TALIBAN SUFFERING HEAVY LOSSES IN AFGHANISTAN; RECONSTRUCTION CONTINUES UNABATED.

The following is a translation from the reliable Dutch magazine "Trouw":

IN URUZGAN, A LOT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED

Gino van der Voet , Lieutenant-Colonel, Commander Provincial Reconstruction Team Uruzgan from March to September 2007

For six months I was closely involved with the reconstruction effort in Uruzgan. I have, of course, followed the many reports and opinions in Dutch media about the situation there. Having worked myself in Uruzgan till last September, I am sorry to say I recognize very little therein [from the real situation].

A lot has changed in Uruzgan. I remember the situation two years ago, when I first reconnoitred the area. There's a world of difference with the present day situation. Those driving through Tarin Kowt now, see tremendous activity. The number of shops has more than doubled, and they offer more. Building companies act as local DIY's too. More trucks than ever drive to Kandahar and back carrying goods.

At the time, the camp lay at least at a distance of one kilometre from the township, now it borders, together with Camp Holland, on the outskirts. More and more Afghan citizens settle in Tarin Kowt to benefit from the activity. So there's certainly a good deal of positive news to tell. Last week Minister Koenders of Development Aid, together with his Afghan colleague, signed the building contracts for the first eleven schools, paid for by The Netherlands via the 'Equip Programme'. And then there's lots of ongoing projects in the fields of education, health care, agriculture, infrastructure, justice and safety.

That things don't move faster is disappointing for some. This conclusion however ignores the circumstances under which the reconstruction effort takes place. Do not forget that Uruzgan is one of the poorest provinces in one of the poorest countries. Of the inhabitants, 93.5% cannot read or write. Establishing effective local governance is therefore a tiresome process. One NGO assists in this task, in Tarin Kowt. On the provincial level, this too will take time. Even as the local authorities are so "green", we prefer to organize our projects in cooperation with them. In this manner one gives the reconstruction effort an Afghan face, which is of paramount importance for the populace to trust its own authorities.

That it won't go faster is also because of the polarization, over tens of years of conflicts and suppression, of Pashtun society. Tribal twists and faux tribal representation in local authorities have led to nepotism. Some parts of the population are deliberately neglected. In an environment like that, we cannot simply pass by and start a project. It costs time to get a good grasp of the local circumstances, but it can't be done any other way. A project that favors one tribe over another, is doomed.

Gaining the trust of the population costs time. But over the past months, a solid base has been laid. Using the contacts we have now, we reached a level of success in new projects. And about that reconstruction effort: there sure are obvious results. Under the PRT's aegis, over the course of one year schools have been renovated or built and irrigation canals have been dug and dams been built. Sabotage by Taliban fighters - widespread in other provinces - hasn't taken place. Not one Dutch PRT project has been set on fire. We ask a local community: what do you need? The school that's built subsequently with Dutch money won't be torched that fast by the Taliban. They would lose all sympathy among the locals.

The Netherlands is deliberately keeping a low profile in the reconstruction effort, so as not to give the impression the project is an exclusive NATO/ISAF initiative. Much smarter is it to have the school built by local entrepreneurs. During patrols the PRT is checking whether the work is done according to the plans drawn up.

It is true, the Taliban try to undo our work and get the country under their yoke again. The Task Force's military act against that. The locals simply don't want to live under the Taliban. They want a future for their family, so that their children can go to school. They want a life without Taliban confiscating their winter rations, enforcing shelter at gunpoint, bomb attacks. The Taliban aren't that strong they can paralyze the whole province. They don't have that power.

The heavy fighting of the past few months doesn't mean The Netherlands is losing. To the contrary, the fighting has enhanced the Dutch troops' standing among the locals, even if civilian casualties were counted. In some areas we now have easier access. Given the circumstances the Dutch military is working in, Holland has accomplished a lot the past year. But it is and remains a first step. All our results have to be consolidated and that too costs time, requiring a long-lasting involvement of the international community.

- Lt.Col. Gino Van Der Voet, Dutch Army, Uruzgan Province

This is not the first time that I read about the Dutch success in quelling Taliban terror, using the bifold tactic of an iron fist against the terrorists and smart, intense cooperation with the local population in rebuilding their war-torn country. As our good friend CDR Salamander has noted several times:

There never was a feeling that there was strictly a military solution to AFG. The military can only provide the security so that the true keys to victory – rule of law, reconstruction and development – can take place. That has always been the case.

You should follow that link. It has an amazing story about American paratroopers enlisting the help of an anthropologist - yes, an anthropologist - in their fight against the Taliban:

SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population...

Okay, enough now about reaching out to other cultures, anthropologists and learning mollahs how to craft wooden shoes. For those Taliban who are no quick studies, there are other courses and projects:




Or:



Or:



HOLLAND BOVEN!!! (*)


MFBB.

(*) (Low Countries version of Holland ueber alles)

DEBUNKING A POPULAR MYTH: WHY BELGIUM IS BY NO MEANS AN ARTIFICIAL NATION.

Those who read The Brussels Journal every now and then will know that these days good part of the coverage is dedicated to, it is suggested, an inevitable if not imminent split of the Belgian nation.

Keen observers of European politics will be familiar with this recurring theme, the tensions surrounding it flaring up every time a general election is held. As a 42-year old Belgian, I must admit that never before I have known so tense an atmosphere with regards to the endless bickering between Flemings and Walloons, Belgium's two principal peoples (there is a small community of German-speaking Belgians in the extreme east of the country, but they don't really count in national politics). At the core of the current debate, which began after the June 10 parliamentary elections, is the so-called BHV dossier, the acronym BHV standing for Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde. Lack of progress in this dossier - of which the key Flemish complaint is that in certain parts of Flanders Wallonian parties can field candidates while the reverse is nowhere possible, is the reason why, three and a half-months after the elections, Belgium still has no government. We will come to this item later on, but suffice to say that the longer this stalemate lasts, the larger the percentage of Belgians - Flemings and Walloons alike - who will make the thought exercise of splitting the nation up. To be sure, it is not that far yet. Belgium is no Czecholovakia. However, a recent poll revealed that a good 40% of Flemings and around 10% of Walloons thought a secession was inevitable. Having witnessed the evolution leading to these percentages, I'd wager that neither this year, or the year after, or three years after, you will find the independent Republics of Flanders and Wallonia on the map. But in 25 years? If Wallonia doesn't change its ways, it might be possible.

Strange though it may seem, I, as a Fleming, and a proud Fleming at that, and even a Vlaams Belang member, am NOT in favor of Flemish Independence. First, because I believe that if Wallonia turns away from the Left, it will get (much) more prosperous and won't need Flemish subsidization anymore, thereby obliterating the main reason for a breakup. Second, because I get SO tired of an argument constantly used by the pro-Independence types, namely "that Belgium is an artificial nation".

Imho, it is not. Or, if it is, by no means more so than, say, Germany, Italy or the United States. In the following I will try to explain why Flanders and Wallonia, however antagonistic they seem to each other, have always had age-old bondages, liaisons, mutual interests and shared histories. In 1830, they were NOT lumped together by ignorant cartographers in London. It is rather that the latter simply confirmed ancient boundaries as the frontiers of a mixed germanic/latin household that had throughout the centuries lived in the same "house", be it most of the time under foreign rule. In fact, "all" that happened was that the household was finally allowed to make up its own "house rules".


In 57BC, in the time frame when Ancient Rome was making the transition from Republic to Empire, Julius Caesar, one of the three members of Rome's first Triumvirate and governor of Gallia Narbonensis in the south of what would become France, endavoured on the conquest of Gaul. It was a campaign which would last nine years and become one of the Republic's most expensive, a development of which the justification caused him much trouble. His account of the campaign is written down in his standard work Commentarii de Bello Gallico, and when I was a school kid, one of our first history lessons invariably highlighted a particular exerpt from it:

Gaul is divided in three parts, one is inhabited by the Belgae, the other by the Aquitanians, the third part by those who call themselves the Celts, but those we call Gauls. They all have other languages, institutions and laws. The Gauls are separated from the Aquitanians by the Garonne and from the Belgae by the Marne and the Seine. The bravest Gauls are the Belgae, because their culture and inhabitants are located far away from the rest of the province, because few merchants visit them, and because they are close to Germania, which is across the Rhine and with whom they are at war.

Although I would lie. The books left out the remark about the Belgians being bravest because they were the furthest away from civilization. Anyway, by defeating the Belgic tribes one by one, including the one I strongly suspect I am a descendant from (the Nervii), Caesar finally established Roman rule over what is present day Belgium and a considerable slice of northern France as well as one of the Rhineland. One of the last bitter pills to swallow for Caesar was the complete annihilation of an entire legion by the Eburones tribe under their leader Ambiorix. Caesar was no liberal and instead of finding out what it was exactly that had so pissed off the Eburones he decimated them, one of the earliest recorded genocides in human history. It was also one of the first ethnic cleansings, since he then had the pitiful remnants remaining in the area replaced with a friendly tribe, the Tungri. He backed up their presence with a military camp and the settlement became known as Tungrorum. Anno 2007, the place is known as Tongeren - Belgium's oldest town and the place where one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, Robert Cailliau, was born. As much as it might disturb good ole Caesar, today a large bronze statue of Ambiorix, wrought in a rather liberal interpretation, is adorning Tongeren's market square opposite the basilica. In 2005 Ambiorix was one of the contenders for The Greatest Belgian. In Flanders he ended fourth. In Wallonia, 50th. Tongeren lies just inside Flanders, you see.

Tongeren may lay inside Flanders, but only just inside it. Wallonia lies barely a couple of kilometers to the south. There is a reason for that, you know. The Romans constructed a very important road running in a faint arc southwestwards from Colonia (Cologne, see "Koeln" on the map to the right) in what is now Germany, over Bavacum (Bavay) northern France, to Boulogne-sur-Mer, at the Channel coast. As it happened, Roman - Latin - influence north of that road was less than south of it. The road more or less traced the fault line between the Latin and Germanic cultures. The origins of Belgium's linguistic divide can thus be traced back to a Roman road.


By the late 3rd century, a dying Roman Empire lost its grip on Gaul, although its cultural heritage would forever leave its mark, and a Western Germanic tribe known as the Franks filled the vacuum. Actually, already in 358 the Romans, gradually leaving the area which is by and large present-day Belgium, had entrusted the Franks with the defense of this northern border region, opting for some kind of peaceful coexistence instead of spending huge sums of money in a campaign they couldn't win anyway. Fifty years later, these same Franks had themselves to endure a subsequent invasion by yet another powerful Germanic tribe, the Vandals, which crossed the Rhine in December 406 and devastated much of Frankish Gaul. Somehow, the Franks withstood the Vandal onslaught, and as the latter proceeded further to the south a Frankish branch known as the Salian Frankish spawned the Merovingian dynasty, of which the most famous King was Clovis I. By the late 4th century, he had reunited much of Gaul north of the Loire river. As time went by, the Merovingian kings became weak and decadent, earning themselves the scornful soubriquet do-nothing kings, and in 751 the last one was deposed by his majordomus, Pippin the Short. This act was the formal end of the Merovingian dynasty, and the beginning of the Carolingian one, although the latter had been in charge for some time already: Pippins father, although nominally no king, was the famous Charles Martel, who stopped the Islamic conquest of Western Europe in 732 at the Battle of Poitiers, sometimes referred to as the Battle of Tours. In fact, although Pippin the Short was the first Carolingian king, the dynasty took its name from this Charles Martel, who earned his nickname (in modern English, "martel" means "hammer") by utterly devastating the muslim army and killing its commander, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, the Governor-general of what was then known as al-Andalus (Spain). Pippin the Short's son was... Charlemagne, better known in Anglosaxon countries as Charles the Great, the most famous Carolingian King, who transformed the Frankish kingdom in a veritable Empire covering most of Western Europe, large swaths of Central Europe, and northern Italy. You will forgive me a certain amount of chauvinism, but Charles Martel, Pippin the Short and Charlemagne were actually, erm, Belgians, since born in a place near present-day Liège which will certainly ring a bell among gun aficionados. I am, of course, talking about Herstal, which is the home of the Belgian small-arms manufacturer FN Herstal. In the context of our story, however, the most important thing is that under Frankish rule too, whether Merovingian or Carolingian, both areas which would become known as Flanders and Wallonia belonged to the same Frankish Kingdom, later Empire (see the outline of Belgium on the map above).

In 800 the great Charlemagne was crowned Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III, and his empire encompassed all of present-day France and the Low Countries, half of present-day Germany and and the whole of what is now northern Italy. Barely 43 years later, this gigantic Empire was broken up in three among Charlemagne's grandsons. The western part - mostly the better part of contemporary France - went to Charles the Bald, the eastern part - half of today's Germany - to Louis The German, and the central part - what would become the Netherlands, the Franco-German border region and northern Italy - to Lothar. The empire of Charles The Bald, who was the youngest of the three brothers, suffered most from Viking raiders, and one of the most prone areas was the so-called Pagus Flandrensis or Flanders Shire, the northernmost region around a settlement which would later be called Brugge - Bruges. The forestier, or Charles' deputy ruler in the pagus flandrensis, was a certain Odokar III, and he had a son named Baldwin (Boudewijn in Flemish). In December 861 Baldwin had the audacity to run off with the emperor's daughter, Judith. To escape Charles's wrath, the couple first fled to Lotharingia and from there to Rome, to seek protection from Pope Nicolas I. The pope must have been a liberal since he endorsed the relationship of the two frolicking youngsters, and he persuaded Charles The Bald to give the couple his blessing. Thus happened, and Baldwin and Judith officially married the year after. Baldwin was given the pagus flandrensis as a wedding gift and became the very first Count of Flanders, eventually to be nicknamed Baldwin Ironarm, for his success in repelling the Viking attacks (other sources claim however that it was because he once allegedly pinned a bear against a tree using a spear). An important element in his strategy was that he reinforced ancient settlements at focal river confluences, where the Vikins used to sail up the hinterland. Two such places were Bruges and especially Ghent, at the confluence of the rivers Scheldt and Lys. As for Baldwin's spouse Judith, she became our First Countess. Together they had four children, of which the second one succeeded his father as Baldwin II. A dynasty was born, which would only come to an end a thousand years later, in 1983, when Prince Charles, the brother of King Leopold III, died. He was the last Count of Flanders.

The 10th century saw the gradual demise of the Carolingian empires, and thus of centralized control. While in France and England, Europes oldest nation states, a monarchy retained some semblance of "national" rule, the real power in this period rested with some sort of subnational level, the counties and duchys. The basic tenet of societal structure was feudalism, whereby the king or the most powerful lords granted vassals possession of land in exchange for their fealty - support in times of war, from the Latin fidelitas. The land was called a fief, and the people on it were allowed to make a living off the fief's harvest and its natural produce in exchange for protection. During this period, around the milennium, local vassals managed to become extremely powerful in their own right, sometimes by conquering adjacent fiefs, sometimes by marriage. In fact, some became so powerful that they became a challenge to the King, and this is about what happened in proto-Belgium, where the 11th century saw the rise of powerful counties such as Flanders, Brabant, Loon, Namur and Hainaut. Somewhat apart from them, but not less important, was the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. In the first three entities , Dutch was spoken, and in the latter three, French, in accordance as you may recall, with the stronger Latin influence to the south of the old roman road linking Cologne with Bavay, and continuing to Boulogne-sur-Mer. While these counties acted as "mini-states" and where thus independent from each other, there was some element of bondage between them given the fact that they found themselves sandwiched between the aggressive "French" and "German" spheres of influence. Notice on the map above, how the loose collection of semi-autonomous counties and duchies starts to assume, as early as the 12th (!) century, the form of 21st century Belgium. For those who think the Flemish-speaking and French-speaking peoples of the region were always enemies, as today some would want us to believe, it may come as a surprise that in the Middle Ages, the County of Flanders was twice united through a so-called personal union with the "Walloon" County of Hainaut, namely from 1067 till 1071 and from 1191 till 1246. The "Walloon" Prince-Bishopric of Liège practically owned te "Flemish" County of Loon (a county in the present-day Belgian provinde of Limburg). And even without such formal alliances or administrative subordinations, there were plenty of contacts between what is now called Flanders and Wallonia. Also on the personal level, and the sheer proliferation of "Flemish" names in Wallonia and "Wallonian" ones in Flanders is testimony to centuries of widespread intermarrying.


By and large, the "Wallonian" counties (the very name of Wallonia does in fact not emerge until the 19th century) tried to get away from French and German influence (tutelage at best, armed incursions at worst) by going the soft way. Not in the north though, where armed conflict halted foreign influence and/or safeguarded the survival of Flemish language and culture. Actually, the case can be made that the fact that nowadays Flemish is spoken in an arc stretching from the North Sea to the Meuse river, is the result of two resounding military victories over powerful neighbors. To the east, the victory of Duke Jan I of Brabant over the Germans under the archbishop of Cologne at the Battle of Woeringen, 5 June 1288, meant that the Duchy of Limburg was wrestled from German control and added to the powerful "central Belgian" Brabantine duchy. In the West, the County of Flanders fought a long-drawn war with France and though it ultimately had to yield, its resistance meant that it never became a part of France the way other entities like the Languedoc, Gascony etc... did qnd eventually became part of the French kingdom.

Now, of all the counties forming "medieval Belgium", it was Flanders which would become the most powerful and wealthiest. This evolution had a lot to do with the emergence of its cities, such as Ghent, Bruges, Kortrijk, Ypres (Ieper) and Oudenaarde. Not without justification one can state that capitalism was invented here. From the 10th century on, the most entrepreneurial among the peasantry left for the cities, where after one year they were free men. In those cities, commerce and industry, particularly the cloth industry, soon took a high flight. A chief factor in this development was the trade with England, whereby large quantities of raw wool, which England had in abundance but was unable to process properly, were sent over the channel, turned into high quality clothing by Flemish craftsmen, and transported back. These tremendous - for the time - trade movements were the main reason why throughout the Middle Ages England and Flanders were close allies. By the late thirteenth century, the French King, Philip IV, nicknamed "The Fair", seeing that an ever more prosperous Flanders, by then only in name subordinated to the French Crown, was escaping control, decided to teach the Flemings a lesson. The war between France and England, broken out in 1294, provided the alibi to send a large army to the renegades, who had allied themselves with France's arch-enemy. At first France's invasion succeeded, and by 1300 the County of Flanders was under firm French Control and the Count, Guy of Dampierre, and his two sons, were imprisoned. In his place the French King appointed a landlord, Jacques de Châtillon, who very quickly made himself detested. After the imposition of one tax too many, a De Châtillon party of roughly 200 French was brutally murdered on 18 May 1302 in Bruges, an episode known as the "Brugse Metten". De Chatillon managed to escaped, and that same summer Philip The Fair, white with rage, sent the most splendid Knight's Army the French Crown had ever assembled to Flanders to extol revenge. It was utterly defeated on 11 July 1302 before the gates of Kortrijk, in southwest Flanders, in a Battle that lives on in history as the Battle of the Golden Spurs. One of the key leaders, leading the contingent from West Flanders, was Guy of Namur. Namur is in Wallonia. Today, it's even the capital of the Walloon Region. So the Flemings' most splendid victory ever, the news of which reached a shocked Pope Boniface VII one week later, was achieved under the (shared) leadership of... a Walloon.


(to be continued)


MFBB.

BRUSSELS POLICE ACT LIKE NAZIS; LEADING SLOVAK POLITICIAN SAYS BEHAVIOUR BRUSSELS MAYOR AND POLICE REMIND HIM OF COMMUNIST DICTATORS

On Tuesday, September 11, 2007 a small gathering of about 200 people on Brussels Luxemburg Plaza was all that materialized of the predicted "tens of thousands" of concerned Europeans, set to demonstrate on that day against the islamization of Europe. Of course, the SIOE demonstration had been forbidden by the extreme leftwing mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans. Of course, the head of the German branch, Udo Ulfkotte, had but one week ago unilaterally decided to withdraw his support for the project. But still, two hundred people was an extremely meager number of people to address a very serious, pan-European problem.

The two hundred were not really demonstrating, but gathering.
They were not acting in a violent manner.
They were not destroying anything.
They were not hurling insults against the "authorities".
They were no vandals, no skinheads, no hotheads.

Yet the Brussels Police suddenly attacked in a coward and violent manner. Well-mannered, civilized, well-clothed and contributing European citizens and taxpayers were roughed up in the most appalling ways.

154 arrests were made.

September 11, 2007, was a day meant amongst others to commemmorate the victims of islamic terrorism.

The Brussels Police turned it in a Day of Infamy instead.

From a reader over at The Brussels Journal:

A Day in Brussels, A Fifty Yard View

Around 10:45, driving around the Luxembourg and Berlaymont areas in Brussels it became obvious the demonstration was en route to become “a whole lot ado ‘bout nothin’ ”. It’s hard to say whether there were 12 or 15 dozen demonstrators near the Europarliament Buildings, come noon, how many there were at the Luxemburg plaza or in between, I can’t say, but what was abundantly clear, was that these particular Brussels areas were under siege.

However much the Belgian media portray the SIOE demo as an anti-islam ralley, I wanted to be there because I’ve started reading the Koran about three years ago. I challenge any or other rational opponent of the demonstration to do the same and not be concerned. I happened to be in Brussels, since it matters to me personally, apart from the fact that 9/11 left a profound impression, and to this day still does, that is...

I wanted to see for myself how the authorities would react. Seeing is believing. As soon as I saw the might of the police and recognised the efforts the authorities had taken throughout the neighbouring communes, it was pretty clear most of those unorganised individuals who would have wanted to attend simply decided to do a 180 and got the hell out of Dodge. Police outnumbered demonstrators by some 300% (guesswork).

Impressive it was, and although throughout the surrounding area police forces kept to themselves, acting as inconspicuous as pink elephants near the north-pole, the cordon policiaire that had been thrown in front of the demonstrators, (keeping to the stairs of the roundabout opposite the Berlaymont-building), the flashing policecars, the horses, the dogs, and the riot-police stood their ground; in the side-streets numerous riot-cars went to all lengths to be overtly and utterly visible. Police in combat gear stood within shouting distance.

No crowds in their tens of thousands, not all too many banners or cards, some flags here and there, and most of the time the demonstrators were hidden behind the press-camera’s clicking away at God knows what. They didn’t wear combat boots, they didn’t carry any sticks, there were no baseball-bats, they didn’t wear face-masks, and they didn’t rip open the pavement, no window-panes shattered, no refuse-cans were lit, the café was open and sold cofffee and sandwiches, business as usual. The demonstrators probably just voiced grievances, although I can’t tell since I didn’t hear any of it. They may not have shaven their heads, they didn’t wear orange, or off-white sarongs, they didn’t fold their hands in front of them, and they didn’t seek any of their heads to forcefully meet with truncheons, yet…

Yet yes, the demo had been banned, and yes there’s probably laws against unlawfull manifestations, and yes, all those in the midst probably knew what to expect, if push came to shove.

However, … For some or other reason police made a dash towards selected demonstrators and singled out those, who for all intents and purposes didn’t in any way seem ‘aggressive’ from my 50 yard away-off-to-the-side view. All those that were brutally manhandled suffered the hyper-adrenaline anger of some eager roughshot-riding police, and although they put up with the assault, they didn’t as such retaliate. Although they did not quite “resist” the person in authority, one was hard put to tell whether the struggles that ensued, were not caused by the ‘brute way’ in which they were thrown to the ground, or it jus may be they simply wanted to prevent their three-piece suits from being torn. And when they voiced their disagreement with the way they were manacled, they protested the fact that they were manhandled. Some protesters even involuntarily ran in to 2-foot truncheons, that happened to be in the way.

It needn’t have come to that. There was simply no momentum. This was unnecessary. An overreaction to an out of control fenomenon. If the police hadn’t acted as they have,… they would have come out tops. As is the case, and under orders, they’re the losers,… Brussels lost face. If one is treated the way these politicians today have been treated for peacefully protesting against a ban on being allowed to peacefully demonstrate, then there’s something wrong. Acutely and perversely wrong.

For, for example the United States as constitutional democracy, specifically allows for peaceful demonstrations to address social and/or political grievances and specifically allows the freedom of assembly to express these grievances. In the ‘New-Europe’ Capital it is now abundantly clear one has no such rights.

Some appalling pictures over at this Danish site.

From another TBJ reader:

The police initiated violence without provocation and I personally witnessed and photographed the officer who appeared to be coordinating the assaults on people. This officer was busy throughout the encounter and was seen and photographed maneuvering frequently between groups of uniformed police and communicating with unknown others whereupon he re-directed the troops to another snatch operation against identified targets ... it was fascinating to watch and he became appallingly clumsy, predictable and blase about his nefarious actions - he obviously was having a really thrilling 'boys day out' telling 'the lads' who to pounce on next - a real hardline bully.

I witnessed first hand the un-provoked and un-warranted assaults on peaceful participants and stood near groups of armed officers waiting for their instructions listening to them in 4 separate locations whispering, nodding and calling up attention onto apparently specific participants who were moving around and circulating.

I am convinced the police were there deliberately to target specific individuals as they left many participants alone who clearly were not in their sights - myself included.

The vast array of armed 'stormtroopers' in backstreets and my witnessing of their subsequent initiation of unprovoked assaults against targeted participants leads me to firmly believe there was a counter-agenda. The SIoE demonstration was but a sideshow and Freddy-the-Mayor is just a stalking horse.




If you live in a free society and want to keep it so, fight its islamization if you are confronted with it.

But above all, Fight Leftism.


MFBB.

PATRIOT DAY

Destroy. Them.


MFBB.

SUMMER'S ALMOST GONE...

... so if I want to have at least a lame excuse for something completely different it's about time.



If you are a "jihadi", you are kindly requested to scrutinize miz sunshine thoroughly, so that you may burn in hell.

MFBB.

MEET FREDDY THIELEMANS, MAYOR OF BRUSSELS. COWARD. TRAITOR. DHIMMI. SOCIALIST STINKER.

Comment 849. E K Cohen From Arizona, USA: To Mr. Mayor Freddy Thielemans: My US Army father did not endure the Battle of the Bulge so that I could watch Belgians kneel before barbarian invaders. Shame on you!

OK, so what happened? On September 11, 2007, the SIOE organization [Stop The Islamization of Europe - MFBB] intended to organize a demo in Brussels, in front of the European Parliament, to protest against what they call the "invasion of muslim customs". In particular, SIOE protests against the encroaching influence of islamic sharia law on relations within Europes muslim communities - and, by extension, to the relations of muslims with indigenous Europeans. Societal trends and separate cases give indeed ample reason for concern, and to name but a few we cite the results of a 2006 UK poll, which revealed that 40% of British muslims wanted sharia law to be introduced in parts of the country; the purposeful "soft" expulsion and discreet intimidation of indigenous shop owners by their moroccan counterparts in Borgerhout, Antwerp; the steeply rising number of honor revenge cases, e.g. in Rotterdam; the molestation of gays and muslim apostates in Amsterdam, the continentwide building of highly visible mosques, funded with money from the Gulf region and under the auspices of Milli Gorus, the Muslim Brotherhood etc etc etc...



Europe had to wait a long time for it, but apparently we are reaching a point whereby sufficient indigenous Europeans are saying "Enough is enough". And so it was that three apolitical European organizations, concerned about the growing influence of Islam, decided to bundle their forces and hold a peaceful demonstration against the Islamization of Europe in Brussels. The event was scheduled for the 11th of September, the West's most symbolic date in its conflict with political islam, and indeed SIOE planned to hold a 1-minute silence to commemmorate the victims of 9/11. SIOE groups the UK's No Sharia Here, led by Stephen Gash, the Danish SIAD (Stop Islamiseringen af Danmark) from Anders Gravers, and last but not least the German Pax Europa, under the chairmanship of Dr. Udo Ulfkotte.


The aims of SIOE, as stated on their site, are:

1° SIOE exists to legally combat the overt and covert expansion of Islam in Europe.

2° SIOE condemns racism as the lowest form of human stupidity, but considers Islamophobia to be the height of common sense.

3° SIOE states that Islam and democracy are incompatible due to teachings within the Koran itself and some of the hadiths which comprise sharia law.

4° SIOE sees that such incompatibility is self-evident when those tenuous democracies in countries where Islam is the dominant religion are scrutinized.

You can agree or disagree with these aims, and personally, with regards to 3°) and 4°) I am still waiting for the US-led effort to implant democracy in the ME to succeed. I still hope the resulting growth in wealth and prosperity, coupled with the Rule of Law, will allow afree enough intellectual climate to take root from which truly moderate religious scholars will step forward, proposing more benign teachings of islam. At the very least, greater material wealth in the ME will in itself stem the influx of muslims in Europe, who now flee their native countries because they live in squalor and under tyranny, and who seem not to comprehend that the very lifestyles they import here are exactly the reasons they lived in squalor and under tyranny.

But these are only minor differences. While the US's prodigious and bold undertaking in the ME can, and should, continue its way, the current ongoing Islamization of Europe does present a "clear and present danger", to be addressed immediately and simultaneously. This really is a clash between civilizations, and typically for our respective cultures, the West's move to finally bring the muslim world in line with the rest of humanity is highly visible and open, while their move to cast a whole continent back into the Middle Ages is mostly a treacherous and covert affair, planned and orchestrated from MB headquarters and Ministries of Religious Affairs.

Well then, as late as Tuesday 7 August, SIOE's Ulfkotte and co-organizers had a meeting with some fifteen Brussels police officials and according to Ulfkotte "there were no problems whatsoever". Two days later, on 9 August, the demonstration had been forbidden by Brussels' Mayor, Freddy Thielemans. According to press reports, he did so after conferring with police and "other services", and he "feared that there would be incidents between demonstrators and immigrants who live in the neighborhood." His spokesman Nicolas Dassonville added:

"The danger for public order is too great. There is an important immigrant community nearby which might react. Moreover, the organization uses islamophobic language."

As if to provoke, Thielemans and Dassonville hastened to declare that every year, they receive between five and six hundred requests for demonstrations, and that over the past five years they only forbade five or six. So there you have it. An apolitical organization asks for permission to stage a demonstration to highlight a very obvious and worrisome development, and is denied the right to protest. By contrast, last year muslim organizations staged a demonstration in Brussels against the headscarf ban, WITHOUT EVEN HAVING ASKED PERMISSION, and... were given a free hand. The news of Thielemans' capitulation to islamic radicals, since that is what it is, caused quite some uproar in the Belgium. In response to this, Thielemans declared "that it was not so much violence from islamic immigrants he feared, but rather from rightwing extremists". Which is, of course, total bullshit. Ulfkotte's SIOE most emphatically distances itself from any political leanings or agenda, and has clearly demanded its demo be not abused by politicians of whatever stripe for their own purposes. Mr. Ulfkotte:

"We are no extreme rightwing stone-throwers but peaceful people who want to come up for our rights. Is this no longer possible in the Capital of Europe? This strenghtens us in our resolve. Has radical islam advanced so much that a scared mayor takes such decisions? We will possibly hire lawyers to fight this decision."

Dr. Udo Ulfkotte knows what he is talking about when the subject is islam. This professor and former journalist spent twelve to fifteen years in islamic countries, mostly as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and his experiences with this backward, mysogynic and utterly inhuman "religion" were so bad that back home in Europe he endeavoured on a personal quest to make westerners aware of the dangers of islam. Recently, during an interview with Muenchener Merkur, he remarked on his motives:

"I have seen executions in KSA and in Yemen, how hacked off hands were attached to the City Gate. I have seen stonings of women, how people are classified in different categories and experienced the antihuman world view of muslims."

Thielemans' decision to stifle freedom of speech becomes understandable when we learn about the person behind the name. He is a prominent member of the Parti Socialiste, the "Party of 1,000,000 scandals". This is not the time to elaborate on the subject, but it is safe to say that very likely no other party in the western hemisphere has such a dismal record of scandal, fraud, gross incompetence, political murder and silencing of political opponents. The Parti Socialiste has been governing Wallonia, Belgium's southern French-speaking half, for over sixty years. In so doing, they have so thoroughly ruined Wallonia morally, economically and financially that Wallonia cannot survive without important financial transfers from rich Flanders, Belgium's northern half. Yet further evidence of the bankruptcy of the Parti Socialiste way of governance was offered this week, when stats comparing cardiac arrests in Ghent, a typical Flemish city, with those in Charleroi, a typical Wallonian city, revealed that as a male citizen in Charleroi your chances on an acute cardiac arrest are twice as high as in Ghent.

It is a common phenomenon in all European areas that where socialists are losing indigenous votes, they start catering to the audiences they see as the next most important vote reservoir: immigrants, and in Europe that means mostly islamic immigrants. The prime constituency among these are not the first generation workers who came here searching for jobs, but rather the second and third generations, marred by high unemployment and characterized by their growing radicalization (third generationers are often far more religious than their predecessors). For over two decades now these people have been told by socialist politicians that the reason they live in squalor is not their own culture, but (western) society and racism from indigenous locals. This story fell not on deaf ears in a community which is notorious for its lack of self-criticism and love for conspiracy theories. In short, this is how socialism and islam found each other, and it shows. Brussels is the Belgian city with the largest number of islamic immigrants, and not surprisingly the PS is Brussels largest party. In the City Council, it holds 17 of the 47 seats. Of those 17, 10 are Muslims. The PS's coalition partner are the Christian-Democrats, with 11 councillors, of whom 2 are Muslims. Taking apart the non-islamic immigrants, then less than half of the City of Brussels' governing coalition, 13 out of 28 councillors, are native Belgians - among them Thielemans. And it is not so hard to imagine how the 10 muslim councillors in his fraction of 17 advised him how to deal with a "Stop the Islamization of Europe" demonstration.

This is not the first time that Freddy Thielemans - btw, not related to Toots - reveals himself to be a big friend of muslims, even though his buddies utterly despise his party's "progressive" ethics such as gay marriage, gay adoption, the facilitating of abortion etc etc. He is a notorious bon vivant - his rosy-red, fat appearance being so typical for a lot of Parti Socialiste bigshots - and last year, when he had to undergo a medical treatment on account of his lavish lifestyle, he appointed as Deputy Mayor the Algerian born Faouzia Hariche, who is, you guess it, a muslim. One explanation for Thielemans' love for the followers of the prophet is that they, like him, hate Christianity and Christians. A nice illustration thereof is the incident he had with his colleague of Angoulême, France. Angoulême and Brussels compete with each other for the title of European Cartoon Capital. Delegations from both rivals visit each other though, and in April 2005, when the Angoulême delegation led by Mayor Philippe Mottet, was visiting Brussels and having a drink with Thielemans, the latter received an SMS on his cell phone informing him of the death of Pope John Paul II. Instantly Thielemans, an atheist, exclaimed to those present: "Du champagne pour tout le monde et de l'eau pétillante pour M. Philippe Mottet!" [Champagne for everyone and sparkling water for Mr. Philippe Mottet! - MFBB]. The center-right Mr. Mottet (he is a member of Sarkozy's UMP as well as a catholic) and his delegation left the meeting in disgust prematurely, and were not present on an inauguration ceremony the following day. Apparently the brave Mr. Thielemans has no fear of offending adherents of certain other religious denominations.


Thielemans' refusal to grant permission for SIOE's demonstration is but one illustration of how, throughout Europe, socialism and islam have gotten in bed with each other. All over Europe, prominent socialists take care not to "offend" their newfound constituency, muslims. Take Amsterdam, for example, where recently the Jewish (!) mayor, Job Cohen, of the Dutch socialist party PvdA, upon learning of the involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood in the building of Amsterdam's Westermoskee, declared that the MB was "not a dangerous organization". The radical islamist organization MB, founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, is known to have spawned several terrorist groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. As if that wasn't bad enough, Cohen found it necessary last month to apologize for... several of the late Theo Van Goghs rowdy opinions on islam. Across the Channel, Cohen's colleague in the British Capital is even farther down the cliff. The lunatic Ken Livingstone, nicknamed "Red Ken", already made headlines by calling a Jewish journalist a concentration camp guard, befriending Hugo Chavez and apologizing for British Muslims leaving for the ME to commit terrorism. Livingstone is the big promotor of London's Mega Mosque Project, the Markaz, which is designed to accommodate up to 70,000 worshippers. The organization behind the Markaz is Tablighi Jamaat, according to the FBI an organization with ties to... Al Qaeda.


In Paris, the openly gay Socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoe does his utmost best to please the followers of the prophet, just like his Dutch and British counterparts. The new Al-Dawa mosque and the planned adjacent socio-cultural centre will be built on a terrain of 3,000 square meters, generously offered by Mr. Delanoe - whose office also organizes yearly events at the occasion of the Ramadan. In October 2006, Mr. Delanoe personally inaugurated a new "Institute of Muslim Cultures", built in an old state school in the Rue Léon, Paris. A zeal like that is a bit strange, given that Mr. Delanoe narrowly escaped death in 2002 when he was stabbed in the stomach by... a muslim. Upon arrest, the perpetrator, a certain Azedine Berkane, admitted he "disliked gays".


Over to Berlin, where the end of this year will probably see the completion of the new Ahmadiyya Mosque in Pankow, a neighborhood in the former East Berlin. Berlin's mayor is a jolly good fellow by the name of Klaus Wowereit, openly gay and like so many socialists (he's a prominent member of the SPD) a pork barrel spender, see this TIME article: "Even though the financial and economic situation of a city may be bad," Wowereit says, "you must show a sense of enjoyment in life." Enjoy the good life while you still can, Mr. Wowereit. Btw, now that we were talking about pork and pork barrel spending, last year, during a television debate with his Christian Democrat contender for burgomaster of Berlin, Mr. Wowereit declared himself to be in favor of a "world-open Berlin" [Weltoffenes Berlin], as well as a strong advocate of the building of the new Ahmadiyya mosque in Pankow. It can be seriously doubted whether the good people of said mosque appreciated Mr. Wowereits concern and support, since their website cites, a.o., Khalifa [a religious bigshot in the Ahmadiyya sect] Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, who wrote that the higher visibility of homosexuals in the West (couples walking hand in hand, Gay Pride parades etc.) can be connected to the consumption of pork meat! Probably Mr. Wowereit simply ate far too much Schweinefleisch.


This list would not be complete without Philippe Moureaux, the mayor of Molenbeek, one of the 19 communes of Greater Brussels. Moureaux is one of the top Parti Socialiste officials in the whole of Brussels, and Molenbeek is his personal fiefdom. It was he who, in 2005, forbade his police officers to drink coffee and eat sandwiches in the streets during Ramadan. He also ordered them to limit their patrols significantly. Today, Molenbeek is a hotbed of Islamic extremism. Apart from his career in local politics, Moureaux has also been, in times past, a pivotal figure in Belgium's federal political arena, where he was deeply involved in drafting the law allowing non-Belgians to vote in municipal elections, as well legislation against racism and xenophobia. Over the years, this legislation was time and again amended until it was tailor-made, so to say, to "kill" the Vlaams Blok - or so Moureaux & Co thought. That was in 2004, and the VB only escaped being completely outlawed by changing its name. Philippe Moureaux' hatred of the VB is not only because of the "racism" he and his ilk perceive in this party or in each and everyone who dares to object to obvious problems caused by muslim immigrants. No, this man hates Flemings because he is a racist himself, and a fierce anti-Fleming racist at that. I have known him for over twenty-five years now, and during all this time I have never heard this cretin utter a single word in Flemish. I bet however, that by now he does speak quite a mouthful of arabic. After all, he married a muslim wife.


EPILOGUE.

The following comment was left on a De Standaard poll page, put up to feel the pulse with regards to the rightness of Thielemans' decision. The comment is from a Flemish student living in Molenbeek.

As a Flemish student in Molenbeek I seem to discern a problematic, cultural islamic influence: during the day or at night I have, until now, never been harassed. Women on the other hand are inevitably addressed at night if they aren't accompanied by a man. Young muslims call the women then denigrating names and follow them on foot or with their cars. I am not talking here about threats or robberies. Still, this practice is daily bread and legally speaking difficult to penalize. As a consequence, women feel unsafe and dare no longer venture out alone at night. And even if there are more than two, they still prefer that a boy accompanies them. In this way muslim culture, in a subtle way, achieves its goal. Namely that the woman without headscarf has no business on the streets at night. And so the indigenous woman unwillingly accepts muslim culture. Like I already said, the deeds look futile, the consequences are not!!! Frederic.

If you love freedom, sign that petition:




MFBB

NEW TOYS FOR BELGIAN CONTINGENT IN AFGHANISTAN.

Imagine my surprise when I came across these photos, picked from the Belgian Army website. It shows troopers on a shooting range near Kabul, equipped with a weird-looking gun. After scrutinizing them, it was clear that the weapon in question is the FN F-2000, first shown to the public in 2001.



Despite its short length, an F-2000 is a relatively bulky weapon with (for a handheld gun) large vertical surfaces, which is why these examples are camouflaged. Notice that Belgian soldiers retain the older Kevlar PASGT helmet [PASGT = Personal Armor System for Ground Troops - MFBB]. Personally, I fail to comprehend why the US Army dispensed with them in favor of the new ACH [ACH = Advanced Combat Helmet], which is distinctively smaller. I have read all the stuff concerning its lighter weight and comfortable feeling, its alleged better ballistic and impact protection, its compatibility with the most recent night vision devices and communication equipment and so on. But it seems to me the soldier on the ground had definitely less protection in the neck and ears area, and I fear troopers will once again pay the price in blood for it. The reason the US Army adopted the M1 helmet back in 1941 was just because the WWI-era M1917 helmet only protected the top of the head, and it looks that in this regard the ACH is a step back over the PASGT. Murdoc Online agrees with me. Check out his post on this subject, it has a good graphic to illustrate the increased vulnerability.



The vehicle in the back is a Kraus Maffei-produced Dingo 2 multipurpose armoured vehicle with a remote-controlled machinegun on top. The Belgian army purchased 220 Dingo 2's in its various forms and currently has a handful in Afghanistan as well as some in Lebanon. Together with a host of other wheeled vehicles they are meant to replace ALL tracked armoured vehicles, which basically is an insanity, but then Belgium had for the past eight years a socialist Defense Minister, André Flahaut, who singlehandedly helped the armed forces a good way towards it transformation to the world's biggest kaki-clad transportation company, with the majority of its obese and middle aged truckers running silly errands. As has been stated on these pages before, civilized countries should have written it in their constitution that a socialist can never run a defense ministry. For some time, it looked like Canada might have committed the same fatal error as Belgium when it considered scrapping all its Leopard MBT's in favor of armoured cars. Luckily, they didn't and its Leopards have come in mighty handy in AF. Other western countries, like Sweden, are even worse off than Belgium, see this article, "Years of Cuts have left Sweden defenseless", but then Sweden has the most abominable history in Europe when it comes to leftist governance. All of this does of course not detract from the Dingo's undisputable qualities, but in my view it is rather an up-armoured Humvee than a wheeled Bradley AIFV. It will never be able to perform the duties of the latter, and this is where our policy makers have (again) gone wrong.



Now for the FN F-2000. It is probably the world's most modern assault gun, combining all modern features required of this weapon such as compact bullpup design [bullpup = shooting mechanism and magazine located behind the trigger - MFBB], modularity (the FN-2000 can literally be tailor-made by adding or leaving off diverse options), and fully ambidextrous handling. The latter means that its design is such that it can with the same easy be used by right and left handed users. It can be fitted with 40 mm FN EGLM grenade launchers as well as a computerized fire control system. The F2000's calibre is 5.56x45 mm NATO, it weighs 4.6 kg with a 40mm grenade launcher, and it's a gas operated, rotating bolt, selective-fire weapon, utilizing a short-stroke gas piston and a 7-lug rotating bolt which locks into the barrel extension. Possibly the most unique feature of the F-2000 is its patented front ejection system: the spent cases, extracted from the chamber, exit the gun via an ejection tube lading from the gun's rear its ejection port near the muzzle, where they fall out at a safe distance from the shooter's face! A special swinging guide, entering the way of the closing bolt, directs the spent case, held on the bolt face, to this ejection tube. At the same time, lower lugs of the bolt strip a fresh cartridge from the 30-round magazine.



This photo, when compared to the picture before, leaves not a shred of doubt anymore about the gun's identity. The gun sight is different... but then the rail on top of the weapon allows for different sights and scopes. An F-2000 is shorter than an M-4, but its barrel is actually comparable, possibly longer (400mm) due to the bullpup design. Its rate of fire is 850 rounds/minute, its effective range 500 meters (without gunsights).

On most Internet sources you'll find that the FN F2000 rifle is only operated by Belgian Special Forces (since 2004), the Slovenian Army, and Peruvian and Chilean Special Forces. Since the current batch of soldiers on duty in Afghanistan is actually drawn from an artillery unit (2nd Artillery Regiment) these photos prove that the FN F-2000 has found its way to mainstream Belgian Army units. With regards to other users beyond the ones above, I cannot exactly rejoice in the rumour that Saudi Arabia signed a deal with FN Herstal in 2005 to procure 50,000 (!) F-2000's... to complement its FN P-90's!

Whether the FN F-2000's will ever be used against Taliban is another matter. The 300 troops in Afghanistan are still only guarding KAIA (Kabul International Airport), and the Belgian government issued a truckload of caveats with regards to their use. The Netherlands is a comparable country, but they have been effective and stalwart allies of the US in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan, where they have the equivalent of a light brigade (some 2,000 personnel with a LOT of heavy matériel) operating in the dangerous Uruzgan province. Maybe, just maybe, Belgium's engagement in the WOT may be upgraded a bit in the coming months. I admit it's a big maybe since Belgian politicians, regardless of their stripe, usually have backbones as consistent as spaghetti which has been lying in boiling water for over one week. There have been parliamentary elections on June 10 and while we are still waiting for a government to be formed, it does look as it's going to be a coalition of liberals and christian democrats. Not that these have any basic understanding of defense matters, but at least the socialists will very likely land in the opposition. And that alone is a big step in the right direction.


MFBB.

AMSTERDAMS WESTERMOSKEE AND OTHER STORIES: NEVER TRUST ISLAMISTS. OR IS IT RATHER 'NEVER TRUST ISLAM ITSELF?'

On March 20, 2006, we reported on these pages how the then Duch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner, a dhimmi multiculti idiot if ever there was one, had his signature chiseled in a commemmoration plaque marking the start of the construction of the Westermoskee, in Amsterdams "De Baarsjes" neighborhood. This mosque is to become Hollands biggest, with a 43-meter high minaret and a sprawling complex with apartments and offices around it. One year and a half later, the project is bogged down in shady conflicts between the muslim overseers from Milli Görüs on the one hand and the Dutch building association "Het Oosten" and the Dutch authorities on the other hand, and between muslims themselves. There is a huge fraud scandal with so-called "Green funds" involving a former Turkish financier and Milli Görüs, which is, according to the German Bundesverfassungsshuetz, an extremist organization. In the course of one year and a half, the muslim project organizers have behaved so callously and untrustworthy that in Dutch Parliament even the socialist party PvdA now wants to scrap the Westermoskee's building authorization.

The following is the response in the Dutch magazine Trouw of Fatih Dag, strongman of the Dutch Milli Görüs branch responsible for building the mosque:

He [Fatih Dag] would find that "very stupid". "I will then immediately call for a demonstration. A bus [with demonstrators] from every Milli Görüs mosque in Europe, that's going to be busy you know. I haven't tipped Al Jazeera, but it will certainly get a whiff of it, and I will speak to them. This is going around the whole arabic world, I brace myself for the backlash. All muslims have a satellite disc, so they see how a magnificent muslim project is forbidden here. Don't forget: we started out here with some Turks, but after all the objections it has become quite something for a lot of muslims in Europe. I expect among them an uprisal, of course (sic) within legal bounds,but still: our people are more emotional than you, Europeans. And there may be a madman among them." Is that a threat? "No, it is insight in how sensitive this issue is. I worry about that."

What has happened is that:

a.) Shortly after the symbolical first stone laying on March 20, 2006, the two strongmen of the mosque project were shoved aside. First the chairman of the local Milli Görüs branch, Haci Karacaer, who resigned "because he was tired". Then it was the turn of moneymaker and businessman Üzeyir Kabaktepe , who, it seems, had to go because of the German branch, which is (not so) secretly pulling the ropes behind the whole project. Of course, given Europes experience with "liberal" muslims, it is not too far fetched Kabaktepe was as liberal as someone who favors throwing gays off buildings instead of burning them to death.

b.) Exit Karacaer and Kabaktepe, enter Fatih Dag. Immediately upon arrival, it became clear that Dag's new Milli Görüs staff had AND close ties with the Milli Görüs HQ in Koeln, Germany, AND that he had no interest anymore in following the "liberal" line promised by Kabaktepe. Indeed, the main reason the Dutch building association "Het Oosten" and Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen (a jew) had given their full support for the project was that Kabaktepe & Co. had promised the new mosque would herald the grandiose start of "the international renewal of islam". By the way, the multiculti fata morgana had been so convincing that two gullible jewish architects had been found willing to design the mosque in the first place. When Fatih Dag made it clear that the Westermoskee would definitily NOT follow a progressive course, the relation with "Het Oosten" and mayor Cohen worsened. A silly attempt by the Amsterdam City Council was made to "assure" themselves that the new mosque board would still follow the "liberal" course, whatever that may have meant, and to unconditionally cut all ties with the German branch of Milli Görüs, by proposing a Declaration of Intent to be signed by all parties. Dag signed... and kept visiting Yavuz Çelik Karahan, Chairman Milli Görüs Germany.

c.) Another element undermining the credibility of Milli Görüs is a fraudulous scheme whereby countless ordinary Turks had been duped for possibly millions of euros by a dubious Pyramid Game organised by so-called "Green Funds" [islamic funds - note by MFBB] and offered by Milli Görüs. Explains Fatih Dag: "Maybe we offered some office space for that, but it [the Pyramid Game] never happened under our authority. Only one of the curent Board members had links with the game. We investigate that now. He will likely (sic) resign.... the guilt lies with my predecessor [Kabaktepe] and his board."

d.) The gist of the Trouw article is that by the time that "Het Oosten" and Cohen realized what a Trojan Horse of islamic radicalism the Westermoskee would become, they wanted to get rid of the whole project - and Milli Görüs' Pyramid Game scandal came in just handy to stop the whole thing.

e.) The worst of all is that apparently both Cohen and "Het Oosten", probably struggling to find a way to get out of the whole affair without the stigma of having gullibly allowed islamic radicals in, blundered in providing Milli Görüs with an exit mechanism for "Het Oosten" - read, it seems that Milli Görüs can legally buy "Het Oosten" out of the whole project. In their despair, both the building association and Cohen probaly thought that if they could convince the public they were no longer involved, they could not be blamed for the Westermoskee becoming some kind of madrassah.

f.) Fatih Dag answer: "I won't go away." ... "We are going to build the whole area full ourselves. Apartments, parking garages, commercial spaces and the mosque. We pay those 6.2 million euros [the exit sum needed to buy "Het Oosten" out - MFBB] and say: "Bye bye, Het Oosten. You can sod off." The Trouw article says laconically: "Building association Het Oosten was yesterday unavailable for comment."

g.) On May 19, 2007, Fatih Dag issues his infamous threat, see above.


And how do things stand today, August 1st, 2007? For the moment, the whole affair seems to be in limbo - which is not a good sign. Keep in mind that in March, the city neighborhood council of "De Baarsjes" did issue a building permit, although at the same time it started an investigation into the Pyramid Game fraud. Because of Milli Görüs' financial troubles and the negative publicity, it is unlikely that building activities will start this year, but next year? What is certain is that the whole affair has - once again - cast a very bad light on the reliability and credibility of the muslim organizations when dealing with local authorities. Time and again the latter herald with great fanfare another fantastic initiative - based on mutual respect of course -meant to "build bridges" amongst the different communities, only to find out they have been cheated and lied to. One and a half year after a beaming Piet Hein Donner laid the first stone for what was to become a model project for a tolerant islam, the "bridges" are blown up and not exactly by Jan Klaas, building corporation "Het Oosten" does not want to have anything to do anymore with the mosque itself, "only the apartments" [good luck with that, idiots - MFBB], and the guys at the steering wheel are extremist muslims in a Koeln, Germany HQ.

The Westermoskee is but one amongst a great many mosques being built in Europe. Unlike their predecessors, they are now highly visible, with domes and minarets. Of this so-called "third generation" mosque, Germany can "boast" 159, and a further 184 are under construction. An overview of the political affiliation of the mayors in all the localities where these builing projects have either been completed, are underway or else being considered, almost reads like a membership list of the socialist party. Amsterdam: Job Cohen, PvdA (Dutch Socialists); Londen: Ken Livingstone (Labour); Haarlem (The Netherlands): Bernt Schneiders, PvdA (Dutch Socialists); Aachen (Germany): Juergen Linden, SPD (German socialists). The latter, upon issuing the building permit for his city's mosque, even proudly proclaimed the advent of the mosque "that Muslims have become a part and parcel of society." Only they haven't. Or at least not in the way gullible fools like Linden would like them to be. They think the increasingly visible mosques will help integration. The opposite is true. Many of these mosques are built, as we have seen in the case of the Westermoskee, with adjacent and even surrounding apartment blocks. Those who think that indigenous Dutch, Spaniards, French or Germans will hurry like madmen to procure these flats because they like so much to be awakened by the call of the muezzin at 5 o'clock in the morning, are ludicrous fools. The apartments will be inhabited by muslims, period. Even in localities where there is no place for an ambitious building scheme around the mosque, the dome and minarets invariably attract muslim-oriented facilities and shops, like e.g. in Mannheim, where the Yavuz Sultan Selim I-mosque and its surrounding centers and - dare we say it - soukhs, now attract thousands of muslims: a purposefully created muslim-only community. A much more realistic view was offered by Borough of Newham Councillor Alan Craig, of the Christian Peoples Alliance , who at the occasion of the building plans for London's megamosque "Markaz"-project remarked:

“I am concerned about the community and security impact of the mosque…although permission has not yet been given, Muslims are moving into the area in preparation. The Savile Town area of Dewsbury where Tablighi Jamaat is currently based is now more than 90 per cent Muslim. This part of London has always been a very diverse community and that is how it should be kept. We can't have one group taking over."

The Markaz mosque is a gigantic monstrosity which will, if built, be able to accommodate 70,000 worshippers. It is actively supported by London's mayor Ken Livingstone, who coincidentally happens to be a socialist. The organization behind the project is Tablighi Jamaat, to which the would be Glasgow bombers had ties.

It is tempting to see this sudden surge in highly visible mosque buildings as part of some hidden policy, and unfortunately, many indicators do indeed point in that direction. Not for nothing Msgr. Georg Gaenswein, Pope Benedict's secretary, stated last July that "Attempts to Islamize the West cannot be denied..." The danger for the identity of Europe that is connected with it,” he said, “should not be ignored out of a wrongly understood respectfulness." And if it wouldn't be bad enough to find out that this attempt at islamization was the work of "local" muslims, unfortunately there's growing proof that it is stimulated, if not coordinated, from the muslim world itself. Saudi Arabia has long been known as a financier of muslim centers across Europe, one notorious example being the Saudi-funded King Fahd Academy in Cologne, Germany - a breeding place for hatred of everything the West stands for. But then take a look at the financiers of the planned Cologne Mosque itself, which is scheduled to offer place for 2,000 worshippers and will have two 170-foot minarets. It will be funded by Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği (DITIB), a branch of the Turkish government's Ministry of religious affairs... Who financed the Freimann Mosque in Muenchen, southern Germany? Libya. (notice that this is possibly the Muenchener mosque which is under poice surveillance because of its ties to extremists). The proposed new mosque in Sendling, also in Muenchen? To be financed by DITIB again. Can you imagine a European Ministry of Religious Affairs - assuming such a folly could exist here - financing a newly to be built church in, say, Egypt? Of course you can't. But here we have coordinated attempts by foreign governments to interfere in the religious life of ethnically related population groups living abroad. And not only in the religious life. The Moroccan Interior Ministry issues a list with first names where Moroccan parents living abroad have to choose the names for their newborns from. The so-called Amazigh names, or names from pre-islamic times, are haram - forbidden. If parents do choose these names, their children will not be regarded by the Moroccan state. It is indeed true that Morocco keeps regarding children born off Moroccan parents as Moroccan state citizens - even if they are third generation immigrants elsewhere. In the meantime useful leftist idiots keep blabbering about integration, reaching out to other faiths and other nonsense.

As the reporter from the Dutch magazine Trouw entered Fatih Dag's office for an interview, he remarked a gleaming silver plaque emblazoned with the heraldic symbol of the Ottoman Empire above the door. Fatih Dag said to him: "The weapon of the Ottoman Empire - I am not a nationalist you know, but I like it."

Fatih Dag and his Board have long since stopped speaking about their mosque as the Westermoskee. To them, it's going to be the Aya Sophia Mosque.


EPILOGUE.

We don't want to fight
but by Jingo if we do,
We've got the ships,
we've got the men,
we've got the money too


MFBB.

TRIBUTE TO HARRY REID.

I'm not a guy who easily copies other bloggers' stuff, but this one struck me so that I had to do my bit to get it known to the rest of us mortals. It's a letter from Uncle Jimbo over at Blackfive to Sen. Harry Reid, of 1.2 million US$ land fraud fame, and there's no way on God's green earth Outlaw could have put it better. Enjoy and may the Farce be with you!












Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's approval rating was 19% as of July 9, 2007, well below President Bush's, who is in his seventh year in office.

MFBB.

TAX MARS!!!

A.) DECEMBER 6, 2001.

MOC Observes Changes in the South Polar Cap:
Evidence for Recent Climate Change on Mars

One of the most profound benefits of being able to continue photographing Mars in the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Extended Mission is the opportunity to go back and re-image a site that was seen in the previous martian year. New MGS Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) images have provided a startling observation: The residual martian south polar cap is changing. The fact that it is changing suggests that Mars may have major, global climate changes that are occurring on the same time scales as Earth's most recent climate shifts, including the last Ice Age.

MOC images of the south polar cap taken in 1999 were compared with images of the same locations taken in 2001, and it was discovered that pits had enlarged, mesas had shrunk, and small buttes had vanished. In all, the scarps that enclose the pits and bound the mesas and buttes retreated about 3 meters (3.3 yards) in 1 martian year (687 Earth days). This rapid retreat of polar scarps can only occur if the ice is frozen carbon dioxide (also known as "dry ice"). Retreat of scarps made of water ice is much slower and would not have been measurable from one martian year to the next...


B.) DECEMBER 8, 2003

Mars Emerging from Ice Age, Data Suggest
By SPACE.com

Scientists have suspected in recent years that Mars might be undergoing some sort of global warming. New data points to the possibility it is emerging from an ice age.

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has been surveying the planet for nearly a full Martian year now, and it has spotted seasonal changes like the advance and retreat of polar ice. It's also gathering data of a possible longer trend.

"One explanation could be that Mars is just coming out of an ice age," Feldman said. "In some low-latitude areas, the ice has already dissipated. In others, that process is slower and hasn't reached an equilibrium yet. Those areas are like the patches of snow you sometimes see persisting in protected spots long after the last snowfall of the winter." "Odyssey is giving us indications of recent global climate change in Mars," said Jeffrey Plaut, project scientist for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

C.) SEPTEMBER 20, 2005.

8 Years at Mars #4: Four Mars Years of South Polar Cap Scarp Retreat
by Malin Space Science Systems

"One of the most profound discoveries that would not have been possible if the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) mission had not been extended beyond its 1 Mars year (687 Earth days) Primary Mission is that of dramatic changes that take place in the south polar residual ice cap each martian year. To make this discovery, the MGS Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) had to be employed during a second Mars year to repeat images of sites on the south polar cap that had been imaged during the Primary Mission."

According to a September 20 NASA news release, "for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress." Because a Martian year is approximately twice as long as an Earth year, the shrinking of the Martian polar ice cap has been ongoing for at least six Earth years.

The shrinking is substantial. According to Michael Malin, principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera, the polar ice cap is shrinking at "a prodigious rate."

"The images, documenting changes from 1999 to 2005, suggest the climate on Mars is presently warmer, and perhaps getting warmer still, than it was several decades or centuries ago," reported Yahoo News on September 20.

D.) FEBRUARY 28, 2007.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said
The conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet's orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun..."

Don't get me wrong here. A quick glance on Google learned me that for every version advocating Mars' global warming, you'll find another one blaming the apparent continuous receding of Mars' South Polar Cap on fluctuations in the tilt of the planet's axis, dust storms lessening its albedo (percentage of light reflected, therefore lower when more light is absorbed, e.g. by "darker" dust storms) and what not.

In that case, the global warming on Mars (OK, some would say it's local warming) would therefore be just coincidentally occur at the same time Earth heats up, and not be a result from increased Sun activity. However, studies also show that a.o. Triton (Neptune's moon), Jupiter and even Pluto experience higher temperatures. And when you then hear the same fellas claim Triton's warming may be the result of an extreme southern summer, a season "occurring every few hundred years), or that Pluto's heating up can be attributed to possible eruptive activity and/or a delayed thawing from its 1989 close approach to the Sun, or that Jupiter might be warmer because of a recurring climatic cycle that churns up material from the gas giant's interior and lofts it to the surface, where it is heated by the Sun...

...then you start to think something is stinking.

I'm all for a clean environment, and willing to do my extra bit. As a matter of fact, I pay to have my company's waste selected and processed in an eco-friendly way in my city's container park. Personally, I think that greenhouse gases may play a role in global warming, at least, I would not dismiss the possibility downright. But the hype of the past several months? Every time I see politicians jump on a propaganda vehicle offering them a cheap excuse to tax us even more, my stink radar beeps alarmingly. Especially when a socialist cunt who on a blue monday became Belgian budget minister, one of those people who like to swap us Eco-Neanderthals around the ears for trodding on Mother Earth, sees no bone in flying to Thailand only to wed some doofus from her cabinet "according to Buddhist rites".

Or when our fat soon-to-be-history (I hoooooooooope so!) Secretary of Defense flies 90 kloms in an attack helicopter from Brussels to Hasselt just to see An Inconvenient Truth.

Or when our fookin gumint considers a ... you guess it ... Gore-Tax.

Global Warming? First explain me the heating up of Mars, and in a decent way, presto. Either that dumbass who has been Prez of the US for six years now secretly built a huge defense industry on the Red Planet, spawning gazillions of tons of carbondioxice in the atmosphere, or the Sun is shining hotter. What will it be?


MFBB.

CHANGE OF THE GUARD IN DOWNING STREET 10...

... Tony has left the building.



One of those nice expressions the French have is: "Voilà un homme!" Meaning "Now there's a ballsy fella!" or "Ese hombre tiene cojones!" depending on whether you live north or south of the Bush Border Fence. It's been ten years since Tony Blair first set foot in Downing Street 10 and he certainly left his mark, so much that the quiet way he slipped away last Wednesday came as an anticlimax. In his place has come Gordon Brown, a Scotsman and Blairs Chancellor of the Exchequer - in the UK something like a Super Minister responsible for Finance, Economy, Budget and Treasury - during three Labour governments. If popular myth is to be believed, the two men arranged for the takeover thirteen years ago in the Granita restaurant in Islington, where they reportedly struck a deal in which Brown would stand aside for some time while the more charismatic Blair would win over Middle Englands crucial swing voters. The bold goal was to end 15 years of Tory rule, first under Margaret Thatcher and then under John Mayor. The agreement would have promised Brown unparalleled power over domestic policy as Chancellor, should Labour win the 1997 elections, and, "at some future date", the premiership itself. Whether or not this story is true, that day has now come.

At first sight the Blair years meant ten years of socialist rule over Britain, but in many respects Blair has been a socialist the way Joe Lieberman has been a Democrat. Already prior to Labour chasing the Tories from power, there was an expression in the UK which went that "I am Tony Blair, MP" in reality meant "I am Tory, Plan B". Interesting is also that young Blair, while a pupil in Choristers School, Durham, northern England, served as the Conservative candidate in a mock school election, and that his father Leo, who Tony named a son after, was Chairman of one of Durham's conservative associations. Certainly it is so that Tony Blair led the Labour Party away from its hard-left leanings towards a rather centrist course, earning his politico-economic philosophy the moniker "The Third Way" (although other, not necessarily comparable policies have also been called that way"). Blairs "Third Way" was a radical mix of free market and interventionist theories, rejecting both the pure laissez-faire aproach as old-school socialism with its nationalizations and massive redistribution schemes through heavy taxing. In fact, he had a clause referring to Labour's committment to "the common ownership of the means of production", read nationalization of key industries, scrapped from the party's constitution. Of course, it would be wrong to label him as a closet rightwinger - after all, the man was e.g. instrumental in developing a controversial Minimum Wage policy. And in the ethical field, he once even supported lowering the age of consent for gay sex to 16 (!), something not exactly jibing with his being a devout Christian. Which, btw, is yet another feature which made him stand out in Britains top leftwing spheres.

But taking it all together, ten years of "socialist" Blair rule over the British Isles hardly compares to socialist rule on the Continent. True, public spending has increased sharply, especially in the fields of Health Care and Education - but at the same time Blairs government has introduced market based reforms in these areas. And, all that extra money did buy something: shorter hospital wait times, better care through tens of thousands more of doctors, nurses and teachers, and a tuition scheme that has put Britains universities on a better financial footing. Economic growth has been sound, though not spectacular, on average some 2.5% per year. However, it was steady, and in fact "The Blair Years" marked the longest uninterrupted period of economic growth in 200 years. Of course, some will say this period of recovery started before the Blair/Gordon tandem, when John Major was PM and Kenneth Clarke Chancellor of the Exchequer, but the fact remains that at least the growth continued on a relatively stable level for ten years, which is an accomplishment in itself. One cannot deny that Blair (and Brown) proved themselves good, though probably boring, stewards of the economy.

In line with the importance the "Third Way" adheres to technological development, under Blair spending on scientific research tripled. Add to this - apart from the longest sustained period of economic growth in modern British history - low inflation, actually less spending on unemployment benefits AND all this while not (significantly) enhancing income taxes, and you begin to understand why the UK's Conservative Party has such a hard time re-establishing itself - New Labour fulfilled part of its agenda. Of course, one notices that the inflation graph to the left shows an upwards jerk over the past two years, but this has of course everything to do with the surging prices for energy and raw materials - we feel that just as well over here too.

In light of all this, it is perhaps remarkable that a man who is, apart from his being an able and efficient statesman, by his very nature an amiable person, towards the end seemed to have lost all this credit on account of just one decision. Naturally, we are talking here about his decision to ally himself unconditionally with President Bush and his Middle East initiative, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the enforcing of democracy with arms. Time will tell Bush's decision was the right one, and in time too, historians will merely be able to confirm that. Ergo, many years ahead from now Blair, without the alleged "stain" of the Iraq "adventure", and with basically only positive accomplishments to be remembered, will be judged much more favorably than today. And then we haven't even talked about that fitting end to his career as PM, the Northern Ireland Peace Deal. Personally, from the (limited) POV of a foreigner, I have but one caveat concerning Blair rule, and that's his government decade-long keeping the gates wide open for all kinds of immigrants, but especially those from muslim countries. Plus, of course, its apparent failure to deport any hate-inciting mad mullah on the first Hercules available to the hellhole he came from. A price will have to be paid for that - not all nightclub porters will see the smoke in time. Plus, creeping islamization does in fact not need carbombs at all. Mindless walking tents willing to breed like rabbits for their usurpers can do the trick too, in a matter of decades. By the time everyone realizes what a visionary Enoch Powell was, it may be far, far too late.

In the here and now, however, Tony Blair has been succeeded by Gordon Brown. With regards to economic policy, not much change is to be expected, Brown in fact being the architect of much of the good work of the past ten years. David Cameron's Tories like to depict Brown as a more leftist Blair, but they forget that the two men long ago agreed on a Labour which should distance itself from the socialist dogmas. The reality is that the Blair AND Brown tandem not only gave free market mechanisms a "free" hand in the private sector, but that they ALSO introduced them in the public sector: the NHS, national security and even in jails (!). It is safe to say that under Brown, the days of John Smith and Neil Kinnock won't come back. Where Browns accents will differ from Blairs is in his approach to the EU though. Blair was pro-Europe, an advocate of more European integration beyond the economical aspects. Brown, on the other hand, is a staunch Euroskeptical: e.g., it was his work that Britain did not join the eurozone in 1999. So if there is more European integration in the coming years, it will be without the UK, at least as long as Gordon Brown rules.

Less change, if any at all, is to be expected with regards to the transatlantic relationship. Like Sarkozy in France, Brown is a great admirer of the US. And just like Blair, Brown sees a solid relationship with America as the cornerstone of the UK's foreign policy. It is therefore unlikely that Brown will suddenly downgrade the UK presence in Iraq or Afghanistan anytime soon. In short, Tony Blair may be gone, at least as PM, and many Americans may - will - remember him with fondness. But under his successor, the fabric of the US/UK alliance will remain strong.

And six years into the WOT, that is something to be grateful for.





MFBB.