Fitzgerald: A tribute to Romano Prodi

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald hails the new leader of Italy:

Prodi is awful, as awful as all those who rise high in the E.U. bureaucracy -- Javier Solana and Chris Patten come to mind. Those Solanas, Pattens, Robinsons, and Moratinoses are all imbued with the Eurabian desire to throw Israel to the wolves, to distance Europe from the United States, and to find some kind of phony common ground with the Arab Muslims, beginning with those deux-rivistes (about which see my article here) in France -- who appear to believe that what separates France from the Maghreb is merely a matter of the Mediterranean, and not an entire world-view.

That Berlusconi, crook and clown, managed almost to win, shows just how awful Prodi is. Berlusconi is not readily yielding power, but this is not as much infuriating as it is comical -- possibly because so many just do not want to see Prodi actually come to power. And Prodi has a history of making remarks in the Eurabian vein, such as his address at the Library of Alexandria two or three years ago -- as perfect an example of Bat Ye'or's thesis as could be imagined.

He does have that Christian-Democratic dullness, but Andreotti, for example, was far more lively in his clever nastiness, or nasty cleverness, than Prodi could ever be. Dull, dull, dull. Not Paul-Henri Spaak workmanlike dull. Really dull.

Meanwhile, after the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv the other day, most of those interviewed on the left minced no words, and their words were good. Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome, was particularly lucid. But then there was also, to remind us of another current in the Italian left, the intolerable Francesco Caruso, the "no global" boy, who immediately began talking about the poor "Palestinians" and how this kind of thing (the suicide bombing) should not be allowed to damage their cause, etc. etc.

Oriana Fallaci and Magdi Allam have had an effect. And the Vatican is having an effect. Michele Pera has had an effect. And that effect will not let Prodi be Prodi. At least, one hopes it won’t.

Perhaps the rule should be: anyone who "believes in Europe," and anyone who has spent a lot of time working for the E.U., should be disqualified from running for office at the level of the mere nation-state. Yes, until the whole sickening E.U. itself dissolves, that could be a good way for countries to proceed in order to avoid that Chris-Patten-Javier-Solana problem.

In the United States, and especially in Wasington, it is not understood that for three decades -- since OPEC's "money weapon" began to be brandished -- there has been a steady, persistent, increasing islamization of European foreign policy, beginning, but not ending, with the so-called Euro-Arab Dialogue. It is not a dialogue but a diktat. The one calling the tune is the Arab League, and the dancers, who must forever pick up their step, faster and faster, are the hapless members of the EU. Agents of, or apologists for, Islam have simply seized the entire EU bureaucracy, as they have that of the UN. Patten, Solana, and Prodi are among the anointed quislings -- who of course cannot dare to look directly at the demographic conquest of Infidel Europe by its overbreeding, and o'erbearing, and expensive (to monitor) and dangerous Muslim population.

How much easier it is to allow oneself to believe that as long as Arab demands in "Palestine" are satisfied (which is to say, not that justice is done, but that Israel is thrown to the wolves), there will be no problem, and all manner of things shall be well. It is nonsense. It would mean a great betrayal of the right of the most persecuted tribe in human history. But more than that, it would be to surrender a sliver of land that is equally important to Western civilization, to those who do not, and never have, wished anything for that non-Muslim civilization except for its subjugation and ultimate disappearance.

Prodi and company are not part of the solution. They are the problem.

The United States must look on Europe as Occupied Europe. It must exercise all of its art and cunning to articulate the reality of the contemporary situation for the mute and helpless and increasingly inglorious Europeans, who live their lives in a world where a campaign of vilification against Israel and America is the daily fare, and where no one is allowed to criticize Islam or even to tell a few oblique truths about it without being hounded or otherwise censored.

In the late 1940s, despite the fact that American troops had liberated western Europe and the Red Army had seized all of eastern Europe, the two largest political parties were the Communist parties of Italy and France. The so-called "intellectuals" (an idiotic word, really) were almost entirely supporters of the Soviet Union. But the Communists were eventually rolled back -- with the spending of large sums of money and subventions to non-Communist parties such as the Christian Democrats in Italy (who later became intolerably corrupt, but served a purpose then). Money also went to support non-Communist newspapers such as Der Monat and to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which in turn gave birth to Encounter, the best English-language magazine in the world, to support for conferences and seminars to and fro across the Atlantic, often conducted by ex-Communists such as Koestler, Moravia, Crossman, and others. It took money, planning, and guile. It worked.

Instead of wasting money and time in Iraq, the main focus of anti-Jihad efforts should be in western Europe. To those in eastern Europe, including such countries as Bulgaria that have historic memories of the devshirme (the Ottoman levy of Christian children for the armed forces) and Rumania, an appeal can be made to enlist their service in helping to convince the decadent and foolish states of western Europe that they must cease to be handmaidens of the Jihad, but instead recognize not the pseudo-link that geography provides ("the North" and "the South" -- les deux rives -- of the Mediterranean), but the real link of culture and ideas. Spinoza and Hume, Leonardo and Pushkin, La Fontaine and Melville, Jefferson and Lincoln and Mill and Raymond Aron -- these are the links that count, not the fact that Muslims live in North Africa and the Middle East and have forced their way again into Europe under the benevolent eyes of very foolish elites (elites whose members have betrayed their own peoples and countries and cultures, and cannot for one minute allow themselves, much less those peoples, to realize it -- it would be simply too horrifying).

When the Prodis and Solanas and Pattens and Mary Robinsons and other who think of Europe as merely a Big Market (for to them, what else is there but markets, big or little?) are all seen for the sinister quislings (with some outright antisemites among them) and fixated anti-Americans they are, American policy will be vindicated -- as it was in Italy, when De Gasperi led that country, and the largest political party in Western Europe, that of the Italian Communists, was effectively blocked from power.

Posted by Robert at April 22, 2006 7:50 AM
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