The Jew as Ally of the Muslim

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I was reading a book [in Spanish so I won't post extracts] about the history of Jews in Spain, which essentially confirmed what I had already written about (here, here and here), namely Jewish collaboration with Muslim invaders in the post-Roman era. This fact is of central importance to the history of Europe's confrontation with Islam. Yet all of the supposed "Counterjihad" sites, although they regularly feature pieces about the Crusades, 1683, the Battle of Lepanto and so forth, resolutely refuse to mention it. This exposes the Counterjihad movement's essentially fraudulent nature. These people are not primarily interested in resisting Islam. Their goal is to promote the interests of Jewry. Resisting Islam is simply a means of doing that, as they perceive it, and, at best, a secondary objective.

The book made reference to another book I had never heard of: "The Jew as Ally of the Muslim". Like many books that expose critical truths about Jews, it is not easily available. I will now order an expensive copy from an antiquarian bookshop in the USA. I did, however, find an old (1987) review of it from Daniel Pipes, the Jew who funds Fjordman and could loosely be considered part of the Counterjihad movement today.

As the title of this study suggests, Allan and Helen Cutler believe that the tendency of medieval Christians to see the Jew as an ally of the Muslim was the decisive factor in the development of anti-Semitism. In making their case, the Cutlers challenge conventional wisdom, which holds that anti-Semitism originated in the charge of deicide (that Jews killed Jesus) and the Jews' anomalous socio-economic status in Europe. Although the Cutlers' study is poorly written and far too lengthy, it offers an intriguing and ultimately convincing argument. 

The logic of their case can be reduced to a syllogism: (1) Medieval Christians feared and hated Muslims. (2) Medieval Christians saw Jews as the allies of Muslims. (3) Therefore, medieval Christians feared and hated Jews. 

On the first point, the Cutlers are correct to note the presence of a pervasive fear of Muslims among medieval Christians. That fear began with the emergence of Islam and lasted until the 19th century. In 634, just two years after Muhammad the Prophet's death, for example, the patriarch of Jerusalem referred to the Muslims as "the slime of the godless Saracens [which] threatens slaughter and destruction." This early view was later echoed many times over; for centuries, the role of arch-enemy, in myth and literature, was filled by Muslims. 

This is understandable, for Muslims, who inhabited a belt of territories extending from Morocco to Egypt to Turkey to Siberia, physically surrounded medieval Christendom. Muslims were also the most constant enemy: with only one exception (the Mongols), every serious military threat against Christian Europe after the 10th century was launched by them. The Muslim danger continued to preoccupy the Christians of Europe for more than a millennium, until after the second siege of Vienna in 1683. 

Muslims also differed from the other invaders - Germans, Bulgars, and Hungarians - in presenting a religious and cultural danger as well as a military one. Hungarians would eventually accept European culture and convert to Christianity, but Muslims brought with them a rival civilization which not only withstood Christianity but even seduced Christians from their faith. For all these reasons, Muslims were the outstanding enemy of Christendom. 

Second - and this is the heart of the Cutlers' study - Jews were seen as close associates of Muslims. There was some justice to this view: the Hebrew language shares much with Arabic, and Judaism shares much with Islam; on the most abstract level, both are religions of law, while Christianity is a religion of faith. More specifically, they share many features such as circumcision, dietary regulations, and similar sexual codes. Further, because the Muslims were preeminent in the medieval centuries, "Jews themselves associated Jew with Muslim." When this became known among the Christians, it much harmed the Jews' position. Most damaging of all, Jews on occasion helped Muslim troops against Christians (as in the initial Arab conquest of Spain) and some Jews held prominent positions in Muslim governments at war with the Christians. Even when they did not actually take part in the fighting, "Jews usually rejoiced when Christian territory fell into Islamic hands." 

The Cutlers marshall a variety of textual and pictoral proof to make their case that medieval Christians saw a deep connection between Jew and Muslim. To take one of each: An influential twelfth-century Christian text includes the bizarre statement that "A Jew is not a Jew until he converts to Islam." The woodcut in a book of religious disputation published in 1508 pictures a Jewish and a Muslim figure: while the Jewish figure carries a banner with the name "Machometus" (Muhammad), the Muslim's banner depicts a Jew's hat. 

The Cutlers conclude:

Since the rise of Islam, the primary (though by no means the only) factors in the history of anti-Semitism have been the following: the association of Jew with Muslim, the longstanding European tendency to equate the Jew, of Middle Eastern origin, with the Muslim, also of Middle Eastern origin; the intensely held Christian feeling that the Jew was an ally of, and in league with, his ethnoreligious cousin the Muslim against the West; the deep-seated Christian apprehension that the Jew, the internal Semitic alien, was working hand in hand with the Muslim, the external Semitic enemy, to bring about the eventual destruction of Indo-European Christendom. 

Third, Christian fear of Muslims affected the view of Jews. In order to prove this thesis, the Cutlers must show that Christian anti-Semitism varied in response to Christian-Muslim relations. The status of Jews had to decline as Christian animosity toward Muslims increased; conversely, Jews had to be better off when wars against Muslims ceased. 

The authors do establish this point in a broad-brush sort of way, more by assertion than through a close look at the record. They argue that far fewer anti-Semitic outbreaks occurred in 700-1000, when Muslims were still a distant concern, than in 1000-1300, when they had become the victims of intense hostility. The Cutlers date the transition to about 1010, when rumors spread through France that the Jews had helped the Fatimid rulers of Egypt destroy the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In retaliation, the Jews of Orleans were made to pay with their lives.

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As I have noted before, the Jews have constructed a narrative of "antisemitism" that is nothing but a preposterous fable. This narrative claims that antagonism to Jews either has no reason whatsoever and/or has ludicrous mythical or psychological explanations, such as the belief that Jews killed Jesus. In reality, antagonism to Jews is provoked by Jewish behaviour. My own present feelings towards Jews were provoked, first of all, by the sight of prominent Jews constantly pushing immigration, diversity, multiculturalism and pro-Islam sentiments while playing the Hitler card against anyone who disagreed; and, perhaps even more importantly, by the reaction of other Jews when these facts were pointed out, one of unreasoning hostility and an absolute inability to admit fault, exactly like Muslims when confronted with their iniquities, in other words. My present suspicion of Jews is rooted, not in fantasy, but in Jewish behaviour.

Similarly, as this book makes clear, the hostility our ancestors felt towards Jews had a similar explanation: they were perceived as a fifth column of traitors collaborating with hostile Muslims threatening to overwhelm our civilisation. (And, as the book points out, and as I have pointed out, there were many instances where this collaboration did undoubtedly occur.) As Muslims largely ceased to be threatening to Europe after the 17th century, so hostility to Jews faded.

Now Muslims are threatening Europe again. Again we see Jews playing the collaborative or facilitating role for their incursions into our lands. And, tragically, almost the entirety of the resistance movement to this invasion is in Jewish hands. Even the Counterjihadists in Europe who aren't themselves Jewish are so utterly under their thumb that they're afraid to say anything bad about them or even link to a site that does! Poor Europe.

Note the authors of the book apparently end it with some bizarre political advice for the present day. They demand that, rather than end Jewish-Muslim collaboration, it should, in effect be intensified.

American and world Jewry should be ready and willing to put much more of its community-relations time, money, energy, and imagination into urging Christians and Muslims to enter into genuine dialogue and reconciliation.

They also demand that the Pope should, in effect, stop being a Catholic and instead become a kind of rainbow figurehead for all.

 [the Pope should] ...transform his office and mission from a more narrowly Christian into a broadly Abrahamic one . . . to create a new spiritual and institutional unity between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

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Why Jewish Guilt in Communism Matters

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You see as normal a world in which Europeans are continually insulted by Jews for being “Nazis”, even the Europeans whose ancestors fought against the Nazis. You see as normal a world in which every manifestation of European nationalism is stigmatised as Nazism and greeted with special repressive measures.

In this world, flayed by guilt, which they passively and meekly accept and internalise, Europeans have no chance of defending their countries against islamisation. Seen as tainted by some kind of “Nazi” original sin, the only way Europeans can redeem themselves is to mutely hand their countries over to the aliens and hope for the best.

You see this world as normal because that’s the world we live in.

But I don’t see this world as normal. It is built on a falsified narrative of 20th century history, one which stresses the evils of nationalism, racism and right-wing politics. An authentic history, however, would acknowledge that anti-nationalism, political prejudice and left-wing politics had consequences that were as destructive, if not more destructive, than nationalism, and that the excesses of nationalism were among those consequences. In other words, extreme nationalism was a reaction to artificially-imposed extreme anti-nationalism. 

Those anti-nationalist ideas have been expressed in ideologies like Communism and multiculturalism. Each of these movements, if they even deserve to be considered separate movements, has exhibited the vastly disproportionate involvement of diaspora Jews in the fermentation of their ideas, their promotion through intellectual discourse and their implementation at the policy level. Anti-nationalism is, literally, the worst idea in history. 

If you could quantify the misery and death the violation of the nationalist principle – the idea that a people should live in a homogeneous ethnic group in its own territory under its own government – has provoked, it would be staggering to contemplate. History is largely the chronicle of the unpleasantness that arises when this principle is violated.

The islamisation of Europe is the consequence of the elevation of anti-nationalism to be the dominant moral ideal of our age. Immigration is the most obvious consequence of the elite’s embrace of this destructive ideal. And islamisation is the consequence of immigration.

When people are infected by HIV, they don’t die of HIV. HIV is just a state of weakness. It is when they catch a secondary infection in this vulnerable state that fatality results. That’s how it is with modern Europe. Islam is not the problem. Islam is what will kill us. But it’s the secondary infection, not the underlying malady. The underlying malady is anti-nationalism.

To some Europeans, it will no doubt sound banal to say that islamisation is the consequence of immigration because, for many of them, the two are inseparable. But this is much less obvious to Americans, since America has been a country of immigration since its inception. Because the American influence is dominant within the Counterjihad movement, and because much of the Counterjihad movement wishes to make itself as inoffensive as possible to elite opinion, in a pitiful attempt to win mainstream acceptance, this fairly obvious truth goes generally unacknowledged. Many Counterjihad activists will abstain from saying anything about immigration for fear of being accused of racism.

A more rounded history of the 20th century would be the clearest possible refutation of the ideal of multiculturalism. It would show that the fact of having different peoples living in the same territory inevitably produces unpleasant results. Even after centuries, separate peoples retain their own sense of ethnic distinctness because the urge to empathise with your own ancestral kin group is an ineradicable part of human nature. Cherishing their own separateness, these distinct ethnic groups inevitably generate conflicts of interests and end up plotting against one another. 

The Jews plotted against the Europeans in whose countries they were living and the Europeans plotted back, or vice versa. It doesn’t matter. The point is that the best way to have a harmonious world is to have separate peoples living in their own territories. That is the policy conclusion that an authentic 20th century history would tend to lead to.

The warped narrative we have all been treated to hitherto, however, suggests exactly the opposite conclusion, namely that nationalism, ethnic identification, and the quest for territorial homogeneity is a terrible scourge which we must all be on constant guard against; that having different peoples living in the same territory is a great and enriching thing; and that all we need is a state willing to victimise the majority population, criminalise its free expression and use its power to crush any incipient manifestation of pride or self-assertion among its people.

The recent persecution of Golden Dawn is a good example of where the dominant narrative takes us. Now, Golden Dawn are very far from being my political ideal. Whatever their imperfections, however, they were one of the best hopes for stopping the islamisation of Greece and Europe in the only way that actually matters: achieving governmental power and using it to stop Muslim immigration and facilitate or enforce Muslim ex-migration. 

That hope may now have been extinguished, partly through direct and indirect pressure from Jewish organisations; and partly through the mythologised narrative of 20th century history that assigns some demonic significance to nationalism, racism and right-wing politics more generally. The EDL likewise have been wounded by the same bizarre European guilt obsessions arising from this distorted account of history.

Jews generally have no difficulty with the concept of ulterior, even subconscious, motivation. Freud, after all, who pioneered the concept of the subconscious, was a Jew. It is common to hear, for example, European governments accused of disguised or subconscious antisemitism for their policies towards Israel or the Palestinians. Why, then, do you have such difficulty with the idea that the Jews active in Communist movements could have had ulterior or even subconscious motivations related to their Jewishness? 

Are we really expected to believe it was pure coincidence that a group of excluded outsiders embraced and implemented an ideology that denigrated almost every aspect of mainstream European society, that sanctioned its deconstruction, the erasure of all its traditions, the wiping out of Christianity, the suppression of European patriot movements and the criminalisation of antisemitism?

I don’t take accusations of antisemitism any more seriously than I take accusations of islamophobia or racism. These are terms designed to shut down rational discussion by imputing impure motivations to opponents and elevating subjective considerations such as emotion and motivation above the core criterion of objective truth. In the world of serious discourse, however, a person’s motivations don’t matter. Facts matter. It is examination of the facts that has led me to take a critical view of the influence Jews have had on European history through their promotion of anti-nationalist ideas. Not that it matters, but I was emotionally well-disposed towards Jews prior to becoming aware of these facts. If any of the facts I have cited are inaccurate, I would welcome their correction. 

But that would be to engage in rational discourse. And we have seen no sign of a willingness to do that. Even you, in your comment, make no attempt to cite any factual inaccuracy. The post you are responding to consists almost entirely of quotes from a Jewish historian who acknowledges the Jewish role in the Communist dictatorships and balances this presentation of facts, overly so I would say, by offering a sympathetic appreciation of the context in which the Jews made the choices that they did.

Instead of rational engagement, we see exactly what I expected when I decided to broach this issue: the de rigueur insults of antisemitism, much like the de rigueur insults of islamophobia, and the silent withdrawal of support from websites that claim to be part of a Counterjihad movement. It is clear that these websites are primarily engaged, not in resisting Islamic Jihad, but in promoting the (perceived) interests of Jewry. 

They are interested in resisting Islam only insofar as the Islamic agenda conflicts with the interests of Jewry, which it clearly does to a significant degree. But that far and no further. When the two agendas come into conflict, the anti-jihad agenda falls by the wayside. Even the Counterjihad sites run by gentiles fear the disapproval of Jews, either because they are economically reliant on them in some way or because they have internalised the codes of conduct created to delegitimise criticism of Jews.

As I said, this response was anticipated when I first started talking about this issue. Nonetheless, it is dismaying to see the lack of moral and intellectual integrity in people you once respected. These are people who spend much of their lives presenting tangible evidence to a hostile mainstream audience unwilling to set aside its preconceptions in favour of the facts. At every turn, they are accused of having impure motivations, of being animated by hatred. 

You would hope, then, that these same people, having faced down the intimidating accusation of wickedness themselves, having bravely brandished factual truth in the face of the hostile arbiters of acceptable opinion, would themselves, when they found their own preconceptions challenged, be better than their own adversaries had been. But, tragically, they’re not. When presented with facts that challenge their preconceptions about Jews, they react in exactly the same way that their mainstream interlocutors do when presented with facts that jar with their preconceptions about Muslims.

The notion that a people – any people – could provoke a mindless, irrational hatred in almost everyone it comes into contact with is a very strange one, much like the idea that a religion could provoke irrational hatred and fear in anyone who comes into contact with its practitioners. 

Yet these very strange ideas are accepted without challenge in the mainstream discourse of our times. If I claimed, for example, that I knew of a dog that was persecuted everywhere it went: other dogs barked at it and attacked it; no one would give it food; children would throw stones at it for no reason; drivers would swerve to try and run it over, etc. the story would provoke extreme scepticism.

It would sound so utterly fantastical, so at variance with our normal understanding of the world, as to hint almost at something supernatural. Individuals who claimed to be persecuted in this way would be classed as paranoid schizophrenic. Rather than indulge these fantasies, the best way to help someone suffering from this affliction would be to explain to them that other people’s responses to them would be governed by their own behaviour, just like every other person in the world, and that the idea of being singled out for persecution in some fateful way was absurd. The fact that so many seemingly rational Jews can take seriously the idea that they have some mystical identity which causes them to be persecuted for no reason is deeply disturbing. 

This bespeaks an Oriental, non-European mindset in which things happen because of supernatural agency. The European mind, by contrast, seeks rational explanations for the way the world works.

When one people attempts to live as a discrete minority in the homeland of another, setting itself apart, adopting an us-and-them mentality, favouring its own in-group in every interaction, it is going to end badly, sooner or later. This is simply human nature in operation. It is not the result of some mystical evil called antisemitism.

The lesson to be drawn from the tragic experience of the Jews throughout history is that anti-nationalism – in other words having different peoples living in the same territory – is a bad idea. Yet most Jews, at least diaspora Jews, have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion. No people can be secure without a homeland of its own. yet the effect of the anti-nationalist ideas advocated by so many Jews is that the peoples of Europe will lose control of their homelands.

I have to say I am repulsed, but not surprised, by the inability of Jews to acknowledge fault. It is the perfect analogue of the Muslim inability to acknowledge fault because it conflicts with their Koran-mandated self-image as the “perfect nation”. How is it antisemitic to simply take note of the fact that anti-nationalist ideas have had destructive effects on the world and that Jews have been disproportionately involved in generating them, advocating them and implementing them? If I take note of the fact that Socialistic ideas have had destructive effects on the world and that Scots have been disproportionately involved in generating them, advocating them and implementing them, does that make me antiscotistic or Scotophobic?

Why can you Jews not make such a simple acknowledgement yourself? Are you so steeped in a lachrymose narrative of victimhood in which innocent Jews suffer continuously at the hands of evil goy that you cannot admit that Jews, like every other people on earth, have, at times, had conflicts of interest with other peoples and, at times, have committed grievous wrongs against those other peoples? No European people that I am know of claims to have innocently glided through history without ever having had a conflict of interest with other peoples, without ever having engaged in contention with other peoples and, at times, having wronged those other peoples. 

To my knowledge, Muslims are the only other people who make this claim. The Koran tells Muslims they are the “Perfect Nation”. Jews believe they are the Chosen People. Although rarely voiced publicly these days, it is clear that this idea still influences the outlook of many Jews. Nothing else can account for such a reluctance to acknowledge fault or the strength of the curious conviction that a people is destined to be the constant target of persecution and that this persecution will be completely unrelated to its own actions.

You say you have no difficulty blaming Jews when appropriate and then cite an example in which you blame Jews for not resisting Nazism more forcefully. But this was mere passivity on the part of the Jews, not actual wrong-doing against another people. Can you give me any example from history in which Jews engaged in wrong-doing against another people?

I have to say that the unwillingness of Jews to acknowledge responsibility for their historical actions takes me much closer to a feeling of general antisemitism than my awareness of the Jewish role in Communism does. The Jewish role in Communism is a detail of history from a time in which there were many mitigating circumstances to explain the choices Jews made. The Jewish unwillingness to acknowledge responsibility is not a historical curio, however. It is right here among us in the present day and it comes from Jews who live in completely secure circumstances and who otherwise sound like reasonable people. 

We could compare the Jewish role in the atrocities of Communism to the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians in the WW1 era. As various diplomats have pointed out when attempting to persuade the Turkish government to be rational on this issue, this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with modern Turkey. If Turkey acknowledged that the genocide had occurred, admitted wrong-doing by a previous generation of Turks and expressed its regrets, the issue would be closed and we could move on. 

The fact that modern Turkey is unwilling to do this, however, hints that something sinister and ugly is going on. It suggests that whatever attitudes lay behind the Armenian Genocide still exist. And Jewish unwillingness to acknowledge their culpability in relation to the atrocities of Communism evokes the same possibility.

Discussion and exploration of Jewish guilt in Communism is important for the following reasons:

• 1) It would establish that anti-nationalism had consequences that were as destructive, or more so, than nationalism. 

This is critical. The dominant political narrative portrays Nazism and, by extension, right-wing politics generally as being uniquely sinister and associated with violence and mass murder. Factual analysis doesn’t support that claim, however. 

The mass exterminations resulting from the political prejudice of Communism were greater in scope than the Nazi extermination based on racial prejudice. Throughout the post-WW2 era, right-wing terrorism has been almost unknown in Europe, while left-wing terrorism has been a chronic problem. In the present day, Europol issues annual reports cataloguing terrorist incidents in Europe. From these reports it is clear that right-wing terrorist incidents are rare to non-existent, while dozens of left-wing terrorist incidents occur every year. Highlighting the atrocities of Communism is one way of restoring balance to public perception.

• 2) It would make it clear that when individuals who self-identify as belonging to different peoples live in the same territory, they will, ultimately, perceive themselves as being threatened by the interests and actions of the other group and will try to ward off the perceived threat from the other group. 

This will cause unpleasantness to at least one of the ethnic factions and very often both. And this is true regardless of how highly qualified or economically successful the groups are, refuting the core contention of the immigration apologists that immigration should be assessed solely in terms of the obvious indicators of economic success.

• 3) It would establish that Europeans can be victims as well as perpetrators. Unlike anti-semitism, which is a marginal phenomenon, anti-Europeanism is the dominant ideology of the world. It is so overwhelmingly dominant that it is not even regarded as a distinct ideology. It is simply regarded as “the norm”. 

The emotional grip of this ideology rests on tales of Europeans doing bad things to non-Europeans in instances such as the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism, etc. These accounts are, to say the least, unbalanced. 

They leave out key facts such as that all societies we know of practised slavery since the dawn of recorded time and that Europeans, after indulging in the practice for a few hundreds years, were the ones who stamped it out; that imperialism often brought betterment to the countries that experienced it in ways that can be measured through metrics such as life expectancy, population size, etc. 

Standard accounts of the Holocaust are also fundamentally unbalanced in that they neglect to mention the key fact that Nazism was a reaction to Bolshevism, that Bolshevism was an overwhelmingly Jewish phenomenon, and that millions of Europeans, and almost every constituent element of European society, were liquidated under Bolshevist rule. This was ethnic war wearing a mask of morality.

• 4) It would destroy the destroy the harmful myth of the innocence of Jews. The dominant narrative of the 20th century assigns Jews the role of passive, innocent victims to a mindless, irrational evil. 

This gives them a special moral authority, which they have not hesitated to invoke at every opportunity to push for open-borders immigration, diversity and the de-Europeanisation of European societies more generally. 

This may not be as apparent in America. But in Europe, any attempt to limit immigration, to discuss its harmful effects or to distinguish between various streams of immigrants results in the Nazi card being played almost instantly. Once the truth that fascism was a reaction to Bolshevism, and Bolshevism was an overwhelmingly Jewish phenomenon, is established in the public mind, that special moral authority disappears for good. 

The standard mythology is an extraordinarily powerful tool that Jews can use to advance their own purposes. It is understandable that any people would be reluctant to give up such an all-conquering trump card. Nonetheless, truth demands that they do so.

• 5) It is simply a moral imperative that atrocities of this magnitude be acknowledged and their perpetrators held to account.

Everything that is true of the Holocaust – the memorials, the commemorative ceremonies, the presence in textbooks and the popular imagination, the mantra of “We must never forget” – is equally true of the atrocities of the Bolshevist regimes, which were greater in scope than the Holocaust. It is an abomination that these truths are not more generally known. Imagine that we lived in a world where the Holocaust had been obscured from history. 

People were generally aware that there had been a war, that bad things had happened and that a lot of people had been killed, but nothing about a deliberate program to exterminate the Jews was known to the ordinary person. Only a few people reading esoteric books would occasionally stumble on this truth. 

Whenever they tried to raise it for public discussion, they would be immediately accused of paranoid anti-Germanism, anti-Europeanism or anti-Christianism and silenced. That’s the world we live in. In reverse. Anyone who denies Jewish guilt in the atrocities of Communism after the facts have been presented to them is the equivalent of a Holocaust Denier.

• 6) There is, it seems to me, inherent value in establishing the point that the world is explicable, that there are reasons why things happen. If we are to improve the world, we must first understand it. 

A narrative that postulates the existence of a mindless, irrational evil that mysteriously blinks into existence from time to time is childlike, primitive, absurd and un-European. 

This is how Orientals see the world, in the simplistic chiaroscuro of good vs. evil. A mature understanding of the world can accommodate nuance and assign more morally complex roles to history’s actors than the cartoon characterisation of goodies vs. baddies. 

The truth about the clashing totalitarianisms of 20th century Europe is that Jews and Europeans mutually victimised one another for reasons that were partially understandable, even if the atrocious form their vengeance took is ultimately unpardonable. If we wish to avert the possibility that such things could happen again, we must understand why they happened the first time. 

And the standard narrative – that the Nazis came to power through a combination of economic crisis and the spellbinding rhetoric of an evil demagogue – is simply false. Such an account deprives Nazi atrocities of their meaning. 

The Jews who died at Hitler’s hands are not honoured or ennobled by false accounts of what led up to their murder. The opposite is true. The truth is that at the heart of the clashing totalitarianisms of 20th century Europe was ethnic conflict. 

And this ethnic conflict only came about because the principle of nationalism – different peoples living as homogeneous groups in their own homelands under their own governmental authority – had been violated. Jews were living outside of their ancestral homeland ruled by non-Jews. Germans were living outside of Germany ruled by non-Germans. The twin facts set off emotional chain reactions culminating in tragedy.

Once I see general acknowledgement by Jews of their moral culpability in this; once I see them express repentance and engage in the critical and public moral self-examination that Europeans have engaged in with regard to nationalism; once I see Jewish guilt in Communism become a matter of public knowledge and parallels drawn with the modern Jewish embrace of multiculturalism, 

I will be happy to let this issue drop. Until then, I will continue to talk about it. If that makes people unhappy or uncomfortable, then they had best go elsewhere.

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Le Pen and Wilders forge plan to 'wreck' EU from within

Two of Europe's leading far-right populists struck a pact on Wednesdayto build a continental alliance to wreck the European parliament from within, and slay "the monster in Brussels".

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's rightwing nationalist Front National, and Geert Wilders, the Dutch maverick anti-Islam campaigner, announced they were joining forces ahead of European parliament elections next year to seek to exploit the euroscepticism soaring across the EU after four years of austerity, and the financial and debt crisis.

Le Pen, who has predicted that the EU will collapse as did the Soviet Union, said the aim was to bypass Brussels and restore freedom to the nations and people of Europe.

The rise of populists on the right and the left, from Sweden to Greece, has worried the mainstream EU elites and is already shaping policy ahead of the May elections. At the top level of EU institutions in Brussels, there is talk of "populists, xenophobes, extremists, fascists" gaining around 30% of seats in the next parliament and using that platform to try to paralyse EU policy-making.

"This is a historical day. Today is the beginning of the liberation from the European elite, the monster in Brussels," declared Wilders after meeting Le Pen in the Dutch parliament in The Hague. "We want to decide how we control our borders, our money, our economy, our currency."

The aim of the electoral alliance appears to be to form a Trojan horse in Brussels and Strasbourg: a large parliamentary caucus dedicated to wrecking the very institution that the far-right has entered. To qualify for caucus status, the new group needs at least 25 MEPs from seven countries, which they will get easily on current poll projections, although it is not clear if they can yet muster seven national parties.

"We want to give freedom back to our people," said Le Pen. "Our old European nations are forced to ask the authorisation of Brussels in all circumstances, forced to submit their budget to the headmistress."

Both politicians are currently riding high in the polls in their own countries. A poll last month in France put the Front National at 24% ahead of the governing Socialists and the mainstream conservatives. Wilders' Freedom party, while suffering setbacks in elections last year, is currently leading in Dutch opinion polls.

Eurosceptic parties or those actively committed to wrecking the EU and to ditching the single currency are also expected to do well in Greece, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe, while Nigel Farage's UK Independence party is being tipped as a possible winner of European elections in Britain.

"As a result of the economic fallout from the eurozone debt crisis, populist parties on both right and left have seen and will likely realise a significant surge in their popularity," said analysts at the Eurasia Group. "The crisis has provided populist and nationalist parties with an excellent opportunity to clean up and modernise their rhetoric. Political parties hitherto thought of as 'nasty' or 'racist' can no longer be considered so."

The pact sealed in The Hague is a big boost for Le Pen who is successfully developing a more moderate image distanced from the overt antisemitism of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and for her campaign to form a broader "European Alliance for Freedom" on the nationalist right.

The effort to pool policies and campaigns has foundered in the past because the various nationalists invariably find enemies in other nations and because far-right parties tend to be dominated by leaders enjoying a cult of personality.

The aim of the Franco-Dutch alliance is to bring in Sweden's Democrats, also rising in the polls, the anti-immigration Danish People's party, Austria's Freedom party of Heinz-Christian Strache, which took more than 20% in recent national elections, and the rightwing Flemish separatists of Vlaams Belang.

By forming a new caucus in the European parliament, the group would gain access to funding, committee seats and chairs, and much more prominent chamber speaking rights. Farage, leading a caucus of 33 MEPs, has exploited the opportunity deftly to raise his European and national profile.

Wilders said they wanted UKIP to join, but Farage has said he will not collaborate with Le Pen because of the Front National's reputation for antisemitism.

There are also several major policy differences that Wilders and Le Pen appeared to be burying on Wednesday which are likely to resurface. Coming from the Dutch libertarian tradition, Wilders is strongly pro-Israel, pro-gay, pro-women's rights. The Front National is seen as homophobic, anti-gay marriage, and no friend of Israel.

The two big policy areas they have in common are anti-immigration and anti-EU. They have ruled out collaborating with more overtly fascistic parties such as Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary.

The attempt at a concerted campaign comes as support for the EU is haemmorhaging across Europe.

Gallup Europe, following polling in September, found that only 30% viewed the EU positively compared to 70% 20 years ago, and concluded that "the European project has never in its history been as unpopular".

Even in traditionally pro-EU countries, such as Germany, support is atrophying. It remained high among older people but the 25-50 age group was split 50-50 between EU supporters and opponents. Across the EU, eurosceptics outnumbered EU-supporters by 43-40%.

A new study by Mark Leonard and Jose Ignacio Torreblanca for the European Council on Foreign Relations identified five "cleavages feeding centrifugal tendencies in the EU".

The European elections "will be held against a background of economic crisis and loss of confidence in Europe as a political project," the authors found, pointing to the possibility of a "Tea party-like scenario" in which eurosceptic parties capture a large quota of the seats, turn the institution into a "self-hating parliament" which is then "effectively prevented from acting".

Source: http://ow.ly/qOLeq

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Rabbi Baruch Efrati: 'Islamization of Europe a good thing'

'Islamization of Europe a good thing' - Rabbi Baruch Efrati believes Jews should 'rejoice at the fact that Europe is paying for what it did to us for hundreds of years by losing its identity.' He praises Islam for promoting modesty, respect for God

As concerns grow over the increasing number of Muslims in Europe, it appears not everyone is bothered by the issue, including an Israeli rabbi who even welcomes the phenomenon.

Rabbi Baruch Efrati, a yeshiva head and community rabbi in the West Bank settlement of Efrat, believes that the Islamization of Europe is actually a good thing.

"With the help of God, the gentiles there will adopt a healthier life with a lot of modesty and integrity, and not like the hypocritical Christianity which appears pure but is fundamentally corrupt," he explained.

Rabbi Efrati was asked to discuss the issue by an oriental studies student, who inquired on Judaism's stand toward the process Europe has been going through in recent years.

Following the election of a hijab-wearing Muslim woman as the mayor of the Bosnian city of Visoko for the first time in continent's history, the student asked the rabbi on the Kipa website: "How do we fight the Islamization of Europe and return it to the hands of Christians and moderates?"

Efrati wrote in response that the Islamization of Europe was better than a Christian Europe for ethical and theological reasons – as a punishment against Christians for persecuting the Jews and the fact that Christianity, as opposed to Islam, is considered "idolatry" from a halachic point of view.

"Jews should rejoice at the fact that Christian Europe is losing its identity as a punishment for what it did to us for the hundreds of years were in exile there," the rabbi explained as the ethical reason for favoring Muslims, quoting shocking descriptions from the Rishonim literature (written by leading rabbis who lived during the 11th to 15th centuries) about pogroms and mass murders committed by Christians against Jews.

"We will never forgive Europe's Christians for slaughtering millions of our children, women and elderly… Not just in the recent Holocaust, but throughout the generations, in a consistent manner which characterizes all factions of hypocritical Christianity…  A now, Europe is losing its identity in favor of another people and another religion, and there will be no remnants and survivors from the impurity of Christianity, which shed a lot of blood it won't be able to atone for."

'Islam a relatively honest religion'

The theological reason, according to Rabbi Efrati, is that Christianity – which he sees as idolatry – has a tendency to "destroy normal life and abstain from it on the one hand, while losing modesty on the other hand," as it "ranges between radical monasticism to radical Western licentiousness."

Islam, the rabbi added, is "a religion which misjudges its prophets but is relatively honest. It educates a bit more for a stable life of marriage and creation, where there is certain modesty and respect for God."

Efrati ruled, therefore, that "even if we are in a major war with the region's Arabs over the Land of Israel, Islam is still much better as a gentile culture than Christianity."

He added, however, that Jews must pray that the Islamization of most of Europe will not harm the people of Israel.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/clpoel8 

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Britain is suffering the results of earlier mistakes in its immigration policy.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Siv Jensen, the 44-year-old leader of the Progress party who cites Baroness Thatcher as her inspiration, said: "What I have seen that the UK has done is to give in to the claims of sharia councils, and I don't think we should give into that. In Norway we have one law, and that is the Norwegian law."

Miss Jensen, who is unmarried, said Britain was suffering the results of earlier mistakes in its immigration policy.

"I see some problems arising – You've had problems with riots, you've had problems with radical groups who aren't very fond of democratic systems and freedom of speech, and I think those are criteria that you really have to stick to in the modern world."

Miss Jensen's party has grown to become Norway's third largest since it was launched in the 1970s, pushing a libertarian economic and social policy, combined with a vehemently anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic stand.

Ahead of parliamentary elections this Sunday, she could now enter into coalition for the first time with the more centrist Conservatives, who hold a wafer thin poll lead over their rivals Labour.


"We are ready to take on the responsibility," Miss Jensen said.

Miss Jensen has steered her party to recovery since the aftermath of the twin attacks mounted two years ago by far-Right terrorist Anders Breivik, a former party member. The party's support dropped to 12 per cent but a softening in her rhetoric since the attacks has helped them recover.

"Siv Jensen used to talk about 'the hidden Islamisation of Norway', and she doesn't do that any more," said Martine Aurdal, political editor of the Dagbladet newspaper and Miss Jensen's biographer.

In recent months the party has published a hard-hitting 'Immigration sustainability report', while she has allowed other members of her party a free voice.

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, who leads the party in Oslo, speaks about a cultural war with Islam.

"We can't celebrate Christmas in school, we can't sing Christmas Carols," he told the Telegraph. "This is a small part of our culture, which is being washed away gradually, and its very painful. We gave them a home, and now it's us who are having to adapt to their culture."

The report recommends the number of non-Western immigrants coming to Norway from close to 20,000 a year to about 1,500 a year.

To do this, it recommends renegotiating international refugee treaties, making it more difficult to get citizenship, and curtailing the rights of Norwegian citizens from non-Western countries to bring over their families.

Traditional Islamic marriages would not count as marriages for immigration purposes, while a spouse would need to have studied for seven years after primary school to be eligible to come to Norway, effectively ruling out family reunion with spouses from most Islamic and less developed countries.

When asked about the proposal to make Islamic marriages ineligible, Miss Jensen stressed that the report was not yet official party policy.

Miss Jensen rejected any comparison of her party's ideas on to those of Breivik. "I haven't really spent much time reading his crazy theories, but what he did was just very awful and he attacked our democracy and I think here, nobody blames us for his actions. That would be absurd."

Source: http://ow.ly/otCBT

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Dutch Football Fans Harass Ukrainian Reporter

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Europe's poignant wake-up call

For those who missed the story, a 77-year old retired pharmacist – Dimitris Christoulas – has shot himself to death in front of the Greek Parliament in Syntagma Square, protesting the degradation of his country.

It is a call to arms, a poignant moment in Europe’s unfolding drama, reminiscent of the Buddhist self-immolations of south-east Asia that so captured world attention.

His suicide note refers to the Quisling regime of George Tsolakoglou under Axis occupation in World War Two.

Needless to say, it is loose talk to compare the Greek technocrat premier Lucas Papademos in any way to Nazi puppets. He is an honourable man, broadly supported by the Greek people, appointed by the Greek president under legitimate – though dubious – constitutional procedure, doing the best as he sees it for his country.

It is equally loose talk to compare the democratic, well-intentioned Germany of 2012 with the rabble of gangsters who hijacked the Weimar state in 1933. Germany’s Angela Merkel too is doing what she thinks to be the best for both her country and for Europe (and which I think is deeply misguided, especially for Germany itself)

But the event has happened, and such events have consequences.

This from Athens News (via Zerohedge):

The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all hope for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not give me any way to react (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans to survive.

I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.

"This is not just a person that killed himself," Laos head Yiorgos Karatzaferis told parliament. "We have all pulled the trigger. What did this man see coming from us, before deciding to take his own life? He saw shady goings-on, he saw that none of those that stole from him and the Greek people are going to jail. He saw no help coming his way, as he tried to deal with his loans and debts. He was told that no slack would be given to him, no room to move."

"It wasn’t this man who should have committed suicide. Rather, it should have been those politicians that have knowingly let Greece to be crushed," said Independent Greeks leader Panos Kamenos.

Yiannis Dimaras, party leader of the Hellenic Citizens’ Chariot, said: "Those who have voted away all the rights of this country, those who have given our dignity away, are those that are guilty for spilling the blood of this Greek pensioner".

Little more needs to be said. We have entered perilous waters in Europe. Greece is not an isolated case. Variants of the Greek tragedy are unfolding in a string of countries as they embark on similar policies of self-feeding contraction, as will become clear over the next two years. Spain’s youth unemployment is already 50.5pc.

The structure of monetary union is the root cause of this deepening crisis, since it shuts off the usual solutions: the policy mix of fiscal and monetary contraction under way simultaneously in countries containing 140m people is making it even worse.

The sugar rush from Mario Draghi’s €1 trillion LTRO at the European Central Bank is wearing off, leaving a residue of concentrated risk (this is not a criticism: Draghi did the right thing, given the imminent collapse of the Club Med banking system last November). Yet little else is in place.

Much hope is being placed on belt-tightening, and on root-and-branch reforms that will take five to 10 years to bear fruit. Mr Christoulas has alerted Europe that civil society will not wait.

Source

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Francis Fukuyama Blames Europeans for the Failed Integration of Muslims

Source

I've been reading Fukuyama's book "The Origins of Political Order" recently and so far it's been very impressive.

But his analysis in a recent blog post (recapitulating a speech he gave last November) of what's gone wrong with European countries and their Muslim immigrants is deeply naive. He starts off with France.

A lot of people pointed to the riots that occurred in the French banlieues back in 2005 as evidence of an Islamist threat existed in France itself. I think that this is a complete misunderstanding of what happened there. ...What was going on in the French banlieues was very different. These were people that did not reject French identity; they in fact believed in the goals that the French society set for them but they were not allowed to achieve them. They could not get jobs; they were barred by racism from access to opportunities that white French people had and that was the source of their unhappiness.

OK, so French racism is to blame for the failure to integrate Muslims in France. What about Germany?

The German case is very different. German national identity evolved very differently from France. Partly due to the fact that the Germans were scattered all over Central and Eastern Europe, the process of German unification required definition of Germanness in ethnic terms. So legally their citizenship law was based on the legal principle of jus sanguinis. You become a citizen not if you are born on German territory, but rather depending on whether you have a German mother. Up until the year 2000, if you were an ethnic German coming from Russia, you could get citizenship far more easily than if you were a 2nd or 3rd generation Turk that had grown up in Germany, spoke perfect German and did not speak Turkish at all. Germans have changed their practice but the cultural meaning of saying I am German is still very different from the cultural meaning of saying I am French. It has a connotation that is more deeply rooted in blood. This means that when Angela Merkel says that multiculturalism has failed in Germany, I think she is only half right. She would be quite wrong to describe that failure one-sidedly as an unwillingness of Muslim immigrants and their children to want to integrate into German society. Part of the failure of integration comes from the side of the German society as well.

OK, so the German inclusion of ancestry as an element in the definition of their national identity (which the multicult would no doubt describe as 'racism') explains the failure of Muslim integration in Germany. What about Holland?

In Holland, national identity has always been defined by the pillarization (verzuilung)of Dutch society, its division into protestant, catholic and socialist pillars. The Dutch are famously tolerant but it’s a strange kind of tolerance. They tolerate people as long as they do things over there but not in my community. In a certain sense, it was a natural thing for Muslims to start arriving in the Netherlands and to create their own pillars, since that’s the way the Dutch themselves were organized. This lead to the emergence so-called “black” schools, in which you have only Muslim students with no opportunities to interact with native Dutch people. I think this has been one of the important obstacles in promoting faster and greater immigrant integration into Dutch society.

Hmm, so Dutch support for community "pillars" is to blame for the failure of Muslim integration there? OK, let's move on to Britain.

The failure of immigrant assimilation has in certain ways been the greatest in Britain – the European country that went for multiculturalism the most whole-heartedly. This was based on a mistaken interpretation of multiculturalism. In Britain there was a belief that pluralism meant you have to respect the autonomy of individual immigrant communities. The government had no role in actively trying to integrate them into a broader British culture. I had a colleague Robert Leiken who wrote a book called Europe’s Angry Muslims, that will be published in the United States very shortly, which gives some fascinating statistics in terms of the number of members of minority groups recruited into extremist organizations. In terms of the number of attempted violent acts by members of this community on a per capita basis he notes that Britain has the highest rate by far – much higher than in France, Holland, or Germany. The reason for that was that the British approach to multiculturalism that simply left radical imams to preach in their local communities without any interference from the authorities and without any effort by the state to actively use the education system to produce people that have allegiance to the British state. Again, the British have changed these policies in the last few years in the light of the subway bombings and other terrorist acts. But there is still a very problematic relationship between that country and its immigrant communities.

OK, so in Britain it's the laissez-faire approach to national identity that's to blame. The government should have intervened to suppress all the crazy preachers and brainwashed the Muslims into feeling British.

There's a pattern to his analysis; and the pattern is that Europeans are always to blame. This is basically just another application of the "European guilt" ideology that dominates our age. He goes through a list of European countries where Muslim immigrants and causing problems and then contrives a reason to blame the Europeans for the failure.

Altough he notes the diversity of the integration approaches that have been tried, there are two significant factors he does not mention. One is that non-Muslim third-world immigrants have not caused anything like the same degree of problems. Another is that the Muslims causing these problems are enormously diverse themselves: Turks in Germany, North Africans in France, Indian sub-continent Muslims in Britain.

The only reasonable conclusion a person who has not absorbed the ideology of European guilt could draw from the set of circumstances described is that the source of the problem lies with the Muslims, not the Europeans; and since the only thing these diverse Muslims have in common is Islam, the problem must lie very specifically in the ideology of Islam itself. Even if you knew nothing about Islam, you could reach that conclusion based on simple logic alone.

What does Fukuyama think about Hindu immigration polices in Europe and elsewhere? Or Shintoist immigration policies? Buddhist or Zoroastrian immigration policies? Of course he's probably never even thought in those terms. There's never been a reason for him to. And that right there points out the source of the problem.

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Farage: We Don't Want a Global Superpower EU, Mr President Schulz

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Peter Hitchens on Atheism and England-EU demise.

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R.I.P. European democracy, 1945-2011

By Vox Day

Being for the most part historically illiterate, few intellectuals are prepared to admit that modern representative democracy and the basic concept of individual rights are 18th century phenomena that were the byproducts of a Christian society.

They prefer to attribute both institutions to the Enlightenment, despite the fact that it was the Enlightenment that led directly to the revolutionary horrors of the French revolution and it is the Enlightenment that presently serves as the inspiration for the anti-democratic authoritarian bureaucracy of the European Union.

It is written that a house divided against itself cannot stand. In like manner, an intellectual movement cannot reasonably be considered the cause of two diametrically opposed conceptual phenomena.

And it will become increasingly difficult for intellectuals to deny the connection between Christianity and democracy as the recognized, even celebrated, post-Christianity of Europe has been closely followed by European post-democracy.

The development of European post-democracy is much less recognized, is not at all celebrated, and yet it is in some ways further along than the more widely reported continental post-Christianity.

The fact of the matter is that the governments of Europe are no longer any more genuinely democratic than the Roman Empire or the Soviet Union were. In Imperial Rome, the Senate voted on behalf of the former Roman assemblies, but its votes were irrelevant and its authority was nonexistent. In the Soviet Union, the people were permitted to vote, but their preferences were ignored, even in the direct elections instituted in the Gorbachev era.

In a 1991 referendum, a majority of Soviet citizens voted to retain the Union, but in the long anti-democratic tradition of the Soviet Union, their wishes were ignored. This is deeply ironic, considering that a majority of European citizens in nearly every European country would now vote to leave the European Union if given the opportunity, but they are being denied the opportunity to do so by their treasonous national "representatives."

In the United Kingdom, all three major political parties are actively denying the English, Welsh and Scottish peoples the opportunity to vote on continued subjugation to the European Union, despite the fact that all three parties promised a referendum on the EU of one sort or another.

David Cameron, the Tory prime minister who makes the weasely Tony Blair look like an honorable man of his word, is presently facing a near-revolt from members of Parliament who are rightly outraged by his treacherous refusal to make good on the Conservative Party's promise to their increasingly euroskeptical constituents.

In the Eurozone, the state of democracy is even worse, thanks to the latest version of what is improbably described as the "Greek rescue deal." The "stability union," which was announced in Brussels last week, removes the power of national governments to make decisions concerning issues of taxing and public spending.

This means that the two central economic functions of national government, monetary and fiscal policy, are now completely out of government control. It also means that the people of Europe are now subject to taxation without representation, the very state that inspired the American revolution in the first place.

The Enlightenment Ourobos has now devoured its own tail. Christianity may be in decline across the continent, but European democracy is effectively dead. The European political elite is no longer even pretending to be representing the will of the European people in any way, hence the public hand-wringing over what is described as the "democratic deficit." But this is more than a mere deficit; it is the observable death of democracy.

But Americans should not take much satisfaction in the Old World's return to pre-18th century oligarchy. For the same processes that killed European democracy in only 66 years have been actively at work inside the United States for decades.

The false promises of the architects of the European Union are little different than the false promises of politicians like Sen. Edward Kennedy, who declared that the 1965 immigration act would not change the racial composition of America, even though that is exactly what it was designed to do.

And Americans are seeing more and more laws and popular referendums overturned by the will of judges and executive-branch bureaucrats; democracy is not yet dead in America, but it is clearly far from well.

In the Telegraph, Janet Daley conceded that the long battle against the inevitable resurgence of European oligarchy had failed. There is not much time left for Americans to learn that their political play-battles of Democrats and Republicans are not so much futile as beside the point.

Until both left and right unite and turn against the Washington-Wall Street axis of oligarchy, American democracy will continue to die.

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Nearly 40 percent of Europeans suffer mental illness

(Source)

LONDON (Reuters) - Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

With only about a third of cases receiving the therapy or medication needed, mental illnesses cause a huge economic and social burden -- measured in the hundreds of billions of euros -- as sufferers become too unwell to work and personal relationships break down.

"Mental disorders have become Europe's largest health challenge of the 21st century," the study's authors said.

At the same time, some big drug companies are backing away from investment in research on how the brain works and affects behavior, putting the onus on governments and health charities to stump up funding for neuroscience.

"The immense treatment gap ... for mental disorders has to be closed," said Hans Ulrich Wittchen, director of the institute of clinical psychology and psychotherapy at Germany's Dresden University and the lead investigator on the European study.

"Those few receiving treatment do so with considerable delays of an average of several years and rarely with the appropriate, state-of-the-art therapies."

Wittchen led a three-year study covering 30 European countries -- the 27 European Union member states plus Switzerland, Iceland and Norway -- and a population of 514 million people.

A direct comparison of the prevalence of mental illnesses in other parts of the world was not available because different studies adopt varying parameters.

Wittchen's team looked at about 100 illnesses covering all major brain disorders from anxiety and depression to addiction to schizophrenia, as well as major neurological disorders including epilepsy, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis.

The results, published by the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ENCP) on Monday, show an "exceedingly high burden" of mental health disorders and brain illnesses, he told reporters at a briefing in London.

Mental illnesses are a major cause of death, disability, and economic burden worldwide and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease across all ages.

Wittchen said that in Europe, that grim future had arrived early, with diseases of the brain already the single largest contributor to the EU's burden of ill health.

The four most disabling conditions -- measured in terms of disability-adjusted life years or DALYs, a standard measure used to compare the impact of various diseases -- are depression, dementias such as Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia, alcohol dependence and stroke.

The last major European study of brain disorders, which was published in 2005 and covered a smaller population of about 301 million people, found 27 percent of the EU adult population was suffering from mental illnesses.

Although the 2005 study cannot be compared directly with the latest finding -- the scope and population was different -- it found the cost burden of these and neurological disorders amounted to about 386 billion euros ($555 billion) a year at that time. Wittchen's team has yet to finalize the economic impact data from this latest work, but he said the costs would be "considerably more" than estimated in 2005.

The researchers said it was crucial for health policy makers to recognize the enormous burden and devise ways to identify potential patients early -- possibly through screening -- and make treating them quickly a high priority.

"Because mental disorders frequently start early in life, they have a strong malignant impact on later life," Wittchen said. "Only early targeted treatment in the young will effectively prevent the risk of increasingly largely proportions of severely ill...patients in the future."

David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacology expert at Imperial College London who was not involved in this study, agreed.

"If you can get in early you may be able to change the trajectory of the illness so that it isn't inevitable that people go into disability," he said. "If we really want not to be left with this huge reservoir of mental and brain illness for the next few centuries, then we ought to be investing more now."

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Matthew Jones)

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President Obama's Most Amazing Libyan Achievements have been in America

Proof that Democrats have no principles -- only tribal loyalties

By bombing Libya, President Obama accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:

a) War-mongering liberals. Liberals are now chest-thumping about military "progress" in Libya. Even liberal television and radio cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support -- and at a time of soaring deficits -- is well worth supporting, in a sort of "my president, right or wrong" fashion. Apparently liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish "best and brightest."

b) Europe first. Many Americans have long complained about the opportunistic, utopian Europeans. Under the protective U.S. defense shield, they often privately urged us to deal with dangerous foreign dictators -- while staying above the fray to criticize America, at the same time seeking trade advantages and positive global PR. But now the wily Obama has out-waited even the French. He has managed to shame them into acting with a new possum-like U.S. strategy of playing dead until finally even Europe was exasperated -- almost as if the president were warning them, "We don't mind the Gadhafi bloodletting if you, who are much closer to it, don't mind." The British Guardian and French Le Monde will be too knee-deep in the Libyan war, busy chalking up Anglo-French "wins" and worrying about European oil concessions, to charge America with the usual imperialism, colonialism and militarism. We are almost back to the 1956 world of the Suez crisis.

c) Iraq was just a Libyan prequel. Conservatives have complained that past opposition -- especially in the cases of then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden -- to George W. Bush's antiterrorism policies and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was more partisan than principled. Obama ended that debate by showing that not only can he embrace -- or, on occasion, expand -- the Bush-Cheney tribunals, preventative detentions, renditions, Predator attacks, intercepts and wiretaps, and Guantanamo Bay, but now preemptively attack an Arab oil-exporting country without fear of Hollywood, congressional cutoffs, Moveon.org "General Betray Us"-type ads, Cindy Sheehan on the evening news, or "Checkpoint"-like novels. In short, Obama has ensured that the exasperated antiwar movement will never be quite the same.

d) Monster-in-recovery. The Gadhafi clan has been wooing Westerners through oil money and multicultural gobbledy-gook. In the last few years, the British released the Lockerbie bomber, a native of Libya; Saif Gadhafi, the would-be artist and scholar and the son of Col. Muammar Gadhafi, essentially bought a Ph.D. from the prestigious London School of Economics; the creepy Harvard-connected Monitor Group hired out cash-hungry "scholars" to write on-spec tributes to Gadhafi's achievements; and singers Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, Beyoncé and other entertainers earned a pile of petro-dollars for crooning before the Gadhafis. Then, suddenly, Obama spoiled the fun and profits by turning Gadhafi from a rehabilitated monster back into Ronald Reagan's old "Mad Dog of the Middle East."

e) Stuff happens. Many supporters of the Iraq war condemned Abu Ghraib as the poorly supervised, out-of-control prison it was. Lax American oversight resulted in the sexual humiliation of detained Iraqi insurgents. It was a deplorable episode in which, nonetheless, no one was killed, and yet it took an enormous toll on the credibility of administration officials. But while the media covered the Libyan bombing and the Middle East uprisings, a number of Afghan civilians allegedly were executed by a few rogue American soldiers. That was a far worse transgression than anything that happened at Abu Ghraib under Bush's tenure -- but apparently an incident that in the new media climate, can legitimately be ignored. Obama made "stuff happens" a legitimate defense for those doing their best to run a war from Washington.

f) War really is tiring. The media serially blamed a supposedly lazy Ronald Reagan for napping during military operations abroad. George W. Bush was criticized for cutting brush at his Texas ranch while soldiers fought and died in Iraq. Obama rendered all such presidential criticism as mere nitpicking when he started aerial bombardment in the midst of golfing, handicapping the NCAA basketball tournament and taking his family to Rio de Janeiro.

g) The road to Damascus? After Bush's interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, many war-weary Americans believed that we would never again get involved in a Middle East war. But now, with Obama's preemptive bombing of Libya, giddy American interventionists are again eyeing Iran, Syria -- and beyond!

In short, Obama turned America upside down when he bombed Libya -- and in ways we could have scarcely imagined.

SOURCE

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Moonbattery before destruction

Source

It's good for a laugh when haughty Europeans (the French in particular) pooh-pooh America from the sinking ship of their spent civilization. But it's frightening too — for the same reason that graveyards are frightening. You can't help but think, Once they were as healthy as I am. Now they're decomposing. One day...

Of course, Europe isn't dead yet. But it could be on its last legs.

Prior to the Twentieth Century, Europe had been the greatest civilization in the world for hundreds of years, making unprecedented contributions to every aspect of human endeavor and laying the groundwork for the American civilization currently supplanting it. What happened to cause such a precipitous decline, from Charlemagne to Jacques Chirac?

Moonbattery is what happened.

If moonbattery is a disease, then one of its most severe symptoms is socialism, which has caused millions of deaths and incalculable economic harm in its three forms — Fascism, Communism, and the "third way" variety that cripples the economy through excessive taxation and regulation, and by discouraging work — leaving Europe enervated. An even more severe symptom is the delusion that a culture has no right to defend itself — in this way moonbattery attacks the immune system, like AIDS.

In nature, when an illness has sufficiently weakened an organism that it is no longer fit to survive, it won't for long. The same is true of nations. France, Holland, and Belgium — the canaries in the coal mine of moonbattery — exist today for the sole reason that they were rescued from extinction by the United States and Britain during World War II. But this was only a temporary reprieve.

Ten percent of the population of France now consists of Muslims. These are not the sort of immigrants America has been blessed with — who have come to this country from all over the world for the opportunities it offers, who for the most part have loved this country, and have worked hard both to assimilate and to make their own unique contributions. The Muslim immigrants in France appear to have neither love for their new country nor any intention of assimilating. They are not there to contribute to France, but to displace it. Given the respective birthrates of the immigrants, who continue to pour into the country, and the native French, there is little doubt that unless France defends itself (which it has not), they will succeed.

What stops French civilization from fighting for its life? A combination of cowardice, inability to confront reality, neurotic guilt, lack of cultural vitality, and indulgence in the self-defeating, sanctimonious nonsense that the Left prefers to morality — in a word, moonbattery.

Islamic conquest by immigration is even farther along in Holland, where people are already being killed in the street for expressing views critical of Islamofascism. When Theo Van Gogh, descendant of the great painter, was murdered for making a film that Muslims didn't like, there was a token complaint: an artist painted a mural in his neighborhood that included an ascending angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Authorities destroyed the mural lest it offend Muslims.

It won't be long before we see women publicly stoned to death for adultery in Amsterdam. That's when we will know that Dutch culture doesn't exist anymore. Prevented by political correctness from fighting to save their country, the Dutch are responding to the situation by fleeing it.

The situation in Belgium is similar. As in France and Holland, there are those not so disoriented by moonbattery that they cannot perceive their encroaching doom. But in Western Europe, the moonbats hold the high ground. Facilitating the annihilation of their culture by Islam, they banned the country's most popular political party on the grounds that it was "racist" — indicating that in a sense, Belgium is already gone.

The situation extends beyond these three countries.

Sweden's ultraliberal asylum laws have resulted in one quarter of Malmö's population of 250,000 being Muslim. Of these, 90% are unemployed and live off government benefits. For self-defense, police cars enter some Muslim neighborhoods only in pairs.

Once a proud nation, Spain hit rock bottom when it responded to a terrorist attack that killed 200 people by electing an anti-Coalition socialist in a shameful gesture of appeasement.

I could go on.

Ironically, the Islamic culture that will finish off a Europe crippled by moonbattery is itself the withered remnant of a once great civilization. During Europe's dark ages, the Muslim world was at the pinnacle of human accomplishment. Now many of its people have degenerated into resentful barbarians, worshipping a homicidal pimp who promises to reward them with sexual favors from virgins for killing innocent civilians.

Every great culture reaches a point where it begins to decline. But for America that point does not have to come soon — not if we do our sacred duty when we encounter moonbattery by driving a stake through its putrid heart.

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UKIP Nigel Farage MEP - Talks about the disater which is the 'Euro' - Sep 2010

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Liberty in the UK

It is long past time for Britain to move from euroskepticism to exiting the European Union:

THE Daily Express today becomes the first national newspaper to call for Britain to leave the European Union. From this day forth our energies will be directed to furthering the cause of those who believe Britain is Better Off Out.

The famous and symbolic Crusader who adorns our masthead will become the figurehead of the struggle to repatriate British sovereignty from a political project that has comprehensively failed.

After far too many years as the victims of Brussels larceny, bullying, over-regulation and all-round interference, the time has come for the British people to win back their country and restore legitimacy and accountability to their political process.

Here is to the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, and other major British newspapers soon following suit. The European Union is an anti-democratic, anti-human liberty, totalitarian institution that is the realization of Napoleon's dream. Like Napoleon's empire, it will collapse, and the sooner Britain is out of it, the better.

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Nigel Farage: 'Who the Hell do You Think You Are: The Euro Game Is Up!'

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Obama seeks to show Europe he still cares

Everything is about him, isn't it? He probably thinks that the sun rises because of him too.

By JULIE PACE Julie Pace

WASHINGTON – Just days after an exhausting and sometimes disappointing trip to Asia, President Barack Obama is dashing to Europe to assure America's trans-Atlantic allies that he is not neglecting them.

Obama departed from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland shortly before midnight. His two days of diplomacy in Lisbon, Portugal, will be framed by back-to-back summits: one with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and then a joint U.S.-European Union gathering.

But it's Obama's agenda — from the future of the Afghanistan war to disputes over currency and trade — that will be in the international spotlight at a time when he's been weakened at home by his party's defeats in the midterm elections and rebuffed abroad by world leaders.

During Obama's swing through Asia last week, he failed to ink a highly coveted free-trade deal with South Korea and couldn't rally wide-ranging international support for his opposition to China's currency manipulation.

What Obama, America's self-proclaimed first "Pacific president," did do in Asia was make clear that the economically booming region is of increasing strategic importance to the U.S. It's a reality not lost in Europe.

"There is some disappointment in the sense of how much attention he's given to Europe — that maybe he's been more focused on Asia, more focused on other problem areas, and that really the interest in Europe is about how many trainers and forces you can provide for Afghanistan," said Stephen Flanagan, a former State Department official who is senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Those concerns peaked earlier this year when European Union officials were forced to cancel a summit with the U.S. planned for Madrid in May after the White House said Obama would not attend.

Both U.S. and European officials say the administration has worked hard since then to bridge any divides with Europe, and Obama does remain personally popular there.

"We are each other's closest partners. Neither Europe nor the United States can confront the challenges of our time without the other," Obama wrote in a New York Times editorial published Thursday.

The White House has been quick to note that Obama's trip to Portugal will be his eighth trip to the continent since taking office — though many of those stops have been just long enough for the president to spend the night. Two separate visits to Copenhagen last year didn't even allow time for that.

Obama's direct engagement with the European Union while in Lisbon will be brief. Just two hours have been allocated on Saturday for the delayed U.S.-EU summit, though European nations will play a central role in the more extensive NATO meetings.

On the heels of his 10-days in Asia — the longest amount of time he's spent abroad as president — some Europe watchers say Obama must use his time with the continent's leaders, however brief, to assure them that his commitment to the trans-Atlantic alliance remains strong.

"They want a sense of a steady hand that's also concerned about the same problems that they see as most immediate," Flanagan said.

Chief among Europe's concerns: Afghanistan, counterterrorism and the economy, which is again causing deep concern on the continent amid news that European countries may have to step in to help stabilize debt-stricken Ireland.

Some in Europe have questioned Obama's handling of the economic crisis, most notably his reliance on stimulus spending as a path toward recovery at a time when many European nations are slashing spending and raising taxes. Germany's foreign minister racheted up the criticism earlier this month when he said the Federal Reserve's move to flood $600 billion into the U.S. economy inflated the value of the dollar and gave America a trade advantage.

Despite the growing policy divide, the economic ties between the U.S. and Europe remain strong. By some estimates, one in 10 U.S. jobs is created as a result of the relationship, and $4 trillion in trade and investment flows across the Atlantic each year. Both parties plan to discuss opportunities for more cooperation during Saturday's summit, including reducing trade barriers and streamlining regulations, especially for new and emerging technologies.

Obama will also face skepticism from Europe over his strategy in Afghanistan. Weary of war and hampered by public anger, many European leaders are under pressure to reduce their countries' combat roles in Afghanistan or shift to a training-focused mission.

The White House hopes a plan NATO is expected to adopt outlining a timeline to transfer security responsibility to the Afghans by 2014 will appease U.S. allies and provide them political cover at home. The agreement will call for the transfer to begin next year and continue across Afghanistan's 34 provinces through the end of 2014, based on conditions on the ground.

Obama and his European counterparts are also expected to discuss increased security cooperation in light of recent terror threats that led the U.S. to issue travel alerts to Europe after attempted attacks on cargo transport networks.

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