This is typical. It has just hit my inbox, headlined 'Save The Day' -- you know, like there was a jolly party being planned. It will give you an idea of what the people who have been sucked into this euro-scientology cult consider 'exciting.' Here it is: 'The EPC' -that is a big euro-loving Brussels think tank -- 'is gearing up for the summer semester with an exciting programme of events. To whet your appetite here are a few highlights of confirmed events and speakers in our busy events calendar: 18 April Visions for Europe Sixty Minute Briefing Is Europe's future green? 2 May Policy Dialogue on Competition regime for services of general interest 19 May (all-day conference) Policy Dialogue on The future of the European social model 31 May Breakfast Policy Briefing on The priorities of the Polish Presidency of the EU 8 June Policy Dialogue on Global challenges of the green economy & sustainability That last one is going to be with Herman Van Rompuy, the Grinch-like Belgian who is the president of the European Council. Yeah, that'll be a cracker. Now, look. I will be going to some of these things. In fact I was supposed to be going to one this morning, but work got in the way. I hope however that if I ever come away from a conference on 'a competition regime for services of general interest' saying, 'Wow, a highlight! Wow, exciting!' someone will simply have me put down. Iceland, banks, democracy: justice. And how Brussels plans to stop it Here is an edited version of my column from today's Irish Daily Mail: God love the Icelanders: what a sturdy, independent and stubborn little nation they are, all 320,000 of them. Well, minus the ten in the government. That lot could seamlessly join the capitulators of our new Fine Gael and Labour Government. The prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, and the rest of the centre-left Reykjavik government -- under pressure from Brussels eurocrats, who can't resist interfering even in countries outside the EU -- want the tiny Icelandic population to refund the bank debt of €4bn, apparently to keep the European Commission happy. But the Icelandic people themselves have no intention of cutting open their veins and pouring out their life’s blood to pay back money owed to foreign speculators, no matter what capitulations their government makes in international negotiations. You should note this. The second referendum on Saturday was not like our second Lisbon referendum where the text of the treaty on which we were asked to vote was exactly the same as the text presented during the first referendum. No, after its defeat in the first referendum last year, the keen-to-capitulate Reykjavik government went back to the British and Dutch governments and worked out a pay-back scheme which would have been easier for the Icelandic taxpayers. That new deal is what they put to the vote at the weekend. And the Icelanders – God, they are splendid people – still voted No. Why? As one well-placed Icelandic source told me: ‘The core of our opposition is our firm belief that we as taxpayers have absolutely no legal or moral obligation to pay for these debts of a private bank. Since this dispute started in the autumn of 2008, no one has been able to point to any laws saying that we must pay for this. No one: no legal experts, no politicians and no governments.’ Don’t you just long to hear even one member of our own Government say exactly that? Just one line of this clear, perfect truth: ‘Irish taxpayers have absolutely no legal or moral obligation to pay for these debts of a private bank.’ I find the arrogance of that a punch in the gut, but I don’t really much care that we won’t get a referendum on the debt. I know what any referendum in this country is worth when it goes against the demands of Brussels. The Government would shred the results and just tell us to vote again. Or in the case of a referendum that did not involve a Constitutional issue – which is the kind of referendum a vote on the bank debt would be – the Government would simply ignore a ‘Can’t pay, won’t pay’ result and claim the voters didn’t understand the issues. Any talk of a No vote in a referendum handing a powerful weapon to our Government for negotiations in Brussels is naïve. That idea depends on the assumption that our Taoiseach and Finance Minister want a powerful negotiating weapon to get this debt off our backs. There is no evidence that they want any such thing. Mr Kenny and Mr Noonan won’t even use the weapons they have already to hand – a default on bank debt, a determination to take a bail-out only from the IMF and not from the EU, an undertaking to leave the euro or even the EU. Instead, our Taoiseach and our Finance Minister have been hovering around the edges of EU meetings, claiming they are using diplomatic skills and building up friendships in order to make headway with their requests for changes in our bail-out. In fact they are like a couple of provincial dorks hanging around the edges a swish cocktail party: just because nobody is being outright rude to the dorks doesn’t mean they are making social headway. Why can Iceland fight against these bank pay-backs while all the main Irish political parties claim it is impossible for us to do so? Here is one reason, as seen by my source in Reykjavik: ‘We can do this because of our independence, since we are not in the EU and because we have our own currency. The EU has tried to bully us and will continue to do so but we are not in their clutches and I’m positive we will never be. We have great sympathy for the Irish, there is quite a lot of coverage in Iceland about the situation in Ireland. The situation shows us how much better placed we are outside the EU despite everything.’ ‘The fight in Iceland in the weeks before the referendum was between the elite and the people. The elite wanted to accept the [Icesave] agreements. The No side was just ordinary people fighting for justice and standing firm. Also the No side was dominated by people who oppose EU membership while the Yes side was dominated by pro-EU people.’ While there is no doubt that the vote was primarily on the Icesave issue, ‘people in Iceland are saying that this was an exercise for a referendum on EU membership, and an indication of how that referendum might go.’ How it might go is to a No vote. The latest opinion poll by Capacent published last month in an Icelandic business newspaper showed 55.7 percent oppose EU membership while 30 percent want to join. Undecideds are at 14.2 percent. Not, of course, that Brussels is willing to leave the Icelanders alone to make up their own minds about the EU. The EU elite are trying to move towards a ‘post-democratic’ form of government and the Icelandic attitude of vigorous people-power is exactly what they want to suppress. It’s just killing the Brussels elite that independent Iceland is now back in growth, its interest rates are falling and that its people make it clear they do not want to be ruled by the EU. (Iceland is only negotiating because of a political deal struck in the Reykjavik parliament a couple of years ago – there is no popular push for membership.) So of course the EU is taking action to ‘explain’ to Iceland how it would ‘benefit’ from membership. The eurocrats have set up a propaganda onslaught in Iceland, using EU taxpayers’ money. Translated from the eurocratic, that means ‘the Commission is going to give more Icelandic bureaucrats a fat-salary vested interest in getting a Yes vote on entering the EU, and remind the politicians how much politically-useful structural dosh they can throw around if they manage to convince the people to vote Yes.’ As for the propaganda, Mr Fuele said ‘the Commission is building up its own information and communication activities to facilitate well-informed public debate. The EU Delegation in Reykjavik is fully operational and actively involved in communication activities and an EU info-centre is planned.’ Translation: ‘We already have eurocrats in smart offices in Reykjavik monitoring who is on our side in the press and broadcasting, industry, labour and politics, and who isn’t. We intend to pump money to those on the Yes side and undermine the No side, just as we did so successfully in Ireland during the second Lisbon referendum.’ However, there is one thing which could destroy the independence of that small island nation: treachery by their own government. For of course that is exactly what has destroyed the independence of this small island nation. 01 April 2011 11:36 AM In 2008, Wilders released a 17-minute film called Fitna (Arabic for 'Strife'), which -- I haven't been able to see the film, so I'm going on a description given to me by a member of Wilders's political staff -- demonstrated how the Koran encouraged acts of terrorism, anti-Semitism, violence against women, homosexuals and infidels. Release of the film provoked the absolutely predictable reaction among British multiculturalists -- most of whom you'd have to guess also hadn't seen the film -- so in 2009 the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith barred Wilders from entering the United Kingdom. He was on his way to London to show Fitna at a private screening at Westminster, on the invitation of the then-leader of UKIP, Lord Pearson of Rannock. Of course, given what we now know about the kind of films Jacqui Smith and most notably her husband do think are okay to watch -- porn, of course -- it is grotesque that she would have tried to bar a democratic politician from an allied country who had made a film condemning the brutal treatment of women under Islam. Maybe if Wilders had called his film 'Hot Babes Unveiled in the Casbah' it could have passed the Jacqui Smith 'we're all adults here' quality test. Still, a court eventually overturned the bar on Wilders entering the UK, and he was able to show the film. Now he has announced he will release Fitna 2 next year. The topic of this one is going to be the Islamic prophet Muhammad, whom, among other things, Wilders calls 'murderous.' The film was about the treatment of women under Islam. In 2004 Van Gogh was assassinated in a street in Amsterdam. His Mulsim killer used two knives to pin a note to his chest threatening unbelievers.
11 April 2011 6:52 PM
Zzzzzzzzz: what passes for 'exciting' in Brussels
Geert Wilders, Islam and freedom of speech: a whole other kind of Dutch courage
Sunday, 17 April 2011
Good grief, do you see what I have to go through?
16 June EPC Annual Conference on The State of the Union
Hooray, and will somebody buy that nation a drink? Iceland has said No again. At the
weekend the Icelandic people voted a thundering No for a second time to any idea that they should pay back loans made to the failed Icesave bank by gambler-investors at British and Dutch banks.
But of course we do not hear it. Even demands for an Iceland-style referendum on the bank debt are dismissed by Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fail as ‘populism.’ (The party of Bertie Ahern is now finding populism distasteful. That is grotesque.) Last Wednesday the group of independent Deputies in the Dail proposed a motion seeking a referendum on the repayments the last Government and this Government have promised. The motion was swept aside by the big parties.
The fund is for propaganda, and bribes: last week at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Stefan Fuele, the European commissioner in charge of enlargement, said he was going to pump €28m into Iceland over the next three years ‘to support strengthening of administrative capacity and prepare Iceland for the management of structural funds.’
The only hope Iceland has to defend its independence against this onslaught is the
extraordinarily strong character of its people. The fact is a people can’t live isolated on the edge of the Arctic for 1,000 years without growing tough. I’d say Iceland has what it takes to defeat the EU machine.
Nobody gets up the noses of the multicultural classes quite like Geert Wilders, the increasingly-influential Dutch
politician who refuses to back down in his criticism of the effects of Islam in Europe. Now he is back to give the 'we-embrace-any-culture-as-long-as-it's-not-Christian' types something new to be 'shocked' and 'offended' about.
Sounds to me like Wilders might as well draw a dotted line across his throat and write the words 'cut here' under it. Agree with him or not, Wilders and every other Dutch politician who speaks out on the effect of large scale Islamic immigration to the Netherlands must remember what happened to the flim maker Theo Van Gogh, seen here on the left, after he made a film called Submission.
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