Sacre bleu!

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese? Charles De Gaulle "Les Mots du General", 1962


The French are being pilloried this week for having the audacity to try to seal their borders and repatriate thousands of "Roma" gypsies that are in their country illegally back to their native Romania and Bulgaria. 


This comes on the heels of their unpopular decision last week to ban the use of full burqas by islamic women in their country.



Mr Sarkozy, who has been trying to crack down on illegal camps, admits that around 500 camps were dismantled in August, of which 199 were Roma settlements. About 5,400 people were evicted from the Roma camps, but the majority of those living in the camps were French nationals, according to the president. The Roma are a group that have never been fully integrated into Romanian society, preferring to leach off the social programs of their more tolerant European neighbors.


It is a difficult thing to write but I say good for the French. Since when does the puffery and dictates of the European Union trump the rights of a sovereign nation to control its borders? Especially since the French were never signatory to the 2004 Directive that gave workers the rights to move freely throughout Europe without respect to national lines. Incidently, Bulgaria and Romania fall outside of the passport free zone.


European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has threatened to drag Paris before the European Court of Justice.  "This is a situation I had thought Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War." She also urged the European Commission to take legal action and start "infringement proceedings" against France over the deportations.

Good old Europe, always so smug. Keepers of the moral high ground. So self important. it is hard to stick up for a country like France, always so deluded by an over magnified sense of its own importance. They did last a good two weeks against the germans, didn't they?


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I watch the situation in europe with no small amount of interest. Perhaps in this brief moment of introspection, they will stop wagging their fingers so self righteously at Israel. I saw this post at my favorite arch conservative blog, Bloodthirsty Liberal and think that it merits linking.


European Union foreign ministers are upset over Israel’s banning their entry to Gaza hours before Yom Kippur, and they have declined alternative dates. The 25 hour fast, the holiest day in the Jewish year, begins shortly before sundown Friday.“The whole country is paralyzed and the airport is closed,” a spokesman in the Israeli Foreign Ministry explained to the London Telegraph. “We told them that it was impossible to hold meetings on Friday morning and that no one would be available. We suggested alternative dates, all of which they refused.”

Those intractable jews again...

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Europe has always been exceedingly patronizing to Israel. It is ironic because we are only 70 or so years from a holocaust that was born out of european anti-semitism. Countries vied with each other to see who could be the most despicable - Austria, Germany, Croatia, France, Hungary, Denmark, Poland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Spain, the hand of blame touched practically everyone but Holland.  All with the complicity of the Swiss bankers of course. British anti-semitism has always been among the worst, although thinly veiled. I will not bore you by attempting to list a litany of abuses unless I am forced to. But there is a lot of blood on european hands.

Yet the Europeans constantly chastise Israel for the audacity of trying to secure their country against an enemy that is publicly committed to destroy them. Go figure. The country that was forced on the world because of the thoroughness of the european "final solution." Caterwaul about the evils of Zionism while you conveniently forget about a couple thousand years of persecution that reached its glory days during the inquisition and the pogroms and finally came to an inglorious rest at Dachau and Buchenwald.
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Now the europeans are being forced to deal with an ever radicalized muslim population that is proving to  be a very troubling house guest. They have no intention of ever leaving, they have a vision of a worldwide caliphate and no compunction about using indiscriminate violence against civilians to secure their aims.  Notwithstanding some very curious cultural beliefs about the rights of women.


Good luck Europe, let us know how things are going. And spare us the lectures, many people's memories of your own past behavior are remarkably fresh.