This isn't supposed to happen. Indeed, the Commission has an annual euro-propaganda budget of at least £2.3bn to make sure it doesn't happen. But somehow it has. The more the people of Europe have of 'more Europe,' the less they like it. Not that the Brussels elite whose lush careers depend on 'more Europe' will accept that people increasingly dislike the EU because they know more and more about it. No, the minute the poll was published, the commission was twisting the results with a press handout headlined: 'EU citizens favour stronger European economic governance.' It claimed that 92 percent of people think the EU has set the right priorities for economic recovery. Whaaa? 92 percent? The last time I saw a figure of that sort support was in one of the Soviet elections. Yes, Leonid Brezhnev was 92 percent loved, and the figures proved it. Viviane Reding, the Luxembourger commissioner in charge of the propaganda department known as 'communications,' even insisted: 'The clear majority for enhanced European economic governance shows that people see the EU as a decisive part of the solution to the crisis.' She wants us to believe that 75 percent of the people in EU countries are in favour of giving the EU -- ie, people like her -- a stronger role in the coordination of member states' economic and budgetary policies. Mats Persson, the head of the Open Europe think tank, took that kind of absurd commission spinning apart in an article for the Swedish news site Europaportalen. Mats has paraphrased the piece for me in English. He wrote that such overwhelming support for EU interference just doesn't appear anywhere else in the poll. What else doesn't appear anywhere in the poll is the role of the EU or the term 'European economic governance.' All there is is a woolly question about whether or not you think it would be effective to combat the current crisis with 'a stronger coordination of economic and financial policies among all the EU Member States.' The propaganda merchants at the commission couldn't resist massaging the result, adding up two groups of different answers into an omnibus 75 percent figure, then repackaging it as three-quarters of all the people of the EU member states being in favour of giving the EU more powers to monitor national economies. But that was never the question. Mats took apart other commission 'interpretations' of the figures, and then noted, ''The commission's Eurobarometer is very expensive -- almost 27,000 people were interviewed face-to-face -- begging the question whether taxpayers' money really should be used in this way.' José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission, tried to spin the poll, too. Almost as soon as it was out, he was onto the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera to insist that the fault for the falling support rests with the governments of member states. He said that when things go wrong, the governments blame it on the EU, but they take all the credit for the things Brussels accomplishes: 'I problemi non si risolveranno fino a che ogni nazione non vede il progetto europeo come il suo progetto.' My recent year in Rome tells me what Barroso meant is that the problems will not be resolved until each nation sees the European project as its own project. In other words, according the Barroso, what is causing the unpopularity of the EU among the people of the 27 EU countries is that the governments of Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the rest just pig-headedly insist on looking after their own nations first instead of looking after the interests of the EU first. He spins the poll until its results are meaningless . So much for the value of the Eurobarometer poll. Once the results get through the mincer at the commission, they bear no resemblance to how the answers went in. Yet the commission will go on ordering Eurobarometer to go on running polls. Eurobarometer is the commission's own creature, after all. And no matter what the results say about people wanting to get the EU out of their lives, the eurocrats will go on insisting the problem is 'communication.' They will insist, as they always do, that if 'EU citizens' (may the phrase burn in hell) only knew more about all the wonderful work the EU is doing for them, they would learn to love the EU just as much as the eurocrats themselves do. At which point the reasoning of boss eurocrat Barroso and the other eurocrats turns into the reasoning of the stalker, insisting that if only the young woman would get to know him, she would realise how much he loves her, and how much she really -- though she resists it -- loves him. He knows he's the only man for her. It is only others -- the eurosceptic press, the governments of member states -- who are poisoning her mind against him. And he'll stand outside her house at midnight every night and follow her to work everyday until she admits the truth. Then surely she will she will submit to an ever closer union... Just a follow-up to my blog of August 23rd on the attempts to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero: Human Events, the long-established Capitol Hill journal, has published reports that reveal Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man who plans to be the Imam at the multi-million dollar mosque, 'owns taxpayer-subsidised apartment buildings in Hudson County [the part of New Jersey across the Hudson River from Manhattan] where the tenants have made municipal health complaints including rat, roach and bedbug infestations, seeping toilets, leaks, urine soaked hallways, no heat and no hot water.' Connie Hair, Congressional correspondent for Human Events, also notes a recent report from the New York Post, which said: 'The mosque developers are tax deadbeats. Sharif El-Gamal,the leading organiser behind the mosque and community centre near Ground Zero, owes $224,270.77 in back property tax on the site, city records show. El-Gamal's company, 45 Park Place Partners, failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July, according to the city Finance Department.' 'Sounds like a good time to raise $100m for a mosque.' Well of course the EU-capitulating Foreign Secretary William Hague has had to deny rumours about his alleged relationship with his new aide, 25-year old Chris Myers. If a Cabinet Minister pushing 50 is still walking around the streets dressed like this with a young man-friend, he is just inviting (totally unfounded) speculation. So I offer a few examples of other couples of man-friends whose style might be a template for Hague and Myers. A change of style could erase all doubt they are as butch as anyone. And finally the ultimate butch twosome in any society, a couple of firemen, These from the 1870s, the kind of conservative period that ought to suit a pair of Tories such as Hague and Myers. Last week he was in trouble because he said Muslim immigrants were a burden on German society because they did not want to integrate. Cue roaring and demands for him to be sacked from the Bundesbank. What seems to have been forgotten in the roaring are the comments made by the Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, at the end of a visit to Germany last February. In a speech in front of 20,000 people at a stadium in Cologne (just as well it wasn't Nuremberg), he warned Turkish immigrants to Germany that assimilation is 'a crime against humanity.' He called for them not to give up their cultural heritage. Chancellor Merkel was pretty brisk in her response: 'If you grow up in Germany in the third or fourth generation, if you have German citizenship, then I am your Chancellor.' Indeed. As Sarrazin is your central banker. After writing my piece on the American primaries this week -- it's on the Debate page,'Okey-dokey: Palin power surges across America' -- I had this note from Dr James Lucier, a former US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director and a veteran of many decades on Capitol Hill. As always, the experienced Dr Lucier is worth listening to on American politics -- and just now on what he calls 'the Palin romp across the deadwood Republican establishment.' Here is what he said: 'In the beginning they said that she was a girl and didn't know how to throw a ball. Over the past few weeks most of the candidates she endorsed either won outright against the establishment or came so close that they are still mopping their brows. 'Tuesday's apparent victory against Lisa Murkowski by a Palin-endorsed candidate, Joe Miller, was especially significant because nobody in Alaska had ever heard of him either. The final margin of victory was 1,688 votes. There are still some absentee ballots, but a lot are Democrats and a huge chunk of the rest are military votes that always vote for the most conservative candidate. (Standard polling of the Military shows that there are no Democrats in fox holes.) 'It is important to understand that the Palin-Murkowski rivalry goes back to the days when she was leading the reform against the big oil companies, against the wishes of the dominant Alaskan establishment, including Lisa Murkowski's father, former US Senator Frank Murkowski, and at the time Governor of Alaska. Sarah-can't-throw-a-ball-properly-Palin knocked Frank Murkowski out in the next Republican primary and then became the next Governor and the rest is history. 'The Lisa Murkowski camp had assembled a war chest to air a blitz of TV ads featuring endorsements by the late US Senator Ted Stevens, considered by some to be the Father of Alaska (he was an Alaskan leader before it became a state), and considered by others to be the Godfather of Alaskan Pork Barrel politics. 'Tragically, Stevens died in a plane crash two or three weeks ago, and the endorsements were never used. Graciously, Palin used her post as a regular TV commentator to praise Stevens for his positive role in Alaska, without once mentioning the Klondike Rush corruption that came with frontier politics. Yet, as the Murkowski defeat shows, it was Palin who brought that era to an end as effectively as the granite mountainside which was Stevens' grave.' A couple of us sat in one of the cafés at the Grand Sablon here in Brussels yesterday and found particular amusement in an article in the Financial Times by one of the paper's euro-enthusiast commentators, Gideon Rachman. Gideon, a Brussels veteran, is greatly frustrated that public opinion across the EU member states just isn't going to let Turkey 'join Europe.' The problem is, 'as long as Turkish membership raises the prospect of mass emigraton to the rest of the EU, it will be impossible to sell it to western European voters.' He proposes instead to offer Turkey membership of the EU -- that is, give it huge weight in framing European law, give it lavish financial and structural aid, give it unfettered access to the European single market and the rest -- only explain that under this deal Turkish citizens would not get the automatic right to work anywhere in the EU, a right which is guaranteed for all citizens of of the present member states (though with some delay for citizens of a couple of the most recent members). Unlike the citizens of the other 27 member states, all Turks could expect is easier travel. One British Brussels wag looked up from his coffee long enough to suggest that Gideon might like to offer the same deal to Israel and see what kind of reaction he would get. Me, I didn't need to say much. I just said I recognised the reasoning behind the plan. So, Abdul, welcome aboard the Euro-bus. Just remember your place: right at the back. Today in Saudi Arabia, the richest and most influential Islamic state in the world, a Saudi man who was convicted in court of paralysing a fellow countryman is being threatened by the judicial authorities with having his spinal cord cut as an official punishment. It is Islamic law and Saudi Arabia enforces it: an eye for an eye. As I write this, the case judge in the north-western province of Tabuk is waiting for replies to the letter he has sent out to several hospitals asking for their advice on whether it is medically possible to slice the spine. Is the judicial mutilation going to happen? We will have to wait and see. But we do know that ten years ago an Egyptian worker had an eye surgically removed in a Saudi hospital as punishment for disfiguring a fellow worker in an acid attack. I mention all that because I am going to write about two dust-ups going on in America now, both of them tied to Islam and what Americans are supposed to make of the Muslims in their midst. Dust-up one is the question of whether a foreign-financed campaigning group of Muslims will be allowed to build a £65m mosque just two blocks from Ground Zero. Dust-up two is the continuing question of whether or not President Obama is actually a Christian. A poll last week showed that one in four Americans believe he is not. They think he is a Muslim. Now, the first response from people in this country to either of these issues is predictable. On the question of the mosque, the response is: ‘A mosque is a place of worship and to deny a place of worship to a religion because of a group of terrorists’ links to Islam is offensive. Islam is a religion of peace and mercy. Bin Laden does not represent Islam. He espouses a warped interpretation of Wahhabism.’ ‘Warped?’ What, unlike the Wahhabism embraced by the Saudi state? See first paragraph. That ‘unwarped’ interpretation of Wahhabism enforces mutilation and beheading of criminals, execution of homosexuals, stoning of adulterers and violent suppression of all other religions. Sweet mother of Jesus, you’d be hard-pushed to spot just where the line is crossed between warped and unwarped if that sort of barbarity is okay. We’ll leave that question for the moment and get on to Barack Hussein Obama and whether or not he is a Christian and whether it ought to matter anyway. The first response to that question by most people in this country is to mock what they believe are the religious obsessions of the American rightwing. Here’s the problem with that response. It is not the American right who have been making the most influential arguments that Mr Obama is Muslim. They don’t need to. All they have to do is point to arguments which have come instead from powerful Muslims such as President Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and from intellectuals such as Dr Edward N Luttwak, a military specialist and historian writing in the Democrat New York Times. The sheer frustration of the White House in all of this is shown in their determination to show that instead it is leading right-wingers such as the broadcaster Rush Limbaugh who are making the accusations. Which leaves Mr Limbaugh laughing. He has challenged the White House to find any instance in which he said the President was a Muslim. Problem is the President’s staff can’t find a single instance. No, the closest Mr Limbaugh has come is simply reading out on his national radio show what President Gaddafi said on June 11, 2008, when the Muslim leader called for ‘all the people in the Arab and Islamic world’ to applaud Barack Obama because he is ‘a Muslim.’ This is the kind of celebrity endorsement the White House isn’t looking for. Nor is this, in the Democrat New York Times. A month before the Libyan president declared that Mr Obama is ‘a Muslim,’ Dr Littwak wrote: ‘As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood… Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian…His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes.’ The crime was apostasy. Recommended punishment under Islamic law: beheading at the hands of a cleric. You may remember that in 2006 a convert from Islam to Christianity in Afghanistan only escaped execution because his lawyers managed to have him declared insane, after which he managed to flee to Italy. Peace, mercy, and run for your life. The Drudge Report last week put Dr Luttwak’s article on its website, which gets 27m hits a day. No, the White House doesn’t need it. And while I welcome any discomfort in the West Wing, I wish the American right would stay out of the issue. Whenever they start fretting whether the President is a Christian, they start getting into muddled history about how the United States were founded on Christian principles. They weren’t. Men such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and above all Thomas Jefferson looked to Providence, not Christ. All these men, and others who led the revolution and established the Constitution, were Deist, or call them Unitarian if you like. The early symbols they chose for the new republic were Roman and Masonic. No crosses, no Trinities. Which doesn’t stop me enjoying the squirming of President Obama over the question of whether he is a Christian. Especially not now, when Americans are divided over the question of whether an Islamic outfit ought to be allowed to build a mosque only a few yards from the spot where mostly-Saudi Wahhabi terrorists committed mass murder in the name of Islam. The people supporting the mosque are trying to frame the argument as one of freedom of religion. It isn’t. It is a question of whether to allow a somewhat suspect Islamic agitator to cock his leg on a sacred American site. I mean the Imam Feisal Rauf, described best as ‘the project’s sharia-touting sponsor’ and a man who famously refuses to consider Hamas a terrorist organisation. One of the best men on the imam and his followers is Andrew C McCarthy, now the head of the Centre for Law and Counterterrorism in Washington, but for 18 years an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. From 1993 through 1995, Mr McCarthy led the terrorism prosecution against the ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s Command Post near Ground Zero. And on it goes. The man is one of the leading experts on American law and terrorism. McCarthy sees the real question of the Ground Zero mosque as, ‘Which Islam will prevail in America?’ Writing this week in the conservative journal National Review Online he says it is sadly ironic that ‘our public debate presents the mosque proponents as the partisans of liberty… wittingly or not, when they champion this mosque and its sponsors, it is the agenda of an alien and authoritarian Islam they champion – an Islam against which many American Muslims chafe.’ He says American Muslims who crave religious liberty and Western enlightenment have been abandoned to the ‘sharia-mongers’ by the elites from President Obama to New York Mayor Bloomberg. It is the foreign-financed Muslim Brotherhood, not American Muslims, who are insisting that this Islamic monument must be imposed on this sacred spot. Mr McCarthy characterises the Muslim Brotherhood as ‘the Saudi-backed saboteurs whose American operatives boldly promise to “eliminate and destroy Western Civilisation from within.”’ The American political elite who want this mosque at Ground Zero are nothing but the latest generation of useful idiots. There are already 100 mosques in New York. No one in America is denying any Muslim a place to worship. It is just a question of, ‘Not here.’ -- this is my column from today's Irish Daily Mail He found this for me from the Madrid newspaper Imparcial by the author, journalist, and political thinker Luis Maria Anson. Kiko calls Anson 'the pre-eminent writer and philosophical leader in Spain.' He is also member of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. Here is a translation of just what European intellectuals such as Anson really think of the Obamas. Keep in mind that in America, the Democrat elite want Americans to think that while the the aloof Ivy League lawyer Obama is rapidly losing support among the plain people of America, those sophisticates over in Europe admire him. Not quite, according to Anson. Oh, and by the way, Anson opens with nice things to say about David Cameron following the Tory leader's recent low-key holiday in Spain. This will certainly be the first and is most likely the last time this blog will say anything good about the Tory leader in a post with 'Europe' in the headline, but here is how the prime minister looks in this article from La Razon: 'With genuine natural behaviour, without fanfare of body guards, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, spends his vacation in a small Spanish village, integrating himself into the village life. He plays cards, visits the bars, visits with the neighbours and comports himself naturally and without fanfare. He is the Chief of a Monarchy that ruled the largest empire in the history of the world and that today is a model of democracy and modernity with respect for the old traditions and protocol. A ten, for sure, to David Cameron.' 'The presence in Spain of the British prime minister, who carries the democratic representation of the United Kingdom, contrasts with the bragging and fanfare of the "nouveau-riche" wife of the president of the United States. With the worst style of a dictator/king of the middle east, Mrs Obama has settled herself in Spain with the "howl" of almost a hundred body-guards, an endless caravan of automobiles, besides reserving fifty rooms in one of the most expensive hotels in the world.' 'We are embarrassed for her. In the middle of the crisis, caused by the economic errors of the American Capitalism, the wife of the American president enjoys herself on the most insulting, lavish waste. This is without mention of the offence to Spain that she refused to accept Spanish security, which has been proven exceptional at the highest international meetings. ' 'Mrs Obama has treated us as if we were a colony of the empire. Caesar remains in Washington while she "lords" herself in Spanish territory.' Sounds like the Spanish are just about ready to start shouting that line the Central Americas used to shout during official visits by Vice-President Nixon in the 1950s, 'Yanqui, go home!' This is getting grotesque. Now the Lisbon-embracing prime minister has appointed Leon Brittan, a former European Commissioner, to be his trade adviser. Brittan is one of the Tory heavies who worked to isolate Thatcher on the issue of the ERM and the single currency. Later he worked to undermine William Hague's resistance to further European integration when he was leader of the party. And he was Nick Clegg's boss at the commission when the Lib Dem leader was doing his ten years in Brussels, known for these purposes as Manchuria, where the candidates come from. It makes you wonder what kind of reward Cameron would give to someone who had actually taken a knife and slid it through a Conservative leader's ribs. The more traitorous a Tory is surrendering British sovereignty to the EU, the more he prospers under the Cameron Tories. So how does one explain Hague prospering under Cameron? Easy. He has repudiated his former attitudes on the EU. Now he wants to be 'positive' and 'constructive.' For which read, 'is now willing to roll over in public and wag his tail for Cathy Ashton and the rest.' He is so glowing with his new-found religion of Euro-loving that he doesn't even realise what an insult Brittan's appointment is to him.
02 September 2010 4:52 PM
That man outside your house every midnight: Barroso the stalker
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Ground Zero mosque imam 'a taxpayer-subsidised slumlord' looking for $100m
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31 August 2010 11:16 AM
The German and the Turk: twins under the skin but apparently it's not genetic
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25 August 2010 10:30 AM
Back of the bus, Abdul
23 August 2010 3:05 PM
A mosque at Ground Zero: not here, not ever
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Political treason prospers, though none dare call it treason
Sunday, 5 September 2010
You might not have noticed but heaven knows it is the sort of thing they notice at the Commission: a few days ago a Eurobarometer poll was published which showed that support for the EU is falling all across the Continent. Fewer than half of the citizens of European Union member states now think that belonging to the EU is a good thing for their country.
'Despite millions of dollars in government subsidies, Rauf has trouble maintaining several small apartment buildings in North Bergen,
Palisades Park and Union City.'
The first is a couple of German officers relaxing together near Stalingrad. How undeniably heterosexual do they look?
Next, one of the great masculine couples of history, the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
Thilo Sarrazin, the German central banker who speaks without a filter, is in trouble again. This week it's a comment he made that 'all Jews share a certain gene.' Apparently he was referring to something he had read in the New York Times about genetic research, but that hasn't stopped the hoo-haw.
But then, I am familiar with the
diagram of the bus used in the infamous 1955 case against Rosa Parks in Alabama, when the 'colored' Mrs Parks was prosecuted for refusing to give up her seat at the front of the bus to a white man. 'Coloreds' were supposed to sit at the back of the bus.
Islam is a religion of peace and mercy, part 47.
Thanks go to my right-thinking Cuban friend, Kiko Villalon -- with whom I shall one day sail into a free Havana -- who keeps an eye on the Spanish press for me.
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