Europe gets back to normal after the end of the Cold War

The New York Times has taken note of the crisis which is tearing Belgium apart:

BRUSSELS, Sept. 16 — Belgium has given the world Audrey Hepburn, René Magritte, the saxophone and deep-fried potato slices that somehow are called French.

But the back story of this flat, Maryland-size country of 10.4 million is of a bad marriage writ large — two nationalities living together that cannot stand each other. Now, more than three months after a general election, Belgium has failed to create a government, producing a crisis so profound that it has led to a flood of warnings, predictions, even promises that the country is about to disappear.

“We are two different nations, an artificial state created as a buffer between big powers, and we have nothing in common except a king, chocolate and beer,” said Filip Dewinter, the leader of Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Bloc, the extreme-right, xenophobic Flemish party, in an interview. “It’s ‘bye-bye, Belgium’ time.”

When an entity as far out on the extreme left as the NYT calls you "the extreme-right, xenophobic . . . party" it means that you possess an ordinary degree of sanity, are of at least average intelligence and possess a world-view not dominated by bizarre delusions.

What are the manifestations of clear thinking that send the NYT into paroxysms of foaming madness? They are tired of having their wealth looted through confiscatory taxation and redistributed to the nonproductive and they are tired of seeing uncontrolled immigration of radical Muslims who refuse to assimilate into their nation. A problem which has become so severe that unless drastic action is taken immediately Europe will be majority Muslim by 2050 - at the latest.

Radical Flemish separatists like Mr. Dewinter want to slice the country horizontally along ethnic and economic lines: to the north, their beloved Flanders — where Dutch (known locally as Flemish) is spoken and money is increasingly made — and to the south, French-speaking Wallonia, where a kind of provincial snobbery was once polished to a fine sheen and where today old factories dominate the gray landscape.

You have the entrepreneurial free-market Flemings sick of being shackled to the dead weight of the socialist French (big surprise there) South. It is a European version of the American red state/blue state divide.

Ban Against Anti-Islamist Demonstration Upheld by Belgian High Court

From The Brussels Journal:

Today the Belgian Council of State (CoS) ruled to maintain the prohibition of an anti-Islamization demonstration on 11 September. Three weeks ago the demo was banned by Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels. Thielemans’s party, the Parti Socialiste (PS), caters for the many Muslim inhabitants of Brussels, the “capital of Europe.” Udo Ulfkotte, a German citizen and one of the organizers of the demo, who intended to bring 20,000 demonstrators to Brussels, decided to appeal against the mayor’s verdict before the Council of State, the highest administrative court in Belgium.

Yesterday, the Council of State postponed its ruling because it said it had to decide first whether the appeal could be made in Dutch or should be presented in French. Today, however, the CoS cut the case short and ruled outright to maintain the ban. According to the CoS Udo Ulfkotte cannot prove that his interests have been harmed by the mayor’s ban.

This verdict may sound nonsensical to non-Belgians, but in Belgium it is not considered harmful to have one’s political freedoms restricted. In Belgium it is also considered quite normal that the lawyer representing Mayor Thielemans before the CoS is Marc Uyttendaele. The latter is one of the most expensive lawyers in the country. He is also the husband of Laurette Onkelinx, the Belgian minister of Justice, who is responsible for appointing, promoting and suspending judges.

The forbidden demonstration was an initiative of Danish, British and German organizations that wanted to protest in front of the European Parliament in Brussels against the introduction of Sharia laws in Europe. They chose to do so on the symbolic date of 11 September, which would allow them to end their demonstration with one minute of silence for the victims of the 9/11/2001 terror attacks in America.

Mayor Thielemans banned the demo precisely because the organizers picked 11 September as the date for their protest. The mayor wrote: “The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. […] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly pronounced judgments condemning this type of acts.” He told The Wall Street Journal: “I won't have Brussels regarded as the capital of racism.” Obviously, Brussels as the ‘capital of socialism’ or ‘capital of Islamization’ will do.

To honor Mayor Thielemans this video was created:


Online Videos by Veoh.com

As I've said before there is no hope for Europe.

A community beyond shame indeed

To all the people who think that things are about as bad as they can get in America I present you with this story from Belgium. Courtesy of The Brussels Journal:

Serge Régnier (as some readers may remember) is a 47-year old Belgian with three wives and thirty children. In 1986 Régnier married Christine Wuest (who is now 38). They have fifteen children, between 19 years and 11 months old. A couple of years later, Christine’s homeless sister Karine Wuest (now 35 years old) came to live with the couple. Soon she fell in love with Serge. Christine consented in her husband taking her sister as a second wife. Serge and Karine have six children, between 10 years and 10 months old.

All that time, Serge had been meeting his former girlfriend Judith De Leenheer (now 38 years old). When Judith’s marriage broke up – which was not altogether surprising since all her children were Serge’s rather than her husband’s – Serge asked his two wives whether they would mind taking her in. They did not mind. Serge and Judith have nine children, between 18 years and 10 months old. They all live together in Serge’s house in Marcinelle, a town in Wallonia, the French-speaking South of Belgium.

The Belgians call Régnier, a stocky, balding man with a fringe of beard, the “Marcinelle bull.” Non-Belgians wonder perhaps how he provides for his large family. Here is the answer.

Régnier applied for and received the status of an invalid from Wallonia's generous welfare authorities. He consequently receives a welfare check of over €1,000 a month. His three wives are all unemployed. Hence, they each get €800 in unemployment benefits. On top of this the family receives €4,000 in child allowances. This makes a grand total of more than €7,400 a month ($9,700 or £4,960) – all of it provided by Belgium’s taxpayers. All the money matters in the household are taken care of by Serge. His wives are only interested in children. They have told the press that they each hope to have another baby in 2007.

[. . .]

Indeed, last Tuesday the Belgian paper Gazet van Antwerpen wrote that there are marital problems in the Régnier household. His three wives complain that their husband is often away from home, while they do not know where he is. They suspect there is a fourth woman. “We are partners, friends. There is no jealousy here, at least not between us three,” they told the paper. But while four is a marriage, five is a crowd. The wives are also increasingly frustrated because Serge does not seem prepared to give them another baby yet. “Judith, Karine and I each want three more children,” says Christine. “So did Serge a few months ago, but suddenly no more. What must we make of that?” she asks. Régnier, however, denies he is cheating on his wives. “They will get their children, but not for the moment,” he says.

The wives are also cross because Régnier often withdraws into his room, locking the door. He is the only one to have a room of his own in the house. There he has a television set and a small fridge. The women complain he sits there watching football and drinking beer, while they cook, wash and iron and take care of the children. Régnier ignores their complaints, and tells the journalist: “I do not know whether you are married but if you have one wife you can imagine what it is like to have three.”

A story like Régnier’s is probably only possible in the south of Belgium, where a man can spend his life in idleness while the taxpayers provide him with enough income to sustain three women and thirty children. Wallonia is a Socialist stronghold which is subsidized by Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of the country. Belgium is a country in which any major government decision requires approval in both Flanders and Wallonia. The Constitution stipulates that every major change requires a majority in both parts of the country. This has doomed the country to inertia and it has inevitably led to the corruption of Wallonia.

[. . .]

In Flanders, which has a strong freemarket culture, there is a large political majority to change the present welfare system. The Flemish want to lower taxes and to reform social security to reduce abuse. But Wallonia blocks all reforms and the Walloon Socialist party guarantees voters that, as long as they support the Socialists, money from Flemish taxpayers will keep flowing to the nearly 50% of the Walloons who are employed or subsidized by the government, including “invalids” like Serge Régnier.

In 2006 the 6 million Flemings subsidized the 4 million Walloons at a rate of €11.5 billion (an enormous amount of money compared to the €14 billion which is the U.S.’s annual spending on foreign aid). Among the frustrated Flemings there is a growing call for secession from Belgium. This has begun to worry the Belgian establishment. This became particularly apparent after a hoax television news item last week in which the end of Belgium was announced.

When Caroline De Gruyter, a journalist from the Netherlands, visited Wallonia five years ago she was amazed to meet several families that had been on the dole for three generations and did not have a single relative who was officially employed. The families liked it that way. They all voted for the Socialist Party, because it guaranteed that Flemish money would keep flowing to Wallonia. They described the attitude of Flemish nationalists “who do not want to pay taxes to support the Walloon jobless” as “unsocial behaviour!” One of the things that struck De Gruyter was that they admitted to having no shame. It prompted her to call them “a Community beyond Shame.”

See, it can always get worse.

And make no mistake American leftists are reading stories like this out of Europe and growing enraged at how "backward" the US is because we don't have a welfare system as generous as Belgium's.

Now that their party controls congress rest assured that they will try to "fix" that.

Merry Christmas.