The Weekly Forum - 21 November
22 november 2024 | Forum for Democracy Intl
The recent attacks against Israeli football supporters in Amsterdam have rightly shocked the world. Whatever the provocations by the Maccabi fans, the fact is that the attacks were committed by local youths from immigrant families – the second or third generation young Arabs who are so prominent in the national crime register and who make people’s lives hell all over Europe. How can anyone not see that European states have imported into their cities populations who continue to identify with their parents’ or grandparents’ country of origin and who perpetrate acts of violence based on this identity? Politicians in Europe have been saying this for decades – Pim Fortuyn was shot dead for it over 20 years ago – and yet nothing is done to attack the problem at its root. Instead, immigration has continued at vertiginous levels and native Europeans live with the consequences every day. In a recent speech in parliament, Thierry Baudet predicted that crocodile tears will be shed because of the anti-Jewish nature of the recent attacks but that nothing will be done about it - except to ramp up police surveillance powers against local national dissidents like FVD.
FVD International’s director, John Laughland, was attending a conference on BRICS-Europe in Sochi last week when a chasm opened up within the NATO alliance. Shortly after his boss lost the US presidential election, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, initiated a phone call with Vladimir Putin. This is the same Scholz who had remained meekly silent in February 2022 when Joe Biden, standing next to him in the White House, said out loud that the Americans would destroy the Nord Stream pipeline. Last week’s phone call is the first time the Russian and German leaders have spoken in two years. Scholz then also used a press conference in Brazil to re-state his opposition to facilitating German Taurus cruise missiles attacking Russia – exactly what the US, the UK and France decided to do a day or so later. No doubt Scholz’s new disobedience explains why the very pro-American FDP party collapsed his ‘traffic light’ coalition, forcing new elections in Germany next February. One thing is clear: NATO is now deeply divided over the Ukraine war.
We can all be happy that Trump won and that the ludicrous Kamala Harris lost but what will it really mean? Stephen Baskerville has long argued that the problems of the USA are structural and very difficult to change. Bureaucrats paid to solve a problem have every interest in seeing it remain unsolved – otherwise their jobs would disappear. Citizenship is not about casting a vote but instead about the period between elections – and in any case the Trump victory might prove ephemeral, as it was in 2016-2020. A professional political class cannot solve anything if it is itself the cause of problems. The destruction of the family and the Mafia-like use of lawfare will continue, whoever is in the White House. Until the Right understands the nature of the problem at its deepest level, the yellow man’s triumph will be nothing but a straw fire.
Read Stephen Baskerville’s article here
An early litmus test will be what Trump does about Roger Ver, the ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ currently being held in Spain on trumped-up tax charges dating back ten years. The US demand for extradition of this non-US citizen and libertarian campaigner is one of the most grotesque examples of lawfare in recent times – and there have unfortunately been many. We were delighted to have Aaron Day, Chhay Lin Lim and Tracy Thurman as our guests on The Forum & Friends to tell us about Roger’s case.