Canada Terrorism: Trump Silent As Quebec Mosque Terrorist Is White Christian Pro-Trump Fanatic - by Colin Taylor

Canadian police have just identified the lone gunman who attacked a Quebec mosque during prayers last night, killing five praying Muslims and injuring eight. Alexandre Bissonnettte, a Quebec native, has been taken into police custody.

Not surprisingly, Bissonnette’s Facebook page  (since taken down) shows that he “likes” Donald Trump and far-right, Islamophobic French politician Marine Le Pen. He also likes the Christian site Reasonable Faith. Here’s a screenshot from Bassinet’s Facebook page, taken before it was deleted, according to Heavy.com:

Bissonnettte is ardently pro-Trump and anti-Islam, according to a former classmate of his from Université Laval, who told Heavy.com that Bissonnettte “has right-wing political ideas, pro-Israel, anti-immigration. I had many debates with him about Trump. He was obviously pro-Trump.”

Furthermore, a Facebook group called “Welcome to Refugees – Quebec City” posted that it was familiar with Bissonnettte, and that he is “unfortunately known to several activists in Quebec City for his pro-Le Pen and anti-feminist identity positions at Université Laval and on social networks.” Le Pen is an ardent anti-Muslim French politician who has been closely linked to Trump in the past.

So let’s recap: one day after Donald Trump bans Muslims from several countries because, he claims, they pose a threat to the West, one of HIS deranged followers shoots up a crowd of Muslims whose only crime was peacefully practicing their faith.

Obviously, religions do not create terrorism, only terrorists do. But will Donald Trump now ban Canadian Christians from entering the United States? This tragic incident perfectly illustrates why blaming entire religions for violence is not only hateful and bigoted, but stupid and counterproductive.

Donald Trump’s Twitter has been uncharacteristically silent since the identity of the gunman was revealed. Hypocrisy, thy name is Donald Trump!
 
Read more: Trump Silent As Quebec Mosque Terrorist Is White Christian Pro-Trump Fanatic

Austria: Left-leaning 'professor' Van der Bellen to become Austria's new president

Independent candidate and former Green Party leader Alexander Van der Bellen – affectionately known as "the professor" among his supporters – won Austria's presidential election on Sunday over right-wing populist Norbert Hofe.

Note Almere-Digest: This is bad news for Marie Le Pen France and Geert Wilders from the Netherlands

Read more: Left-leaning 'professor' Van der Bellen to become Austria's new president - France 24

POLAND: population rejects Right-Win Gpvernment pplicies

Tens of thousands march against right-wing government in Poland Tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets of the Polish capital Warsaw Saturday to rally against moves by the rightwing Law and Justice government that they say undermine the rule of law. http://f24.my/2d0wqZg

EU: Will Populist Parties Run (Ruin) Europe? - by Judy Dempsey

Populism and Nationalism, two destructive political forces

Populism is on the rise in Europe but is unlikely to win enough votes to run Europe. Yet the risk that populism will run Europe by proxy is real if mainstream governments do not address the phenomenon’s underlying causes.

Leaders of the center-right and center-left are racing to embrace right-wing populist demagoguery in the hope of catching a few votes. This tactic does not pay off, as Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico discovered in Slovakia’s parliamentary election on March 5. His embrace of the right-wing anti-immigration card boosted far-right parties more than his own. If voters want xenophobia, they will choose the real thing.

But Fico’s experience does not seem to be persuading mainstream politicians to stop chasing right-wing populism. Governments’ responses to the refugee influx are paralyzed by a fear of populism’s rise in upcoming elections.

Worse still, populists are framing the way in which the refugee challenge is debated. These fears are blocking the emergence of alternative solutions, in turn giving populists even more ammunition. If mainstream politics does not recapture the debate with alternative proposals and a vocabulary that reflects its principles (those that have held Europe together), it will put itself at the mercy of a populist minority.

Contrary to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s boldest dreams, illiberal national populists will not run Europe anytime soon. In many countries, the shrinking center still just about holds. But this should provide little comfort. Populists don’t need to run Europe to ruin it. Of course, the poison works best in countries where authoritarian populists control the government. The proudly illiberal regimes of Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party, would fail to meet the Copenhagen criteria for acceding EU states.

But populists do not need to control the government to feed on and fuel a new age of fear in Europe: fear of the Other (especially Muslims) and fear of global competition. Populists’ seemingly easy answers—pull up the national drawbridge to keep Muslims and competition out—put pressure on terrified establishment elites and drag political culture to previously unseen lows, depriving policymaking of the oxygen of reason.

This trend is now also threatening to engulf Germany, so far one of the last islands of liberal democratic normalcy. If you want to know what a neurotic Germany feels like, take Bavarian Minister President Horst Seehofer as a harbinger of things to come. Not a pretty prospect for the dream of a self-confident liberal Europe in the twenty-first century.

Populist parties already run many European countries. Look at Central and Eastern Europe, where populists formally make up the government, or at France and the UK, where they set the tone of the political debate to a greater or lesser degree. There are reasons to believe that populist and other fringe political forces will increasingly shape Europe’s political landscape and polarize it along liberal versus illiberal or globalist versus territorialist dividing lines.

But the real question is not whether populists are likely to grab power in one or two more EU member states—although a French presidency led by the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen would be the end of Europe as we know it. The real (and currently materializing) threat is that so-called mainstream parties will gradually give up their fundamental principles of human rights, civil liberties, equality, and openness out of panic fear of a populist surge.

The rise of populism is sometimes a high but inevitable price to pay for a firm policy of not bowing to external pressures. The right-wing Alternative for Germany versus Chancellor Angela Merkel is a case in point. Perhaps Europe needs to accept this price. And instead of seeking to accommodate populists, Europe should try to mobilize those large parts of society that have lost not only confidence in the elites but also the belief that the stakes in today’s politics are high. If liberal democracy and open societies fall in Europe, it will happen by default, not because of an outright rejection by the people.

Read more: Judy Asks: Will Populist Parties Run Europe? - Carnegie Europe - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Political Revolution?: The People Have Woken Up - Political Establishment in Europe And US Is In Trouble - by RM

French revolution 1789 until 1799

When you look at it closely there really is not much difference today between the EU and US when measuring the  public opinion in both areas as to how their ruling political establishment is perceived.

Polls show they both consider them unreliable and "in the pocket" of  private interest groups and lobbyists.

In a way this reaction is also a refreshing development. Slowly but surely in both America and in many countries around Europe people are waking up to the fact that many politicians within their political establishment, on both the left and the right, are not really representing the people who elected them anymore, but rather their own interests.

In fact, most of the polls taken on this issue seem to indicate that many voters now feel that they have been completely sold out by their political elite.

They are also angry about the steady takeover of their liberties by unregulated global corporate forces, and the fact that their elected Governments are doing very little to stop it.

Hence we see the rise of  a new breed of somewhat unorthodox people successfully entering the political arena in the US - like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Same is happening in Europe, with the likes of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marie Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in Britain, Victor Orban in Hungary, Alexis Tsipras in Greece, and .Pablo Iglesias in Spain, to mention just a few.

Could this be the beginning of a total shake-up and possibly even a peoples revolution changing the existing "fault-lines" of today's political and economic structures in both the USA and the EU ?

It looks like the party has only just begun.

EU-Digest

France: Marine Le Pen, Leader of France’s National Front Party, Splits With Her Father, Its Founder - by Suzanne Daley

Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s far-right National Front, has openly split with her father and the founder of her party, calling his recent comments, including those on German gas chambers, “political suicide” and an attempt to harm her.

In recent years, Ms. Le Pen, trying to clean up the image of her party as racist and anti-Semitic, has kept her distance from her father, Jean-Marie 

Le Pen, 86, and his more extreme statements, even as he continued as the party’s honorary chairman.

But Mr. Le Pen made headlines over the last week, after he once again claimed that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of history; praised the France’s collaborationist wartime leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain; and questioned whether France’s Spanish-born prime minister, Manuel Valls, was really loyal to France.

His outbursts appeared to be more than Ms. Le Pen and her entourage could put up with. In a statement on Wednesday, Ms. Le Pen said she had already told her father that she planned to block him from running in coming regional elections.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen seems to have descended into a strategy somewhere between scorched earth and political suicide,” she said. “His status as honorary president does not give him the right to hijack the National Front with vulgar provocations seemingly designed to damage me but which unfortunately hit the whole movement.”

She added that, with great sadness, she was calling a meeting of the party’s executive bureau with her father present “to find the best way of protecting the interests of the movement,” a statement that some experts took to mean that Mr. Le Pen may be expelled from the party altogether

Ms. Le Pen’s deputy and the party’s chief spokesman, Florian Philippot, soon said in a Twitter message, “The split with Jean-Marie Le Pen is now irrevocable and definitive.”

Read more: Marine Le Pen, Leader of France’s National Front Party, Splits With Her Father, Its Founder - NYTimes.com

France: Paris massacre - Deranged radical Muslim terrorists - Islamophobia

Killing in the name of Allah

Today's Paris terrorist attack by deranged radical Muslim terrorists will unfortunately only increase Islamophobia in most "Democratic countries" around the world and strengthen nationalistic right-wing politicians like Geert Wilders in Holland, Marie Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in Britain or movements like Pegida in Germany or the US Tea-Party.

This was another sad event for humanity and must be condemned in the strongest terms possible by everyone, including Muslim and Secular leaders, without any if's of but's.

Almere Digest

Far Right Dangers in Europe: "In parts of Europe, the far right rises again" - by Sonni Efron

As Europe marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the war that destroyed Old Europe, far-right parties are gaining ground across New Europe.

Most of the far-right parties are pro-Russia, opposing U.S. and European Union efforts to isolate President Vladimir Putin for his intervention in Ukraine. They are expected to do well in the May 25 European Parliament elections.

Last month, I traveled to Hungary and Greece, where the neo-fascist movements are strongest. In Hungary, the extreme-right Jobbik party won 1 in 5 votes in last month's parliamentary election. In Greece, even as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is being prosecuted by the government as a criminal organization, it remains the fourth-largest political party in the country. Golden Dawn lawmaker Ilias Kasidiaris, who sports a swastika tattoo and once read from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on the floor of Parliament, is running for mayor of Athens.

Both parties deny being inherently anti-Semitic or anti-Roma, but their symbols and rhetoric suggest otherwise. Party leaders are unapologetically hostile to LGBT rights, and Golden Dawn is vehemently anti-immigrant. And in both Greece and Hungary, many voters appear to be either overlooking the neo-fascist message or embracing it.

Despite international condemnation of Jobbik's anti-Semitic, anti-Roma vitriol, support for the party rose from 18% in the 2010 elections to 21% last month. Among those reelected to office was a Jobbik member of parliament who demanded that the government draw up a list of Jews in official positions because they posed a "national security risk." Another winning candidate claimed that "the Gypsy people are a biological weapon" of the Israelis who have "occupied" Hungary. These are not idle words in a country where Roma have been terrorized or killed in organized attacks.

Read more: In parts of Europe, the far right rises again - Los Angeles Times

EU Immigration Policies: Immigrants Benefit Host Nations' Economies, so Why Is Public Perception Negative? - by Anna Leijonhufvud

Immigrants seeking democracy and better life benefit economy

Almira is one of many millions of immigrants who every year cross borders in search of a better life. A year ago, she left her home village in Croatia to find work in Helsingborg, Sweden, and today she's gone to Arbetsförmedlingen, a Swedish public employment agency, to find a job. "I worked as a cleaner for a hotel, but the work is tiresome," she said. "I would want to work as a receptionist, but I don't think my Swedish is good enough yet."

Immigrants like Almira are often seen as having a negative impact on the host country, such as when they allegedly take jobs from the native-born. But as anti-immigration views have gained traction--even in government  policy in some cases, as in the U.K.--an increasingly large body of work suggests that assumptions that immigrants are harmful to a country's economy are unfounded.

"There is overwhelming evidence that migrants have a positive impact on the economy," said Peter Sutherland, the U.N. secretary-general's special representative for migration and development. Sutherland was on the panel for the World Economic Forum's Open Forum session titled "Immigration: Welcome or Not?"

Also on the panel was former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who agreed with Sutherland that immigrants often bring lots of advantages with them. To make his point, Annan referred to a poster showing Albert Einstein trying to cross the border into a country with a sack of clothes on his back. The caption read: "The sack of clothes is not the only thing that the immigrant brings."

While many of the leaders speaking at the WEF appear convinced, the evidence that immigrants have a positive effect on their host countries' economies has not yet had much impact on public perception.

Editors Note: The question is why European Governments are  not making sure they change this Public perception about the benefits of immigration ? Instead they are letting populist, nationalistic politicians like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marie Le Pen in France and others in Europe control the debate.

EU-Digest

Attention Geert Wilders and Marie Le Pen: Eurozone posts euro 13.1-billion September trade surplus

The eurozone posted another big 12-month increase in its trade surplus on Monday, the latest monthly data from the EU's Eurostat agency showed.

The first estimate for September gave a 13.1-billion-euro surplus (US$17.7 billion) for the trade in goods with the rest of the world, compared with 8.6 billion euros in September 2012.

A trade surplus is one of the factors of growth in an economy, whereas a deficit tends to sap growth, and so achieving a trade surplus is of critical importance to economies in crisis.

Read more: Eurozone posts 13.1-billion September trade surplus: EU