Geert Wilders during His Interrogation by the Dutch State Police

From the Gatestone Institute:

As a democratically elected politician I name the problems that I see.... That is my duty. That is why I have been elected. I rely on objective facts and figures.... Because they are the truth.
I do not intend to hurt or offend people either... Already for over 10 years, I have lost my personal freedom.
In my fight for freedom and against the Islamization of the Netherlands, I will never let anyone silence me. No matter the cost, no matter by whom, whatever the consequences may be.
To speak with the words of Martin Luther King: "I close by saying there is nothing greater in all the world than freedom. It's worth going to jail for. It's worth losing a job for. It's worth dying for."

The Hague, December 8, 2014.

Today, Dutch parliamentarian and PVV leader Geert Wilders made a statement during his interrogation by the Dutch State Police. The State Police interrogated Mr Wilders on behalf of the Dutch Public Prosecutor, who is considering to prosecute Mr Wilders because the politician had asked his voters during the election campaign whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands.

Our freedom is being threatened. Threatened by a violent totalitarian ideology – Islam – that brings with it death and devastation. Threatened by a politically correct elite that does not tolerate criticism of Islam and mass immigration, and that nurtures cultural relativism.

I rise up against this.

As a democratically elected politician I name the problems that I see. I name the dangers and disadvantages that we experience in the Netherlands as a result of cultural relativism, mass immigration and the ongoing Islamization. That is my task. That is my duty. That is why I have been elected. That is the reason why I am in politics and why I founded the Party for Freedom (PVV).
I am fighting for a better Netherlands.

To preserve our own culture.
Our own identity.
Our safety.
Our freedom.

I do not discriminate. I do not spread hatred, nor do I incite to it. I do not intend to hurt or offend people either. However, I do not mince my words when I defend our established freedoms and name the dangers to our society.

I dedicate my life to the fight against this evil ideology and the defense of our liberties. Every day, I pay the price for this fight. Already for over ten years, I have lost my personal freedom.

During the past 10 years, I have drawn attention to the Moroccan problem which we have here in the Netherlands. These include serious problems with integration, crime and welfare dependency. The majority of the jihadis travelling from the Netherlands to Syria is Moroccan. In order to see the whole context, the contents of the attachments that I deposit with you here today must be taken into consideration.

I rely on objective facts and figures. Facts that I must name. Because they are the truth. If we had had the same problem in the Netherlands with Canadians, I would have named them.

Those who do not understand that we have an enormous problem with Islam and with Moroccans in the Netherlands, though seeing, they do not see, and though hearing, they do not hear.

For the reasons above, while on campaign in The Hague, I argued that there need to be fewer Moroccans. And, at an election meeting in The Hague, I asked those present a number of questions, one of which was "Do you want more or fewer Moroccans?"

Geert Wilders during his March 2014 speech, where he asked "Do you want more or fewer Moroccans?" (Image source: nos.nl video screenshot)

Indeed, I want fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands for the reasons and context that I have previously expressed in this statement as well as in Parliament and for which I refer you to the documents that I now deposit.

I have yet to meet the Dutchman who wants more Moroccans in the Netherlands. Asking for fewer Moroccans is something totally different than if I were to want all Moroccans to leave the Netherlands or than if I were to object to every Moroccan.

Like me, 43% of all the Dutch and 95% of my supporters want fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. I have said what millions of Dutchmen think.

I also want less Islam in the Netherlands.

And like me, 65% of all the Dutch and 100% of my supporters think that the Islamic culture does not belong to the Netherlands.
Since the establishment of the PVV, I have advocated fewer immigrants from Islamic countries.
Since the establishment of the PVV, I have identified the Moroccan problem and presented (democratic) solutions for it, such as:

• limiting the immigration of people from Islamic countries, hence also Morocco
• promoting the voluntary remigration of non-Western foreigners, hence also Moroccans
• expelling criminals with dual nationality after denaturalization, hence also Moroccans. Since Moroccans living in the Netherlands are significantly overrepresented in crime statistics and often have dual citizenship, this would also lead to fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands.

I do not retract anything of what I have said.

Because I have said nothing wrong.

In my fight for freedom and against the Islamization of the Netherlands, I will never let anyone silence me. No matter the cost, no matter by whom, whatever the consequences may be.

To speak with the words of Martin Luther King: "I close by saying there is nothing greater in all the world than freedom. It's worth going to jail for. It's worth losing a job for. It's worth dying for."

For these above reasons, I assume that the Public Prosecutor will decide not to prosecute me.
Any other decision cannot be interpreted otherwise than politically motivated.

Geert Wilders

The Neverending Voyage of the Landshut

I have posted this twice before and I will go on posting it on every suitable occasion until somebody finally pays notice.

On October 13, 1977, flight LH 181, the Lufthansa Boeing 737-200 "Landshut" with 91 people on board, several children and five crew members among them, was hijacked by Palestinian Arab terrorists on a trip from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt/Main, an event that marked a new level of terrorist brutality and government response.

The hijacking was the means to the end of freeing eleven Baader-Meinhof/Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) terrorists from prison. Crew and passengers had to fly several sectors to various airports in the Mediterranean and the Middle East under threat of death by guns or explosives. Because Yemeni authorities had blocked Aden airport, captain and first officer, facing the fact of being almost out of fuel, managed to land, in a maneuvre of unique aeronautical mastership, the 30 meter long jet safely on a sand strip nearby. At Aden it was, that Captain Jürgen Schumann was forced to kneel down in the aisle, in front of his passengers and the crew, and executed. After the cold-blooded murder of his captain, Jürgen Vietor, the first officer, had to fly the 737, which had just undergone a gruelling emergency landing, solo to touch down safely at Mogadishu, Somalia, an airport, that had before, literally and metaphorically, not been on his, a Boeing 737 pilot's, map. Both men had a military background, Captain Schumann had been a Starfighter-, Vietor a navy pilot. At Mogadishu airport, passengers and crew were forced to undergo an ordeal of almost twenty more hours before an elite unit of German federal police, the GSG 9, finally and successfully raided the plane, killing three of the four terrorists and only hurting one of the hostages. The heads of the Baader-Meinhof gang at Stammheim prison commited suicide only hours later, Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the German employers' association who had been held hostage by the RAF for the same purpose, was found the next day. He, too, had been mudered -- execution style.


The Landshut in Rome. Italy refused to comply with German wishes and let the aircraft take off.

The odyssey of the Landshut

On October 12, 2007, the Frankfurter Rundschau published a remarkable interview performed by Mark Obert with Jürgen Vietor, which I luckily happened to save, as it is now offline. I translate a few excerpts here.

[...]

Are you frequently asked whether you never made the attempt to overpower Mahmud [the leader of the terrorists]

Sometimes.

Do you consider it a reproach?

No, I always tell precisely what happend aboard. One has to understand: We couldn't risk to antagonize Mahmud. There were 86 passengers we had to bring home safely. Our four hijackers defined themselves as freedom fighters, they weren't suicide assassinators like those on September 11. Our hijackers had two goals: The freeing of eleven prisoned terrorists, including those in Stammheim [i.e. the Baader-Meinhof gang members]. And they wanted to survive -- like we did. Based on this common ground we had to cooperate.

And to cope with the fear of the hijackers?

That too. Mahmud's fear played a decisive role at one point. Before we touched down at Aden ... something happened, which explains Mahmuds later atrocious behaviour. He wasn't able to fasten his seatbelt. He sat there like paralyzed because he was obviously scared to death. Therefore Jürgen [Captain Schumann] and I had to fasten his seatbelt. [Vietor explains earlier in the interview that they had to do that because a dead Mahmud bulleting through the cockpit in case of an emergency would have endangered the entire aircraft.] After touchdown, Yemeni military came to the aircraft straight away and talked to Mahmud, who was still upset. Mahmud then told us: "They are adamant to force us to depart. They have issued an ultimatum." Imagine the humiliation for Mahmud: First the thing about the seatbelt and now the rejection by those he had considered his friends. South Yemen was at that time a training center for the PLO. [Notabene that the Baader-Meinhof terrorists received training at PLO camps, thus reviving a long-standing tradition of cooperation between Arabs and Germans.]

Did you consider Mahmud's defeat as dangerous for yourself right from the start?

Mahmud had suffered a loss of face. I understood that he was bound to compensate for it sooner or later...

[...]

At that point you have been for two days in the hands of the hijackers already. Did you have a clear picture of Mahmud and the others?

Something like a profile? No. But that they, too, were highly under stress was obvious from the first moment: all the darting around, the shouting and the gun-waving. The first thing Mahmud did was to sport Jürgen Schumann's captain's cap. That's what he wanted to be, Captain Mahmud. After that, one had to assume that he was a psychopath.

Did you anticipate that Mahmud would kill Schumann?

I had to, because Mahmud had in the meantime informed the passengers as well that he was going to hold a revolution tribunal... In Dubai he had selected passengers for execution. Stupefying. Luckily, he didn't go through with it. But then he became more mistrustful and irritated by the minute because he didn't know what Schumann [who had left the aircraft under the pretense of inspecting the undercarriage which might have suffered through the landing on the sand strip, but, so it became known later, had gone to the airport building to plead for the people in the "Landshut"] was up to. That was an additional loss of authority on top of the other humiliation. I had a very bad feeling, but what could I do?

Does the question haunt you?

It is a non-starter, really. I don't know for sure what Jürgen Schumann would have done in my place, but I think he'd done the same. It was the sensible thing to do.

Feelings of guilt can exist in spite of rational decisions.

His death makes me sad.

The hijackers had thrown his dead body out of the aircraft the next day at Mogadishu.

That wasn't quite so. In fact, they've let him down the rear emergency chute.

Is this difference important for you?

It is a little bit less undignified.

Did you know Schumann well?

He was a young pilot, I was young. [Schumann was 37, Vietor 35.] We had first met before takeoff at Mallorca. And during the hijacking there was no opportunity to talk about private matters.

Do you sometimes think of what Jürgen Schumann might have thought on his way back to the plane?

I thought of it a lot, but without result. Now, after the statement of that General [Sheikh Ahmed Mansur, head of the unit that had surrounded the "Landshut" at Aden airport] I see that he must have known what was waiting for him. And so it happened. Exactly between Economy and First Class before everybody's eyes he had to kneel and Mahmud asked him: "Are you guilty or not guilty?" And Schumann said: "I tried to…" Then Mahmud again: "Are you guilty or not guilty". And again Schumann tried to explain what happened, but Mahmud didn't want to know it at all. He murdered the captain to appear as the resolute leader.

Herr Vietor, is it permissable to think that your chance of survival increased because of Schumann's death because now you'd become indispensable for Mahmud?

One can think that. One can ask as well the basic question why Mahmud murdered the captain and not the first officer.

He almost murdered you as well.

Before Schumann died, I was going to be shot dead twice. First, because I wore a Junghans watch with a "J" on the face and a company logo that looks a bit like the Star of David. Therefore Mahmud thought I was a Jew. The second time, because I was caught calling the Baader-Meinhof group, whom Mahmud intended to free, terrorists instead of freedom fighters. Then there were all the denied clearences to land, the emergency landing in Aden. Five days long it was about nothing but to survive the next hour, not to make any mistake, to keep an eye on the technology... Captain Schumann had just been shot dead when the ancillary unit went out. If one doesn't pinch off the battery pronto, one needs a new one. I didn't want to risk that. Therefore I went to the cockpit as fast as possible and had to step over Schumann's dead body, very carefully, over his legs, his arms, and over his head. Gosh, I couldn't even mourn -- the more as it was me who had to fly the aircraft now. Because I had no idea of the condition of the plane, I had at least to try and to delay the takeoff until daylight to have a better chance for an emergency landing in case of technical problems. I thought feverish how to play for time. First I asked ... for manual refuelling... then for weather charts, which won me ten more minutes. In the end, I had to take off in the middle of the night. Believe me, to fly an aircraft that had just gone through such an emergency landing was risky enough and then Mahmud topped it all by telling me that we were flying to Mogadishu. Mogadishu? I had no idea, where that was, I didn't even know where Somalia was. As a first officer on a 737, the farest I had ever gotten was Cairo. Lucky for us, on our maps, which only showed the 737-routes, the southernmost spot was just Mogadischu, two millimeter away from the bottom margin.

How was Mahmud after his act of violence?

Very focused. I needed a first officer. And finally he was where he wanted to be all the time, in the pilot's seat, with Jürgen Schumann's cap on his head.

How did you react to him?

We all behaved just right without thinking much about a strategy. We were cooperative without sucking up to the hijackers just as every instructional film recommends.

[...]

Did it help that you had to concentrate on the technology?

Very. Being ruthlessly exposed to those people was the most difficult thing I had to suffer because I like to be in control. But at least I had something to do whereas the passengers were confined to their seats, belts fastened, without information. They weren't even allowed to speak. And because the sunshades had to be down all the time they didn't even know where we were. Sometimes they were allowed to use the lavatory, that was all. That was much worse than what I experienced -- I believe.

[...]

What do you think [of the fact that the 20th- and 25th anniversaries of the "Landshut" hijacking went almost unnoticed, different from the 30th]?

Maybe the media are so eager because most of the witnesses will be dead in a couple of years. To think of how old the then chancellor [Helmut Schmidt] is now. Not to forget the discussion about the petitions for clemency of Mohnhaupt und Klar [Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar were among the masterminds of the "second generation" of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and the crimes commited during the "German Autumn". They were detained, trialled and sentenced in the Eighties, Mohnhaupt to five terms of life in prison and additional 15 years. After the minimum term of 24 years, she was set free in March 2007 on parole. Klar was sentenced to six terms of life in prison and additional 15 years. 1992 he got an additional life sentence in a different trial.] ... This discussion irritated me very much.

Why?

... When the consequences of terrorism are discussed, it's mostly about the consequences for the state. And now the state is supposed to show mercy because state and society are past terrorism. That may be, but are the bereaved past it? If somebody is able to show mercy it's them. I think that Klar and Mohnhaupt deserve more than just those 26 years. They ought to leave prison only in a coffin.

The discussion about pardon [for the Baader-Meinhof terrorists] has offended you.

Very much so. In spite of the fact that my suffering was limited. But I don't even want to begin to imagine how Jürgen Schumann's widow feels, or the widows of Schleyer und Buback [Siegfried Buback, German chief federal prosecutor from 1974-1977, his driver and a security officer, can be considered the first victims of the "German Autumn". They were murdered in a drive-by shooting on April 7, 1977.], or the children of the security officers. I don't intend to mention all the names here, there are so many who were murdered in cold blood. Okay, there may be good reasons to ask for mercy, but then the perpetrator ought to be deserving of it. Does Mohnhaupt? I don't know. But Klar, who is still adamant that the fight insn't over yet? How can he ask a state he is fighting for mercy? That is cowardice. Alright, the president has denied Klar that [in 2007, Christian Klar's mercy petition was rejected], but I fear that Klar will be released sooner or later.

What does a life sentence for Klar mean to you?

Satisfaction? It would go together with my sence of justice. That in any case. I will tell you something: Three of our four hijackers were killed by the GSG 9, and the only survivor, Andrawes, is suffering for life. I am glad for that.

She was shot during the raid and can't walk properly anymore…

… and is in pain. Yes.

Do you wish she were suffering from a bad conscience as well?

How can one determine anything like that? It's not measurable anyway.

[Notabene that Jürgen Vietor's witness account at Souhaila Andrawe's court trial exonerated her in many details because he chose to tell the facts instead of taking revenge.]

[...]

Did you ever have nightmares?

No.

[...]

Never been scared again?

Never.

Did you assess passengers henceforth? Who looks suspicious? Who is acting oddly?

No.

But you surely forewent the "Landshut", didn't you?

I'll tell you something now that is hardly believable. When a colleague asked me years later whether I've ever flown the "Landshut" again, I said that I didn't know.

What? Tourists have nicked pukebags from the "Landshut" and you didn't care whether you had to enter that plane or not?

Wait, it gets even more remarkable: I looked up my old flight schedules. My first scheduled flight after the hijacking was with the "Landshut". Of 80 possible 737-jets the "Landshut". I have proof of that.

[...]

The last hours on October 17 and 18.

Yes, things were coming to a head now. Day five, Mahmud was at the end of his tether. He submitted his last ultimatum. At 15:00 at the latest, the Baader-Meinhof group and the other terrorists were to arrive at Mogadishu or he'd blow us all up. Our last information was that the federal government wasn't going to give in. So they tied our hands behind our backs with the women's nylons, shoved us into seats and fastened the seatbelts. Even the children's seatbelts were fastened. Then they uncorked the duty-free spirit... and emptied the bottles on top of us. "So that you will burn better." Ah well... In the end, they applied plastic explosives everywhere. I had been in the military and saw at once that it looked like the real thing. And the detonators were definitely genuine: brass sheathing. When I looked at the clock it was ten to three.

May I ask a fallacious question?

Whether we didn't fight even then, right?

Is that the question you are asking yourself?

It has been asked before many times. I have always admitted that we let ourselves drive like lambs to the slaughter. But who has never felt a gun at his neck ought to judge very carefully.

What I really wanted to ask is whether it is true that in the face of death one seas a fast-motion playback of one's life.

That is a myth. I saw nothing at all anymore, only the hands of the clock. Now you have ten minutes more to live, now nine, when suddenly, five minutes before time, excited radio voices could be heard from the cockpit. Mahmud came running and asked me how long it would take a Boeing 707 from Frankfurt to Mogadishu. I started to do the numbers. Adrenaline works miracles. Imagine, I hadn't slept even a minute for several days. So I figured out: we are close to the equator, Frankfurt lies 50 degrees north of us, roughly 3000 miles, a bit of slope distance as well: roughly seven or eight hours. That was good because it was exactly the time they had told Mahmud via the radio. Then he cried joyfully: "They'll exchange! They'll exchange!" What a relief.

[...]

Then, when it was dark, the plane was raided. Your second birth.

One can put it like that.

The mission of the antiterror unit GSG 9 was triumphal.

Yes, brilliant.

Was it worth the risk? Just to not having to release eleven imprisoned terrorists?

I never gave it a thought.

You never gave it a thought? The state could have given in and set you free without such a risk.

That is a touchy point. Let me put it like that: Should somebody ask me whether I thought while we were in that situation that the state ought not to budge and I'd reply with yes, I'd lie. We have beseeched the chancellor to exchange, we begged over the radio. Life is important. Who wants to victimize himself. But had I been in front of a TV set I, too, would have said that the state must not budge.

[...]

So you understand [Chancellor Helmut Schmidt]?

His moral dilemma, yes. Guilt and liability are hard to escape. At that time I have simply begged for my life, as Mr. Schleyer did.

The chancellor considered himself to be in a sort of war against terrorism and put himself, together with his crisis squad, almost all of them former Wehrmacht members, in a sort of combat situation.

But it was a war the terrorists waged against the state. That a politician taps into his experience as a soldier I can, as a soldier, understand.

What do you think if hostages are taken in Iraq or Afghanistan. To pay or not to pay?

What is the state supposed to do? To budge? How big is the danger to produce copycat crimes and thus even more victims in the long run? Exactly that is the question to which nobody has an answer. I am not presumptious enough to consider my opinion important just because of my experience as a victim.

[...]

I could have died through a [GSG 9] officer's bullet. Did this thought occur to you?

The government had even taken into account that some of us hostages would die ... It is bordering on a miracle that no hostage and no GSG 9-officer died.

It must have been an incredible ruckus.

The banging away seemed endless and if the GSG 9-boys hadn't hollered all the time we hadn't even known that there were Germans attacking. "Where are you pigs?" "Here, you pigs!"

They hollered that?

Believe it or not. And it felt good to hear it.

[...]

Did you ever talk about that to the GSG-9-commander, Ulrich Wegener, the hero of Mogadishu?

I met him recently for the first time since 30 years. It was very helpful because he was able to explain some details previously unknown to me. For example that at the ladders they got at Mogadishu rungs were missing.

Not a personal word?

Only technical stuff. Nothing deep.

What do you consider deep?

Something like questions of innocence and guilt, like those we just discussed. That is deep. In the sense of profound.

You close yourself off, in a psychological sense?

I don't have any secrets.

[...]

And still, many think you are a hero.

I don't. Heroes look out for danger. I was exposed to it. And even that by mere chance. On October 13, the day we took off from Mallorca, I was on standby when the first officer fell sick and I stood in for him.

Good God, how does one ever say "thank you" for anything like that?

He never said "thank you". I am still waiting for my bottle of bubbly. But seriously, I don't even know the colleague's name. I have never tried to find it out.

Are you sometimes amazed at yourself?

A little bit. And at this point I remember a peculiar thing. When I was with Mahmud in the cockpit, I heard scratching noises and suddenly turned around and saw an empty seat in front of the emergency exit. I thought I go and sit down there. Later I learned that the GSG 9 was watching us with night sights and hoped that I would move away from Mahmud. I don't believe in telepathy but that is truly amazing, isn't it?

Do you believe in luck? In fate? Or is everything mere chance.

We were damned lucky.

There had been children on board.

Yes, it could all have been much more sad than it was anyway.

Have you ever met Jürgen Schumann's widow?

No, never. There isn't anything about her in the media. She must be very bitter.

Mr. Vietor, you are retired. What are you doing now?

My partner and I do a lot of travelling with the camper.

You are divorced?

Yes, and believe me, that really hurt me. I was vitually depressive. It had nothing to do with the hijacking.

Sure.

Sure. I am fine now. I just regret that I can not live in Canada.

Nice and far away.

In Vancouver, wonderful city. But the Canadians don't want an old age pensioner.

So far Jürgen Vietor's account. What happened to the other participants in the drama?

Jürgen Vietor and flight attendant Gabriele Dillmann 1977

Jürgen Vietor and Gabriele von Lutzau 2007

The "Landshut" served the Deutsche Lufthansa until 1985 and then went on an odyssey serving many owners around the globe. Until January 2008 she flew for TAF Linhas Aereas under the registration number PT-MTB in Brasil. Since January 2008, after 38 years and about 30.000 trips, she is now placed as a memorial to itself in a remote spot of Fortaleza airport. The name "Landshut" is still in use by the Lufthansa. Currently, an Airbus A330 is thus named.

The Bavarian town of Landshut named a street after Jürgen Schumann and the Lufthansa the building of their flight training school in Bremen. Different from his colleague Vietor, Schumann can not hand back the Bundesverdienstkreuz that had been awarded to him posthumously.

Monika Schumann is still, so it can be safely assumed, serving her life sentence. Waltrude Schleyer's ended when she died on March 21, 2008 at the age of 92, 31 years after the RAF had murdered her husband.

From October 1964 until June 1965, Leutnant Jürgen Schumann received training at Luke AFB under Colonel James Jabarra. Memorial page here (in German).

Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the man whose strength, authority and brains saw Germany safely through the most difficult time since WWII, was, two years ago, at the age of 89, publicly reproved because his smoking habit was setting a bad example for society. This, to show that we have got our priorities right.

Chancellor Helmut Schmidt offers his condolences to Waltrude Schleyer.

The Federal Republic of Germany, who was adamant in 1977 never to talk to terrorists again, pledged at a donor conference on December 19, 2007 twenty million Euro for the Palestinians.

Ringtone

This should be understandable even without any knowledge of German. The reader of my German blog who sent me this commented: "I think that's great. The entire controversy about 'values' in 22 seconds!

Lost in Translation or An Abyss of Demagoguery

The Sarrazin affair has hit international headlines, which is not entirely a good thing. For example (just one of many, this Yahoo/AFP article, "German banker hits nerve with anti-immigration book", gets it subtly and thus dangerously wrong. Let me pick on two details. Quoting the leading, well, THE, German newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL it says:

Thilo Sarrazin's book "is not convincing, but it has convinced many people," said the influential Spiegel magazine, which this week has the Bundesbank executive on its cover, calling him a "people's hero."

And further down in the article:

Sarrazin has no intention of doing any such thing [i.e. setting up his own political party], but the survey raised fears that a charismatic right-wing populist in Germany, like anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, could win considerable political support.

This is misleading on several levels.

First,somewhat naturally, it doesn't get across the sneering, contemptuous overtones of the German DER SPIEGEL article and the English translation is toned down considerably. For example, while the English DER SPIEGEL article is headed "Why Sarrazin's Integration Demagoguery Has Many Followers", the cover of the print edition says bluntly: "Volksheld Sarrazin -- Warum so viele Deutsche einem Provokateur verfallen". This is disingenuous because anything connected to the word "Volk" evokes, in German, memories of Nazi-terminology and is cunningly exploited by those who intend to give others a bad name. So "Volksheld" doesn't just mean "people's hero" but has nasty overtones which subtly allude to something sinister and unwanted. Second, Estimated 18% share Sarrazin's views and 18% do not a people's hero make.

The subtitle of the cover says: "Warum so viele Deutsche einem Provokateur verfallen". This can be translated simply as: "Why so many people fall for a trouble maker/rabble rouser/agitator/somebody who fishes for a reaction". (I couldn't find a 1:1 English translation for the word "Provokateur".) But what is really interesting is the verb "verfallen". It can indeed be translated as "to fall for", but it has strong overtones of "to get addicted to" or "to become a slave of". It used to be used in a sexual sense as well, but has become somewhat archaic. To use it in this context insinuates an extracerebral reaction from those who are supporting Sarrazin. They don't see his points, they don't support him because they have come to see that he is right, they have become addicted to him, or his slaves.

Talk about demagoguery.

The Yahoo/AFP article then says that the support for Sarrazin raises fears that a charismatic right-wing populist in Germany, like Geert Wilders in Holland, might win political support on a large scale. I have said before that Sarrazin has carefully distanced himself from Geert Wilders (whether that was a good thing to do or not is a different question) and has the charisma of a floor vase, so there goes the "populist". Part of this is that, different from Wilders, Sarrazin is entirely void of any vanity. He is one of the leading economists of his generation, not a politician, although he used to hold a public office. To insinuate that he might set up his own party and thus evoke fear of "right wing extremism" is not just disingenuous, it is demagoguery of the vilest sort.

One last point: Sarrazin is not "right wing" by any definition. If anything, he is a somehow surviving fossil of the European Socialdemocratic "Old Left", law-abiding revisionists with a strong law and order strain. Eugenics were openly discussed in Germany among Social Democrats pre-1933, but to no practical avail, notabene because of the resistance by the conservative bourgeois powers, men who are considered now "right wing extremists". Of course, nobody of the readers of this blog will know all those long-dead (many of them prematurely because of REAL "right wing extremist" action) old Germans, but maybe some remember Tommy Douglas, another one of that extinct breed.

"Right wing extremism" has nothing do do with it, but it sounds good, pushes the right (or rather: left) buttons and keeps the people where they belong: Anxious, frightened, insecure and addicted to and slaves of the debased left wing ideology as preached by, for example, DER SPIEGEL.

The JPost Agrees with Us

Benjamin Weinthal in today's Jpost:

BERLIN – “Everyone’s against Sarrazin!” was the headline that Bild,Germany’s largest daily newspaper, chose for its Tuesday issue. Deutsche Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin has sharply criticized both German Muslims for failing to embrace integration and Islam for its tendency to lead to terror.

Sarrazin, 65, a former Social Democratic finance commissioner for Berlin state (2002- 2009), has become, according to some observers, the subject of a feeding frenzy by the German media and political establishment, which is turning an unconventional thinker into a pariah.

“What did he say that was so sensational? You can look up all the facts. You can see – Germany supposedly loves people who think outside the box. [Eh? What?] But Germans don’t trust non-conformist opinions. That’s why this witch-hunt is happening,” the well-known German-Jewish journalist Henryk M. Broder said.

While Turkish and Islamic organizations have accused Sarrazin of racism and damaging Germany’s reputation abroad, the prominent German- Turkish sociologist and best-selling author Necla Kelek, who has defended Sarrazin, introduced him at a Berlin press conference on Monday attended by roughly 300 journalists, a number normally reserved for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s infrequent press appearances.

Kelek said Sarrazin addressed “bitter truths” in his new book and the chattering classes have judged it without reading it.

[...]

Regarding Islam, Sarrazin said, “No other religion in Europe makes so many demands. No immigrant group other than Muslims is so strongly connected with claims on the welfare state and crime. No group emphasizes their differences so strongly in public, especially through women’s clothing. In no other religion is the transition to violence, dictatorship and terrorism so fluid.”

While Sarrazin has tapped into a raw nerve among the politically and socially correct elites of Germany, which roundly slammed him for his language, his critique of Muslims and his right to articulate his views enjoy widespread support within mainstream German society. Polls have revealed extraordinary levels of approval for Sarrazin, ranging from 85 percent to 95% of those questioned.

The first edition of his 460- page book (25,000 copies) promptly sold out, and a second edition of 15,000 was quickly purchased, prompting a third edition (70,000) and a fourth (80,000) to be commissioned.

CNN Turkey said on its news site that “The Netherlands has their Gert Wilders. Germany has its Thilo Sarrazin.” Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom in his country, has waged a campaign against political Islam in the Netherlands. The Sarrazin debate had dominated the Turkish press.

The furor associated with Sarrazin’s book has led to a bizarre wave of anti-intellectual hysteria, triggering leading German politicians and journalists to trash Germany Abolishes Itself without having read it. A bookstore in Hildesheim, 30 km. southeast of Hanover, announced the cancellation of Sarrazin’s first public reading on Thursday due to “security concerns” in connection with a group called “Alliance against the Right.”

The Alliance has urged on a poster that Sarrazin be kidnapped.

Arno Widmann, a cultural editor for the Frankfurter Rundschau daily, whose writings are considered to be anti-Israeli by some, went so far as to call for the prosecutor’s office to indict Sarrazin for inciting hatred.

[...]

While the discussion about a shared genetic makeup among Jews was reported on in June in The New York Times and Jewish newspapers, Germans react in a Pavlovian way to genetic theories, because the Nazis employed biological racial theories to dehumanize Jews and other groups. All of this helps to explain the hysterical attacks on Sarrazin’s references to Jewish genetics.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle went so far as to term Sarrazin’s comments “anti-Semitic and racist.”

Back in 2002, Westerwelle could not bring himself to rope in Jürgen Möllemann’s (then a top Free Democratic Party politician) mass-mailing of election flyers bashing prime minister Ariel Sharon. Möllemann’s campaign strategy was widely viewed as the first public use of anti-Semitism to win over voters since the Hitler movement.

Leading members of the FDP, including Westerwelle and Development Minister Dirk Niebel, have refused to recognize the outbreak of Israel-hatred within the FDP as modern anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, Sarrazin further clarified his comment and said, “A statement I made in an interview on August 29, 2010, caused irritation and misunderstanding that I regret. When I said that ‘all Jews share a particular gene,’ I did not express myself with sufficient precision.”

Does that make Sarrazin an anti-Semite? Broder, the Spiegel newsweekly commentator, offered what might very well be the most cogent explanation for Sarrazin’s statements about Jews.

“And there’s a second trick that’s being used now: he’s being accused of anti-Semitism. If you could accuse him of anything, it’s philo-Semitism, because he wrongly thinks Jews are more intelligent than others,” Broder said.

He added, “But of course, behind the anti-Semitism accusation you can really go after the man, because anti-Semitism of course is no longer acceptable in Germany, and rightly so. There is no substantive debate here at all – the issue is that a nation gets up, as it were, they all agree and they take it all out on a scapegoat who they’d like to send into the desert. It’s very disturbing.”

Sarrazin has acknowledged that he used emotionally charged language to jolt Germans out of a dogmatic slumber about their country’s failed integration policies toward Muslims. His rhetoric is at times prone to clumsy generalizations and sweeping provocations. The efforts to silence him and prevent a debate about his book seem to prove his thesis correct. A closing of the German mind does not help advance the discussion about the dangers of German Islamism and failed assimilation programs.

Well, what can I say but: a very good summary of our entry from one day ago.

By the way, the comparison of the dour, dry, understated Thilo Sarrazin with the much younger, flamboyant and charismatic Geert Wilders is totally inapproriate. Sarrazin didn't waste any time, too, to distance himself, in typical insular German thinking, from Wilders, which shows that even he hasn't quite twigged what REALLY is as stake and that it's not about Germany only.

The New Decalogue

Commandment 1 - 10: "Thou Shalt Not Hurt Muslims" ... and specifically not with the truth.

A leading member of Germany’s federal bank (Bundesbank) and former finance minister for Berlin, has caused "outrage" by speaking the truth.

Thilo Sarrazin (65) holds a doctorate of economics from Bonn University, in 1975, he began working in the Federal Ministry of Finance, until 1981 he served as Head of Unit in the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, 1981 he returned to the Federal Ministry of Finance. From October 1981 he served as bureau chief and was a close collaborator of then Federal Finance Minister Hans Matthöfer and his successor Manfred Lahnstein. Even after the end of the socialdemocratic-liberal coalition in October 1982, Sarrazin remained in the Finance Ministry, where he became director of several units, including (from 1989 to 1990) the "Innerdeutsche Beziehungen" (inner-German relationships) unit, from where the German monetary, economic and social union was kicked off. From 1990 to 1991 Sarrazin worked for the Treuhand. Then he was up to 1997 State Secretary in the Ministry of Finance in Rhineland-Palatinate. Subsequently, he was chief executive of TLG Immobilien, a Treuhand successor, before he became finance minister in Berlin. He is still a member of the Social Democrats (SPD).

A heavyweight by any other name.

Now he has written a book titled "Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen" -- "Germany Does away/Abolishes Itself: How we Jeopardize Our Country". His concern is that immigrants who do not integrate are undermining German identity.

The thrust of the book is particularly aimed at -- who would have thought so -- Muslims. Sarrazin points out that only 3% of men of Turkish origin and only 8% of women of Turkish origin marry Germans. This compares badly with other groups, he says. He says that in Berlin 20% of all acts of violence are carried out by only 1,000 Turkish and Arab youths; a population group that makes up only 0.03% of the actual population in Berlin.

"I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and forefathers to be in broad swathes Muslim, where Turkish and Arabic is widely spoken, where women wear headscarves and where the daily rhythm of life is set by the call of the muezzin", Sarrazin wrote in an extract published in Der Spiegel on August 22.

He says of Islam that "with no other religion is there such a fluid connection between violence, dictatorship and terrorism as there is with Islam". He says "boys are taught an exaggerated idea of the readiness to be violent... for the sake of honour you must take the role all the more seriously the less successful you are in the school system". He says that Muslim immigrants are "unwilling or incapable of integrating into Western society". He says that Germany is on the road to ruin because of the influx of immigrants from the Middle East which would overwhelm the indigenous population and create a nation of ‘dunces’. He says that in particular Muslims are failing to integrate. He says that this has been going on virtually since the war since when the birthrate of native Germans has been steadily falling. He says that the result has been a "dramatic fall" in literacy and numeracy. He says, too, that "Germany is becoming more stupid".

All that is true.

The reactions are stunning, but not amazing.

Kenan Kolat, a leading member of the Turkish community, who thinks that the Turkish genocide of the Armenians ought not to be taught in schools becaus this would put "psychological pressure" on Turkish pupils and will endanger "national peace" (sic!), and who, notabene, prefers the word "participation" to "integration", labelled Sarrazin's stance "pure racism" and called on the Bundesbank to sack him. "This man is trying to reduce the problem (of integration) to the ethnic origin of people and is then vilifying them on that basis". Well on what else? We don't have major problems with other immigrants.

The Central Council of Muslims (shrewdly named after the "Central Council of Jews" to give it credibility it doesn't possess) called him "the embodiment of an ugly German" and its speaker Aiman Mazyek "a Nazi in pinstripes", something of which nobody would accuse Mr. Mazyek (below left).

The board of the Muslim Central Council: Aiman Mazyek, Dr. Ayyub Axel Köhler (German convert), Maryam Brigitte Weiß (German convert), Burhanettin Dag, Yakup Tufan.

Siemens boss Peter Loescher (not in this picture -- yet and just), stated with refreshing honesty that Sarrazin's comments "are damaging the international reputation of Germany as a business location". Yes, Germans really get that democracy and free speech thingy. It must be in their genes.

But it gets better. In a newspaper interview about his book Sarrazin said that "all Jews share a gene", which accounts for their higher intelligence. While this true as well, to Germans, that's even a bigger howler than accusing Muslims not to integrate. What a wonderful opportunity to show "how much we have learned from our past". The mob devours Sarrazin. Calling for the burning of his book will be the logical next step.

German’s Jewish community reacted with scorn and horror and accused Sarrazin of -- you've guessed it -- antisemitism and of calling for racial profiling. "Whoever tries to define Jews by their genetic make up succumbs to racism", so Stephan Kramer, secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and a convert to Judaism from the people of perpetrators. Kramer's general record gives reason for the question whether he was planted as an agent provocateur to give Jews a bad name.

Germany’s openly homosexual Vice-(pun intended)-Chancellor and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle who is, somewhat understandibly, wildly into politically correct causes, accused the banker of hate speech and, given his intellectual capacities, I wonder how long it took him to come up with something quite that original. He thinks, too, that remarks that feed racism or even (sic!) antisemitism have no place in our political discourse. And all that in an interview with the smutty weekly "Bild am Sonntag", no less.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned Sarrazin for making "stupid and pointless" statements. His book, she said, isn't "helpful", as if her job was to issue book reviews and even before the book was on the market. She said, too, that the Bundesbank should discuss dismissing him, which is none of her business either. A spokesman for the Bundesbank said in an e-mail statement, that the book is Sarrazin’s "private affair" and the opinions he expresses are unrelated to his work, something Merkel, who holds a doctorate in physics, is obviously too dumb to twig.

Meanwhile, the assorted Chamber of Horrors exhibits crawled out from under their stones. Professor Wolfgang Benz, a discredited but nonetheless, or rather therefore, terrifically successful "antisemitism researcher", called Sarrazin's theses -- surely you've guessed this as well -- racist and himself a squaller, lout and somebody who caters for the bowel-movements of the social majority. Well yes. Now we know at least what the "antisemitism researcher" thinks of democracy. Likewise, ex-bishopette Margot "Boozebitch" Kässmann, who is treated by the public and the media as if she had (almost) died for our sins and not driven her official car pissed as a newt through a German city, showed even more powerful creativity by calling Sarrazin "dehumanizing". Burp!

Media personality Michel Friedman who had fallen even deeper than fun-loving boozette Kässmann through an affair involving cocain usage and forced prostitutes from Eastern Europe, has as well long ago made a triumphant comeback because German television, shallow and whorish as it is, allowed it. Friedman, now heavily married and a family man, obviously needed, after his vocal condemnation of Pope Benedict in 2009, another whipping boy to attract what he loves most: attention. "We need bridge builders in Germany, not hate preachers." Well, yes, whatever.

Aygül Özkan, that insufferable simpering fool they made "minister for integration" in the state of Lower Saxony (that's the one who had nothing better to do than to discuss the removal of crucifixes from classrooms before she was even sworn in, to later fail with an attempt at curbing the freedom of the press) accused Thilo Sarrazin, and, too, in smutty "Bild am Sonntag", of "malice" and to "hurt migrants". While, say, pedophilia has become a venial sin as long as it's not a Catholic priest who practises it (and in case of Muslims it's not a sin at all), "Thou shalt not hurt Muslims" -- and specifically not with the truth -- has become the only commandment of importance.

All of them are, of course, not populist, only Thilo Sarrazin is that.

I have limited this entry for obvious reasons more or less to people I have covered before in this blog. It is impossible to even begin to give an impression of what is really going on, of the veritable witch hunt that is in full fly in Germany right now. A man who is, to all intents and purposes, a heavyweight and qualified by training and professional experience to speak expertly on many issues, is marginalized, ridiculed, dismissed by people who are not worth to clean his office lavatory. It is spooky, eerie, surreal. An entire people seems to have become mad. Utterly, stark, barking, clinically insane. An entire people hunts down a man who dares to speak the truth, a people who are put under pressure and threats by Muslims, threats which increase in severeness and frequency on a daily basis, a people that is bled white financially and emotionally by ever increasing strident demands and greed for power of a group of hostile aliens, and what is the worst: they are really and truly believing that they are being noble and doing the right thing.

And now, I think, the question is in order whether I have read Sarrazin's book myself. No I haven't. This is not a book review, but a report of the mood in Germany. Why didn't I read it? Simple! I tried to get one yesterday, the day after publication. When I looked at Amazon, it was sold out, all four editions. When I called the local bookshop, I got the same answer. All four editions means 180,000 copies. More to come in two weeks. I guess this, at least, is good news.

José María Aznar: If Israel goes down, we all go down

If Israel goes down, we all go down.

Anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West´s best ally in a turbulent region.

For far too long now it has been unfashionable in Europe to speak up for Israel. In the wake of the recent incident on board a ship full of anti-Israeli activists in the Mediterranean, it is hard to think of a more unpopular cause to champion.

In an ideal world, the assault by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara would not have ended up with nine dead and a score wounded. In an ideal world, the soldiers would have been peacefully welcomed on to the ship. In an ideal world, no state, let alone a recent ally of Israel such as Turkey, would have sponsored and organised a flotilla whose sole purpose was to create an impossible situation for Israel: making it choose between giving up its security policy and the naval blockade, or risking the wrath of the world.
...
Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined.

If Israel goes down, we all go down. By José María Aznar, The Times /
Diario de América / America´s Daily, June 17, 2010


Israël : s´il tombe, nous tous tomberons

La colère à propos de Gaza est une diversion. Nous ne pouvons pas oublier qu´Israël est le meilleur allié de l´Occident dans une région turbulente.

Cela fait trop longtemps maintenant qu´il n´est plus "à la mode" de défendre Israël. A la suite du récent incident de la flottille remplie d´activistes anti-israéliens en Méditerranée, il est difficile de trouver une cause aussi impopulaire à défendre.

Dans un monde idéal, l´assaut des commandos israéliens sur le Mavi Marmara ne se serait pas terminé par 9 morts et des douzaines de blessés. Dans un monde idéal, les soldats auraient été accueillis paisiblement à bord. Dans un monde idéal, aucun état, notamment un allié récent d´Israël comme la Turquie, n´aurait promu et organisé une flottille dont le seul but était de créer une situation impossible pour Israël, c´est-à-dire choisir entre l´abandon de sa politique de sécurité et le blocus naval, ou risquer la colère du monde.

Dans nos relations avec Israël, il faut dissiper les brumes rousses de la colère qui trop souvent brouillent notre jugement. Une approche équilibrée et raisonnable devrait inclure les réalités suivantes.
...
Israël est une partie essentielle de l´Occident. L´Occident est ce qu´il est grâce à ses racines judéo-chrétiennes. Si l´élément juif de ces racines est déterré et Israël perdu, alors nous sommes perdus aussi. Que cela nous plaise ou non, nos destins sont inextricablement liés.

Il faut soutenir Israël car s´il tombe, nous tous, nous tomberons. Par José María Aznar, ex 1er ministre d´Espagne
The Times - Londres 17/06/10. Traduction Albert Soued


Israel no es el problema, somos nosotros

La versión original en español del artículo del ex-presidente del gobierno español, José María Aznar, que publicaron en inglés en el Times de Londres:

"En los años 50 y 60 la izquierda europea andaba encandilada con Israel, en donde veían la realización práctica de un socialismo de rostro humano, pero desde que Israel recurrió a las armas para defenderse de sus vecinos, esa izquierda que era y sigue siendo profundamente pacifista, renegó de Israel y pasó a condenarlo por hacer lo que cualquier nación en guerra y atacada haría: defenderse por todos sus medios".
...
Israel no es el problema, el problema es no reconocer a los verdaderos enemigos de la libertad y la prosperidad, a los enemigos de Occidente

Israel no es el problema, somos nosotros. Por José María Aznar.
Martha Colmenares, 18 de junio de 2010


Als Israël ten onder gaat, gaan we allemaal ten onder

Al weer veel te lang nu is het in Europa niet "populair" geweest om voor Israël op te komen. In de nasleep van het recente incident in de Middellandse Zee aan boord van een schip vol anti-Israëlische activisten, is het lastig een nog impopulairdere kwestie voor de geest te halen om de schouders onder te zetten.
...
Israël is een fundamenteel onderdeel van het Westen. Het Westen is wat het is dankzij haar joods-christelijke wortels. Als het joodse element van die wortels wordt omgespit en Israël verloren is, dan zijn wij ook verloren. Of we het nu leuk vinden of niet: ons lot is onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden.

Als Israël ten onder gaat, gaan we allemaal ten onder. Door José María Aznar,
Het Vrije Volk, 18 Juni 2010


Wenn Israel untergeht, gehen wir alle unter

Aznar Israel -- No hit in German
Aznar Israel untergeht -- No hit

---

Taken from Gudrun Eussner's website and adapted for this blog.

You Go Geert!

Today, elections for the town- and city councils are held in Holland.

The politically correct hyaenae are all in a flutter.

This is the result of a Google News search for "Wilders Rechtspopulist". Rechtspopulist can be translated as "right wing populist", but I have a hunch that the latter has in English more the ring of "popular", "common touch" or "grassroots". In German, it's exclusively used to describe a demagogue.

Which is, of course, fatuous, because a demagogue tells people what they WANT TO hear, whereas Wilders tells people what they DO NOT want to hear.

You will recognise some terms, I think. "Rechts" is the ever-recurring "right wing". Germans won't recognise a liberal because they don't understand the concept. They long to be anally penetrated by totalitarism, and, after Nazism and Communism, Islam is just the option. 20 years of a totalitarism-free Germany is more than enough! In that spirit the term "Islamhasser" ought to be seen, which means, not too surprisingly, "Islam hater", and that is about the worst thing one can call a politician here.

Which tells, of course, nothing about Wilders but all about the German mainstream.

Islam is Peace and Mercy

Last year in Afgoye, Somalia:




Those pictures have been taken by the photographer Farah Abdi Warsameh and were awarded the World Press Photo Award 2010 (2nd Prize in the General News category).

The Swiss magazine Blick prints three of the four pictures and asks him about his "experience". A group named "Hizb Al-Islam" invited him to the scene without telling him what would happen. "All the blood, the cries, my own helplessness - all those impressions are deeply ingrained in my brain. I will never forget them." Abdi Warsameh hopes to inform about what is going on in his country -- a truly courageous thing to do. Will people be interested? I doubt it. Basically, this is not new.

Notabene that in the comment section of the Blick article America is compared to, or rather equated with, Somalia. Clearly, Europeans deserve what they are getting.

---

At the World Press Photo website all four pictures can be viewed in high resolution, which I recommend specifically for those who think that "some Sharia" in the West wouldn't be all bad.

This is incredible! Must watch!

An Arab tells what is wrong about the Arabs!

Memri TV is down, so I've uploaded it.

Algerian author Anwar Malek on Al-Jazeera TV, Quatar, on March 3, 2009.

Edited to add:
I cross-posted this at IBA. Somewhat naturally, Wafa Sultan was mentioned. For me, the old anti-feminist diehard, it's not amazing that Wafa Sultan made (justifiedly so) headlines and this man remained (unjustifiedly) largely unrecognized.

Another thing Pastorius brought up:

The distinct difference between this guy and Wafa is that Wafa defended the Jews. This guy buys into the Palestinians as oppressed narrative. That will probably spare him the death threats.

And...

...it would be unreasonable for him to buy into the Palestinian story given his otherwise reasonable take on the Arab world.

He recognizes the inherent problems, so why would he not recognize that in the Palestinian territories they don't even keep their streets nice, they don't plant trees, they don't keep businesses going, etc. (Particularly in Gaza, from what I understand.) So, why would he observe that and think, well, in that case it's not the Arab's fault but the Jews fault.

I wonder what will follow. There is remarkable little about Anwar Malek in the Internet and even less in the blogosphere.

Another Arm on the Octopus of Woman's Insanity

At The Evil Style Queen, commenter Carl makes an excellent point:

Do you think Stockholm Syndrome really exists as most people know it?

When the women of the Norrmalmstorg robbery behaved so insanely during and after the incident it was too big and too ridiculous an issue to just brush under the carpet. So someone had to come up with an explanation and it couldn't sound like some update of Victorian "hysteria" (i.e. merely point out that all sufferers were female!) or they would have been ignored.

But really, other than the time scale, how is it any different to women staying with abusive partners or even the slow surrender to the barbarians at the gates?

How many adult men have suffered from Stockholm syndrome vs adult women. On the other side how many captive women have pulled off an "Hawaiian good luck sign"?

I think that eventually Stockholm syndrome will be viewed as just another arm on the octopus of woman's insanity.

In other words, "Stockholm syndrome" isn't an excuse for women like this but just the politically correct way of saying everything you did about her. A way to state the truth without admitting the truth.

The links Carl provided (see here and here) explain the "Hawaiian good luck sign" and reveal how MEN react under the pressure of kidnapping as shown by the crew members of USS Pueblo:

USS Pueblo was a Navy intelligence ship which was captured by North Korea in January 1968. For the next 11 months, Commander Bucher and his crew were held as POWs by the North Koreans, and were starved and tortured during their captivity. The treatment became even harsher when the North Koreans finally understood that crewmen were giving them "the finger" in staged propaganda photos, which they had explained as a "Hawaiian good luck sign". The men mocked their captors, too, by the wording of extorted confessions. As none of the North Koreans spoke English well enough to write such a confession himself, they were reduced to just verifying the meaning of the words, but failed to catch the puns and popular cultural hints: "We paean [pee on] the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung". And: "We, as conscientious human beings who were cast upon the rocks and shoals of immorality by the tidal waves of Washington’s naughty policies know that neither the frequency nor the distances of these transgressions into the territorial waters of this sovereign peace-loving nation matter because penetration however slight is sufficient to complete the act," "Rocks and Shoals" being Navy jargon for the Uniform Code of Military Justice and "penetration however slight" the legal definition of rape.)


What conclusion can we draw from this? I have discussed earlier at this blog women who damage or even kill their own children to get attention:

If those perpetrators hadn't been female they would have been labelled simply evil. As they are, there is a long name now for it: Münchhausen by proxy syndrome.

And the Stockholm syndrome sufferers, we can safely assume, hysterical.

Maybe the answer to the question why the same women who refuse to accept good, caring men, but rather choose to vilify and marginalize them, succumb so easily to evil and alien forces, is really, as Carl suggests, insanity.

I guess, should another USS Pueblo incident happen today, the brave men, once home again, would have to face a trial for mocking the great plight and heroic efforts of the feminist movement.

A Fission Fungus' Account from Cologne...

Or: Nazis don't go where they are not welcome

UPDATE Wednesday, May 13:

PI is backpedalling. In an entry headed "The Congress - An Alternative Review", they offer a more nuanced account of the events at Cologne. And before I get a dressing-down from a great height by the mighty Baron Bodissey or some other frightfully important Internet-opinion-maker, I better say that I am not privy to all the private correspondence that is bound to have passed back and forth before this entry was published and that my advice to myself is not to jump to conclusions and just translate some brief excerpts from it.

This is about some invited speakers and their statement, that said a lot about Überfremdung and little of criticism of Islam. [We thematized that phenomenon here.]

About Petra Edelmannova, chairman of Narodni Strana ([Czech] National Party) which clocked up a whopping 0.17% at the last elections, who talked in her speech a lot about democracy and sacred duty to resist, we learn that she intends to push for a „final solution in the gipsy question“.

... Apart from that [so Edelmannova] there wasn't any genocide and the 326 victims [at a certain camp], mostly children, were responsible for their own death because of lack of hygiene.

[...]

Of course, the organizers knew all this, they had even been made aware of it by PI. That Edelmannova was graced with a speech at the main rally nevertheless is amazing only if one refuses to recognize the history of Pro Köln. "Gypsies" are targets of their hatred since they were up to their tricks as "Deutsche Liga für Volk und Heimat"...

PI-reader Hufeland writes:

I found it rather disgusting how Beisicht at the rally applauded every sentence of the right-wing extremist Czech Edelmannove (…) With such allies one can not win over voters with traditional conservative vaues...

[...]

Somebody like Wilders from Holland knows why he isn't playing court jester for Beisicht and his cronies, (…)

[...]

Another guest of honour of the congress, Robert Spieler, chairman of the French Nouvelle Droite Populaire, published on August 28, 2007 an enthusiastic article justifying the Iranian activities to build an atomic bomb, which will be, in contrast to the American ones at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only be used for determent purposes... In his speech he totally missed the topic in that he decried "political banks" and capitalism. [We thematized the fact that those valiant "conservatives" have nothing against Islam as such here as well.]

Later in the article, they quote the statement of Norbert Gehrig, which originally triggered off this entry.

And now I can only hope that you-know-who-you-are will read this, as he read the original entry, and go again crying at you-know-whom-I-mean's bosom, telling that he hasn't seen any (but ANY!) trace of a Nazi-presence so that you-know-whom-I-mean can then pass it on to me again, and will, again, get no reply from me in that matter.

But hey I've changed my mind! You-know-who-you-are WILL get one, here and now and on my terms: You say: "I have not seen red-white-black flags (the flag of Imperial Germany) at the rally." So what? Norbert Gehrig didn't say A THING about black-white-red FLAGS, he mentioned flag stickers (pin stickers or embroidery) on basecaps. You CAN read? And yes, Imperial Germany had black-white-red flags. Let's say, for argument's sake (And WOW! DO I love this argument!) that there HAVE been people carrying flags of Imperial Germany. By your reasoning they would be innocent, oldfashioned, conservative monarchists, right? By all let this be heard: Should people carry Imperial German (i.e. black-white-red) flags at rallies, they will be invariably, always, without exception and per definitionem ... what? Yes, you've got it: Nazis! Because Nazis always do that. They do that first to yank the state's chain because the Imperial flags are legal, and second because it gives them the oportunity to gather under something that looks as closely as legally possible like a Nazi flag.

Oh! You didn't know that? One mighty opinion maker more shooting his mouth off without knowing A THING? So what else is new? I, for one, have at least learned one thing during this entire sordid affair: Namely that the importance of a blog has nothing (but NOTHING!) to do with the intellectual capacity behind it, and when I have finished lighting a candle at the altar of Sancta Simplicitas I will come back and tell you what I REALLY think.

Seems somebody has taken the razor away from the ape for the time being. But I guess it's still on the loose.

Start of the original article:

Here is a comment by one of the regular commenters at the German blog Politically Incorrect (see my sidebar) on PI's account of the Pro-Köln rally:

#236 Norbert Gehrig (09. Mai 2009 22:03)

Also ich war wohl auf einer anderen Demo in Köln.

Ich lese hier Dinge die ich vollkommen anders erlebt habe..

Schon auf dem Bahnhof in Leverkusen wurden wir Frankfurter von der Front National aufgefordert,Abstand zu halten. Grund : Unser Fahnen- Israel Fahnen.

Auch die Polizei hatte wohl Probleme die Situation einzuordnen und bildete zeitweise eine Schutzkette vor uns und hinter uns. Ich muss die Polizei für Ihr verhalten loben. Umsichtig und vorausschauend. Sie verstanden zwar nicht warum wir da waren (wir im Laufe der Veranstaltung auch immer weniger), wären aber am Schluss der Veranstaltung bereit gewesen, uns separat auszuschleussen. Zu der Zeit war unser Gruppe über 20 Mann stark.

Ich schreibe nicht weiter. Nein. Ich hatte die Augen offen. Sind keinem die vielen Jugendlichen mit den Rot Weis Schwarzen Fahnenstickern auf den Baseballmützen aufgefallen, die Aufdrucke auf den T-shirts?

Macht die Augen auf Leute. Islamkritiker kommen aus den verschiedensten Schichten. Aber National-Sozialisten und ihre Nachfolger zählen nicht dazu. Die NS Elite war Anhänger der Islamfaschisten, der Großmufti von Jerusalem lebte bis 45 in Berlin.

Und Nazis gehen nicht dahin, wo sie nicht willkommen sind.

Front National war laut einer Pro Köln Aktivistin eingeladen. Sie forderte mich auf, nicht als “Spaltpilz” zu wirken.

Wer schwarz weiß rote Farben trägt, vertritt keine demokratische Vereinigung.

Weder mit National- Sozialisten Nachfolgern, noch mit ihren angeblichen Gegnern der Antifa, mit der sie die Ideologie teilen, sich nur nicht über den Weg einig sind, werde ich gemeinsam arbeiten.

Schwarz Rot Gold ist die Farbe der Republik.

Toll war das Zusammentreffen mit der Christlichen Gruppe aus Köln. Aber wir standen gemeinsam zwischen den Fronten.

Pro Köln hat ein gutes Stück Arbeit vor sich. Durch Taten beweisen, dass sie nichts mit diesen Leuten zu tun haben. Durch Taten..

norbert.gehrig@yahoo.de

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I must have been at a different rally in Cologne.

What I am reading here is totally different from what I have experienced.

At the railway station in Leverkusen [a nearby town] already, our group from Frankfurt were asked by Front National to keep away from them. Reason : Our Israel banners.

The police, too, must have had difficulties to draw the correct conclusions and formed from time to time a chain to shield us. Kudos to the police, they acted diligently and far-seeing. Although they didn't understand why we were there (a view we started to share increasingly as the rally went on), they were willing to lead us safely from the scene after the rally was over ...

... Have none of you noticed the many young people with the black, white and red banner-stickers on their basecaps? The imprints on their t-shirts?

Keep your eyes open, folks! Islam critics come from all walks of life, but National-Socialists and their successors are not among them. The NS-elite followed the Islam-fascists, the grand mufti of Jerusalem used to live in Berlin until 1945.

And Nazis don't go where they are not welcome.

Front National was, according to a Pro Köln activist, invited. She asked me not to be a "fission fungus" [i.e. divisive].

Those who wear black, white and red colours do not stand for democracy.

I will work with neither, National-Socialist successors nor their alleged enemies, the Antifa, with whom they share the ideology and just can't agree on a mutual path.

Black red and gold are the colours of the Rebublic.

Meeting the Christian group from Cologne was just great. But we were caught together between two fronts.

Pro Köln has a lot of work to do. They'll have to prove by their deeds that they have nothing to do with those people. By their deeds.

And now Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer can go and email Norbert Gehrig that he must have seen things that only exist in Charles Whatshisname's imagination and that they only cancelled their attendance because Charles Whatshisname might have drowned their cyber rubber duckie had they attended, same Charles can tell Norbert Gehrig that it was MUCH worse because he says so and that he (N.G.) is a "Euro fascist" for attending at all. No doubt, all the other valiant and eminently knowledgeable experts of Germany, German culture, history and society and the German political scene on the strength of Robert Shaw's performance in "Battle of the Bulge", from B, like Baron Boddissey, to B, like Brussels Journal, can, and hopefully will, enlighten Norbert Gehrig as well.

And all that while we are scared witless about what might happen to us.

Even THEY have had enough!

"Sheer Recklessness"

Leonard Fein makes mincemeat of Mearsheimer & Walt’s "The Israel Lobby" at the Americans for Peace Now blog.

Hat-tip: Gudrun Eussner!

We’ll do God, and you can do Baal!

I came across the following through the help of an excellent new blog-find, WI Catholic Musings. The full article appeared at The Jewish Press, who are, as they are putting it themselves, commenting from "from a centrist or Modern Orthodox perspective".

The Pope's Got A Point
By: Rabbi Yerachmiel Seplowitz

The pope has generated a bit of controversy.

First, he permitted congregations to go back to the old custom of praying in Latin. (More about that later.) Then he announced that only the Catholic Church qualifies as a real church. Protestants, as far as the pope is concerned, simply don’t make the grade!

And with that, over 40 years of ecumenical dialogue go down the tubes. Protestant leaders are offended. The churches whose founders long ago broke away from the Catholic Church feel they are considered less-than-Christian by an institution they previously rejected as “too Christian.”

No doubt, in short order, a multitude of Jewish leaders will express their own concerns over the pontiff’s lack of tolerance for those whose beliefs are different from his own. After all, a spirit of cooperation fostered by the Second Vatican Council back in 1965 has allowed people of diverse faiths to share their beliefs in mutual respect. Why, we’ve even witnessed the intriguing phenomenon of cardinals, in full “uniform,” visiting rabbinical students to observe the study of Talmud. How, many are asking, could the pope jeopardize this détente with his bigoted condemnation of non-Catholics?

I have one thing to say to the pope: “Hear! Hear!” What do his critics want from the man? He’s got a religion to run!

I, for one, am not at all put off by the fact that the leader of another religion sees that religion as primary. If he thinks his religion is right, he obviously thinks mine is wrong.

I’ve always found it curious that people of different religions get together in a spirit of harmony to share their common faiths. By definition, these people should have strong opposition to the beliefs of their “colleagues” at the table. The mode of prayer of one group should be an affront to the other group. Yet, for some reason it isn’t. Why is that?

I suspect the reason many representatives of diverse religious groups find it easy to pray together is that they don’t really believe very strongly in the uniqueness of their own beliefs.

If my religion is okay and your religion is okay, we can mix and match and share with mutual respect and admiration. Can you envision Elijah the Prophet conducting an ecumenical service on Mount Carmel? “Oh, would you like to have a joint prayer meeting? Great! We’ll do God, and you can do Baal!” I don’t think so!

What the pope is saying – and I agree 100 percent – is that there are irreconcilable differences, and we can’t pretend those differences don’t exist.

Christians believe we are all sinners and that there is only one way to achieve salvation. It starts with believing that the Messiah arrived about 2,000 years ago. I obviously don’t believe that premise to be correct. I can’t. Such a belief is, based upon the teachings of the Torah, theologically indefensible.

If you believe in something, if you really believe in something, you need to have the courage of your convictions and stand up for what you believe. I can respect the pope for making an unambiguous statement of what he believes.

We need to respect all people. All of us are created in God’s image. This does not mean, however, that we have to respect their opinions. Nor does it mean that we should go around trashing the beliefs of other people. What it means is that we don’t need to play games of “I’m okay, your okay” with beliefs we find unacceptable.

The Latin Mass that was dropped many years ago included a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. Now that the Latin Mass is once again acceptable to Catholics, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations has written to the Vatican and expressed “profound concern … that the authorization may have allowed the return of this prayer.” They have requested confirmation that the conversion prayer will not be reintroduced.

I ask you, does this make sense? Where do we Jews get off making demands of Catholics that they only say prayers that meet with our approval?

Next week is Tisha B’Av. Have we forgotten that we are living in exile? The audacity of Jews dictating to Christians how they should pray is simply mind-boggling.

First off, the request implies that we can influence Catholic theology. Face it: Christians believe they are right and we are wrong. They think we should convert, and that attitude will not change until Moshiach comes.

And speaking of Moshiach, if we are going to sit down with the Vatican to negotiate liturgy, should we, l’havdil, offer to take out the second paragraph of Aleinu, in which we pray for the day when gentiles will stop worshipping idols? How about “sheheim mishtachavim” – the line that Christian censors removed from Aleinu, claiming it insulted Christians? Many of us have put it back. Should we allow the Vatican to dictate what we say in our prayers? Or should we, perhaps, do a line-by-line analysis of the Talmud to make sure there is nothing there that people may find offensive?

I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t be talking to Catholic leaders. The pope needs to know, for example, that it is good to encourage his millions of followers to support Israel and that it is bad to hate Jews. There needs to be careful dialogue, but it needs to be a secular, common, needs-based dialogue. We should not be studying Talmud together and we should not be discussing prayer.

A Catholic doctor once came to visit me in my office. Someone had told him what I said in a sermon about the murder of pre-born children, and he determined that he and I were on the same page. He invited me to participate in a symposium on abortion, to be made up of doctors, lawyers, and clergy. He was looking for non-Catholics. “After all,” he reasoned, “we orthodox people have to stick together!”

I declined the invitation.

The rabbi's views are like a fresh breeze cleaning up the minds clogged by relativism and I-am-okay-you-are-okay drivel. Can you believe it! He is not taken aback by the fact that the pope is Catholic! This is a long-overdue slap in the face of all those who insist on their different-, precious- and uniqueness and who are then not content with discerning respect received from a distance, an attitude best defined as leftism, by the way.