. A traumatic experience when dangling from a rooftop has ended that dream, and leads him into a hallucinatory adventure with a twice-dead blonde beauty, Madeleine/Judy, played by Kim Novak.
Flash forward 50 years. A lanky blue-eyed Scot from Pennsylvania, whose ancestors fought in the American Revolutionary War, as James Stewart’s did, has a lesser chance of becoming San Francisco’s Police Chief than he has becoming the chief ballerina of the SF Ballet. This is no hyperbole, what with the T in the ubiquitous GLBT.
Scottie in a 2009 Vertigo would not dare harbor such an audacity of hope as becoming Chief of Police. Just to be hired as policeman is difficult now if you are a white heterosexual male.
San Francisco’s actual Chief of Police now is an affirmative-action diminutive Chinese-American female from the accounting department who is the laughingstock of the police force. The rate of unresolved murder cases in San Francisco is so high that the city has tried, unsuccessfully, to solicit help by offering $100,000 rewards to people who would come forward with information.
At a loss, the city’s leaders elected what else but a transgender person, Theresa Sparks, as President of the San Francisco Police Commission. Mr./Ms. Sparks’ qualifications for the job consist in his/her managing a vibrator company which was recently running a special under the slogan, “August is Anal Sex Month; 15% off select Anal Toys.”
To bolster this team with some serious dose of law-enforcing testosterone, San Francisco got itself a female District Attorney who bestows additional glory on the city by being half Tamil-Indian and half-black. Kamala Davis Harris refuses to seek the death penalty for murder, which is the law of the land, plea-bargains murder cases, and fails to prosecute criminals arrested with firearms. San Francisco police officers take a dim view of this, what with their own being murdered by criminals that the District Attorney has failed to prosecute. But the need to keep their jobs muzzles their mouths.
Of late, Ms. Davis Harris has made the news due to her office’s failure to prosecute Edwin Ramos, a vicious Mara Salvatrucha gangbanger and illegal Honduran alien, who had been arrested on illegal gun possession charges, and then released instead of being at the least deported. One month later Mr. Ramos would be arrested for the murder of Tony Bologna, 48, and his sons, Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16. The murder weapon has since been linked to two other murders.
San Francisco’s metrosexual mayor is given to utterances like, “You know we're the only city -- I think we're the only big city in America ... there may be an exception or two ... that women are running the Police Department, Fire Department and our emergency services. That's why I feel so safe.”
In a town where reserved, well dressed men once wooed elegant, alluring women, in a society whose genders 45 years ago were still unmixed and whose cultural reference was still coherent, now weird hermaphrodites prance, proud penises parade, and penetrations of pumped-up poofters peek in public venues at perturbed families with children who just came for the baseball game or the Disney movie.
It’s because homosexuals and other gender-benders have colonized San Francisco. After the hippies’ Summer of Love in 1967, people with deviant (2) sexual preferences started streaming into the City by the Bay from all over North America and turned it into an orgiastic Anustown.
Now, 15.4% of San Francisco’s population of 800,000 calls itself by the confusingly adopted synonym of ‘joyful.’ And their impact on the city and those who live in it is as though they were 54% of the population. You can find out more about that in the Passionate Struggle exhibit of the “GLBT community,” including the aspiration for “hot living in the face of disease and sex negativity.”
As for Mr. (?) Newsom feeling so safe, I looked up some stats for you:
Yup. San Francisco is safer than 11% of cities in the USSA. Congratufuckinglations asshole.
Also megatotallycompletely fed up with the religion of piss and a socialist for president? Here are some hits by Belgian pop band Novastar for a change. It ain't bad.
Here are the names of the Dutch judges who ruled that Geert Wildersmust stand trial for "inciting hatred" - while among those who asked them to do it is the board of the salafist As-Sunnah mosque in Rotterdam.
Mr. J.P. Splint Mr. Tom M. Schalken Mr. F.A. Hartsuiker
Take a GOOD, HARD LOOK at these names.
The Dutch rightwing blog Het Vrije Volk has much more on the identity of this scum, as well as on the extreme leftwing/islamist bunch of scoundrels who complained at the Amsterdam Court to reopen the case and overturn an earlier decision (summer 2008) not to charge Geert Wilders. But perhaps none other than Pat Condell can nail it so eloquently:
"Look at what you're doing: you're prosecuting a man who lives under 24 hour protection from attack by violent muslims yet he's the criminal for expressing an opinion."
It is indeed true. In his own country Geert Wilders has to move from secret location to secret location, under the protection of at least four bodyguards. Last week, FOX News had a good take on the story, and in the interview this rare example of a brave European politician NOT willing to lean over backward to muslim barbary stood by his statements which may now land him... in prison.
The Freedom Party (PVV) and Geert Wilders are faced with an all-out assault. Exploding legal expenses might cripple the continuation of the battle for our liberties. The survival of the Freedom Party and Geert Wilders’ struggle for the defense of the West are now in jeopardy.
Therefore, we need your financial support urgently. There are three ways of donating money:
1. Via PayPal: Use the button at the top left of this page.
2. Via International Money Transfer: Deposit money into account number: 67.04.72.344 on behalf of our Foundation “Stichting Vrienden van de PVV”. IBAN: NL98 INGB 0670 4723 44 BIC: INGBNL2A
3. Via Cheque: Send your cheque to our Foundation "Stichting Vrienden van de PVV", PO Box 20018, zip code: 2500 EA The Hague, The Netherlands
"In a democratic system, hate speech is considered so serious that it is in the general interest to... draw a clear line."
Shit and baloney, of course. What we have here is a trio of leftist judges:
a.) with brains so hopelessly fucked up that they actually believe they are doing The Netherlands a favor by raping the country's century-old tradition of freedom of speech.
b.) shitting in their pants and groveling in the dirt for their muslim overlords
The brave reactions of the usual mavericks notwithstanding (Vlaams Belang, Wilders himself and his party, an isolated columnist here and there), the deafening silence of Europes MSM with regards to the umpteenth assault on a key democratic feature was once again appaling. I do appreciate very much the sharp-edged rebuke by the Wall Street Journal, but at the same time it saddens me that for MSM reactions like this one has to look across the Atlantic:
"The court yesterday overruled this decision [an earlier decision not to prosecute Wilders - MFBB], arguing that the lawmaker should be prosecuted for "inciting hatred and discrimination" and also "for insulting Muslim worshippers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism." This is no small victory for Islamic regimes seeking to export their censorship laws to wherever Muslims reside. But the successful integration of Muslims in Europe will require that immigrants adapt to Western norms, not vice versa. Limiting the Dutch debate of Islam to standards acceptable in, say, Saudi Arabia, will only shore up support for Mr. Wilders's argument that Muslim immigration is eroding traditional Dutch liberties."
It is interesing to note that the three judges argued "that they had weighed Mr Wilders’s “one-sided generalisations” against his right to free speech," and come to the conclusion "that he had gone beyond the normal leeway granted to politicians." It is therefore most surprising that on the other side of the political spectrum Geert Wilders' political opponents can get away with things that, imho, go far further beyond the "normal leeway granted to politicians." What to think e.g. about Harry Van Bommel, Dutch MP for the Socialistische Partij (SP), who participated in the violent muslim riots which took place in the first half of January all through The Netherlands following Israels incursion in Gaza. As his cronies were torching cars and busting shop windows, this fine fellow loudly chanted along "In-ti-fa-da! In-ti-fa-da!" while on the background the popular motto "Hamas! Hamas! Joden aan het Gas!" (Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the Gas!)resounded. While we are at it, listen to this audio file documenting how fine integrated muslim fellas rampage through the centre of Utrecht, shouting "Allahu Akbar", "Hamas! Hamas! Joden aan het gas", and "Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!".
However, to the good enlightened judges calling for administering a new batch of Jews with Zyklon B doesn't qualify as "inciting hatred".
The crazy bitch on Van Bommel's side is Gretta Duisenberg, widow to the late Wim Duisenberg, Trichet's predecessor as President of the European Central Bank. Gretta Duisenberg, who hangs up Paleostinian flags on her mansion for a sport, is an extreme leftwing econutter who is so mad as a hatter that it makes a sane person shudder with fear for western civilization (watch that movie and look at her eyes).
DUTCH COURT ADOPTING SAUDI BLASPHEMY LAWS
SAYING 'KORAN IS FASCIST BOOK, SHOULD BE FORBIDDEN.'
SHOUTING 'HAMAS HAMAS! JEWS TO THE GAS!'
HATE SPEECH. INCITING HATRED. TO BE PROSECUTED.
UNDERSTANDABLE GRIEVANCES. OKEY-DOKEY.
MSM polls state that give an take half of the Dutch population supports Wilders. As with the MSM in other western countries, everything the Dutch whorenalists say is to be taken with a rather large grain of salt. I'd rather have confidence in a poll conducted by Holland's superpopular group blog GeenStijl (literally NoStyle), which says it is actually 85%.
So who filed the complaint against Geert Wilders? GeenStijl provides us with the following list. Always the same song. An alliance of extreme leftists and muslims. Here are the names of the scoundrels:
Timo Eekhoudt Jörgen Raymann [TV comedian] Sjoukje Maartje Aafke Wiersma Evy Dewina Kasmo Ali Al-Jaberi Mohamed Yosuf Haydaty Nan Luursema Floris Alberse Khalid Bedri Milena Holdert Klaas Stutje Mirko V. van Pampus René Boer A. el Aqde Cüneyt Kocak Dirim Kutlar Casper Thomas Jennifer Tason Allard Altena Willemijn Kuper
"Oh God here are Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh. You will visit them with Your rage and disgust. Oh God, give Van Gogh a disease that not a single inhabitant of Earth will be able to cure. He would as a result long for death and not receive it. Oh God, let misery visit Van Gogh so that he longs for death and not receives it. Oh God, blind the sight of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as you have blinded her heart. Oh God, blind her sight. O God get a cancer in her brain. O God, make her get tongue cancer..."
In case you wonder whether a rant like that, which is as ludicrous as it is hateful, was actually ever recited in a mosque, I am sorry, IT WAS, and there are audiotapes to prove it.You will find the complete text, and much more, here. As you can see this "prayer" was recited before Van Goghs murder, which means we are at this moment a couple of years further down the road. It hasn't gotten better. When I tell you that the Dutch state even designated a salafist bulwark as the as-Sunnah mosque as an ANBI (Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling, Charity for the General Good), which means that financial gifts to it are tax-deductible, you must think I'm making this up. But alas, that is also true. So let's summarize:
* among the group of leftozoid econutters and islamists who filed a complaint against Wilders before the Amsterdam Court is the Board of the As-Sunnah Mosque in The Hague
* The As-Sunna Mosque in the Hague, a salafist hotbed, is the "place of worship" where Imam Sheik Fawaz Ineid regularly treated the faithful to "prayers" like above
* The Amsterdam Court decided Wilders must be prosecuted for "inciting hatred", while it turns a blind eye on the hate sermons at the As-Sunnah mosque (and other mosques), and the crowds of "youths" shouting verbal abuse at jews
One last thing. The swinging Dutch royals, that is to say, heir to the throne Willem Alexander, the son of Queen Beatrix, and his wife Maxima (who is Argentinian and who was born a Zorreguieta, the daughter of a minister under Videla's government), just paid a royal visit to Oman. Here is a photo of Maxima, the future Dutch Queen:
Maybe the future Queen Fatima al-Zorreguieta is rehearsing?
MFBB.
P.S.: Photo via GeenStijl. Some data via our Virginian pals over at Gates of Vienna.
Apparently Ted was not the only one with a seizure.
Every cloud has a silver lining though. On its first day, the new US Administration got at least something right. Below is a screenshot from the Vlaams Belang website:
20.01.2009 14:58 - Three weeks ago all fraction leaders and the members and the mandatory members of the Foreign Affairs commission of the Senate, received an invitation to witness the taking of the oath by Obama at the Embassy of the United States in Brussels. This morning it suddenly seemed that Vlaams Belang was not welcome, when our Senate fraction received a last minute call from the Embassy to inform them it was a “mistake”.
By suddenly making a distinction between members of parliament on the basis of their political affiliation, the U.S. steps de facto into the Belgian logic of the “cordon sanitaire”. Apart from the fact that the manners of the Embassy do not testify to very good manners, and are improper for the largest democracy of the World — as Joris Van Hauthem expressed in a reaction — it must be noted that it is not the task of an Embassy — even if it is that of the United States — to mingle actively in internal politics of another nation. Or are we “mistaken”?
Personally, I think that Mr. Van Hauthem, who acted as VB spokesman to condemn the calling off of the invitation, is acting a tad too emotionally. Imho, a cold shoulder to Vlaams Belang from any American official representing the new administration is an honor rather than an insult.
b.) a Democratic New York Representative, José Serrano, introduced a measure to repeal the 22nd Amendment, which provides the only term limit on federal office — the Presidency. It seems like some people would like to see the One still around by 2016. Probably Obama was inspired by Hugo.
"If Muslim Americans are to participate in such a critique of American policy, however, they will only be effective if they do it, according to the Prophet’s words, in a “brotherly” fashion. This implies a high degree of loyalty and affection. This does not mean, however, that citizenship and religious community are identical commitments, nor that they demand the same kind of loyalty. People of faith have a certain kind of solidarity with others of their faith community that transcends the basic rights and duties of citizenship."
Translation from Cuntspeak to Outlaw Mikese: "Being a muslim trumps being an American." In 2007 and in July 2008, federal prosecutors in Dallas filed court documents proving that Mattson's ISNA, based in Plainfield, Indiana, has ties with Hamas, which, last time I checked, was considered a terrorist organization by the US. Last July, prosecutors wrote that they had "a wide array of testimonial and documentary evidence expressly linking" ISNA and Hamas. Read THIS and puke.
To all those who voted Democrat, CONGRATULATIONS YOU FUCKWADS!!!! AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS!!!
From my Nov. 4 post I will simply repeat:
"As for those who voted for Obama, I personally have no congratulations to offer you. Mssrs. Qaddafi, Mullah Omar, Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Morales, al-Sadr, an estimated 500 million impotent Zeropeans and the Federation of Chairmans of Socialist Parties from NORK over La Paz to Byelorussia are right now doing that in my place. Enjoy the glow. To vote for someone who could live with twenty years of God daaaaaaaaaaaaamn America sermons in his local church, sit for years on end on the boards of two "charities" with a guy whom he KNEW had MURDERED innocent American citizens, and publicly regretted there hadn't been more of them, funneled money to a PLO operative, thought it was cool to choose his friends among Marxist professors, and to top it all off married a woman who was NOT proud of the Moon Landing or bringing the Iron Curtain down, is the height of folly. I shall have zero tolerance for your fucking wir haben es nicht gewusst excuses when the elephant's bowel contents will hit the Osprey rotors because you all had an internet connection and a mouth to ask questions during the terrible ordeal of 7 years of having to watch uniforms on TV. You had the choice between victory and baloney, you chose baloney and you will get taxes. You were sooooooooooooo angry at PRESIDENT BUSH because your fucking Oprah show was interrupted now and then with flashes from the front, basically your only nuisance. By contrast, the men and women who year after year risked their lives to preserve your right to listen to that cunt, hunting down islamic terrorists who would kill you in a heartbeat if they could, voted massively not for your Golden Boy, but for his contender... and still it doesn't ring a bell. Well then, change is what you wanted, and you will get plenty of it. You just hope that at the end of it, you have some change left."
History's judgment will be very harsh indeed... for the many who let you down when the country was at peril. I never thought I would borrow a line from Oliver Stone, but here I do: "The enemy is in ourselves".
Thanks for avenging the innocent. Thanks for making the world safer. Thanks for saving the lives of millions. Thanks for freeing millions more. Thanks for standing up for freedom, liberty and human dignity.
An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal of January 13, 2009 by Gunnar Heinsohn, Head of the Raphael Lemkin Institute at the University of Bremen, Europe's first institute devoted to comparative genocide research.
ENDING THE WEST'S PROXY WAR AGAINST ISRAEL.
"As the world decries Israel's attempt to defend itself from the rocket attacks coming from Gaza, consider this: When Hamas routed Fatah in Gaza in 2007, it cost nearly 350 lives and 1,000 wounded. Fatah's surrender brought only a temporary stop to the type of violence and bloodshed that are commonly seen in lands where at least 30% of the male population is in the 15-to-29 age bracket.
In such "youth bulge" countries, young men tend to eliminate each other or get killed in aggressive wars until a balance is reached between their ambitions and the number of acceptable positions available in their society. In Arab nations such as Lebanon (150,000 dead in the civil war between 1975 and 1990) or Algeria (200,000 dead in the Islamists' war against their own people between 1999 and 2006), the slaughter abated only when the fertility rates in these countries fell from seven children per woman to fewer than two. The warring stopped because no more warriors were being born. In Gaza, however, there has been no demographic disarmament. The average woman still bears six babies. For every 1,000 men aged 40-44, there are 4,300 boys aged 0-4 years. In the U.S. the latter figure is 1,000, and in the U.K. it's only 670.
And so the killing continues. In 2005, when Israel was still an occupying force, Gaza lost more young men to gang fights and crime than in its war against the "Zionist enemy." Despite the media's obsession with the Mideast conflict, it has cost many fewer lives than the youth bulges in West Africa, Lebanon or Algeria. In the six decades since Israel's founding, "only" some 62,000 people (40,000 Arabs, 22,000 Jews) have been killed in all the Israeli-Arab wars and Palestinian terror attacks. During that same time, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars and terror attacks -- mostly at the hands of other Muslims.
What accounts for the Mideast conflict's relatively low body count? Hamas and their ilk certainly aim to kill as many Israelis as possible. To their indignation, the Israelis are quite good at protecting themselves. On the other hand, Israel, despite all the talk about its "disproportionate" use of force, is doing its utmost to spare civilian deaths. Even Hamas acknowledges that most of the Palestinians killed by Israeli air raids are from their own ranks. But about 10%-15% of Gaza's casualties are women and minors -- a tragedy impossible to prevent in a densely settled area in which nearly half the people are under 15 and the terrorists hide among them.
I do actually not agree with the gist of the author's article, but then Mr. Heinsohn is a European academic and generally, persons of this category outside the technical and scientific sphere are even more liable to mindclouding than their American counterparts. Towards the end of the article Mr. Heinsohn even advocates that the West should take in a couple of hundreds of thousands of young Gazan males to ease tensions in that hellhole. Mr. Heinsohn also fails to grasp the paramount importance of one factor in the Gazan equation yielding the unstoppable body count among young males, namely islam plain and simple. To be sure, he does mention the muslim religion, but almost as an aside, and basically focuses uniquely on the anthropogenous character of the self-inflicted bloodletting. This argument of his fails to explain why there are then no more violent mini-genocides among the world's poor populations with an unhealthily high percentage of testosterone driven jobless teens and tweens.
That being said, I DO feel sorry for a fifteen year old who had the misfortune to grow up in a barren overpopulated strip of land under the shadow of a barbaric "religion". He can't help it either. But it's no use crying over his fate as long as the core problems are not correctly diagnosed and addressed. Let us repeat the one paragraph where Gunnar Heinsohn comes closest to the ultimate truth as can be. Wait... let me put it in bold for you:
"In the six decades since Israel's founding, "only" some 62,000 people (40,000 Arabs, 22,000 Jews) have been killed in all the Israeli-Arab wars and Palestinian terror attacks. During that same time, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars and terror attacks -- mostly at the hands of other muslims."
There was a truly excellent op-ed in Dutch daily "De Volkskrant" by Geert Wilders and Martin Bosma of the Dutch PVV, the Partij voor Vrijheid (Party for Freedom). As much as I resent simple cut-and-pasting, I thought it worthwile to simply use the excellent translation made by poster VH over at Gates of Vienna, because the case Wilders and Bosma make is so convinving that this article deserves far more attention than the "Low Countries Sphere"! So here goes. Thank you, Baron Bodissey, Dymphna and VH! (first follows demi-screenshot from De Volkskrant, since it is they who gave Wilders a forum in the first place):
Directly from GoV:
Below is a Below is a magnificent op-ed from De Volkskrant, written by Geert Wilders and Martin Bosma, who are both PVV members of the Dutch Parliament. The translation is by our indefatigable Flemish correspondent VH:
LAND FOR PEACE DOESN'T WORK by Geert Wilders and Martin Bosma
"It is one of the central doctrines of the Leftists’ church: “land for peace.”
That was supposed to put an end to the conflict in the Middle East. These days we encounter the definite end of that dream. The Israeli army last Sunday returned to Netzarim. Three years ago, Netzarim and other so-called ‘settlements’ were abandoned as a part of the framework of disengagement. This withdrawal should have then led to peace. But 5,000 arguments for a different reality rained down in the form of Kassam rockets on the residents of the Negev.
“Land for Peace” is a medicine based on the wrong diagnosis. The war against Israel is not a territorial conflict and thus can not be solved with territorial concessions. Giving away an area does not help. Hamas cum suis are not fighting for pieces of land but for the total final victory of Islam, to which the rapid destruction of Israel is only a transitional stage. The conflict is jihad, the violent duty of every Muslim. Israel is located on the fault line of the dar-al-Islam and dar-al-Harb. To Islam, all of Israel is occupied territory and Tel Aviv is as much a “settlement” as was Netzarim. The Hamas charter doesn’t know the word ‘polder model’.
Encouragement
The withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was a huge encouragement to aggressive Islam. What the West convulsively tried to view as a step towards peace is translated by true Muslims as a sign of weakness. The 5,000 rockets from Gaza were therefore the logical consequence of an ideology that seeks to destroy the West. Samuel Huntington, who ironically enough died in the week before the first bombing of Hamas, already wrote it: “Islam has bloody borders”. You can move those bloody borders of Islam, but with that you only shift the jihad. What does it show? “Settlements” are no barrier to peace, but a barrier against terror.
Muslims view the conflict as an Islam-related conflict. It is not without reason that during pro-Hamas demonstrations over the whole world “Allahu akhbar” is prominently chanted. Saturday this was illustrated when Muslim colonizers demonstrated in Amsterdam, together with the extreme Left. The SP (Harry van Bommel), the Olive Trees Campaign/ICCO (from Doekle Terpstra), and the inevitable Gretta Duisenberg showed how much the Left in the Netherlands has merged with Islam and hatred of Israel.
My colleague Van Bommel showed without the slightest embarrassment his true extreme face by publicly and loudly calling for another intifada against Israel. The Left demonstrates with flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, along with portraits of Khomeini and the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.
The fight against Israel is a fight against Europe and the Netherlands
Seventy years after Auschwitz, in the streets of Amsterdam, partly at the expense of the taxpayer, sounds the cry “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” This is what Doekle the Dhimmi [Doekle Terpstra, Christian Democrat] apparently means with his “benoemen en bouwen” [“naming and building”]. Would he view the Jew Haters of Saturday as moderate Muslims? - - - - - - - - -
Therefore, never give away any more land to the Arabs. But what then? To begin with, there is already a Palestinian state, and that is Jordan. This land covers nearly eighty percent of the historic Palestine. Most residents of Jordan are Palestinians, for instance queen Rania. Those who are looking for a territorial solution have thus found it. An eventual second Palestinian state is no improvement, but rather an encouragement for more jihad and thus more bloodshed. Judea and Samaria, the heart of Israel, must therefore remain in the hands of Israel whatever the cost, with Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the Jewish state.
Deterrence
The war against Israel is permanent because it is jihad. However, the conflict can be made manageable and the Netherlands can play a role in this. To begin with, deterrence should again be the cornerstone of the Israeli security policy. That used to be so until Israel in 1992 surrendered to the Oslo wishing dream. The Netherlands must help to press forward the notion that Israel is fighting for the West and therefore must not give in to the Arabs. Not an inch. If Israel falls, Europe is next. Israel is our first defensive frontline. The fight against Israel is a fight against Europe and the Netherlands.
The billions that the EU and the UN in past years dumped down the endless drain in Gaza must be reversed. The Palestinians have done nothing positive with the money, apart from making it serve the madly popular Hamas terror. It would be good to invest that money in masterful Israeli science and high-tech. The tiny state of Israel has grown to become a global center where the brightest minds in the world are creating inventions on a daily basis that have been a blessing for all mankind. Such a change will provide a boost to the Israeli economy. This success shows the whole world that Israel is not of transitory nature, but a persistent source of progress.
Would it not be great if the money that now goes to the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas, might be used by, for example, the Weizman Institute in Rechovot to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease or multiple sclerosis? International aid money, not for death and destruction but for a future to our sick and elderly. A more beautiful beginning of the new year is cannot be imagined.
And to the Israeli army: kol hakawod, all success! You fight for us too."
Geert Wilders and Martin Bosma are respectively fraction leader and member of the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Parliament of The Netherlands and recently visited Israel.
Spearpoint in the War on Islamic Terror: the Israeli Army. "Israel is our first defensive frontline." Kol Hakawod!!!
Some would say it's "just" demonstrations. I say it's a challenge to the police, a reconnoitring mission, testing how far they can go. There are of course the usual leftwing airheads - or maybe not, "airheads" implies they are naive, but I fear it's becoming crystal clear they are deliberately siding with islamists - who claim these are rightful demos against Israels incursion in Gaza. But then one can ask why on earth Europes muslims have to export their problems to our cities. What we are increasingly seeing is a deliberate attempt to impose their point of view on the indigenous population. When interviewed, the spokesmen of the muslim organizations - invariably posing as the "moderates" - claim they are sooooo sorry for the mayhem, the destroyed shop windows, the terrorized locals, the damaged infrastructure etc etc etc BUT in the same breath DEMAND we should understand "muslim anger". The following video is from Mulhouse. Truth to say, all seems quiet. Yup, the quiet of submission. No sane Frenchman would dare to venture out. All those flag-wielding Turks, Algerians and Moroccans claim it's their democratic "right" to demonstrate in favor of Palestine - but I GUARANTEE you they would DENY that right to Frenchmen demonstrating for Israel. Anyone bearing a flag with the Star of David round these barbarians would be lynched. From the website of François Desouche:
More from Desouche, a scene in a Parisian neighborhood:
"21,000 persons demonstrated in Paris against the situation in the Middle East. Certain vandals threw stairs taken from cafes to the security forces, who responded with tear gas. Some persons mounted vehicles, others destroyed public infrastructure. On the Boulevard Haussmann, several cars were torched, some fifteen others were turned upside down, then smashed apart. Shop windows were thrown in.
In Lyon, between 8,000 and 15,000 persons. In Marseille, there were 15,000 according to the organizers, 4,000 according to the police. In Bordeaux, there were between 2,000 and 3,000 demonstrators, in Lille 3,000, in Toulouse between 600 and 800 accooriding to the source, in Nantes between 1,700 and 4,000."
It's not that French security forces were unprepared. Galliawatch reports that:
Seven thousand men will be mobilized in France to reenforce the usual deployment on New Year's Eve, announced Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie. The government had already decided to reenforce security in the big cities on December 17, following the discovery of explosives with no detonator in the Printemps department store in Paris. [Note: The event in question took place on December 16 when the police, alerted by a letter signed by the "Afghan Revolutionary Front", found 5 sticks of dynamite in the public toilets of the department store. In their letter they demanded the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan before the end of February 2009, "otherwise we will strike again in your capitalist department stores and this time without giving you warning." (Source: 20 Minutes)]"
From Denmark, Danish blogger Snaphanen reports that the following reaching out posters from the country's successfully integrated muslim minority are adorning the square in front of Copenhagen's Town Hall:
In Brussels, Belgium there were demos which turned violent, with cars burnt and public and private property destroyed. But it was in Antwerp, home base of the terrorist-related Arab European League, that the most havoc was wrought:
The caption from Het Laatste Nieuws reads:
"JEWS DARE NO LONGER CROSS THE STREETS IN ANTWERP.
Because of the totally derailed demonstration of the Arab European League (AEL), many Jews in Antwerp dare no longer venture out on the streets whenever protestors are around. They fear vandalism and violence. An internal sms service of Antwerps Jewish community warns jewish people to steer clear off the Turnhoutsebaan and the Diamond District, writes Michael Freilich of Joods Actueel."
"In the course of the day [Sunday January 4] it became known that in the night from Saturday to Sunday a fire bomb was thrown at a house in Antwerp. The house belongs to a Jewish family. As if by a miracle the fire extinguished itself. The consequences could otherwise have been disastrous because at the time of the attack 12 children were sleeping in the house.
The targeted house is located in the Oedenkovenstraat in Borgerhout, within walking distance of the Turnhoutsebaan. The Turnhoutsebaan was in 2002 the location of serious riots after an AEL [Arabisch Europese Liga, “Arabic European Legue”] demonstration went out of control."
More pics from the pro-Palestinian demo in Antwerp on January 4:
If we are to preserve our freedom and prosperity, we must prepare our armies for battle against our muslim minorities BEFORE they turn into majorities. If ever that critical treshold is reached, Europe is done. I am sorry that I have to put it so bluntly, but 1,400 years of history teach us that wherever the followers of the vile "Prophet" have spread, violence and loss of rights and human degradation for "non-believers" have invariably followed. Why would it be different this time? It is too soon to judge whether the prodigious American experiment in the Middle East, started by President Bush, will bear fruit and if it does in decades to come, it may be too late for Europe and our magnificent civilization. It is thus better to err on the side of caution. It is with pain in my heart that I therefore state that Europes armed forces must prepare for battle in the streets, with heavy armor, artillery and ground attack aircraft, against muslim usurpation of power and the challenge to our democratically chosen representation.
Anyone who, in light of the very clear trend towards destabilization of our societies and the erosion of democratic values at the hands of our muslim minorities, the most radical elements of which who don't even hide their aspirations anymore, is either a fool, a liar, or a traitor of his people.
I must emphasize again that I do not write this down lightly. I am a hard-working small business owner and tax payer and a law-abiding citizen. I try to be a good husband and father. I'm not your run of the mill trigger happy fanatic. I would PREFER, and ENCOURAGE, that our muslim minorities adapt to our ways and laws and try to become good contributing citizens, like the truck driver from Niger who delivered goods to my business this afternoon. I sense - know - that he is not challenging our systems and institutions. He is welcome here, and I wish him all the best and a long and happy life in our country.
It is however clear but to the fools among us, that Europes islamic communities have a different agenda than my truck driver from Niger.
MFBB.
PS: hat tip for some of the stories to the inimitable Gates of Vienna.
The Dutch are completely nuts about Luca Prins, an instant starlet who participated in the traditional "New Years Dive" on January 1 in Egmond aan Zee, a Dutch coastal town. The reason: see above. Dutch daily De Telegraaf reports: "Ladies and Gentlemen, we got her!". The popular blog GeenStijl has more pics.
Reader LydiaVH sent me a little sumpin to laugh your *ss off:
(Lydia) Remember the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”? Well, here’s a prime example offered by an English professor at an American University.
(Teacher) “Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. There is to be absolutely NO talking and anything you wish to say must be written on the paper. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.” The following was actually turned in by two of my English students: Rebecca -last name deleted, and Jim - last name deleted. ———————————————————— STORY: (First paragraph by Rebecca) At first, Laurie couldn’t decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she had to, just now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.
—————————————————–
(Second paragraph by Jim) Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. “A.S. Harris to Geostation 17, he said into his trans-galactic communicator. “Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far…” But before he could sign off, a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship’s cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
———————————————————-
(Rebecca)
He bumped his head and died almost immediately but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel,” Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed hurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. “Why must one lose one’s innocence to become a woman?” she pondered wistfully.
——————————————————–
(Jim)
Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu’udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through the congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu’udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret Mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion, which vaporized poor, stupid Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. “We can’t allow this! I’m going to veto that treaty! Let’s blow ‘em out of the sky!”
———————————————————
(Rebecca)
This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate adolescent.
———————————————————-
(Jim)
Yeah? Well, you’re a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. “Oh shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of F*CKING TEA??? Oh no, I’m such an air headed bimbo who reads too many Danielle Steele novels.”
———————————————————-
(Rebecca)
Asshole.
———————————————————-
(Jim)
Bitch.
———————————————————-
(Rebecca)
Wanker.
———————————————————-
(Jim)
slut.
———————————————————
(Rebecca)
Get f*cked.
———————————————————-
(Jim)
Eat shit.
——————————————————–
(Rebecca)
F*CK YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!!!
———————————————————-
(Jim)
Go drink some tea - whore.
——————————————————–
(Teacher)
A+. I really liked this one.
Meanwhile, on Planet Bozo, the peaceful farmers of Badass living in the model province of Blablaza were overjoyed when the socialist party won an overwhelming majority in the Parliament of the evil kingdom of Jooz, and promptly passed a unilateral disarmament treaty, so that illegal incursions of Carl Harris-type machos like the ones on the photo below were a thing of the past and they could continue growing Brussels sprouts in their zero carbon emission greenhouses, earned through hard work over the past three years.
Not.
MFBB.
P.S.: the Flemish noun "zever", in most of our dialects pronounced as sheaver, means rubbish, nonsense. Not that there isn't a lesson to be learned from this story.
In 2005, the Israeli Army left the Gaza Strip after 38 years of military rule in an unprecendented move masterminded by then Israeli PM Ariel Sharon. For a hawkish person like Sharon the "disengagement" was a totally uncharacteristic operation with which he apparently hoped to finally end the stalemate that Israeli/Palestinian negotiations had ended in. The IDF pullout was globally described as the thing that Israel should have done decades before. A more sober IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Dan Halutz said:
"This is their true test. We will not tolerate their ineptitude, turn a blind eye to their failures or ignore acts of terror. They will not be able to shirk their responsibility," he said.
State building didn't go too well for the Paleostinians. Before the pullout, dim-witted mostly western philanthropists had bought the 8,500 Jewish settler's famous greenhouse facilities in order to present the Palestinians with a hot start for exporting agricultural produce. Among the naives were, apart from Bill Gates, quite a lot of Jewish Americans. Today, with the greenhouses in ruins, the 14 million dollars wasted on the endeavour is the price for the lesson that exporting an entitlement culture to another continent does not make it work there either. I doubt however that the lesson has been learned.
The only thing Gazans have had a degree of success in, is developing their own missiles. Instead of improving their agriculture, infrastructure, education, health care system and whatever passed for an industrial basis, they put all their effort in developing homemade rockets. Crown on the work of Hamas's rocket scientists is now something comparable to what Sir William Congreve had in the nineteenth century. The Qassam 3 is 2 meters long, reaches 10 kilometers far and carries an explosive charge of a couple of kilograms. Needless to say, the military value of this thingy lies far more in its psychological effect than in its destructive power.
With Qassams, they can reach cities like Ashkelon and Sderod. The human loss caused by the 3100 or so Qassams fired since 2001 is 15. By disrupting normal life there, they of course cause great economic harm. But... while I do absolutely not want to belittle the fifteen dead Israelis, it is clear that if Hamas wants to reach its goal, the destruction of the Israeli state, in this way, they have a long way to go still. Just think of it... the Israeli so-called occupation gone now for three years. Massive financial injections from all over the world AND from the Israeli state. And ALL that these fuckfaces have been able to come up with is... scores of Qassam rockets. So, while I deplore the innocent victims made during Israels recent bomb runs, I have zero sympathy left for sheer idiots who simply DON'T want to take matters in their own hands and work on a better life for themselves and their families. In addition, you might want to give the graph above a closer look. See when the missile launching took a spike, correction, several spikes? That's right, AFTER 2005. For those do-gooders in the west and elsewhere lamenting the plight of pathetic Paleostinian losers and watching scores of staged handwringing scenes by wailing martyr mothers, the truth is simply that the idiots fired one petard too many and Israel, which has actually shown far too much restraint, finally hit back hard. It has every right to do so, it even has the DUTY. To me, the most sad thing of it all is that it took America one month to lose the "global sympathy" it had after 9/11 for rightfully hitting back, and Israel lost its in, oh, 1947 or so, Gaza islamonutters can for sixty years and longer prove to the world what incurable, impossible to live with bastards they are... and yet count on uninterrupted goodwill from LA to Stockholm. Pathetic. IAF...
I actually wanted to do a post about why Israel has every right - what do I say, the goddam duty - to blast these Hamas m*therfuckers to hell, but I was a bit bored.
Oh yeah f*cking *sshole? Sorry you blistering old fool. The war did not begin in Afghanistan nor in Iraq. It began in New York, on 9/11. May I also draw your attention to the fact that your revered Kyoto Protocol is a sham and that over the period 1990-2004 greenshouse gas emission by China and India - signatories to the Protocol - actually rose by 47 and 55% respectively (compared to the US's 15.8%)? As for "the horrific images from Abu Ghraib", how about this?
One of the 1,600 murder victims, the overwhelming majority of them white, in over 10,700 attacks by blacks on white-owned South African farms since 1994. Now, one has to be very cautious by suggesting a link between these horrible murders (plaasmoorde in Afrikaans) and the ANC-dominated government, but it is a fact that the sheer brutality aimed specifically at white farmers is starkly reminiscent of the Zimbabwean example whereby the government, with disastrous results, deliberately let loose gangs of thugs on its white farmers as part of its "land reform programme". The official aim of the SA government is to transfer one third of white-owned farmland to black farmers by 2014. The friendly ties between the Zimbabwean and South African governments are well known, and the ANC has always been a hotbed of radical murderous terrorists. Isn't it entirely plausible that radical ANC elements in the SA government, with the silent approval of the "decent" cadres, have been simply applying Mugabes tactics to scare and chase away the Boers in order to facilitate South African "redistribution"? A telling ANC slogan was "Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer" by Peter Mokaba, an ANC youth leader later turned Deputy Minister for Environmentalism and Tourism (he was also an AIDS denialist, ironically he died a couple of years back from that same disease). And then there is of course the example set by that old commie hag of a Nelson Mandela himself, caught here on tape advocating the murder of whites:
There's a gigantic body of evidence there hinting very strongly at involvement of ANC elements and even South African Police in the "plaasmoorde". Tutu must be aware of this.
But even the scandalous dismissal of the horrible murders on white farmers as random acts of murder by the SA government and important black personages like Tutu is trumped by the sheer negligence and denial with which that government treats the country's greatest peril: the AIDS endemic. Here are some conservative (?) estimates on the prevalence of HIV in the New South Africa:
National estimates based on all surveys
Based on a wide range of data, including the household and antenatal studies, UNAIDS/WHO in July 2008 published an estimate of 18.1% prevalence in those aged 15-49 years old at the end of 2007. Their high and low estimates are 15.4% and 20.9% respectively. According to their own estimate of total population (which is another contentious issue), this implies that around 5.7 million South Africans were living with HIV at the end of 2007, including 280,000 children under 15 years old.
The ASSA2003 model produces a similar estimate of 5.4 million people living with HIV in mid-2006, or around 11% of the total population. It predicts that the number will exceed 6 million by 2015, by which time around 5.4 million South Africans will have died of AIDS.
Of course, the picture is no different in the rest of black Africa, but South Africa presents an especially grave case, even more so in light of the position of relative prosperity vis-à-vis other African countries that white rule has given the nation. But of course, what can you expect if for years on end ANC thugs can produce no one better than a Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for Health Minister, whose recipe in 2006 against AIDS was... eating garlic and beetroot. It took the departure of Thabo Mbeki as SA President for Tshabalala-Msimang to disappear from the scene... in September 2008.
Along the way of Africa's plight something happened though, in 2003. That was the year PEPFAR was launched. PEPFAR stands for the "President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief" and involved a $15 billion commitment over five years (2003–2008) from President Bush to fight the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, with an almost exclusive focus on African countries. PEPFAR initially aimed to give antiretroviral treatment (ART) to 2 million HIV-infected people in the worst affected areas, to prevent 7 million new cases, and to provide care for 10 million people (the "2-7-10 goals") by 2010. PEPFAR was a very effective initiative, increasing the number of Africans receiving ART from 50,000 in 2003 to 1.1 million by March 2007 and an estimated 1.4 million by early 2008, at about the time that Michelle Obama deemed this accomplishment as yet another US feat she, as a African American, could not be proud of. Even though 1.4 million is still small compared to the roughly 33 million HIV/AIDS sufferers worldwide, it's not exaggerated to state that PEPFAR is one of the most successful medical/humanitarian programs of the past decades.
Actually, by early 2008 he money spent was rather 18 billion dollars, 3 billion up from the original goal of 15. But you wouldn't know that from the MSM. Nor would you know from them that, as PEPFAR I expired earlier this year, President Bush had a PEPFAR II in the scaffolds:
Someone tell this... f*cking fool, asshat superdeluxe, ignorant dimwit, overrated fourteenth rank "bishop", blistering idiot with long overdue porridge for brains... THAT IF MILLIONS OF AFRICANS ARE TODAY WALKING TALLER THAN THEY DID FIVE YEARS AGO... IT IS BECAUSE OF GEORGE W. BUSH!!!
In Flanders, we have a saying: "Ondank is 's werelds loon" - Ingratitude is the world's reward.
Regular reader and commenter Mark, who is no longer from Colorado and now prefers to go by the moniker of Spiral, tirelessly provides us with excellent, insightful links. One of the latest caught my eye. It's a WSJ article by Andrew Wilson, titled "Thatcher wouldn't have gone wobbly on Detroit." Especially at a time when the Messiah seems to succeed in selling everyone the phantasmagoria pipe dream of the benefits of a trillion dollar injection to ward off the US's economic woes, I thought I might just share it. Thanks Mark!
The incoming administration is talking about spending hundreds of billions on public works with the hope of creating some jobs, but remember: 93.3% of Americans, though shaken, already have jobs. So what to do?
The government must do something, and something fairly big, to jump-start the economy, an economist friend told me. His point was that the private sector is too shell-shocked to climb out of the hole it is now in, and government needs to take the lead. He also quoted the old shibboleth among economists -- the "fallacy of composition" -- which argues that what might be a good course of action for an individual can lead to disaster if widely adopted by members of the larger group. In this case, disaster could be the result if there was too strong a preference for savings over consumption.
I disagree with this whole line of thought. It reminds me of the open letter that 364 economists addressed to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1981, condemning her for daring to cut public borrowing in the midst of a recession, which was contrary to the Keynesian orthodoxy at the time. They did not accept Mrs. Thatcher's reasoning that too much public-sector borrowing and government-directed investment could only crowd out private-sector borrowing and risk-taking.
They also implicitly rejected Mrs. Thatcher's strongly held belief that both governments and individuals must be guided by fundamental rules of common sense and frugality, in good times and bad. The economists described her thinking on this score as naive. Mrs. Thatcher spurned the collective wisdom of the 364 economists, seeing their advice as just more of the same failed interventionist policy prescriptions which the country had followed for over three decades. When she came to power in May 1979, the British economy, by every measure, was in worse shape than the U.S. economy is today. Inflation was out of control. Unemployment was high and rising rapidly. Job creation had been at a total standstill for almost a decade and a half...
... President-elect Barack Obama has said that he expects things to get worse before they get better. If the experience of the first Thatcher administration is anything to go by, that will certainly be the case. For one thing, some "hidden unemployment," as Mrs. Thatcher called it, will be flushed out into the open. This will be the case with the expected closure of the Big Three's "job banks," which pay almost full wages and benefits to several thousand auto workers for doing nothing.
With the elimination of much higher levels of "over-manning" in parts of British industry that were heavily unionized and subsidized, unemployment doubled to 12% in Mrs. Thatcher's first three years in office. Yet by sticking to her policies of lightened regulation, reduced trade barriers, privatization of a raft of publicly owned companies, reduced taxation, and the adoption of laws to prevent abuses of union power, Mrs. Thatcher achieved something few if any of today's economists have begun to consider. She achieved a genuine, productivity-led recovery that transformed Britain from perennial basket case into the Europe's most improved and vibrant economy.
U.S. policy makers and professional economists should study her example in order to turn this time of crisis into useful and enduring change. As she herself said, "Economics is too important just to be left to the economists."
I seem to detect an imho rather illogical line of thought there where Mr. Wilson writes: "President-elect Barack Obama has said that he expects things to get worse before they get better. If the experience of the first Thatcher administration is anything to go by, that will certainly be the case.", because it implies that Mr. Obama is going to do what Mrs. Thatcher did. This, of course, he won't do, since it is clear for everyone but the deaf and blind that the president-elect is hell bent on treating the US to a New Deal v2.0. Because Mr. Wilson rightly concludes by pointing out the merits of the Thatcher method, I assume it was just a lapsus of his. Let us sum up Thatcher's key measures, as noted by Wilson:
* lightened regulation * reduced trade barriers * privatization of a raft of publicly owned companies * reduced taxation * the adoption of laws to prevent abuses of union power
Let us now see how Obama's proposals measure up to Thatcher's success recipe
* Obama has promised more regulation * Obama stance on NAFTA varies between lukewarm enthusiasm and closet hostility * Obama's plans for "federal oversight" of the Big Three reeks almost like a desire to nationalize an important part of US carmakers * Under Obama, the Bush tax cuts will expire, and the top two tax rates will likely to return to 36 and 39.6 percent. That's just for starters * Obama wants to make the "Employee Free Choice Act" the "Law of the Land".
Don't know how it is with you, but I can't find anything Thatcherite in Obama's to do list. To top it all off, he has promised to embark on a public infrastructure project "unseen since the fifties". Good luck with that. He should know that keynesianism does not work, but I'm not making myself any illusions anymore. During a 60 Minutes appearance in November, Obama heaped praise on a book dealing with FDR. Over at Instapundit, a commenter named Greg Gransden wrote:
I watched it, too. I would have been more reassured if the FDR book Obama says he’s been reading was Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man,” which painstakingly demonstrates how Roosevelt’s economic policies helped to prolong and worsen the Great Depression.
Unfortunately, the book Obama’s been reading actually lavishes praise on FDR’s economic management in the early months of his presidency - which seems to me precisely the wrong lesson to take away from that period.
Oh the irony! At the moment the USA seems to make a sharp leftward bend, Belgium more or less emerges from the stagnation of eight years of leftist rule. A simple scene like below could never have happened even one year ago:
I don't blame nobody for not understanding Dutch/Flemish, a language spoken by, give and take, 23 million people worldwide (without counting Afrikaans). Here's what's being said in that video:
(voice of news anchor): Groen! [the Flemish greens - MFBB] and SP.a [the Flemish socialists - MFBB] doubt whether the army has the financial clout to send more troops to Afghanistan and claim that NATO is "doing things the wrong way there".
Wouter De Vriendt (MP, Flemish greens): "I think that the Leterme governmnet is making a clear ideological choice here, an idelogical choice whereby one follows the American war logic."
Dirk Van Der Maelen (MP, Flemish Socialists): "This minister, followed by this government, is dragging our country into a hopeless and illegal war in Afghanistan."
[Reply by] Pieter De Crem (Belgian Minister of Defense, Christian Democrats): "You are, Mr. Van Der Maelen, completely isolated. You find yourself in the camp of Osama Bin Laden and his friends bomblayers and rapists. You are an objective partner of the bomblayers and of those who cut off the ears of girls when they attend school."
So what we have here is a November 5, 2008 meeting in the House Committee for Defense whereby the Belgian Minister of Defense, Pieter de Crem (Christian Democrats), has to field questions by the opposition, mainly the Flemish greens (Groen!) and the Flemish socialists. De Crem is the man who, immediately upon formation of the Leterme government in Spring 2008, took the necessary steps to send at least a token contribution to the real fight in Afghanistan. While it is true that on average some 300 Belgian troops have been guarding Kabul International Airport (KAIA) since 2002 (and been doing a fairly good job of it), it is also commonly known throughout NATO that this assignment is one of the safest in the whole country. Apart from that, for several years now a small demining detachment is active in the north around Kunduz, embedded with German troops. While both assignments are not completely without risk it is clear that the Belgian ISAF committment is a far cry from the active involvement in combat operations by, e.g., the Dutch. The most visible change since De Crem took the helm at Defense is that since mid-September, four F-16 MLU5 fighter bombers are actively participating in CAS (Close Air Support) operations, together with Dutch and French planes, from the southern Kandahar Airport. According to the Belgian Air Force website, on average every other day the missions involve bombing and strafing of Taliban positions. As small as this contribution may be, given the political climate in Belgium this is something of a small miracle. It's not that the will to fight has left the military itself - in early September, possibly encouraged by now having a normal Secdef after eight catastrophic years under the Walloon socialist André Flahaut, Major General Testelmans, Chief of the Belgian Ground Forces, hinted that the Army could do more than humanitarian operations and even stated that Belgian troops were ready for the fight in Afghanistan's south. He, and his Minister, were immediately treated like reckless anachronistic Rambos on steroids not only by the opposition but even by some MP's from the Liberal Party. A case like this shows once again how difficult it has become to project a credible defense in European countries. Leftist and center-left politicians have evolved into actual adversaries of the military - a very dangerous development and one which is actually completely in line with their policy of weakening our states from within. In Germany, the greens objected to the sending of a mere six Tornado fighter bombers to AF on the grounds that... they would unnecessarily contribute to the greenhouse effect (I kid you not). In Spain, the socialist Minister of Defense, Carmen Chacon, has more or less vowed that she wants to strip the Spanish Armed Forces of every armed component (again, I kid you not). How else would you explain her quote: "I am a pacifist, as are the armies of the 21st Century." At the same time however, Madama Pacifist is not shy of signing huge arms contracts with Hugo Chavez. Logic and leftism, the two don't go together. As for Sweden, at the time of this writing it seems that the Swedish military has been more or less castrated and would now number around... 20,000.
An interesting photo. Belgian groundcrew tend to an F-16 on Kandahar Airport. Clearly visible is the brand new sniper pod, the successor to the LANTIRN, offering such razorsharp images that the risk of confusing Taliban with ordinary afghans citizens is greatly reduced.
Recent data and pics of the Belgian fighter bombers in Kandahar are hard to come by, especially news of operations. I highly suspect that the MoD has ordered a complete radio silence, since, socialists being what they are, the news of a Taliban terrorist with a broken toenail as a result of a confrontation with the Belgian Air Force might provoke such spasms among our moral betters that they might get in a position to force the redeployment of our F-16's to, say, the Ursel airstrip near Bruges. So Minister De Crem is probably being just wise. Which means that, to get some idea of Belgium's very first real involvement in the WOIT after more than seven years, I have to make do with this short 2006 video, taken during the F-16's first stint in AF, during which they were limited to recce missions. Either way, the crews and ground personnel are competent, and the planes, although old, have been kept up to date. I'm pretty sure they're pulling off a good job. Better late than never. Hat tip for the video of the meeting Luc Van Braekel.
