The Cultural Narrative in Europe Falls Apart

It would be hard to come up with a satire to do justice to the farcical scene in Paris on Sunday when our leaders masqueraded as defenders of free-speech. Probably one of the best comments was a sketch by Rich, the cartoonist for London’s House of Commons blog, Guido.

What would Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, author of last summer’s Operation Protective Edge bombardment in which more than 2,100 Palestinians and at least 7 journalists were killed, say to the man the West has chosen to lead the Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko who has been shelling and starving out civilians in Donetsk for months.

After days of flailing around, Europe’s elites have agreed on a line – free speech is sacrosanct, but only when it comes to mocking Christianity and Islam. The Holocaust is off-limits as is any questioning of immigration or multiculturalism.

And now they have found an enemy they are brave enough to take on – ordinary White people who dare question the elite immigration consensus. Across the continent phony conservatives are joining forces with the left to exclude the anti-immigration lobbies from the debate. Any democracy pretence has gone. It is all about power now.

Despite the French president calling for “unity” in the light of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, an almighty row broke out on Thursday after the National Front were refused access to  Sunday’s Unity rally in which all the other parties were taking part.

Germany too provided an interesting example of what psychologists might call deflection or blaming when a supportive media said a crowd of 35,000 stood in support of immigration and multiculturalism.  This was the government’s heavily state-sponsored reply to the huge crowds drawn by PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) over Christmas.

In Britain, across the mainstream spectrum the three main parties joined forces to condemn UKIP’s Nigel Farage who blamed immigration and warned about Islamic “fifth columnists”.

Labour leader Ed Miliband led the condemnation. The New New Statesman said “With its assortment of racists, homophobes and all-purpose bigots, Ukip may have raised the shock threshold in British politics, but Nigel Farage’s response to the Charlie Hebdo murders is still breathtaking in its cynicism.”

Nobody mentioned Geert Wilders, the fearless campaigner against Islamisation in the Netherlands. Perhaps this is because he is due in court on racial hate charges against Islam. A poll in Sunday came up with the result that if elections were held now his Freedom party would be the single largest in the country with 31 out of 150 seats.

The right-left alliance to defend immigration at all costs follows a pattern established in Sweden after elections only a few weeks ago when the centre right and the left wing parties joined together in  coalition to specifically exclude the anti-immigration Swedish Democrats from power.

Despite the huge marches and “Je Suis Charlie” posturing there seems little enthusiasm to follow in the footsteps of Charlie Hebdo.  No one seemed in a hurry to repeat the blasphemy cartoons. This has particularly peeved David Aaronovitch at the The Times and Nick Cohen at the Guardian, who are determined that others risk their lives.

One source of their anger was that the BBC was forced to admit it had a policy of never showing a representation of Mohammed. Although this is being “revised” which will no doubt delight the craven, terrified BBC staff.

At the Guardian, Nick Cohen wrote “The British are the world’s worst cowards. It is one thing to say you don’t approve of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons. But the BBC, Channel 4 and many newspapers won’t run any images of Mohammad whatsoever. They would at least have acknowledged censorship if they had announced that they were frightened of attacks on their staff.”

Meanwhile an  BBC Newsnight, discussion was interesting for two reasons.  Not one native English person sat around the table. Also, interesting in that it revealed the contours of what is acceptable free speech or not. David Aaronovitch led the charge in condemning the media as scared.

I think we’ve been scared. [We have] dodged the issue of the representation of Mohammed beyond any other subject or anything, partly because they don’t want to give offence but also because they are scared of the potential repercussions and that is why we don’t have Monty Python’s life of Ahmed.It is actually felt to be too dangerous to represent a satire on Islam, one of the great world religions.

The one area that the other two left-wing panelists, Myriam Francois-Cerrah and Nesrine Malik could agree with him on was that discussing immigration was “problematic.”

In The Times on Monday neocon Jewish commentator Melanie Phillips insisted the real reason for the massacre was not the cartoons but the timeless hatred that Muslims felt for the Jews.  In about 1000 words (behind paywall)  which never contained the words Gaza or Palestinians she said:  “The West, by contrast, is ignoring the key lesson of the Holocaust; that anti-semitism is not some marginal horror affecting a tiny minority, but a psychic derangement that undermines civilisation.”

Other Jewish journalists such as Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle and Norman Lebrecht in the Daily Telegraph (behind paywall) effectively said that Jews were fleeing France in great numbers.

But while these brave journalists were calling for others to risk their lives, the British public was about to learn that at least one ethnic enclave should feel safer because it has been allowed to set up its own private security force. Andrew Joyce’s prediction that the Jewish community would enjoy greater protections than the rest seems to be coming about. Around 4700 soldiers deployed to protect 714 Jewish schools across France.

This comes about hot on the heels of the Daily Mail  revelation that in London the Jewish community had unveiled it’s own private police force complete with squad cars which looked like police cars and the slogan Shomrim — Hebrew for ‘guards’ — branded across the side. This new force, the only private police force in Britain,  has been kitted out at the expense of the taxpayer via the Metropolitan Police without public debate or information. It turns out they have their own trained “rapid reaction team” who carry out street arrests.

Meanwhile the cracks in the narrative are appearing as fast as they are patched up. A Muslim siege hero had been discovered. But no-one seems to have told Rupert Murdoch who said that all Muslims must take responsibility.

One by one the left-wing poster boys for press freedom repeatedly turn out to have feet of clay. Danish journalist Flemming Rose was given the red carpet treatment by the Daily Mail for his brave stance in publishing cartoons mocking Islam in the pages of his newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten.  The act had earned him a death sentence but he stood proudly defiant.

The only problem was that the same journalist had also promised to publish Iranian cartoons mocking the Holocaust until the management heard of his plan.  According to Wikipedia, the paper’s editor-in-chief said that Jyllands-Posten under no circumstances would publish the Holocaust cartoons and Flemming Rose later said that “he had made a mistake.” The next day, Rose’s editor-in-chief stated that Flemming Rose was on indefinite leave because he needed time off, obviously to ponder the distinctions between what can be satirized and what can’t. After some months Rose returned to Jyllands-Posten.

Elsewhere we were approaching peak hypocrisy . Index on Censorship — under chief executive Jodie Ginsberg  — urged the repeat use of the offensive cartoons. Obviously the same organisation had forgotten its gloating, complacent stance when Theo Van Gogh was killed for his film “submission”. At the time the organisation had refused to defend him saying that it stood against “hate speech” as much as it was for “free speech.”

Also thanks to Gilad Atzmon and via Counterpunch we now have the full details of Charlie Hebdo’s censorship of its own staff on the grounds of anti-semitism.

Below is the full text which got the cartoonist Siné fired and brought before a court on charges of anti-Semitism. He was acquitted and later won a wrongful termination suit against Charlie Hebdo.

The back story was that Jean Sarkozy rear-ended a BMW driven by some random Arab guy. Instead of stopping, he fled the scene. The police were not interested, but the BMW owner’s insurance company tracked down the scooter driver and it ended up being the younger Sarkozy. He was eventually acquitted of all charges and walked away scot-free. He married an heiress to the Darty fortune (Darty is a chain of electronic stores in France similar to Circuit City in the US). It was rumoured he would convert to Judaism (his great grandfather was Jewish) for the marriage but he denies he did this.

So in response Siné wrote the following in Charlie Hebdo: Jean Sarkozy, a son worthy of his paternity and already a general counselor for the UMP, was set free –almost with applause — from his criminal proceedings for the offense of on his scooter. The prosecutor actually requested his release! It must be said that the complainant is an Arab! But that’s not all: he [Sarkozy] just declared his intention to convert to Judaism before marrying his fiancée, who is Jewish and the heiress to the founders of Darty. He’ll go far in life, this lad!

Commenters on Steve Sailer’s blog made many interesting points including these two.

So almost exactly a year after the French establishment banned comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala from performing his comedy show in Nantes, because he mocks the sacred victim-hood of Jews, there are huge demonstration for free expression to mock Islam’s ban on Mohamed imagery.

and

There were two sides of the French people who did not show up in Paris for the “unity” march — the angry Muslims from the banlieues and the angry working classes from France profonde. If there is an eventual civil war, these are the two sides that will be fighting it –with the Parisian bourgeoisie on the sidelines and probably supporting the Muslims.

Also, according to Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday it seems that in 1996 deceased  Charlie Harbo editor Stephane Charbonnier had set up  a petition which gathered 170,000 signatures in order to have the Front National banned.

Some free-speech martyr. Some hero of democracy.