Before you think I have finally gone bananas, let me update you on yesterdays electoral results.
First, like I mentioned already in the comments section,
the VB (Vlaams belang, Flemish Interest) does make significant gains in virtually every town from the North Sea to the river Maas, and in several cities (
Aalst,
Lier) becomes the largest party. The results thus far indicate
that the VB almost doubles its number of seats in town councils (from 439 to over 800) as well as its number of seats in provincial councils (from 54 to 87).
In Flanders's big cities, like
Antwerp and
Ghent, there was a either a status quo (the former) or a slight drawback (the latter). The same phenomenon could be observed in smaller cities with a huge immigrant population, like
Mechelen. But especially
Antwerp was the focus of national - and international - media attention, since it is the place where the VB originated and since it was considered the main battleground where the VB's strongman
Filip De Winter (not the party chief, that's
Frank Van Hecke) would challenge the sitting socialist mayor
Patrick Janssens. Before October 8, De Winter had indicated he hoped to reach
35% of the vote in Antwerp (in 2000, the party got 33% of the vote). It turned out the VB won "only" 33.5%...
while the socialists jumped from 16% to 35%!Now, the disappointing status quo in Antwerp City is one thing, solid gains all over Flanders are another. To illustrate this, the following table shows the progress the Vlaams Belang made per province (Belgium has five Flemish and five Wallonian provinces)
vis-à-vis the previous municipal elections, held in 2000 (in Belgium, there's municipal elections every 6 years):
West Flanders: +7%
East Flanders: +6%
Antwerp: +7%
Flemish Brabant: +6%
Limburg: +6%Keep in mind that this is a table
per province: there is thus also a province called Antwerp, and on the whole and despite the VB status quo in Antwerp City, throughout the province the party chalked up a 7% gain.
But if you had been in Belgium last night and watched TV, the impression you would have got was that VB had
suffered a severe setback. There's a saying that Antwerp City, pop. 460,000, is a big village. Yesterday one would have thought that the whole of Flanders was a big Antwerp. The progress made "nationwide" was totally overshadowed by the socialist gain in Antwerp. With the written press it was the same story: the headline of
De Standaard, Belgium's main newspaper, screamed
"VLAAMS BELANG STOPPED". While actually, it
doubled its seats. The headline of
Het Laatste Nieuws:
"THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR THE VLAAMS BELANG". Goebbels already said that a lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth, and from glancing at a few newspaper covers today I got the impression that the regime press studied Goebbels well.
Nevertheless, the admittedly disappointing result in Antwerp deserves to be scrutinized. And then we see an interesting evolution. Check out the following map:
The map shows the nine electoral districts of Antwerp, which by and large are determined by the center and the suburbs. In case you wonder, yes, "7" is the place the
Hoboken in
Hudson County,
New Jersey, is named after. Since in Antwerp the election was basically a megacontest between the VB and the socialists of the SP.a, the map shows which one is the biggest in each of the nine districts, whereby grey has been chosen for socialists and black for the VB (not a coincidence imho). In Antwerp City, "1", the center, the SP.a is biggest. Good. Now look at the periphery: with the exception of "2" and "4"
it's all black. So, socialist are biggest in the center, VB is biggest in the suburbs. How to explain this?
1° Well, firstly, as you may or may not know, in
2004 the Belgian State, in one of its many instances of criminal insanity, granted voting rights in municipal elections to immigrants who do not even have the Belgian nationality on the condition that they know what Smurfs are, can tell Belgian fries from French ones and say "merci" upon receiving their monthly 1,000 EUR stipend from Social Security. Since it is a well-known fact that the socialists were the driving force behind these voting rights, it can be safely assumed that those who use these rights voted SP.a.
2° Secondly, there is the impact of the so-called
Snel-Belg Wet (
Quick Citizenship Bill), rushed through Parliament in
2000 after the previous municipal elections in which the VB, then still
Vlaams Blok, also gained considerably. The
"Snel-Belg Wet" (literally
"Fast-Belgian Law") gives one Belgian nationality on very easy terms, namely:
* remain in Belgium for some time (some = three years, sometimes as less as two years)
* work in Belgium
* be married to a BelgianSince North African youths who already possess Belgian nationality almost invariably prefer imported, unspoiled (and unassimilated) girls from Morocco, Algeria et al for brides, the
Quick Citizenship Bill granted every newlywed young woman from these countries automatically Belgian nationality, and thus the right to vote. No one argued more in favor of this bill than the socialists, who correctly reckoned that the newcomers would in all likelihood vote for them.
3° Thirdly, there's the fact that those Belgians of North African origin who have been here since decades and whose numbers are quickly rising thanks to a much higher feritlity rate,
vote overwhelmingly for the left.4° Fourthly, not only is the fertility rate of the "old" Belgians much lower, since a couple of years they are moving out of the center in droves. Currently, Antwerp Central has a population of
460,000, of which around 120,000 are immigrants, or one quarter, most of them Moroccans. Of the remaining 3/4 of indigenous Belgians, around 4,000 leave each year and their place is being taken by about 5,000 newcomers of foreign origin, mostly from muslim countries (although recently there's been an influx too of East-Europeans). Almost as a rule,
the newcomers vote for socialists.And these dynamics yield the picture above. The "old" Belgians leave Antwerp Central for the (residential) suburbs and bring their political preferences with them, which explains the very high Vlaams Belang scores in places such as
Deurne (nr. 5) where the party received
a staggering 43.46% of the vote. Or like in
Hoboken (nr. 7) where VB also got more than 40% of the electorate behind it. The very good VB results extend even beyond the nine districts. Not visible on the map, but lying immediately alongside the nine core districts, are such towns like
Schoten,
Boom,
Niel,
Borsbeek,
Willebroek and
Stabroek, and here also VB becomes the biggest party.
However, the other side of the medal is that in Antwerp Central the upward dynamic of the VB has (almost) come to a standstill: from 33% in 2000 to 33.5% in 2006. But as we have seen, since over a timespan of six years tens of thousands of potential VB voters have moved out and tens of socialist voters moved in, one can only conclude that the VB must effectively have grown further strongly in Antwerp City - only among "old" Belgians! Indeed, my fellow Flemish blogger Peter, who lives in Antwerp, gathers that 4 in 10 of every "Flemish" Antwerpian might have voted VB. Which, of course, does not detract from the fact that the socialists won significantly, and that this gain has been brought about largely by the immigrant vote.
It is a phenomenon which will produce itself exceedingly all over Europe. We have already seen how, on
March 7, 2006,
the Dutch municipal elections were won by the Left and how the immigrant vote was largely responible for it. In
Rotterdam,
Amsterdam,
Utrecht and
Leiden the native population is effectively being ruled by people of Moroccan origin. Antwerp on
October 8, 2006, is basically the same story. The Antwerp City Council has
55 seats.
SP.a won 22, and 7 of them, or one third, are going to muslim immigrants: Sener Ugurlu,
Karim Bachar,
Ouardia El Taghdouini,
Youssef Slassi,
Fauzaya Talhaoui,
Fatma Akbas, and
Güler Turan. Only Fauzaya Talhaoui is a veteran. The other six seem to have suddenly come from nowhere, a result of the fact that immigrants not only seem to vote SP.a but in particular for their "own" SP.a candidates. This unlike "native" SP.a voters, who will often vote for immigrants out of a misplaced feeling of having to make good for past colonial injustices or whatever. Possibly the best illustration of this select link of immigrant candidates vs. their "own" electorate was offered in the runup to the elections in
Gent, another large Flemish city with a huge immigrant population. There a Turkish candidate for the Christian Democrats,
Fuat Korkmazer, opted for distributing leaflets
uniquely in Turkish. Hooray for assimilation and the multicultural society!
Notice how the Belgian flag (Black/Yellow/Red) flows over in the Turkish one. If you visit
the site of US Congressman Bobby Jindal, who is of Indian origin, which flag do you see up there? Yeah,
that one. So, where do you think Mr. Korkmazer's principal loyalty lies, hmmmm? Interesting to know too is that
Mr. Korkmazer was chairman of Gent Türk Ocagi, an organization with strong ties with the Turkish racist and fascist organization of the
Grey Wolves. When news leaked out in the local Gent press, Mr. Korkmazer first denied his membership (of the Grey Wolves), then stepped down as chairman of
Gent Türk Ocagi. It is interesting to notice that this sympathizer, if not member, of the Grey Wolves chose to be a candidate for the Christian Democratic CD & V.
Pope John Paul II's would be assassin,
Ali Agça, was a former Grey Wolf.
In Brussels, although the situation is more complicated there by the Flemish/Walloon antagonism, the situation is nevertheless comparable. Here too, not only is the number of immigrant councillors steeply on the rise, but also they tend to belong to the left. As
Paul Belien from
The Brussels Journal reports:
The Brussels borough of Sint-Joost-ten-Node (where the party headquarters of the Vlaams Belang party is located) has 19 councillors of non-European origin on a total of 27. Eleven of the 16 Socialist councillors in Sint-Joost are non-European immigrants, as are 4 of the 5 Christian-Democrats, 2 of the 3 Greens and 2 of the 3 Liberals.
...
Exactly 50% of the Brussels electorate are either foreigners or naturalized Belgians. Six years ago the figure was only 32%. In Antwerp, where 17% of the electorate are immigrants (11.5% in 2000), one third of the Socialist councillors are Muslims. In Ghent, where 12.6% of the electorate is foreign (8.1% in 2000), one quarter of the Socialist councillors are Muslims. In Vilvoorde, a Flemish suburb of Brussels, where 14.8% of the electorate is foreign (9.3% in 2000), half the Socialist representatives are Muslims.
Now, one could rightfully argue whether dominance, or indeed only a strong presence, of "new" Belgians in Belgian politics necessarily needs to be a bad thing. And my answer is: it doesn't. Or rather, it wouldn't have to be. It wouldn't have to be, if only the newcomers would subscribe to the
Leitkultur here, which, despite the obvious drawbacks, still gets Belgium ranked among the world's foremost societies. Belgian industry may not produce things with ringing names like Sweden's Volvo, Saab or IKEA. But small as it is, our little country does produce an awful lot more than beer and chocolate. There
are satellite and cyclotron and train builders here, there
is top-notch pharmaceutical industry, and there
is a powerful car and petrochemical industry. Some Belgian companies create huge artificial islands in the Persian Gulf on which superrich oil sheikhs erect cities, others build technology for integrating laptops in the world wide web. If you computer uses DSL, that was invented here! And why is that? Because our entrepreneurs still have the old zip. Because modest, low profile businessmen from small localities like Dendermonde somehow manage to secure contracts with the South Korean Army. Because our workforce by and large (especially the Flemish part) takes pride in delivering a tough and good job. Because our ways of dealing with each other, either in everyday life or in business, are still ruled to a large extent by old-fashioned, christian-inspired notions such as decency, reliability, honesty.
All this is not meant to denigrate the abilities and ways of other peoples who have come to my country. But we have to face the naked fact that our immigrants are mostly muslims, come mostly from arab countries, and vote overwhelmingly for the left. There is a reason for that. After the end of colonial rule, the arab countries almost without exception embraced socialism as the economical doctrine.
Socialism applied without religion is bad enough, see the USSR. But when it is mingled with Islam, it will kill your country's economy. That is why anno 2006 the 22 muslim countries in the Middle East, with 270 million inhabitants, produce about as much as 5 million Finns, if you discount the oil. Somehow, the many millions of Algerians, Moroccans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Syrians and what not who flocked over the decades to Europe, failed to see the connection between the deadly combination of the socialism of their Nassers, Ben Bella's or Assads and their religion. Once in Europe they were showered with all the surplus welfare of our modern and rich societies, and the fact that the state was taking care of them and took responsibility out of their hands must have seemed normal, since where they came from the State had been omnipotent too. It may be one reason why muslim immigrants vote so massively for Europes socialist parties. But in the end, the net effect for Europe threatens to be the same. Already, the economic contribution of muslim imigrants is a mirror image of what passes for economy from Rabat to Baghdad: economies overwhelmingly based on trade with very little real production. Think, e.g. of countless small companies doing nothing but buying secondhand European cars and shipping them to the Middle East. Think of eateries and carpet shops. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. But while that kebab shop around the corner may indeed be an enrichment for Belgian gastronomic diversity, the lack of muslim companies producing anything more complicated than stools or tables can hardly be described as an enrichment for economic diversity.
And so it is with sadness that I see the current developments. The Left, traitors as they have always been when faced with bullies, do not even hide anymore that they are after the immigrant votes NOT because they care so much to reach out for them. It is about power, nothing less. Stayin in power. How do you stay in power when your traditional electorate dumps you? Simple: you usher in newcomers, give them rights, pamper them with free housing and positive discrimination and the only thing you ask in return is that their vote. It works. We see it in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Leiden. We see it in Antwerp, Gent and Brussels. We see it in Londen, Leeds and Birmingham. What we are seeing is that instead of us implanting Middle-Easterners in European economy, it's them implanting Middle-Eastern economy in Europe. Still, Europe can kid itself it's on a par with the US and Japan. But in twenty years? That magnificent Mercedes 280E you buy today is still the work of bright German engineers. But their hairs are silver, and their heirs increasingly scarce. I don't like to say it, but Europe obviously cannot count on Moroccan or Algerian engineers. Twenty years ago I was an engineering student in Gent. In my seven years of study, during which I held class with possibly three hundred different individuals, I have known only two muslim colleagues. The first one did not even make it past his first year. The second was indeed very intelligent and a computer whiz kid. But all in all, one has to conclude that so far, the muslim community among us has shown a spectacular ability to
not contribute technical novelties in what is supposed to be the space age.
The Belgian municipal elections offer us an interesting glimpse into the future. A future with bipolar societies. In the cities, a large, miserable immigrant body asking itself why it finds Brussels 2025 not so different from Cairo 1965. Out in the country, an ageing local population angry and desperate over the loss of their country's prosperity, bitterly lamenting the fact they ever thought a limitless and conditionless immigration could ever solve their problems. Bitterly lamenting the fact they were so unbelievably foolish to once scold for racists, xenophobes and hatemongerers, those who saw what was in the making decades earlier.
Yesterday, I noticed an article in
Gazet Van Antwerpen in which a certain
Jan Hertogen, Sociology Professor and Professional Lunatic, had the following to say about the so-called defeat of the Vlaams Belang:
"The VB has only stalled in cities with a lot of Belgians of foreign origin. Eighty per cent of the inhabitants of foreign origin in the big cities have used their voting rights and stopped the extreme right. Therefore, it's the immigrants who have saved democracy."
Weep Europe. Weep.
MFBB.
The criticism on Donald Rumsfeld mostly seems to crystallize around two main charges. The first one is that the current mayhem in Iraq is his fault because he ignored General Shinseki's recommendation that in order to maintain stability in Iraq "several hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed". Rumsfeld may indeed have underestimated the number of "occupation" troops, but your most obvious question which is never asked with regards to Shinseki's estimate is: where would he get them? As far as I know, the US Army numbers some 480,000 troops on active duty. Plus, perhaps 350,000 in the Army National Guard. Add to that the Army Reserve, give and take 200,000, plus some 70,000 Marines. Adding these four branches together one arrives at a grand total of 1,100,0000. Now suppose that Shinseki's goal was 350,000 men on the ground. I am not a military expert, but I gather that in order to maintain a field strength in Iraq like this, you need at least three times that number - or, 1,350,000, since I assume a working and bearable rotational plan involves three shifts whereby one shift is in the intended Theatre of Operations, one shift is resting and/or refitting, and one shift is readying itself to go. Well, as we have seen there simply are no 1,350,000 ground troops available! Moreover, I do not suspect all of these 350,000 National Guard troops can be mobilized all at once, and I suppose the same goes for the reserves. Then consider the troop requirements all over the planet from Europe over Afghanistan to South-Korea, which - quick guess - account for possibly 120,000 men. And you have a situation where you have to make do with a far less impressive personnel pool to provide for a permanent presence in Iraq. I haven't followed the particular topic too closely, but I read news flashes every once in awhile about it being always the same units that return, always too quick, second Iraq tours for the National Guard etc etc etc...
"Americans can already see what their country’s future will be if they vote for Pelosi and her band. They only need to watch Europe. That is what America will be like 20 years from now if the Liberals succeed in turning the U.S. into a European-style welfare state. The latter is the cause of all Europe’s problems. It has led to secularization, because people who are catered for from the cradle to the grave no longer need God. It has led to the immigration debacle, because Europe has attracted welfare immigrants who only come for the benefits and not to contribute to the host country’s wealth creation. It has led to the loss of the citizens’ ability to care for themselves, because they expect everything from the state.
The consternation in King Marke's camp upon seeing their hero returned from the dead quickly makes place for joy, but the young knight can't forget his Irish heartthrob. One day, King Marke receives a rather incongruous - given the state of war with Ireland - invitation from King Donnchadh for a tournament to be held at Donnchadh's residence, supposedly to herald a new era of cooperation. The price will be Donnchadh's daughter, Princess Isolde. Tristan, not knowing Isolde is actually his savior, volunteers to be King Marke's champion, who is a widower and to whom he feels indebted for having been adopted as an orphan. As could be expected, Tristan wins this tournament, and only then recognizes that he has won his lover for his Lord. Back in England, after King Marke's marriage to Isolde, the two try at first to suppress their emotions but soon see each other again secretly. Word of their affair spreads, and eventually reaches Donnchadh through Wictred, a renegade English knight who envies Markes' kingly rule. The two craft a plan whereby during a visit of the Irish Court to Marke, the latter will be publicly humiliated through disclosure of Tristan and Isolde's affair, and Donnchadh reckons that then is the time to dispose of a weakened Marke and replace him with the more trustworthy Wictred.
By and large I found Tristan & Isolde quite entertaining. It was also the third movie I saw with Kevin Reynolds as director, after Fandango (1985) and The Beast (1988), and I'd say that Reynolds lacks just that little bit that would make him a real powerplayer among directors. It's not that his productivity is low; Kubrick's was lower. But there seems to be lacking some drive. Either he chooses mostly mediocre scripts, e.g. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), or he isn't a tyrant enough on the set. Possibly a bit too much intimacy too (especially in Fandango). And then there's the fact Reynolds seems to have trouble finding budgets with clout to finance his films - you can see that Tristan & Isolde is really, really low budget. Not surprisingly perhaps, since the only time he really did oversee a huge project, Waterworld (1995), it flopped terribly. That said, Tristan... gets the green light from yours truly, not in the least because of the fine acting. Both James Franco (who was also in both Spidermans) and Sophia Myles (Underworld) glow in their roles - watch out for those two - and Rufus Sewell too plays a very plausible King Marke. The producer of Tristan and Isolde is Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven).
To dwell a little longer on Reynolds' curriculum, the one movie that really, really left a lasting impression on me was The Beast (1988), which came out here in Europe as The Beast of War. It tells the story of a Soviet tank crew who, after having destroyed an Afghan village in 1981, get lost in a dead-end valley and are chased by mujahideen. Not surprisingly, Reynolds too calls The Beast his best film. I saw it first in 1989 IIRC at the International Film Festival of Ghent, and back then it was really trendsetting as far as combat scenes go, if you discount Platoon (Platoon was very good for combat scenes and general atmosphere, but I absolutely disliked the pathetical way Willem Dafoe went down as well as the PC message that "the enemy was inside us"). Actually, I'm surprised that The Beast received comparatively little praise since all of it - crew, director, story, special effects - were top notch. After the performance, I walked into the lobby of Decascoop, Gents main movie theatre, and bumped into Mr. Reynolds, a guy from Decascoop and George Dzundza, who plays the bad sergeant Daskal, the tank commander. Dzundza, who I believe is from Georgian origin (that's Georgia in the Caucasus, not in the Bible Belt) is a chap who also played in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. I was able to exchange a few words with Mr. Dzundza about the tank which is more or less a star too in the movie, the way the F-14 Tomcat was a star in Top Gun. As a tank geek, I don't like it when directors fail to come up with "correct" tanks in depicting historical battles, think Patton tanks for Tigers in movies about the Ardennes Offensive. But the T-55 in The Beast was goddam real. I asked Mr. Dzundza how on earth they had managed to get a genuine Russian tank at their disposal (remember, it was still the Cold War) and it turned out it was a Syrian army tank captured by the IDF. For the tank nutters among you, see the poster to the left. The gap between the first and second wheel identifies it as a T-55, not a T-62. I read somewhere that Russian tank designers put in that space to allow for easily making a tank with a blasted track roadborne again in case spare tracks were missing. The idea was that the crew would simply omit "the missing links" and drape the remaining track along the shorter wheelbase.
While it is clear that the violence has in fact continued unabated throughout the year, especially since last month it seems to have gained momentum, with the French Interior Ministry claiming a total of 480 violent attacks against the police for the whole of France during September, or an increase of 30% compared to August. Towards the end of last month, a law enforcement memo warned of a "climate of impunity" in Seine-Saint-Denis, a notorious district in the north of Paris that includes suburbs like Epinay-sur-Seine. The memo reported a 23 percent increase in violent robberies and a 14 percent increase in assaults in the district of 1.5 million during the first six months of 2006, and complained about young, inexperienced police officers sent into the mêlée and a lax court system (during a certain period of unrest this year in Epinay-sur-Seine, out of a total of 85 juveniles arrested, only one was jailed). I think the table to the left speaks for itself, should you need regulare updates on Frances best hidden war, I recommend checking out NoPasaran! at least once a week (which is also where I got the table from, merci mecs!).
From my perspective in Belgium, Frances northern neighbour, one thing is very obvious, apart from the scale of the troubles of course. That is the TOTAL BLACKOUT in the Belgian Regime Media. One would think that with nearly 32,000 cars burned and 3,000 police officers wounded, it would be frontpage news and/or news item no°1 on TV. After all, Paris is barely 3 hours driving from Brussels. And yet... nothing. Nada. Niks. Nichts. Rien. Could it be that Belgian MSM received secret instructions from the powers that be to broadcast nothing that could smash the wonderful multicultural Utopia to smithereens? Especially around election time? It could be. In fact, it would not surprise me in the least. Belgium is, like France, a country where the Left is entrenched in power to an extent unthinkable in the US. There simply is no alternative viewpoint save from blogs. Unfortunately, despite all the bruhaha about the impact of blogs on the media landscape, fact is that blogs ultimately reach relatively few people. And so it is with sadness and horror that people who get a glimpse of reality, like yours truly, view the march of the ignorant masses towards doom. There are going to be presidential elections come next spring. The main candidate for the French Parti Socialiste is a woman, 53-year old Ségolène Royal. Tens of thousands of French Police Officers may be besieged each and every day, resulting in an everyday average of 14 wounded ones, but Madame Royal, more aware of the grave danger posed by capitalism and free markets, was quoted on October 13 as:
In the 308 communes of Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, 4,648,649 people will head to the ballot box. Together, they will elect 7,350 town council members as well as 411 provincial council members, out of 31,906 candidates. For those of you who are interested in such matters, if you follow this link you are offered a map of Flanders with the contours of all communes and provinces, and if you click on a commune you get the results of the 2000 elections. Clicking on "Wetteren" e.g. learns us that back then the Liberals (the VLD, who are over here considered "centre right" but who are effectively a lot like the US's Democrats) got 40.1% of the vote, the Christian Democrats (CD&V) 31% and the Vlaams Blok, as the Vlaams Belang was named before it was outlawed in 2004, 8.6%. Notice, as you wander through Flanders electoral landscape, the multitude of parties as compared to the US's virtual bipolar political constellation. There's liberals, socialists, christian democrats, greens and several brands of nationalists, and while there's a 5% treshold for federal elections, for municipal elections a dog with a hat on can come up with a party, if he can fill a minimal list.
One week ago, in an effort reminiscent of the 2003 Rock The Vote Tour performed by a Moooooooooooo-ron in the U.S.AAAAAA---, Tom Barman, a Flemish "rocker" as red as Che Guevara is dead, orchestrated the so-called 0110-concerts, free performances by the fine fleur of the Belgian music scene intended to point out to the general public - which is considered too stupid to reach any conclusion by themselves - just how wrong a vote for the Vlaams Belang is and how limitless tolerance towards people of other faiths and cultures is of such paramount importance. Even as gangs of Moroccan youths had rioted like animals in a Brussels quarter not one week earlier. Mr. Barmans concerts were not the culmination of the hatefest yet, however. That was left for Luc Tuymans, a Belgian artist who, truth to tell, is labeled by Tate Modern as "one of the most significant and influential contemporary painters working today". Personally I think, although I recognize his work has a certain technical quality as well as the ability to leave a lasting ephemereal impression - for me anyway - that the man proper is as mad as a hatter and like all ardent leftoids dangerously inclined to endorse the silencing of dissenters. It's even worse: in the face of muslim extremism, he even advocates self-silencing. Over at The Brussels Journal Paul Beliën reports:
For at least three consecutive nights there has been heavy rioting in the Marollen, an old neighborhood near the Palais de Justice in the centre of Brussels. At this moment, Thursday night, things seem to have calmed down but the incidents show once again that every European community with a fair number of North African, read muslim immigrants, is a potential powderkeg needing very little to go off, see also the May 2006 riots in Montfermeil near Paris. So what happened?
On Monday night 25/26 September tens of Moroccan youths (I know, actually they are Belgian youths but since the authorities keep referring to Vlaams Belang voters as SS Einsatzgruppen, shit, why not play the game) ventured out in the Marollen, busted several car and shop windows and set one shop and five cars between the Marollen and the Square Anneessens ablaze. Ten youths were arrested, and released 15 1/2 nanoseconds later. Luckily, the owners of the shop and the cars found tremendous solace in the words of Philippe Close, Cabinet Chief to Brussels Mayor Freddy Thielemans, who hastened to emphasize that there had been no real riots between the youths and the police nor huge gatherings, only isolated incidents. It is possible here that Mr. Close labeled the burning of the shop as antics of bored young people, since the shop in question (Dechamps) did in antiques. Anyway, somewhere in the night of Monday to Tuesday, it was agreed between communal representatives and a delegation of the youths to hold a meeting Tuesday evening to listen to the grievances of the latter.
Apparently having become smarter, the representatives of the Brussels City Council this time made no rendez-vous to listen to the youth's grievances come Wednesday evening. And goddam right they were, for as far as I know, apart from the usual innocent passers-by stone-pelting, café-burning, carglass-busting, two molotovcocktails have been thrown in the Saint-Peter Hospital, a main hospital in Brussels Centre. I don't know anymore if the firefighters were hampered in their work here too, but the car keys of some fire engines were stolen. 45 youths were arrested, and it appears 31 of them have a criminal past.