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The new European Union president is being chosen amid Soviet-style secrecy, according to former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga. The EU is working in “darkness and behind closed doors” and must “stop working like the former Soviet Union,” she said last Thursday.

EU leaders will meet Thursday this week to decide who the president, foreign minister and secretary general of the European Council will be. The list of candidates is a closely guarded secret. The British Telegraph writes:

David Miliband, an undeclared candidate for the post of EU foreign minister until he pulled out on Wednesday, compared media efforts to work out the EU appointment process as akin to “Kremlinology.”

Kremlinology was the name given to Cold War-era attempts to understand the inner workings of a secretive and totalitarian Soviet government.

The lack of public, democratic campaigning during Soviet leadership battles left Western observers trying to divine internal political dynamics from apparent trivia such as seating orders at official banquets and the removal of portraits.

“Trying to work out who is going to be president of the EU Council is not dissimilar to decoding who was in or out in the Kremlin in the 1970s. It seems strange to many of us that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall we have to dust off our Kremlinology skills here in Brussels,” said an Eastern European diplomat.

One nation that is particularly hard to read in this process is Germany. “Amid the squabbling among European Union member states over who will become the bloc’s first president and foreign minister, the one country that has puzzled diplomats in Brussels is Germany,” writes the New York Times. “It holds the key for the selection of the two jobs, and it is also crucial for influencing the direction of Europe. Yet Chancellor Angela Merkel, so far, has not put forward a German for either post ….” Times analysts are divided on the reason for this. Both history and Bible prophecy indicate that Germany will be working behind the scenes for key positions now or in the future. As Europe progresses, watch for Germany to take the lead.

For more on the selection process currently underway for the EU’s two new posts, read “EU Mulls Top Jobs.” •

It’s bad enough that Islamic terrorists can practically operate freely within British borders, but inside British prisons too? According to the Quilliam think tank, mismanagement by the Prison Service is helping al Qaeda and “strengthening jihadist movements.” The London Times writes:

Abu Qatada, described by MI5 as “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe,” has published fatwas—religious rulings—on the Internet from Long Lartin prison, in Worcestershire, calling for holy war and the murder of moderate Muslims.

Long Lartin is supposed to be one of the most secure prisons in Britain. The Times article provides other examples:

Abu Doha—said to be al Qaeda’s main recruiter in Europe—has taken courses in Belmarsh prison, south London, enabling him to mentor other inmates.

Abu Hamza, jailed in 2006 for inciting murder, has preached radical sermons to followers using water pipes in his Belmarsh cell, and Rachid Ramda, the Algerian leader of the Paris Métro bomb plot, led Friday prayers in the same jail ….

In October 2006, a Libyan detainee wanted in Italy on terrorism charges used telephone boxes in Long Lartin to speak live on an Islamic television channel.

One of the most appalling things about the report is that prison authorities allow these radical preachers to spread their hatred. The Times writes:

Using eyewitness accounts from inside jail and official prison inspection reports, Quilliam says some leading Islamist figures are given mentoring courses to teach them how to counsel fellow inmates and are allowed to lead Friday prayers.

Others are “empowered” by the prison staff, who treat them as leaders or representatives of Muslim inmates. Some manage to give television interviews or are able to inflame their followers through Internet discussions. Others lead Muslim gangs who bully fellow inmates into conversion.

The report concluded that “Islamist extremists are running rings around a Prison Service which often seems clueless about the nature of the extremist threat. If this situation is not tackled, British prisons risk becoming universities of terror.” •

A new study shows that a growing number of affluent shoppers impacted by the global recession have turned to shoplifting to obtain the luxury items they can no longer afford to buy. Last Wednesday, Time wrote:

The global recession isn’t just making jobs scarce and tightening spending—it’s also turning more people into thieves. According to an annual survey released on Tuesday, incidents of shoplifting rose nearly 6 percent over the past year, representing nearly $115 billion in losses for businesses. One of the more surprising findings: A growing number of new shoplifters are outwardly reputable, middle-class people who are walking off with French cheeses, quality meats, cosmetics, mobile phones, clothing and other goodies that they feel they need to maintain a quality of life they can no longer afford.

“People already feeling, or merely anticipating, the negative impact of recession have taken to stealing … at the very time retailers also suffering from the downturn have had to cut back on security staff,” says Joshua Bamfield, director of the Britain-based Center for Retail Research, which documented the findings in its annual Global Retail Theft Barometer. “In addition to the usual criminals, you have lots of newcomers to stealing who figure they don’t run much risk at getting caught, won’t pay much of a price if they are and justify their action on the hard times we’re all facing.”

The researchers found that shoplifting—or what’s euphemistically known as product “shrinkage”—jumped 5.9 percent in the past year at the more than 1,000 retail chains the group surveyed globally. In previous years, the increase hovered at 1.5 percent annually. Though the problem was documented across all regions, the steepest increases occurred in North America (8.1 percent) ….

Even more significant than the economic impact of these costs being passed along to consumers are the ominous social implications of this trend.

This ilk of shoplifter doesn’t steal out of “necessity” to feed his or her family. These shoplifters are not organized criminals stealing for resale. They simply can’t afford comforts they’ve grown accustomed to, and the idea of scaling back their standard of living is more absurd to them than that of stealing to maintain it.

Through interviews with police and shoplifters, researchers found that many of the individuals caught shoplifting regard this kind of stealing as fully justified because of the recession. This is evidence that the moral compass of a growing number of people is way out of kilter.

Where does it end?

Without moral integrity guiding our actions, there is nothing we won’t do. This is a harbinger of the riots and chaos that will erupt in the future. Here’s what we wrote in August about the tensions building with every foreclosure:

Unfortunately, America is heading into the worst economic times ever. What some commentators have called the Greater Recession is really just the early stages of a Greater Depression. Expect devalued dollars and soaring interest rates. Sky-high oil prices and hyperinflation. Wheelbarrows of money for loaves of bread. This is the future of the U.S. economic implosion.

Economic catastrophes such as the one we’re beginning to experience don’t just affect the economy. We are sitting on a social powder keg. The public disillusionment and social disruption when the green shoots and imminent economic recovery fail to materialize will be a tragic spectacle. Expect social discontent and race wars to flare. The town hall meetings are just the first sparks of a greater social powder keg ready to explode.

This growing number of casual, unapologetic, middle-class shoplifters provides more evidence of how quickly and easily that powder keg will be ignited. •

Lebanon’s unity government convened for the first time Tuesday, one day after the majority U.S.-backed political bloc and its rivals in the Syria- and Iran-backed minority coalition finally agreed on a new power-sharing cabinet. Lebanon had been without a government since the June parliamentary elections.

Hezbollah was given key positions in the new government, voa News reports, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Time further reports:

Although it accepted defeat in its effort to win control of the government at the ballot box, Hezbollah has since maneuvered behind the scenes to rig the composition of the cabinet in its favor.

In fact, this had been Hezbollah’s intent all along. As Joel Hilliker wrote in a column just after the election, Hezbollah actually had no intention of taking over the government of Lebanon. It was confident it could get what it wanted without having the responsibility of governing the country. The behavior of Hezbollah since the election corroborates that fact.

Time continues:

First it demanded veto power over all decisions, but eventually it accepted a compromise formula that left the ruling coalition without a large enough majority to make big decisions on its own. Still not content with that, the opposition pushed for control of Lebanon’s telecommunications system, which would give Hezbollah added operational security from Israeli intelligence—but could also help it hamper the activities of the UN tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. …

Saad Hariri, son of the murdered former prime minister and leader of the ruling coalition, initially balked at Hezbollah’s terms, but eventually had no choice but to give in. Lebanon’s longstanding deadly rivalries and the ever present threat of violence have made Lebanese politicians wary of acting unilaterally, which is why Hariri invited Hezbollah and its allies into the cabinet in the first place. And Hariri is increasingly isolated, with none of his allies being prepared to confront Hezbollah head-on given the experience of the May 2008 mini–civil war.

In other words, fearing Hezbollah would take matters into its own hands, Hariri set out to appease the group, giving it the guarantees it wanted.

Time goes on to point out that the Obama administration has been far less supportive of the pro-U.S. government in Lebanon than the Bush administration. Largely as a result, that pro-U.S. alliance is breaking apart. Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has flipped from being hostile toward Syria to being pro-Syrian—clearly he senses momentum swinging toward Iran, Syria and Hezbollah as America’s influence wanes.

Time concludes:

But the government’s caving in to Hezbollah and Syria will have its consequences: Most importantly it’s a message to those in Lebanon—and the wider Middle East—who put their trust in the U.S. and political reform that guns are still more powerful than votes.

For more on the dangerous results of America’s current foreign policy, see our article “Ditching Friends, Courting Enemies.” •

America is following Britain’s lead in gradually submitting to Islam. While it is demonstrably true that most Muslims are peaceful, that fact has lulled these two nations into a dangerous naivety about this religion’s aggressively missionary tendencies.

The reality remains that many Muslims—even the peaceful ones—want to convert the world to their faith. What many British see as broad-minded efforts to reach out to Muslims and show respect for their religion have played right into the hands of those Muslims who want Islamic law to trump British law, Muslim culture to supplant British culture. Tolerance has turned into full-scale submission.

The Middle East Forum’s Raymond Ibrahim wrote an eye-opening piece this week detailing two telling examples of American naivety regarding the true nature of this religion it is so vociferously trying to support. The first is a koranic quotation that President Obama used in his Cairo speech to Muslims in June: “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth” (Sura 9:119). Sounds nice. But in fact, that translation completely obscures the actual meaning of the verse.

Let us for the moment put aside the fact that Sura 9, from whence Obama quotes, contains the most violent and intolerant exhortations in all the Koran (which is saying something). The problem here is that the original Arabic text of Sura 9:119 says absolutely nothing about “speaking the truth.” The word “speaking” is nowhere in the text, and “truth,” as an abstract, is a wrong translation for sadiqin, which refers to people. The verse most literally translates as “fear Allah and be with the truthful.” In other words, Muslims should stand firm with fellow Muslims (“truthful” serving as a Koranic epithet for “Muslims” the same way “believers” often does). It is, as ever, a call for divisiveness—of Muslims (the “truthful”) versus infidels (the “false”).

Had Obama or his Mideast advisers and speechwriters simply bothered to read this verse in context—verse 9:111, a jihadi all-time favorite, looms just above, promising believers paradise in exchange for their killing and being killed—or if they had bothered consulting mainstream Muslim exegeses, they might have known that this verse is part of a Koranic segment that deals exclusively with fighting infidels ….

The second example is even more remarkable. The New York Police Department hosted a splashy event intended to show solidarity with members of the Muslim community. Ibrahim reports on npr’s coverage of the event.

In the audio version of this report (around 0:25-0:50), the npr narrator says that “there was not an empty seat to be had at the nypd’s auditorium at One Police Plaza. nypd brass, Muslim clerics, and community members all stood and listened to the cadences of the call to prayer from the nypd’s imam,” Khalid Latif. While this is being said, you can hear part of the imam’s Arabic recitation from the Koran in the background.

The narrator’s enthusiastic talk of nypd brass standing in awe of the “cadences of the call” makes it difficult to discern exactly which verse is being recited. Only the last few words—qawm al-kaffirin, “nation of infidels”—are crystal clear, raising red flags. Thanks to my trusty Arabic-Koranic concordance, I have placed this phrase as part of Koran 2:286, which supplicates Allah “to make us [Muslims] victorious over the nation of infidels.” Bear in mind that, from an Islamist point of view, the United States is the “nation of infidels” par excellence.

Political correctness may seem right. It can be a sincere effort to show good will toward all people. But because it does so without respect to God’s law, and is based entirely on human reasoning, it has extraordinarily dangerous unintended consequences. As Proverbs 16:25 says, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” •

Bloomberg reported earlier today that all 27 European Union leaders will gather for a previously unannounced meeting in Berlin Monday night. The gathering will occur amid festivities marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The meeting will be hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and speculation has it that the leaders may use the occasion to pick the EU’s first president. “This may be the meeting that breaks the logjam on who becomes president and foreign minister,” said Shada Islam, an analyst at the Brussels-based European Policy Center. “The leaders need to move fast to correct the image that the EU moves at a glacial pace.”

With the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall Monday, one can appreciate why EU leaders might consider it a fitting occasion to announce the new EU president.

The Trumpet has kept a keen eye on the rapid developments occurring in Europe in recent weeks. To bring yourself up to speed with our analysis of these developments, look at our regional coverage of Europe. If you’re interested in the outcome of Monday’s meeting, and other significant news coming out of Europe, stay tuned! •

“So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag,” wrote Melanie Phillips last week. “For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened.”

“The Labor government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage,” she writes, after an article published by Andrew Neather—a former speech writer for Britain’s top politicians—revealed the true agenda behind Britain’s immigration policy.

“Neather wrote,” says Phillips, “that until ‘at least February last year,’ when a new points-based system was introduced to limit foreign workers in response to increasing uproar, the purpose of the policy [former immigration minister Barbara] Roche ushered in was to open up the UK to mass immigration.” She continues:

This has been achieved. Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Since 1997, the number of work permits has quadrupled to 120,000 a year.

Unless policies change, over the next 25 years some 7 million more will be added to Britain’s population, a rate of growth three times as fast as took place in the ’80s.

Such an increase is simply unsustainable. Britain is already one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe. But now look at the real reason why this policy was introduced, and in secret. The government’s “driving political purpose,” wrote Neather, was “to make the UK truly multicultural.”

It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.

It was done to destroy forever what it means to be culturally British and to put another “multicultural” identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

For more details on the dangerous threat this poses to British society, see “The Sickness in Britain’s Heart.” •

Although Wall Street jived its way upward last week at news the economy had expanded healthily in the third quarter, Main Street America refuses to dance in the streets.

Part of the reason for America’s shortfall in hope, explains Peggy Noonan, is that people no longer trust their leaders, and the numbers and facts that flow from them. “Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts,” she writes.

This is not a minor problem.

The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.

When crises occurred in the past, explains Noonan, Americans always felt there was a path through the problem. They might have disagreed over which solution was best—Democrat or Republican—but there was always a solution. Today Americans are growing hopeless because they don’t see anyone, Republican, Democrat or otherwise, with a clear path through our troubles.

[Our leaders] are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won’t work. It’s not a way out. It’s not a path through.

America’s leaders are out of touch with reality. They are calloused to the worries of the American people. The people see it, and they’re disheartened—even scared. It truly is a terrifying state to be in. Not only are major crises besieging the United States—the soaring debt, the unraveling economy, the increasingly hostile world—but America’s leadership, Democrat and Republican, is impotent and solutionless. The United States today, as the Prophet Isaiah wrote about, is a headless nation.

To appreciate the importance of quality leadership in national success, read “The Death of Churchillian Leadership.” •

God, Give Us Men!

GOD, give us men! A time like this demands

Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;

Men whom the lust of office does not kill;

Men whom the spoils of office can not buy;

Men who possess opinions and a will;

Men who have honor; men who will not lie;

Men who can stand before a demagogue

And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!

Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog

In public duty, and in private thinking;

For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,

Their large professions and their little deeds,

Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,

Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps.

By Josiah Gilbert Holland •

Britain’s efforts to have former Prime Minister Tony Blair selected as the European Union’s first full-time president are not panning out. The Financial Times reported on Thursday:

Tony Blair’s chances of becoming the European Union’s first full-time president were in serious trouble late on Thursday as a Brussels summit opened with a chorus of criticism from his own supposed center-left allies.

British officials said the “jungle drums” also suggested support for the former prime minister was on the wane in some European capitals, including, crucially, Paris and Berlin.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel met French President Nicolas Sarkozy for dinner in Paris on Wednesday night, and reports say that both leaders are lukewarm about Blair’s candidacy. Then, the Daily Mail said on Friday that there are now plans for “a joint Franco-German candidate for the post.”

Last year, the Trumpet wrote this on the subject of Britain’s role in the EU:

Prior to his death in 1986, Herbert W. Armstrong spent 50 years using biblical prophecy to forecast world events. For anyone familiar with his teachings, one prophecy stands out above the others; it could be considered his keynote prophecy.

That is the prophecy about a colossal religio-political superstate that would emerge from Europe as the central power in end-time events. This empire, explained Mr. Armstrong based on a prophecy in Daniel, would include five nations, or “kings,” from Eastern Europe, and five from Western Europe.

In 1956, with European unification gaining traction and Germany rising from the ashes of World War ii, he warned that a European superpower was emerging. “The stage is all set!” he wrote. “All that’s lacking now is the strong leader …. Germany is the economic and military heart of Europe. Probably Germany will lead and dominate the coming United States of Europe.”

“But Britain,” he wrote, “will be no part of it!”

Year after year, decade upon decade, this man explained, in the face of all who mocked, that Britain would never be a part of this final European power. So confident was he in the source of his insight that he refused to budge even as Britain’s relations with the European Community seemed to improve.

When Britain was invited into the EC on Jan. 1, 1973, he said that date would prove to be a “tragically historic date” for Britain, a date “fraught with ominous potentialities.”

Today, more than 50 years after Mr. Armstrong first made this forecast, and despite the best efforts of numerous European and British leaders to succeed in unification, this prophecy is poised to unfold in spectacular fashion!

The waning support for Blair’s bid for the EU presidency is another indication that the UK is on the path leading away from Europe. Britain will continue to grow politically and ideologically isolated from the EU.

For more on who will possibly be the initial EU president, read Ron Fraser’s article “EU Intrigue Over Top Jobs.” •