While Europe hopes that America will assist it in its crack-down on “racist” websites and blogs, it is less keen to assist America in its battle against terrorism. In this context, civil-liberties and privacy concerns are invoked to deny the U.S. continued access to financial information from SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), an international banking consortium, headquartered in Brussels, which processes inter-bank data. SWIFT processes millions of transactions daily between banks and other financial institutions worldwide. It holds the data of some 8,000 banks and operates in 200 countries.
The European Parliament has nixed any cooperation with the US regarding SWIFT data. What’s really mind-blowing, however, is that America had direct access to the data until its servers were moved to Europe at the end of 2009. That really made the headlines here, didn’t it? What one might be inclined to call a real swift move by the Obama administration. That is, if they had a choice.
one of the more interesting points in Mr. Belien’s post:
One of these NGOs is the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship among Peoples (French acronym MRAP), that monitors “racism” in France. Last January, the MRAP presented a 154-page report [pdf], listing more than 2,000 URLs (including 1,000 blogs) deemed to be “racist”, “racialist”, “ethno-differentialist”, “extreme-right”, “anti-Semitic,” “Islamophobic,” “homophobic,” “ultra-Zionist,” etc. The website of the American scholar Daniel Pipes is listed on page 129 as a “neoconservative” site which “develops Islamophobic themes.”
Imagine the hours these flunkies spent surfing the internet just to find writings and images they consider offensive. Imagine the time it took to create these categories. Why “ultra-Zionist” when they detest Zionism itself? And is there any category of “right” that is not prefaced with “extreme”? The two words have become synonymous. And do you think they’ve listed the Islamist web sites that have fatwahs and rantings about the evil West? Or is that protected under religious speech?
