For decades now “progressives” have been regaling us with tales of Europe. It used to be that pointing to “Europe” was the default position whenever Canadian socialist utopians got backed into a corner. “In England you know, they … ,” was the response whenever unions, over-taxation, and above all, healthcare, were debated. Sometimes you’d think Swedes or Dutch were little blond angels sent down from NDP heaven just to show the rest of us in Canuckland how it’s supposed to be done. Ah, the good’ol days.
So it is, that “progressive” Shangri-La now uses ambulances as waiting rooms outside emergency units and in some countries wait-times rival Saskatchewan’s. When it comes to short wait times and socialized medicine, “progressives” in Canada are running out of examples to point to.

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UPDATE: Actual Defamation Lawyer Ezra Levant posts excerpts of the Kay column at his site.
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It’s up at FreeDominion, but has disappeared from the Post’s own site.
Was it in the print edition?

Photo: Danish Jews Escape to Sweden (WW2)
A little known fact about Denmark is that during World Two, she stubbornly protected her Jewish population. Other occupied lands turned over their Jews and even assisted the Nazis, so much so, that Himmler commented about France that his own SS couldn’t have done a better job. In the land of my ancestors, Czechoslovakia, the Slovaks in particular were ardent Jew-hunters.
But not the Danish; they continued their liberal human rights traditions even when faced with the full brutality of Adolf’s Reich. Now, in 2008, it would seem that the tradition is continuing and the Danes provide a lonely voice in a sea of “progressive” milque-toast values. They understand full well the menace they (we) face:

Today the Danish Board of Foreign Policy Matters unanimously have cancelled a planned trip to Iran after the Iranian ambassador demanded an apology for the reprinting of the Mohammed cartoons. That is, every single member from the far right to the far left has collectively made it crystal clear to the Iranians that under no conditions will they try to interfere with the press, or even worse, make an apology. And since this is an ultimatum from the Iranians, the trip is cancelled!
As they say: “No one is going to tell us what to print in our own newspapers. If anyone should make an apology it should be the Iranians for all their repeated violations against human rights etc.”
I cannot tell you how happy I am to see this kind of collective spirit among Danish politicians.

Only if the rest of Western civilization would learn from the Danish example, we might be spared the next great conflict between barbarism and the democratic liberal West. First though, the “progressive” class has to somehow be injected with a dose of reality, and made to see how dangerous its well-meaning, but naive, multi-culti-we-are-the-world religion is.
crossposted @ Celestial Junk
Update: And then, there was Finland.
Update 2: Bomb and Slaughter Them.
Update 3: Youths Celebrate the Motoons.

“Last week when I was on the Hill mingling with some MPs from both the Liberal and the Tory parties, I asked an MP for an opinion on the freedom of speech/ Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn human rights complaints. This particular MP was appalled by it. I asked this individual for a public comment. After a few moments thought, the MP decided not to.
“Then this person mused–alas, I did not have a notebook or my recorder out so I can’t recall the exact words–that some MPs might be afraid to speak out on this issue, afraid their families might be targeted.”

“The Dutch politician, who sees himself as heir to a recent string of assassinated or hounded mavericks who have turned Holland upside down, has been doing a crash course in Koranic study. Likening the Islamic sacred text to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he wants the ‘fascist Koran’ outlawed in Holland, the constitution rewritten to make that possible, all immigration from Muslim countries halted, Muslim immigrants paid to leave and all Muslim ‘criminals’ stripped of Dutch citizenship and deported ‘back where they came from’.”

Note that, from the Guardian’s viewpoint, the troublemaking infidels were the ones who “turned Holland upside down,” not Van Gogh’s or Pim Fortuyn’s assassins or the harrassers of Hirsi Ali.

“But if Wilders shares positions and aims with others on the far right in Europe, he is also a very specific Dutch phenomenon, viewing himself as a libertarian provocateur like the late Pim Fortuyn or Theo van Gogh, railing against ‘Islamisation’ as a threat to what used to be the easy-going Dutch model of tolerance.
“‘My allies are not Le Pen or Haider,’ he emphasises. ‘We’ll never join up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I’m very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.’ Dutch iconoclasm, Scandinavian insistence on free expression, the right to provoke are what drive him, he says.”

“Long-distance telephone marriages can be dialled up under sharia law and then used to sponsor loved ones into Canada, Muslim leaders say.
“Two Muslim leaders have told the Toronto Sun telephone marriages are permissible under Islamic law and require two witnesses and imams here and abroad to conduct the vows, which may have the bride in Pakistan and the groom in Toronto.”

And if these couples are first cousins, which is a commonplace in the UK, their chances of producing unhealthy children increases exponentially.
But so what? Health care is “free”, eh?

… has a way of repeating itself … so much so it’s creepy:
Copenhagen, February 15th, 2008
crossposted @ Celestial Junk