“In Gaza, I see orphans who have sprouted wings. In Gaza, there are great and proud men, whose feet are firmly planted in the ground, who have realized that darkness and the Jewish state would vanish, and that the morning sun will rise on Palestine,” said Al-Danna. “We will return to the sea of Jaffa, to the sands of Haifa, to the palm trees of Beit Shean, and to the hills of Lod and Ramla. We in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque await the legions of the conquerors. We await the armies from Tunisia, from Jordan, from Egypt, from Iraq, from the Maghreb, and from the Hijaz,” he declared.

“We await a Muslim leader, whose voice we yearn to hear, shouting to the liberating armies in the Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard: You must say the afternoon prayer only in Safed, Haifa, or Jaffa. You must say the afternoon prayer only in Lod and Ramla.” A member of the crowd can be heard responding with, “Allahu Akbar”. These comments by the imam are just the latest example of the ongoing incitement against Israel by Arabs, much of which has been reported by MEMRI, Palestinian Media Watch and Arutz Sheva.

Such incitement ranges from the glorification of Nazism and the lionization of Adolf Hitler, to programs on official PA television featuring heavily-stereotyped Jews as villains (and encouraging violence against them), and various TV and radio shows which literally wipe the Jewish state off the map. In addition, top officials in Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party have openly supported Hamas’s efforts to kidnap Israeli soldiers. One of these officials, Abbas Zaki, recently declared that "Allah will gather [Israelis] so that we can kill them."

One of the departed heads said she had been the victim of an “attempted coup” by “dementors [evil characters]” and people “working against me, overtly and covertly”. The entire governing body at another Bradford secondary school has been sacked by the local council as it attempts to tackle the problem. Senior Department for Education sources said that coordinated attempts to undermine secular heads had occurred or were suspected in at least five places across the UK – Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester, and the London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets.

In video footage seen by the Telegraph, the man accused of being at the centre of the Bradford plot, Faisal Khan, describes how he and his colleagues have worked for a “number of years” to “change the head teacher” at schools in the city, adding: “We have to do that for every single school… we have to be there, on governing bodies, because that’s what it’s all about… It’s time we took these schools back.” Mr Khan, a councillor formerly for George Galloway’s Respect party, now sitting as an independent, insisted last night that his sole motive in removing head teachers was driving up standards and said he had no wish to “Islamise” schools.

Park View, Nansen and Oldknow are highly likely to be placed in special measures by Ofsted, with their governors and leadership removed, after inspectors found evidence that they had been heavily “Islamised”, with girls made to sit at the back of the class, sex education curtailed, GCSE syllabuses “restricted in line with a conservative Islamic teaching” and an extremist preacher invited to address pupils at assembly.

Mr Faraz, brother of a convicted terrorist, is also administrator of a group known as “Educational Activists” which pursues what he called an “Islamising agenda” in schools. Mr Akmal, Mr da Costa and Mr Alam are co-directors of a group called the Muslim Parents’ Association. All four men have close links to the al-Hijrah Trust.

The Nasdaq Biotech Index had beautifully shot up along an exponential curve. Then the hot air hissed out of it, and it swooned 21% in six weeks. In the social media space, the bloodletting has been ugly. The Social Media ETF SOCL is down 23.4%, but stronger stocks like Facebook (down 16% from its high a month ago) paper over individual fiascos, like Twitter, which has plummeted 48% from its peak last year to below its IPO price. Other momentum stocks are getting annihilated: Amazon down 25% since January, Netflix down 27% in just two months. From their peaks, Pandora crashed 39%, Gogo 63%, and Imperva, a Big Data security outfit, 65%.

Then there’s the “Cloud,” the single most hyped miracle-sector last year. Escalator up, elevator down. Workday, which sells cloud-based corporate software, went public in late 2012 and soared. Two months ago, it sprung a leak and the hot air hissed out of it. It’s down 36%. Veeve, which sells cloud-based healthcare software, has crashed 60% from its November high, shortly after it had gone public. Salesforce is down 22%. ServiceNow lost 30% over the past two weeks. LinkedIn reported a loss after hours on Thursday and got hammered. It’s now down 40% from its peak last September. Jive Software is down 71% from its high in 2012.

Parts of the market have already tumbled. Momentum stock traders have taken a drubbing, and some of those who trade on margin received margin calls and were forced to sell, and others dumped their positions to avoid getting wiped out. It’s bloody out there, in momentum stocks. They’re the ones that go first. And the last two times, they didn’t go solo. That’s how it always starts: with a deadly mix. Home sales are collapsing while inventories are soaring in six housing markets that had been white-hot just a few months ago.

The US attorney for the Southern District of New York recently mocked the silly claims of gloom and doom:

“Companies, especially financial institutions, will do almost anything to avoid a tough enforcement action and therefore have a natural and powerful incentive to make prosecutors believe that death or dire consequences await,” he said. “I have heard assertions made with great force and passion that if we take any criminal action, the skies will darken; the oceans will rise; nuclear winter will be upon us; and the world as we know it will end.”

As we’ve repeatedly noted, this is wholly untrue. Indeed, prosecuting the individual Wall Street executives who knowingly committed criminal fraud won’t harm the economy. After all, the main driver of economic growth is a strong rule of law. And numerous Nobel prize winning economists have said that prosecuting Wall Street white collar is necessary for a prosperous economy.

The prospect is causing jitters not only among the big wigs in Brussels but also among many of Europe’s mainstream political parties, whose oligopoly on political power faces a serious threat for the first time in decades. Calculations by the Open Europe think tank suggest that hardline sceptics could take as many as 218 of the 751 seats available in the European Parliament.

In the UK, poll research shows that the most pro-European Westminster grouping – the Liberal Democrats – is about to have its European Parliamentary representation completely decimated. Indeed, so threatened do the three establishment parties in the UK feel by Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKip) that they hit back this week with a cross-party campaign to condemn it as “Euracist”, an ingenious combination of the two words “Europe” and “Racist”.

The episode serves as a timely reminder of just how dumbed down the inhabitants of Westminster have become. For not only does their latest sound bite imply that Europeans are now a common, unified race – anthropology clearly not being the UK political caste’s strong point – but it also suggests that Farage’s party is actually “racist” towards all members of this new race, including, one would assume, Britons themselves.

The problem for Cameron and, by extension, his party, is that most people – even many dyed-in-the-wool Tory voters – no longer believe him. Once-bitten, twice-shy voters still remember his “cast-iron” pledge, while in opposition, to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – a pledge that turned out to be not-quite-so-cast-iron once in government. In short, an increasing number of UK voters no longer believe that any of the three mainstream parties offer any real protection against the EU’s plans for full-spectral dominance of the continent. And it’s not just in Britain: across the continent, voters are looking to the fringes for alternatives to Brussels’ authoritarian, technocratic model of governance.

From the SEC complaint: "The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced an enforcement action against the New York Stock Exchange and two affiliated exchanges for their failure to comply with the responsibilities of self-regulatory organizations (SROs) to conduct their business operations in accordance with Commission-approved exchange rules and the federal securities laws. Also charged was the NYSE exchanges’ affiliated routing broker Archipelago Securities."

Or in other words, the SEC is claiming that for 5 years the NYSE was aiding and abetting the very same rigged market that the SEC swears does not exist.

It. Just. Does. Not. Compute.

Think about that for a moment, and then consider Simon Jenkins’s piece in the Guardian today.

"Four polls at the weekend on next month’s European election show Farage’s Ukip in the lead or running neck and neck with Labour. The avalanche of scrutiny, abuse and ridicule that rival parties and the media have dumped on Ukip has not dented its appeal. It has, rather, driven home its message that Britain’s political establishment has lost touch with the electorate and is running scared. As Lord Tebbit [a veteran Conservative politician from Mrs Thatcher's era] remarked: “If I suddenly discovered my customers were walking past my shop and going to a competitor, I would not stand in the street cursing them.”

…The point at this moment in time is not Farage; it is Europe. It is not Ukip, but Europe. It is not racism, but Europe. For a quarter of a century, calling any critic of the evolving architecture of the EU “anti-European” was not just inaccurate but stupid. It played into the hands of the rejectionists. The chickens are now coming home to roost.

Polls everywhere indicate rising disillusion with European union. One survey recently for Open Europe, an independent thinktank, was unequivocal. Majorities of 73% in Britain and 58% in Germany want their parliaments free to block new EU laws. A mere 8% of Britons and 21% of Germans support the legal sovereignty of the European parliament. A BBC poll this month showed British support for our continued membership down to little more than a third. While opinion is evenly divided on actual withdrawal, such uncertainty is hardly a sound basis for a referendum in the next parliament. Consent to the union is collapsing.

Another poll calculated that as many as one third of the seats in the new parliament could be taken by sceptical or rejectionist parties. These groups may agree on little else, and thus fail to cohere within the parliament. Not all want withdrawal. Most seek an end to the euro straitjacket and a return to flexible currencies. Some are fighting for more subsidies, others for more protectionism. But all reflect one thing: a concern for the nature and status of Europe’s nation states. It is not necessarily EU policy that they reject, only the fact that is the EU’s….

This is not 1848 (as discussed here the other day, the elections to the EU parliament will still leave the oligarch parties in charge), but the fact that so many voters are unhappy with the future that has been prepared for them has alarmed Europe’s political class. It is a shock made all the more acute — so enclosed is the eurocratic world — by its belief that only the wicked, the reactionary, or the profoundly misguided could disagree with “ever closer union.”

And so Van Rompuy presses on.