Anti-Americanism flatters France, and gives its unwanted Muslims a claim on the political life of a country that knows not what to do with them.

Unlike the authors of this slush, I would not claim to know Miss Corrie's motivations, but it is no more accurate to describe her campaigning as 'an impressive legacy' than it is to refer to her as a 'peace activist'. The International Solidarity Movement is not an advocate of peace: it explicitly states on its home page:

"[W]e recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle."

What it means by 'legitimate armed struggle' is disclosed in a diary written last week by an ISM activist from the UK (who would benefit from the services of an editor to cure him of both his verbal incontinence and his presumably unwitting admissions):

"The movement is non-violent, and trains people in that practice. Tonight I sleep in a martyrs [sic] house, which is a practice used to try to stop them being knocked down by the Israelis."

Article I-25 #4 stipulates that the Commission is insulated from the governed (it will not seek or take instruction from any government or any other body - such as the Council of Europe, Council(s) of Ministers, or the European Parliament). This body of appointees and lifelong bureaucrats is the real power in the Union. This is what I was talking about when I said that Parliament didn't make laws, as we usually understand it: they simply pass what the Brussels Bureaucracy submits to them. They lack independent authority to draft legislation or even propose it.

What we're seeing in these debates is really a clash between those preferring collective decision-making and (enforced) consensus, along the lines of the EU model, and one that instead fosters cooperation among independent states which, to the largest degree possible commensurate with a reasonably ordered (that is, mostly peaceful) world, are able to make their own policy decisions, joining together in "coalitions of the willing" when their interests overlap but neither compelling others to participate nor being prevented by others from making their own policies - except where agreements that they consented to explicitly prevent them, but such cannot be imposed on them without their consent by, say, "democracy" in the form of a majority of other nations.