Christopher Caldwell om krigsmoral

Caldwell anmelder bog af Goldsmith:

Vetted, Altered, Blessed

‘Power and Constraint,’ by Jack Goldsmith

By Christopher Caldwell – June 8, 2012

When the Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah was captured, six months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, C.I.A. lawyers were asked to approve a battery of tough interrogation techniques hastily thrown together. They did not much fear that posterity would think them ruthless. On the contrary, the C.I.A.’s No. 2 attorney worried that “with all the restrictions and precautions and scrutiny by lawyers and doctors and psychologists,” they’d look like a bunch of wimps.

It is not as a bunch of wimps that history has remembered George W. Bush’s antiterrorist team. The Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who worked briefly in the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, has himself been critical of his former colleagues’ “unilateralism” and their preference for power over persuasion. But he has also been an eloquent dissenter from the view that the Bush administration simply ran roughshod over the Constitution.[...]

Mere HER i The New York Times.

Christopher Caldwell om Thilo Sarrazin

Om EU, Tyskland og Sarrazins nye bog:

You wanted brave, Mr Draghi? Well, meet Mr Sarrazin

By Christopher Caldwell – May 26, 2012

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi urged European governments to make a “brave leap” towards greater fiscal union this week. Seldom do people who call for intellectual bravery genuinely want it. As the Bundesbank warned German taxpayers of the “considerable risks” they had already taken on by vouching for Greek debts, two men who have won adulation for their new ways of thinking about the eurozone crisis spoke in Berlin. Neither received a warm reception.

Thilo Sarrazin, the economist, Social Democrat and former Bundesbank governor, is nothing if not brave. Two years ago his profound book about the decline of Germany’s social market economy – The Abolition of Germany – became the biggest-selling non-fiction book of the past decade, largely for its bluntness about immigration, education and welfare. His new book, Europe Doesn’t Need the Euro, topped the bestseller lists as soon as it went on sale on Wednesday.

Mere HER hos iPolitics. Artiklen er egentlig fra The Financial Times, men de har låst den inde.

Christopher Caldwell om indvandrere i Europa og valget i Frankrig

Christopher Caldwell anmelder to bøger. Dels “Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation” af Robert S. Leiken og dels “After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent” af Walter Laqueur:

Europe’s Other Crisis

May 4, 2012 | Christopher Caldwell

In two separate incidents in March, Mohammed Merah, a French-born French citizen who thought he was waging jihad, ambushed four soldiers around Toulouse, killing three of them. A week later, he shot dead three children arriving for morning classes at a nearby Jewish school, along with a young rabbi who was father to two of them. The children were aged eight, six, and three. Merah recorded the killings on a micro-camera mounted around his neck and sent the footage to Al Jazeera, which did not air it. Shortly before he died by gunfire, Merah told the soldiers who had surrounded his apartment that he regretted not having done more of what he did.

These were crazy deeds, and one can argue about what role insanity played in them, but something else needs to be candidly acknowledged: the killer was not a lone wolf. He had a measure of community support and a great deal of family support. His brother Abdelkader professed himself “proud” of his relation to the murderer. His mother refused to convince her son to surrender to police. His father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the French state. The contemporary culture of politicized Islam, as deracinated Internet-surfers understand it, is what Merah believed he was fighting for. He was upset about French laws that limit the wearing of the Muslim veil among schoolgirls. Someone had whipped him into a frenzy over Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

Mere HER hos The New Republic. OBS: Jeg har valgt at linke til printversionen for at undgå den fjantede sideinddeling, som er her.

François Hollande er Frankrigs nye præsident. Nicolas Sarkozy har tabt. Artiklen herunder er skrevet før valget, – på trods af datoen:

The Lady with the Popular Front

France’s rightists have grown too big to ignore.

May 7, 2012 • By Christopher Caldwell

The French prefer “tenacity” to “cooperation” by a measure of 51-44 percent, according to a poll about political attitudes published this election season. By 57-41 percent they like “hard work and courage” better than “social justice and solidarity.” Such attitudes have not been widespread in France since the war. On Friday, Dominique de Villepin, the foreign minister who led France out of the Iraq war coalition in 2003, professed himself “frightened” of France’s right-wingers. As Attorney General John Mitchell said of the United States in 1970, “This country’s going so far to the right you’re not even going to recognize it.”

Mere HER i The Weekly Standard.

Andre kilder: Jyllands-Posten,

Video: Christopher Caldwell, Robert Fisk og flere

Fra i dag – France 24 har 5 års fødselsdag og ser tilbage på nyhederne i kanalens levetid:

France 24 turns five

As The France 24 Debate turns five, François Picard’s high-profile panel highlights the common thread between the Arab Spring and the world financial crisis, a fundamental shift of the balance of power in our globalized world.

• Claude Lanzmann. Writer, journalist and filmmaker;
• Stephen Clarke. British journalist and writer; Author of “1000 Years of Annoying the French”;
• Viviane Reding. Vice-President of the European Commission; EU Justice Commissioner (from Brussels);
• Christopher Caldwell. Author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”; Columnist at the Financial Times; Editor at the Weekly Standard (from Washington);
• Robert Fisk. Middle East Correspondent, The Independent (from Dublin).

Christopher Caldwell & Srdja Trifkovic om EUs krise

Der er ingen, der tror på, at EU klarer skærene:

Forgive Us Our Debts

Europe runs out of money

Nov 7, 2011 • By Christopher Caldwell

As they do every few weeks, the leaders of the European Union met in Brussels on Wednesday, October 26, to solve their finance problems once and for all. As the sun rose on Thursday they emerged with a document that resembled an Obama budget—crystal-clear about its aims and aspirations, opaque about how it intends to achieve them. There is a reason for that. It is that these aims and aspirations are growing less and less realistic.

Back in 2010, when the crisis seemed confined to the Greek government’s inability to repay its lenders, the Europeans thought they could fix things by having its various neighbor countries chip in 45 billion euros ($65 billion) to throw at the problem. Eighteen months later, the crisis is as complicated as a Rube Goldberg machine and more dangerous. The particular corner of it they dealt with last week has three intertwined aspects, and to solve one of them is to exacerbate the other two:

Mere HER i Weekly Standard.

A Hellenic Haircut

by Srdja Trifkovic • October 28th, 2011

There will be no Greek default—not for months to come at least, as we predicted here two weeks ago. The private banks that had splashed out on ostensibly lucrative Greek bonds will have to accept a “haircut” of fifty percent of their nominal value, according to an agreement reached early Thursday morning after days of tense talks between French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, other euro zone leaders and private financial institutions.

Greece’s private-sector debt is now down to 100 billion euros, and the country will continue its long road to nowhere with zero growth, cuts and austerity. Even after the 50 percent write down its debt is still 90 percent of the country’s GDP and for as long as it stays in the euro the burden can never be paid off. To make the banks agree to the deal, however, the euro zone governments had to offer them inducements in the form of “credit enhancements”—bureaucratese for provision of low-cost government liquidity—worth over a third of the “haircut” itself.

Mere HER i Chronicles Magazine.

Theodore Dalrymple & Christopher Caldwell

Den første artikel er ret god:

Alarms

Christopher Caldwell | October 20, 2011

Citizen Islam: The Future of Muslim Integration in the West by Zeyno Baran – Continuum, 240 pp., $24.95

In the divisive, decade-old War on Terror, one certitude unites the warriors and the conscientious objectors. It is that Islamism is not to be confused with Islam. “Whatever it’s called,” George W. Bush said, “this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam.” Attorney General Eric Holder described the Islamism of the late Anwar al-Awlaki as “a version of Islam that is not consistent with the teachings of it.” Zeyno Baran has come reluctantly to the conclusion that the Bush/Holder view is false. Her new book describes how Islamists have captured many Islamic religious and social institutions, including most of the Western ones. Islamism has supplanted more traditional tendencies and has become what most people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, understand as mainstream Islam. Gullible American and European policymakers have partnered with the wrong Muslims, freezing out their friends and empowering those who wish them ill.

Mere HER hos The New Republic. Og den anden artikel indledes med et par afsnit om David Horowitz:

Knowledge Without Knowledge

by Theodore Dalrymple – November 2011

Recently I reviewed a short book by David Horowitz, a man whose has changed his political and philosophical outlook somewhat down the years, to put it no stronger. He has mellowed with age, a process that seems perfectly normal, indeed almost biological, until one remembers than not everyone does mellow with age. Some remain mired in the swamp of their youthful convictions.   

As it happens, I had in my library a book edited in 1971 by Mr Horowitz, in the days when he as still a leader of the American New Left. It was a collection of essays about the life and work of Isaac Deutscher, the British Marxist biographer of Stalin and, most famously, of Trotsky. Deutscher was also a prolific journalist and essayist.

 Mere HER i The New English Review.

Video: Christopher Caldwell & Annette Young

Christopher Caldwell har sommetider en svag tendens til lidt utidig forsigtighed. Men så får han alligevel anbragt en virkelig fin kritik. En lidt spøjs balancegang:

Christopher Caldwell – Reflections on the Revolution in Europe – October 6, 2011

From France 24: Annette Young meets Christopher Caldwell, Author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” and Senior Editor at The Weekly Standard. The touchy subject of Muslim immigration to Europe has become an electoral issue across the continent, especially here in France which is heading towards a presidential election next year.

Christopher Caldwell om jødehad i Frankrig

Caldwell er grundig i dette essay:

An Old Hatred Returns By Europe’s Back Door

Christopher Caldwell – September 2011

In mid-August, as London’s neighbourhoods underwent violence, looting and fire, France’s Jews looked on with a familiar disquiet. Jews were in no sense the target of this summer’s rioting, but a decade ago, something similar went wrong on the streets of Paris that has not been put right since. The present era of European street violence began with widespread assaults on Jews around Paris in the autumn of 2000, the year of the so-called “second intifada” in Israel. The following year saw riots in Oldham and Rochdale — overshadowed in retrospect by the destruction of the World Trade Center just weeks later.

There were 744 acts of anti-Jewish violence and threats in France in 2000, the worst year since the war. While these were, beyond any shadow of a doubt, anti-Semitic acts, they were not perpetrated by the sort of anti-Semites against whom French people had steeled themselves to be vigilant. Violence was particularly intense in those north Paris neighbourhoods, such as Sarcelles and Garges-lès-Gonesses, where an established and ageing Jewish population, much of it descended from North African immigration of the early 1960s, lived at close quarters with newer Muslim immigrants, many of them young. The attacks were stemmed by an aggressive government response starting in 2002, but they have never died out. The years 2004 and 2009 were worse. They form the backdrop to a more general sense of being ill-at-ease, or no longer quite so at home, that many French Jews describe.

Mere HER i Standpoint Magazine. Kan også læses her i The New English Review.

Christopher Caldwell om økonomisk krise i USA

America’s overdue financial crisis

Christopher Caldwell – 6 August 2011

When Congress went into deadlock on the debt ceiling, it was the culmination of years of bitterness and complacency – and there is worse to come

Washington DC

It’s obvious to me why the United States found itself so deep in debt that only an ugly compromise — rushed through Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday — could save it from failing to pay its bills for the first time in its history. The country is in the middle of a moral crisis. So often have Americans heard the tale of their forebears’ self-reliance and genius for political accommodation that they have grown complacent. If the crisis is new, the danger is of long standing. Describing how the rugged frontiersman degenerated into the flabby couch potato, the late historian Henry Steele Commager wrote a few years ago: ‘From Maine to Oregon he left forests in ruins; instead of cultivating, he mined the soil; he killed off bison and pigeon, polluted streams, wasted coal, oil and gas. His habits of waste he transmitted to a generation that could no longer afford them.’

Mere HER i The Spectator. Samme artikel i printversionen, som ikke er hakket op i små sider her.

Opdatering 21. august 2011:

Why Buffet is wrong about soaking the rich

Aug 20, 2011 by Christopher Caldwell

Like Monty Python’s crime-fighter The Bishop, Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Warren Buffett arrived late last week to the congressional argument over the debt crisis. By the time he published his broadside in the New York Times to the effect that billionaires like himself are being “coddled” by U.S. politicians, Republicans had already staved off tax increases until after the next elections. Both parties had passed off $1,500bn in extra deficit reductions to a bipartisan committee unlikely to call for tax increases. And Standard & Poor’s was sufficiently unimpressed to downgrade the US credit rating.

Buffett believes taxes on the “mega rich” ought to go up, in the name of both fairness and debt reduction. He paid just under $7m in federal taxes last year, about 17 per cent of his taxable income. But his back-office employees pay 36 per cent. It is a spreading problem. In 1992 the top 400 US earners made $16.9bn and paid 29.2 per cent in taxes. Today their income is $90.9bn and they pay 21.5 per cent.

Mere HER hos iPolitics.

Christopher Caldwell om familier og finanskrisen

Og om amerikansk politik:

Elizabeth Warren, Closet Conservative

The most misunderstood woman in Washington

Aug 1, 2011 • By Christopher Caldwell

President Obama’s nomination of former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may finish off the brief political career of the most eccentric and poorly understood figure of the finance crisis. It was Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren who dreamed up the CFPB in 2007, and it was she who spent the past year running it. Now she will return to Cambridge, either to teach or to run for Senate against Republican Scott Brown.

It is not surprising that Warren found no place in Washington. The cameo role she played on the national stage made her an idol to the leftmost part of President Obama’s coalition and a hate object for conservatives​—​and yet her understanding of the financial crisis is best described as populist, conservative, even right-wing. It arises from what has happened to the American middle class in the past four decades.

Mere HER i Weekly Standard. The Volokh Conspiracy har en kritik af artiklen her. Også PowerLine er skeptisk – her.

Opdateret.

Bernard-Henri Lévy – upopulær?

The Strenuous Life

How Bernard-Henri Levy fought his way into chronic interventionism

Summer 2011 – Christopher Caldwell

I. Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so. Perhaps, Zéro speculated, it had to do with dual identity. There was Bernard-Henri Lévy, who launched his career in the 1970s with La Barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face), an attack on Communism, and who in the decades since had written three dozen more books, most of them about current affairs, and many of them best sellers. Then there was BHL (“Bay-Arsh-Ell”), as he was called in the gossip magazines, the very wealthy heir to a lumber fortune, who owned John Paul Getty’s old palace in Marrakech, who had married a fashion model, and who had counted the country’s last three presidents among his personal friends. Zéro seemed to suggest that the glamour and privilege of BHL clashed with the roles that Lévy accorded himself in his writings—Tribune of Democracy and Conscience of France.

Lévy had another theory. He believed he provoked strong feelings among French people because he was right so often. “Because I was right about Bosnia,” he said. “Because I was right about Rwanda. Because I was right about Darfur. Because I was right about Communism.”

Mere HER hos Book Forum. Kan også læses her hos The University of Utah.

Opdatering 21. juli 2011 – en boganmeldelse:

Guilty Men

The political origins of the meltdown

Jul 25, 2011 • By Christopher Caldwell

How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon by Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner

Mere HER i The Weekly Standard.

Opdatering 11. august 2011 – fanklubben svinder ind:

Bernard-Henri Lévy Just Can’t Shut Up

Hugh Fitzgerald – 8 August 2011

I’m so glad I don’t have to see, or read, or hear about, BHL more than I already do, and feel sorry for those who, living in France, can’t escape him, can’t avoid seeing him on television.

Here he is, unrepentant, in the Khaleej Times:

Mere HER i New English Review.

Christopher Caldwell om Danmarks grænser

Europe’s Arizona Problem

By Christopher Caldwell – June 11, 2011

Alongside Greek debt and the Libyan intervention, European Union countries are bickering over another issue, one that could well determine the future of their would-be megastate: immigration and internal borders. A growing number, including Italy, France and Denmark, want to carve out exceptions to the agreements under which member states open their borders to one another.

The issue has been simmering for years, but unrest in the Middle East and North Africa and fears of a new wave of migrants have brought it to a boil. Of course, closing off Europe to newcomers violates the cosmopolitan vision on which the European Union was built, and doing so could kill the project altogether. But as the continent’s leaders are now learning, it’s also possible to kill Europe by opening its doors wider than its citizens will tolerate.

Mere HER i The New York Times. Today Online her.

Christopher Caldwell om Libyen

Lessons from Kosovo for Libya campaign

by Christopher Caldwell | Jun 10, 2011

This weekend marks a curious anniversary. Twelve years ago, Nato’s air war to wrest the province of Kosovo from Serbia’s control ended after almost three months. The allies achieved their professed war aims: Kosovar autonomy and an end to Serbian counter-insurgency measures, which Nato described as genocidal. But Serbian resistance was tougher than anticipated and western publics began to fear the war was going terribly wrong. The fears were well-grounded. There were two big consequences of Kosovo. First was a deepening Russian distrust of Nato’s aims. That led to Vladimir Putin. Second was an end to the principle that a sovereign ruler’s mistreatment of his own subjects is not grounds for war. That led to the invasion of Iraq.

What makes the Kosovo anniversary curious is that Nato’s mission in Libya is so similar. As in Kosovo, the west intervened to prevent a humanitarian tragedy and has wound up engaged in a civil war on the side of an insurgency.

Mere HER i iPolitics. Jeg fandt desuden dette fra marts 2011. Yderst interessant. Blandt andre disse herrer vil have krig: Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, Bernard-Henri Lévy. Her er resten – åbent brev om Libyen fra:

Historian Nicole Bacharan, artist Jane Birkin, writer Pascal Bruckner, European Parliament member Daniel Cohn-Bendit, philosopher André Glucksmann, former cabinet minister, Nicole Guedj, publisher Gilles Hertzog, former Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, philosopher and member of the editorial board of Le Monde Group Bernard-Henri Lévy, publisher Oliver Rolin, publisher Olivier Rubinstein, writer Dominique Simmonet.

Dette er, hvad de skriver:

Remember Rwanda…And Guernica! An Urgent European Call For Immediate Western Intervention In Libya

A group of leading French intellectuals and politicians make the case for immediate Western intervention in Libya, including possible military strikes against Gaddafi’s forces.

March 17th, 2011

Time is pressing in Libya. Day after day, hour after hour, the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, with his murderous army of airplanes, helicopters, tanks, missiles and mercenaries, is retaking his country and crushing the efforts of the Libyan people to break free. The tyrant seems determined to drown his country in “rivers of blood” — machine-gunning civilian populations, “purging” the towns of his opponents and sowing terror. Everywhere, in Tripoli and the other regions retaken by Gaddafi’s forces, large numbers of men have been abducted, taken to torture cells and murdered.

Mere HER i Worldcrunch.

Rwanda og Guernica ?? Så kan det vist heller ikke blive mere hysterisk…

En humanitærpopulist hopper af

En boganmeldelse:

Curb Your Dogma

Apostate David Mamet confronts the secular religion of liberalism.

Stefan Kanfer – 8 June 2011

The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, by David Mamet (Sentinel, 256 pp., $27.95)

“I had my first conversation with a conservative at the age of 60.” On the face of it, that claim seems absurd: David Mamet must have dwelt in a hermetically sealed environment for six decades. But the playwright/director is telling the truth; he’s spent his career in show business, an ecosystem as airtight as academia.

Unlike so many of his colleagues, however, Mamet began to question the shibboleths and doctrines he had long taken for granted. In four years, the 64-year-old moved inexorably from left to right, like the hour hand on a clock. In The Secret Knowledge, his latest collection of essays, he confesses that “I examined my Liberalism, and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and time again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws.” But there was a profound difference; the gambler hurts primarily himself. “The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.”

Mere HER i City Journal. Og endnu en boganmeldelse:

Applied Ethics

Christopher Caldwell | June 9, 2011

In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe by Adam Michnik – University of California Press, $29.95

In March 1968, when he was twenty-one years old, Adam Michnik had a copy of Forefather’s Eve, a play by the nineteenth-century poet Adam Mickiewicz, on his bedside table. He wound up reading it in jail. A production of the play in Warsaw had fired wild hopes among students, who saw in its anti-Tsarist themes a reflection of their own predicament under Communism, and saw in Mickiewicz a model dissident. Michnik led protests when the government ordered the play closed, and that was the beginning of a heroic career. He helped found the Workers’ Defense Committee, out of which grew the Solidarity movement that rose against Polish Communism through the 1980s and eventually toppled it in 1989. His book The Church and the Left laid the groundwork for an anti-Communist alliance between students, Catholics, and workers. He has edited Poland’s paper of record, Gazeta Wyborcza, since its founding in 1989. Reading Mickiewicz behind bars, Michnik now writes, “helped us realize our place in the long chain of Polish generations, all of which had to serve an apprenticeship in ‘fortresses and prisons.’”

Mere HER i The New Republic.

Opdatering 12. juni 2011 – The Guardian har mere om afhopperen, David Mamet:

David Mamet launches tirade against ‘antisemitism’ of British writersAmerican playwright says books, plays and essays by contemporary authors are full of anti-Jewish ‘filth’

Vanessa Thorpe – 12 June 2011

Leading US playwright David Mamet has launched an attack on the British literary establishment over what he claims are inherently antisemitic attitudes.

Mere HER i The Guardian.

Opdatering 20. juni 2011:

David Mamet’s Right-Wing Conversion

By Christopher Hitchens – June 17, 2011

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this:

Mere HER i The New York Times.

Amitai Etzioni om Tysklands og USAs økonomi

Amitai Etzioni. En gammel kending fra studietiden. Og min egen bogreol. Amitai Etzioni har to blogge og en hjemmeside. Den ene blog kører fra Huffington Post – her noget om Keynes og nationaløkonomi:

Advantage: Keynes?

Amitai Etzioni – June 1, 2011

If you want to know what is going to happen next to your investments, the job and housing markets, and more generally to the economy, you may want to follow what is happening to the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes argued that when economies are sputtering, the government must increase deficits, because its increased expenditures will stimulate the economy to better growth. (The time to slash government spending is when the economy is running at full clip.) This is the theory Presidents Bush and Obama, as well as the Federal Reserve, have followed. However, the anti-Keynesians have long maintained that cutting government expenditures is the course to follow — because the more money that is left in private hands, the better for the economy. The Tea Party is full of anti-Keynesians, and these days, so is the GOP leadership in Congress.

Mere HER i Huffington Post.

Desuden link her til omtalte artikel af Christopher Caldwell i The Weekly Standard.

Opdatering 7. juni 2011 – om Kina:

Who’s Afraid of the Chinese?

Amitai Etzioni | June 6, 2011

Should we be still afraid of the writhing snake of al-Qaeda after its head has been cut off? asked Stephen Colbert. To which his guest Francis Fukuyama replied: “Be afraid of the Chinese, I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space. They hack into people’s computers. The Osama bin Laden people can’t make their underwear blow up.

Mere HER i The National Interest.

Søren Kern & Christopher Caldwell om muslimer i Frankrig

Debate Heats Up Over Muslims In France

by Soeren Kern – March 17, 2011

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has fired a Muslim advisor  he recently hired to promote “diversity” after the appointee openly attacked the president’s plan to hold a debate about Islam in France.

The dustup reflects growing Muslim resistance to Sarkozy’s efforts to protect the secular nature of the French state from Islamic Sharia law, namely by calling for the estimated six million Muslims living in France to be better integrated into French society.

Abderrahmane Dahmane, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, was let go after he spoke out against a plan by Sarkozy’s center-right Union for a Popular Movement  (UMP) party to hold a debate on secularism and Islam. The debate, which has been scheduled for April 5, is on the compatibility of Islam with the rules of the secular French Republic.

Mere HER hos Hudson New York. Og:

Le Pen Is Mightier

Why, just four years after its supposed demise, does France’s National Front have its highest poll ratings ever?

Mar 14, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 25 •  Christopher Caldwell

“I used to worry about the National Front,” a middle-aged writer told me when we met in France in February. “Suddenly I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not further to the right than they are.” The National Front, or FN, has been Europe’s archetypal fascistic party of recent years. Founded by Algerian War veteran Jean-Marie Le Pen, anathematized in the media, manipulated by Socialist president François Mitterrand as a means of dividing his opponents, it was embraced by ex-colonists, ex-Communists, and the unemployed as a vehicle for protesting the changes that mass immigration brought in its wake. Le Pen was offensive, clownish, unpredictable. He defended Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. He described the Holocaust as a “detail” of World War II. He walked onstage with a photo of the head of a Socialist minister on a platter. And in 2002, he shocked the country by taking 17 percent in the first round of the presidential election, finishing second and eliminating the Socialist candidate. That episode led to a national soul-searching that has not yet abated.

Mere HER i The Weekly Standard.

An estimated 5 million Muslims live in the ZUS – Zones Urbaines Sensibles -, parts of France over which the French state has lost control.

Søren Kern.

Audio, interview & artikler: Christopher Caldwell om multikultur

WorldNetDaily har interviewet Christopher Caldwell og Anjem Choudary. Intervieweren hedder Michael Carl:

Listen to an interview with Caldwell

First it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Then came British Prime Minister David Cameron, and now French President Nicholas Sarkozy is joining the team with his conclusion that the attempts to promote a multicultural society across Europe are a failure, and there needs to be a return to pro-Western values.

Interviewet med Caldwell startes HER – åbner Windows Media Player. Varighed 7 minutter.

Og så interviewet med Anjem Choudary, hvori fjolset bla. siger, at Det Muslimske Broderskab har eksisteret i 1.000 år:

Listen to an interview with Choudary

“The statements of David Cameron are intended to coincide with the march of the English Defence League. It’s no coincidence the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is not that different from organizations like the EDL because he believes in secularism, as do they,” Choudary declared.

Startes HER. Varighed knap 8 minutter. Der hører en artikel med til de to interview, som man kan læse HER i WoldNetDaily.

Den næste artikel handler om Irland og økonomi. Den er lidt indforstået:

Not Too Big to Fáil

The death of Ireland’s crony capitalist party.

Feb 21, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 22 • By Christopher Caldwell

In the grand old days before the Irish real estate boom collapsed, the ruling Fianna Fáil party used to campaign the fun way. Infamously, the party held blowout fundraisers every year in a tent at the Galway races. Bankers and property magnates would show up, caked in bling, surrounded by attractive young women and occasionally even their wives, and get drunk with their elected representatives and regulators.

Mere HER i The Weekly Standard.

Opdatering 24. februar 2011 fra City Journal. Også Theodore Dalrymple følger Irlands økonomiske krise:

How the Irish Bubble Burst

The Emerald Isle’s story is a microcosm of the global economic crisis.

23 February 2011 – Theodore Dalrymple

If you want to study the economic crisis of the last few years, go to Ireland, where you will find it in its purest form. Ireland is a small country, with a population of just 4.4 million, and the connection between clientelistic politics, bankers’ cupidity, and the mass psychology of bubble markets is easiest to comprehend there.

Dotted around the country, outside of almost every town and sometimes in the middle of nowhere, are housing estates—completed, half-completed, and never-to-be-completed—which are unsaleable, will almost certainly never be inhabited, and are destined to fall into graceless ruins. Some 300,000 new dwellings now stand empty in the Irish Republic, a number whose equivalent in the United States would be approximately 21 million.

Mere HER i City Journal.

Christopher Caldwell om Thilo Sarrazin

You can’t say that here!

Christopher Caldwell – 15 January 2011

Thilo Sarrazin is breaking Germany’s taboos on welfare and immigration – and selling over a million books in the process

In Berlin in September, I noticed that Deutschland schafft sich ab (‘The Abolition of Germany’), a taboo-breaking blockbuster by Bundesbank governor Thilo Sarrazin, had just come through a new printing after having been sold out for a week. In the morning, as I walked off to work, there would always be a large table near the front of the Hugendubel bookstore on Tauntzienstrasse stacked two feet high with bright red copies. In the evening, as I returned to my hotel, the table would be denuded, or have just a few scattered copies, like the bar after an undergraduate drinks party.

Sarrazin had at that point given a few interviews, and the wildest nonsense was being said about him in the feuilletons. He was making eugenics respectable. He was a racist. He was rallying native Germans to xeno- (or Islamo- or some other kind o-) phobia. In short, he had written a Mein Kampf for our times. The Bundesbank and chancellor Angela Merkel bullied him into leaving his post. The Social Democratic Party moved to expel him. And although the Pope’s book of interviews managed to dislodge Sarrazin for a few days in November and a crime thriller called Snow White Must Die bumped him this week, his book is still near the top of the bestseller lists, having sold 1.2 million copies. It is the most important publishing event in Germany since the war.

Mere HER i The Spectator.

Video: Christopher Caldwell – Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

London School of Economics har uploadet denne video på YouTube den 15. december 2010. Det er den lidt naive side af Christopher Caldwell, der kommer frem her. Sådan en har han jo altså:

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: can Europe be the same with different people in it? 

Speaker: Christopher Caldwell
Chair: Maurice Fraser

This event was recorded on 5 May 2009 in Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House

After a half-century of mass immigration, has Europe overestimated the need for immigrant labour and underestimated the culture shaping potential of religion? Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, and a regular contributor to the Financial Times. His new book is entitled Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Islam, immigration and the west.

Desuden en ny artikel – en boganmeldelse:

Black Like Me

By Christopher Caldwell -  December 8, 2010

A review of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick

The Bridge, by New Yorker editor David Remnick, is not so much about how a black became president as about how a president became black. It opens at a 2007 commemoration in Selma, Alabama—the site of a clash between police and civil rights marchers 42 years earlier—where Barack Obama was able to present himself as a worthier inheritor than Hillary Clinton of the struggles for which the old men and women in the audience had risked so much. “Don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama,” he said. “Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama.”

Mere hos The Claremont Institute HER,

Ned med EU!

Christopher Caldwell om Euroen:

Euro Trashed

Europe’s rendezvous with monetary destiny

By Christopher Caldwell – Dec 20, 2010

It has been easy to snicker in recent weeks at the politicians who designed the euro, which appears on the verge of collapse after a decade as the common currency of a dozen countries in the European Union. Last May, the continent’s finance ministers put together a $145-billion package to bail out the corrupt Greek state. When that failed to calm markets, a new trillion-dollar European Financial Stability Facility was set up with money from the EU and the International Monetary Fund. It was meant to awe any speculators away from betting against the euro. It didn’t work.

Since October, the yields on Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, and even Italian and Belgian bonds have risen dangerously. While Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving, European finance ministers tapped the EFSF to buy Irish bonds and set up a fresh $113-billion rescue plan. The numbers surrounding the plan sound like a joke. It comes to about $25,000 for every man, woman, and child in Ireland. Ireland’s budget deficit is 32 percent of GDP.

The Weekly Standard HER.