Re: Gus, I have to say you've been very quiet about the impending civil war in Belgium.
Actually, I've broached the issue now and then:
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Re: Politically, Belgium is beginning to look like Bosnia in 1991, before it plunged into brutal civil war.
A gross overstatement... but then again, things might spiral out of control. However, neither Germany, France nor the Netherlands would benefit from Belgium/Brussels' collapse into ethnic strife. Hence my belief that Belgium's three powerful neighbours keep a close watch over Belgium's troublemakers.
Re: ...Belgium is the headquarters of both the European Union (Brussels), and NATO (Mons).
NATO is headquartered in Brussels intra muros (Evere) while SHAPE is HQed in Mons.
Re: While Fleming parties are largely conservative, Francophone politicians are mostly left-liberal, and often make alliances with Muslim immigrants...
A captious statement which actually reflects the Flemish far-right's viewpoint... In the 1960s, Belgium tapped Morocco as her "most favored" pool of available, unskilled labor. Morocco was favored over Algeria because of the latter's revolutionary, anti-Pied-Noir legacy. Moreover, both Belgium and Morocco were --and still are-- kingdoms, which led Belgium's ruling class to expect Moroccan immigrants more amenable to the Belgian regime... Now, what angers the Flemish far-rightists/Judeofascists is the fact that North African and sub-Saharan immigrants came from countries that were ALL former French colonies: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Congo, Senegal, Cameroon, Mali, Gabon, etc. All these African countries still have French as one of their official languages (alongside Arab, lingala, ouolof,...). Flemish far-rightists, however, insinuate that such a French-speaking immigration policy was a conscious, cunning ploy by Belgium's French-speaking nomenklatura to "ally" themselves with Muslim/African immigrants in order to better "Frenchify" Brussels... But they'd rather ask themselves, where else could Belgium have looked for large pools of available, unskilled workers --in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s???? Eastern Europe was cut off by the infamous Iron Curtain --up until 1989. Hence the only way/policy that made sense for Western Europe to fix her labor shortage (following the WWII bloodbath) was to tap (North)Africa and Turkey! Too bad the Netherlands never colonized Africa... and too bad the Dutch Indies (Indonesia, Malacca) were too faraway....
Re: A protest against the Islamization of Europe, scheduled for September 11, was the only political demonstration in recent history actually banned by Brussels mayor Freddy Thielemans. Brussels police savagely attacked the protesters.
A double whopper... The Brussels mayor routinely vets hundreds of requests to demonstrate in Brussels and, accordingly, forbids dozens of them... The SIOE demonstration by Judeofascists would have prompted others to launch a counter-demonstration in Antwerp calling for a "Stop to the Israelization of Europe"....
Re: France's cozying up to the U.S. is also causing troubles with Germany. [...] However, with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy to French presidency, relations between Paris and Berlin have become significantly cooler.
I'm afraid the author got the issue upside down: it was the election of Angela Merkel and her victory over Gerhard Shroeder that shook the French-German relationship... As a conservative, pro-business pol, Merkel's first priority was to mend relations with the US and the Bush administration and distance herself from Jacques Chirac and his anti-US legacy.
Gus |
