Posted on 11/26/2003 4:50:35 PM PST by akbaines
The pro-Saddam Hussein European manifestations of February 15th that brought millions into the streets of European capitals are the culmination of Charles de Gaulles political vision of a European destiny led by France. During World War II de Gaulle was the leader of French resistance against the Nazis, but his post-war anti-Americanism rallied many of his previous enemies. Hostility to America and antisemitism were strong in various French circles: the communists, the left, and particularly among the numerous politicians, civil servants, intellectuals and businessmen, who had willingly collaborated with the Germans. Those political currents had important links with the Arab-Muslim world.
De Gaulles vision intended to restore to France a dominant role in international affairs by the construction of a strong and united Europe as a counter-weight to American power. After the loss of Algeria in 1962, Frances last Arab colony, de Gaulle oriented his policy toward the Arab-Muslim world. During the 1960s, a French Mediterranean policy was elaborated, which would link as an economic and political geostrategical unit the European Community (EC) and the Arab League countries. But Arab collaboration had a price: the elimination of Israel. In spite of Frances efforts to bring its European partners closer to Arab views, many countries were reluctant to follow this path. At that time, the Arab-Israeli conflict didnt provoke any interest or declaration from the EC.
After the Syro-Egyptian October 1973 war against Israel, and the third Arab defeat, the Arab oil producers proclaimed an oil embargo, increased the oil price four times, lowered the production, and classified the consuming countries into friends, enemies, or neutrals. Now, Frances maneuvers to align the EC on the Arab anti-Israeli policy in order to create a strong Euro-Arab bloc succeeded. The nine countries of the EC, meeting in Brussels (November 6, 1973) issued a joint Resolution, which endorsed the Franco-Arab policy in respect to Israel.
In 1974 the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation was founded to strengthen the political, economic and cultural co-operation between Europe and the Arab world. The Association had about 600 members in 18 national Parliaments of the countries of the enlarged European Union (EU), as well as in the European Parliament and all the major trends in European politics were represented. This Association organized regular meetings with Arab leaders and politicians and served as a channel between them and the European governments, the Presidency of the European Council of Ministers, and the Commission of the European Communities. In other words, it was a most powerful Arab lobby functioning through European functionaries, built into the European institutions to influence European policy at its summit.
In the following years, this body was reinforced by a political, economical and cultural structure, named the Euro-Arab Dialogue, which united at the highest level the EC later to become the European Union and the countries of the Arab League. The Europeans tried to maintain the Dialogue on a base of economic relations, while the Arab countries tied the oil and business markets to the European alignment on their anti-Israeli policies. Even though some countries were reluctant to follow this path, the joint proclamations of the EU concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict endorsed the anti-Israeli points established previously by the Second Islamic Conference in Lahore, Pakistan (February 1974).
Henceforth, an associative diplomacy binding the Arab-Muslim countries and the EU developed in international forums and especially in decisions concerning the Middle East conflict. During Euro-Arab symposiums the oil threat was brandished and pressure was exerted on the EU, as a reminder that economic relations were inexorably tied to Europes political alignment with Arab anti-Zionist policy. However, the Dialogue was not restricted to influencing European foreign policy against Israel and detaching Europe from America, it also aimed at establishing permanently in Europe a massive Arab-Muslim presence by the immigration and settlement of millions of Muslims with equal rights for all, native-born and migrants alike. This policy endeavored to integrate Europe and the Arab-Muslim world into one political and economic bloc, by mixing populations (multiculturalism) while weakening the Atlantic solidarity and isolating America.
To facilitate Muslim settlements in the West, cultural changes in school teaching, universities and social life were imposed. Textbooks were rewritten in view of allaying Muslim susceptibilities, and university teachings in Middle East and Islamic history soon conformed to Arab-Muslim norms and their worldview. Recommendations were emphatically and repeatedly imposed for spreading the knowledge of the Arabic language in Europe, and the learning about the superior Islamic history and civilization. As these decisions were taken, and then implemented through the mechanism of the Dialogue that covered every country of the EU, a profound cultural Islamization through the network of schools, universities and the blessing of Islamophile clergymen conditioned the mentalities of two generations of European youth. To this cultural transformation was added from within the demographic pressure of an ever-increasing Muslim immigration and, from without, an all-encompassing symbiosis on every level with the Arab-Muslim world. This symbiosis built on the system of the Euro-Arab Dialogue, and hence approved by the higher political authorities of the EU, covered book publishing, university exchanges, television, press and radio collaboration, theological rapprochement, youth meetings, and intense collaboration between numerous ONG organizations, humanitarian activities, workers unions, economical and financial relations. Scientific, nuclear and military training were provided as, for exemple, Frances nuclear program with Iraq, culminating in the construction of the nuclear reactor Osirak, destroyed by Israel in 1981.
The development of those complex ties between the Arab-Muslim world and the EU was, at its core, conditioned by an anti-Israeli and anti-American policy, the Arab ambition being to detach Europe from its Atlantic ally. As Palestinian and Islamic terrorism developed, the EU anxious to save its growing and multiple interests in the Muslim world accused Israel and U.S. policy of provoking it. Rather than confronting Islamic terrorism, European leaders resorted to appeasement by condemning Israel. Anti-Zionism, integrated into the developing Euro-Arab relations became a European sub-culture of hate, denigration and disinformation, nourished by the inner dynamic of the Euro-Arab Dialogue that led to the rise of Eurabia. Opposing views were silenced to maintain a monolithic façade of Islamic correctness in the press and publications. From September 2000, the outburst of Palestinian terrorism within Israel triggered a violent antisemitic wave in Europe as if it had become the heart of Arabism.
France, Germany and Belgium, the troika leading Eurabia, imposed monolithic orders for the EU and their African satellites. An alliance with the Organization of the Islamic Conference, comprising 56 countries, would provide world supremacy at the UN in some issues. The Euro-Arab blocs reliance on UN international legitimacy is based on its virtual control of this forum. Essential to the Arab Leagues policy in relation to Israel, Arafat the godfather of international terrorism became the key regulator between the EU and the Arabs. The EU assumed the main funding of the Palestinian Authority, and until now the European Parliament refuses any investigation of how more than a billion euros of European taxpayers money, transferred to Arafat, has been used.
Today the Iraqi crisis confronts the EU governments with three decades of pusillanimous policy based on oil, markets, short-term economic gains, and an imperialist ambition of domination. It is practically impossible now in Europe to control Islamic terrorism either from within or without. Nor can the EU accept the destruction of the multifarious symbiosis created by all European political parties with the Arab and Muslim world, to the detriment of their own country's security. Europe has undergone a profound structural and demographic change, which is not yet fully perceived by Europeans, even less by Americans. This transformation of a Judeo-Christian based-civilization and culture by strong trends of Islamization is creating social, political and cultural grounds for confrontations that could provoke dangerous social implosions. The drifting away of Europeans from America is not, therefore, due to their superior moral exigencies, as some superficial analysts write. Rather, this drift reveals a traumatic fear of a terrorism that the EU always refused to acknowledge, scapegoating instead Israel and America. It reveals the preservation, at all costs, of Arab and Muslim corrupt dictatorships, including Arafat, with whom the EU has built its economic and international political strategy, power and security. And, more threatening, it indicates a profound transformation, a mutation, whereby a civilization is drifting toward 'dhimmitude.'*
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*Author's note: Dhimmitude derives from the surrender of the Christian clergy and political leaders to the Muslim jihad armies, and their submission to Islamic domination of both their lands and peoples. In exchange, they received a pledge of protection ('dhimma') from the Muslim sovereign - and the cessation of the jihad war. This "protection" was conditioned on a ransom payment (jizya) that was extorted from the vanquished Christian and Jewish populations (dhimmis). Sometimes, Christian submission to Islam was rooted in personal ambition. Dhimmitude often induced self-hatred, and hatred against Jews and Christians who resisted the jihad and Muslim domination. Christian dhimmitude has been a world force for Islamization throughout history.
Europe would have been arabizized a long time ago if not for the Crusades. But, apparently, the Crusades just delayed the arabization, not prevented it.
I doubt that we will have another episode of Crusades this time.
...learning about the superior Islamic history and civilization....
The Europeans are suffering under the true Jihad, as everyone looks to the "wars" in Afghanistan & Iraq.
The Islamics are conquering Europe in the wink of an eye, as everyone looks there, they fail to see the events in their own front yard, and the Media allows it to go unreported. Pat Buchanan had it correct in his book "death of the west." The French are so over, and they are the lackeys of this Jihad against Western Civilization.
You do not join up with these Muslims, you get assimilated one way or the other. The French have lost another war, and they don't even know it yet.
Islam and Civilization are mutually exclusive terms. I bow to the superior civilization. Well, after they pull my gun from my cold dead hands, I will.
Today there are more practising Muslims than practising Christians in most countries of Western Europe.
The secular Europeans may see the danger of Islamization, but only from the standpoint of crime and employment. They neglect the looming specter of what the Koran and Sharia Law have in store for their future. They ignore the reality they will soon become second class citizens in their own countries, and they won't even realise "why".
The enemy is not only at their doorsteps but in their living rooms. They think this is "company" whom they can invite in and coexist with - with Western European Christendom remaining the dominant culture. But to them Christ is dead or non-existant and only the surface remnants of their rich culture and mores survive. There is no "there" there. They will shortly find out how wrongheaded they are in these assumptions. The tipping point will come when Muslims start demanding, and getting, Sharia Law - first in their own communities and then spreading it into entire legal systems.
They're developing an addiction to Islam. First they're fed a little taste which they find harmless. Then a little more and a little more until they find that there's nothing they can do and they HAVE to have it.
Yup. The first warning sign is when the first hamlet or town implements sharia. Then you'll know that Europe is in its death throes.
Godspeed
It will never happen .. But it won't stop France from bring all of Europe down with her in the process
Scary times are ahead for us .. but mostly for Europe.
These terrorist will hit any targets .. including all the soft targets in Europe
"First, we take Manhattan.... then we take Berlin!"
hey will .. but by that time, it will be too late
However, I disagree .. this isn't about what we will take .. it will be about bailing their butts out once again.
Islam-list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
Sometimes the surrender is complete and the Christians convert to Islam. Bosnia-Herzegovina for example.
I noticed a subtle but marked change in the UK papers during Bush's state visit a few weeks ago. I was just scanning the articles coming out of the UK, not really caring what they had to say because I thought it would all be so predictable, but I noticed that even the leftist papers (Guardian et.al.) had toned down their rhetoric and even had faint praise for our president. My thought is that it may have something to do with the bombing in Turkey, i.e. the Euros realize that the Islamofascists aren't just going after Fortress America, they're going after any easy target that's even faintly scented with Westernism. In a nutshell, I get the impression that the oh-so-worldly Europeans are just now realizing that they screwed up, and screwed up badly, and that "interesting" times are ahead of them.
In parts, I can confirm this. It is true, that the security agencies are investigating the connections between (Neo-)Nazis and extremist Muslims. There are more and more contacts, and the common enemies are the US and Israel.
But I cannot confirm the claim that the number of Nazis has risen, such cannot be concluded from the statistics of the domestic intelligence. However, the Nazis are becoming more active than they´ve been the last years.
New ping list for Islamic Jihad and terrorism. 3 pings per day, every day. Some from my old ping list are on by default.
On or off let me know by freepmail.
Easy on, easy off, via freepmail.
( Cite:http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001000.html#001000 :
I would guess that postmodernism is so Franco-centric because the real subject of Postmodern theory is France. Perhaps a better way to put this would be to say that postmodernism is about the experience of being French in the late 20th century...after your country suffered a degrading collapse (and then collaborated with the Nazis) in World War II, after your country suffered the humiliating loss of Vietnam and Algeria (and nearly succumbed to a military coup in disengaging from the latter), after being displaced as the world center of art and culture, and after being economically colonized by American transnational business. Hey, talk about being decentered!
This may be rather glib, but I'm not done. Lets take Lyotard's "death of meta-narratives." Id say the biggest meta-narrative that ceased to be credible around, say, 1945, was the notion of France as the center of the world, the Grand Nation, the birthplace of the Revolution, the place where everything important happened and always would happen. (The Marxism of Sartres generation was a sort of rear-guard defense of this crumbling meta-narrative, because, bien sur, Marx was an intellectual offshoot of the Revolution and hence, French by association.)
Or how about Baudrillard's theories about the "death of the real" and the growth of "hyperreality"? Doesnt that sound a lot like a description of the displacement of traditional French culture by American and international media culture? (By the way, if "Postmodernism for Beginners is accurate, Baudrillard's discussion of the history of simulacra rather humorously skips over the iconclasm of the Reformation, which I suppose makes sense to a French intellectual because, hey, if it didnt happen in France, it might as well have not happened at all!)
Then there are Foucault's theories about power, knowledge and resistance. I dont know, but they sound a lot like life under the German occupation to me, as well as a discussion of the life under the continuing Vichy-like authoritarian strain in French politics and society.
But probably the best example is Derrida and his notions of how there is a sort of unstable shifting back and forth between "privileged" and "marginalized" readings of the same text. Hmmm, what could have prompted that notion? Lets see, over the past 214 years the French have had how many constitutions? How many revolutions? How many governments? How many general strikes? How many flip-flops between "right" and "left"? How much heady rhetoric? And yet, oddly enough, it's still a Catholic country with a tradition of authoritarian central control and a strong affection for its (inefficient) agricultural sector...just like in the days of Louis XIV! Isn't there a saying about "the more things change, the more they stay the same? (Maybe theres even a French version of that remark.)
The Postmodernists are right; there is something "ambiguous" and "unstable" about French culture (indeed, something verging on the schizophrenic). Of course, at the same time there is something awfully fixed and unyielding about French life. I can see how, in France, a suspicion of the ambiguities of language would be appropriate, non?
I guess the real question is not why the French see something of themselves and their situation in Postmodern thought, but rather what American academics see in it? Whatever our own issues are, America clearly lacks that peculiarly French culture-schizophrenia. Is it possible that our academics miss it, or do they perhaps actually long for it? Or have they simply not read enough history--either French or American?
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