
France’s Minister for Family and Women’s Affairs this week lambasted fashion houses for proposing Islamic clothing for women. Laurence Rossignol said it is “irresponsible” for major brands like Marks & Spencer’s to promote the “confining of women’s bodies.” At question is everything from the ‘burkini’ bathing suit to high-end head scarves.


No, Nicolas, the Commune is not Dead!
They are closer to 70 than 50 but have all the dynamism of the French high school students who disrupted Paris this week. They came out of the workers’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and have not lost their determination to change the world, or at least a name.

The EU must pressure foreign governments to punish parents who send their children on the perilous and illegal journey to Europe or face financial consequences. All too many parents in poverty stricken countries readily send their under-age children on the dangerous trek to Europe knowing that, if they make it, Europeans will care for them. These parents hope their children get papers and that they can join them in Europe later under Europe’s liberal family regroupment rules and that one day they get work and send money home. Europeans are alarmed that about 10,000 of these children are unaccounted for.

“Invasion.” I can think of no other word to describe it when hundreds of thousands of people illegally enter your country. But who are these people and what do they really want?

Mom passed away on December 12th, and an unsung hero of the power of women to overcome the odds died with her. In the 1960s, when the professional ladder was sawed off below the half-way mark for women in general, Mom, a single mother with three young boys, worked her way through college and obtained a Doctorate from Columbia. “Impossible” was a word not in my mother’s vocabulary.

I angered one of the softest and nicest guys I know so much that, if he were a boxer, he would have punched me out with the simple American-style question of “when did you arrive in Europe?” It was another rude lesson in Europe is not the United States.
“Right and left, who strew war against political Islam internationally, are harvesting the war of Islam nationally,” tweeted the anarcho-French philosopher Michel Onfry the night of the Friday the 13th massacre. A tweet which earned him the scorn of the establishment. Basically, you reap what you sow.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is playing with matches. When he shot down a Russian bomber on November 24, he hoped to put NATO and Russia in each other’s crosshairs even though, in this case, Ankara is clearly the aggressor. It was an attempt to sabotage the Vienna peace process.


