Champagne for Everyone!

Contrary to the title, this is really a rather depressing story about the fear and loathing currently taking over in Europe. Paul Belien of the Brussels Journal blog wrote this article
about a decision by the mayor of Brussels to deny a permit to demonstrate.

Freddy Thielemans, the Mayor of Brussels, prohibited a demonstration against the Islamization of Europe, planned to be held next September 11 in front of the European Parliament buildings. Mayor Thielemans is worried that the demonstration will upset the large immigrant population of Brussels. Over half the inhabitants of the Brussels region are of foreign origin, many of them from Morocco. According to the mayor there is a real danger of violence between demonstrators and Muslims living in the neighbourhood. The latter might not tolerate native Europeans protesting against their continent becoming Eurabia.

Thielemans is a member of the Parti Socialiste (PS), a Belgian party which caters for the Muslim population. The PS is the largest party in Brussels, holding 17 of the 47 seats in the city council. 10 of the 17 PS-councillors are Muslims. The PS governs Brussels in a coalition with the Christian-Democrats, who have 11 councillors, of whom 2 are Muslims and 3 are immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. Only 13 of the 28 councillors in the governing coalition of the city are native Belgians. Thielemans is the most conspicuous of these. He is an atheist who is fond of Muslims, not because he respects religious people, but because he hates Christians. On 2 April 2005 the Brussels mayor was attending an official cocktail party with the mayor of Angoulême (France), when the news of the death of Pope John Paul II reached him. On hearing the news he ordered “Champagne for everyone!” His French colleague walked out in disgust.

Last Spring, the Danish group Stop Islamiseringen af Danmark (SIAD), the British group Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) and the German group Pax Europa, whose logo includes the flag of the multiculturalist EU, decided to organize a protest march against the introduction of Sharia laws in Europe. The organizers want the march to take place on 9/11 in the streets of Brussels and to end in front of the EU Parliament. There, the victims of Sept. 11, 2001, will be commemorated with one minute of silence.

Up until last week the Belgian press had made no mention of the march. Last Thursday, however, Mayor Thielemans banned the demonstration. A local joke has it that the mayor cannot allow a demonstration on his 63rd birthday (Thielemans was born on Sept. 11, 1944) because he fears that if the pope dies on his birthday it will cost him a fortune to offer “champagne for everyone.” That would be no big deal in a city where the many Muslims do not drink alcohol, but with 20,000 non-Islamic visitors in town the mayor might bankrupt himself on champagne.

The Danish-British-German organizers can lodge an appeal against the mayor’s prohibition with the Belgian Council of State. The CoS may rule that the demonstration must be allowed to take place. Meanwhile an online petition, which everyone is invited to sign, asks the mayor to reconsider his decision. Thielemans’ ban has turned the anti-Sharia demonstration into a huge publicity stunt, even if only a few people show up. Meanwhile, Thielemans’ decision has showed the world that Brussels, a city which does not allow peaceful Europeans to demonstrate and make their wishes known to the European authorities in town, is unworthy of being Europe’s capital.

It saddens and disgusts me how sick and twisted the atheist/socialist movement in Europe have become. There no longer is any connection between liberals, in an 18th century classical liberal meaning of the term, and these lefties. Mark Steyn and others have been saying for quite a while that Europe is lost. Something has got to change, or, I fear, they are correct.