Merry Christmas

Moloch political correctness! The Scotsman reports:

Fathers dress like Santa for parenting protest
JOHN INNES

HUNDREDS of protesters for fathers' rights dressed in Father Christmas outfits went on the march yesterday to raise awareness about parenting.

The Fathers 4 Justice campaigners marched through central London calling on the government to amend legislation so that fathers can obtain equal rights to see their children.

The protest group, which was formed a year ago, said yesterday that the government and Margaret Hodge, the children's minister, had failed to reform a flawed family law system.

The group's founder, Matthew O'Connor, 36, said yesterday's protest had begun as their Christmas party but had evolved into a mission to spread the word about fathers' rights.

He said one in four children would not see their fathers this Christmas because of court orders disadvantaging male parents.

He said: "What we are saying to the government and the minister is that they must change the law in this country. We need to support all the ordinary fathers out there. We are not going to let this issue be ignored."

The protesters, some of whom brought along their children, chanted "Two parents are better than one" and "Children need two parents" as they marched through the streets.

Of course this is not an isolated British problem. In Germany in 2002, every other case of the 204,214 divorce cases involved children under the age of 18.

One year after the separation, 50 percent of the fathers don't have any contact anymore with their children and roughly 2.5 mio minors grow up without a father.

22 percent of the mothers deny the child any contact with its father in spite of mutual custody.

Notwithstanding the ubiquitous "Culture of Dismay" and all those sensitive, "caring" people everywhere, the plight of the children and their estranged fathers remains a forgotten cause.

Why is that? What does cause this obvious cross-border problem, which seems to have become an inseparable part of our Western culture? Women portray themselves as the righteous victims struggling to correct male injustices. In fact, in many cases they ARE victims. And a victim can never be a perpetrator, right?

And perpetrators, of course, never victims.

We rather consciously and willingly let our children be hurt, than to admit that victims can indeed be perpetrators and do not deserve unlimited protection, defense, support and affirmative action when they wrong others and that more often than not in fact the latter are the ones deserving of protection and support, something that is obviously unthinkable.

A Torchlight Rally for Every Fart

There it is AGAIN! The German urge to have a torchlight rally for every fart in the true spirit of Hermann Goering:

New German Patriotism: The Road to Berlin Goes Via Baghdad
From Deutsche Welle 05.12.2003

George Bush may have hoped that a new national identity would emerge on the streets of Baghdad following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Instead, the war has helped forge a new kind of patriotism in Berlin.

Yes, Germany, having already undergone a transformation from dictatorship to democracy under American stewardship after World War II, is now being freed from the burdens of the past by the U.S. campaign to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. As strange as it may sound, Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq has made it okay to be German again.

Long averse to displays of patriotism due to the excesses and crimes of the Nazis, flag-waving outside of sporting events -- either real or figuratively -- has been largely taboo for this nation of 82 million. But now many young Germans have found new pride in the country's prominent role along with France and Russia in opposing the war in Iraq.

"I thought "wow" Germany stands for peace. It wasn't always that way, you know," explains the 23-year-old singer from Berlin who goes by the name Mieze. Inspired by recent events, she has written a love song -- not to a person, but to her home country. Only a few years ago, such a move could have quickly ended the career of a promising musician in Germany.

A new Fatherland

But instead of rejecting the Fatherland as left-leaning German youth have done for decades, a brave group of pioneers has begun to embrace a new concept of patriotism rooted in pacifism, tolerance and human rights. And as the idea of a liberal and modern Fatherland spreads, so too are the colors of the German flag -- black, red and gold -- beginning to show up in different aspects of society including fashion and music.

The movement, if it can be called that, has proven to be a boon for Cologne-based fashion designer Eva Gronbach, who for the past couple of years has created collections integrating black, red and gold along with other national symbols such as the German eagle. Far from just tapping into a growing trend, Gronbach's inspiration for the designs come from her own personal reconciliation with her country.

After fleeing Germany to study and work in London and Paris, she eventually began to see her own vision of her country was as outdated as that of many foreigners. The traditionally conservative images of the country did not represent modern Germany's open and tolerant multicultural society, and staid Teutonic stereotypes had nothing in common with the country's hip electronic music scene.

"People may now accuse me of just having a clever marketing strategy, but it's a very personal and very honest thing for me," Gronbach told DW-WORLD.

Turning down a job with Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto in Paris, she returned home to create a collection entitled "Declaration of Love to Germany" with nationally colored items for both men and women.

"I used to find the colors ugly," said Gronbach. "But I thought maybe I could consciously change what they mean to me personally."

Breaking taboos

But breaking the taboo was not easy. She described how terrified she was when she first wore her designs on the street a few years ago. Now, with more and more of her generation rethinking what it means to be German, her designs are appearing not only on stylish people on the street, but also the cover of glossy national magazines.
[...]
Back in Berlin, Mieze's band Mia have chosen to splash black, red and gold across the cover of their latest album and the singer even uses the colors metaphorically in some of her song lyrics to describe how her own relationship to her country has changed over the past year.
[...]
The song also addresses the frequent self-loathing that many young Germans experience growing up in the shadow of the country's Nazi past and how half a century later things may finally be changing: "If someone asks me now where I'm from/I no longer feel sorry for myself/I'll risk something for love/I feel as if I'm ready."

Well, what can one expect from a people that can't be bothered to protect themselves against their own criminals, which is bad enough, but calls that "designing one's privacy laws to prevent an all-knowing totalitarian state from ever emerging again" and thus turns politically correct cowardice into an ethical achievement?

And they can't be just plain silly, fatuous or tasteless like anybody else, no, they've got to call it "new patriotism" and make it ANOTHER great effort of dealing with their murky past. Oh yes, the young generation suffered soooooo heavily because they always had to feel sorry for themselves. But now they are OVER it! AT LAST!

And they really HAVE changed. They are all humanists, progressives, pacifists now! They are "terrified" when somebody wears "patriotic clothes" in public. Seriously. And they teach the world what goodness is all about. And all that with the zealous obsession about responsibility that makes them akin to a convicted child molester who thinks he is specifically qualified for a job as kindergarden teacher (what Wolfgang Pohrt called the "Michel Syndrome") .

"Specifically we as Germans", "We must never let it happen again", this obnoxious way to handle the past really serves as an excuse for every fatuous whim and foible as well as for serious ethical shortcomings. They know now where they are from, they no longer feel sorry for themselves, they risk something for love (whatever that is) and they feel as if they're ready.

For what? Silly question. Making "hip" music and designing execrable clothes, of course (I wonder about the stylish people on the street, surely NOT Germans, are they...?) and selling that as a historic accomplishment.

But let's be fair, knowing we are talking about Germans, it could be MUCH worse, couldn't it?

Having learned "under American stewardship" what evil is, they are now finding fighting evil instead of fighting Evil.

If their past qualifies Germans for anything in particular it's to keep their traps tightly shut.

We just can't be bothered

Is it just me who feels like throwing up?

Web Crime Ignites German Debate on Privacy Rights
Thu Dec 4, 8:28 AM ET
By Mark Trevelyan

WIESBADEN, Germany (Reuters) - Germany is floating the idea of easing its cherished privacy laws, designed in part to banish its Nazi and Communist past, in order to combat rising Internet crime.

The government and the police say new rules are needed so that online connection data -- in other words, who is accessing which Web sites -- is automatically stored in case it is eventually needed as evidence in criminal investigations.

But that idea worries both telecommunications companies and officials charged with data protection, in a country which experienced Nazi and East German communist dictatorship and whose privacy laws were designed to prevent an all-knowing totalitarian state from ever emerging again.

"This goes to the very root of a democratic society," said Alexander Dix, commissioner for data protection in the state of Brandenburg.

"Telecommunications secrecy is very strongly enshrined in our constitution. The Gestapo experience and also the Stasi experience is something which is very present in the public mind here," he told Reuters, referring to the Nazi and East German secret police.

Dix was speaking at a cybercrime conference where Interior Minister Otto Schily this week proposed that online connection data should be stored by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) just as transaction records are held by financial market supervisors.

"It's unacceptable for the law enforcement authorities that connection data which are important for combating IT crime have often already been deleted for data protection reasons by the time the authorities request them," Schily said.

PORNOGRAPHERS AND TERRORISTS

Waldemar Kindler, a senior official in the Bavarian Interior Ministry, said allowing such information to be stored was a fair price to pay for combating crime on the Internet, including recent cases involving cannibalism and suicide forums.

"We want to combat child pornographers and terrorists and we need the necessary prerequisites for that fight. We must not be distracted by idealism and create lawless areas in which the security of the citizen is in danger," Kindler said.

He said ISPs should be obliged to store connection records for 12 months, instead of deleting them shortly after invoicing clients, as they do now.

Police, prosecutors and telecoms providers at the Wiesbaden conference all said the current situation in Germany was a muddle, with contradictions between aspects of the criminal code and telecoms and data protection laws.

"The legal provisions are very contradictory and everyone is suffering, the providers included, because the situation is so complex and difficult to understand," said Thomas Koenigshofen, deputy head of corporate security at Deutsche Telekom.

Storing online connection records would involve huge volumes of data and significant costs. "The state must ensure we are compensated for the costs of collecting data and sharing it with the law enforcement community," he said.

But for data privacy watchdogs, the issues go beyond cost.

"All your preferences, the kind of information you might have downloaded from the Net, the Web sites you have visited -- all that would be registered in a weakly encoded form" if Internet Protocol addresses showing people's viewing habits were retained by the ISPs, said Dix.

"That could easily be decoded to show your political opinions, your preferences. Your lifestyle would really be open to anybody who had access to this data."

It surely is a difficult problem, even ouside the Internet. Data protection in Germany revolves around important concepts of general privacy, human rights and the balance between access to information and privacy concerns. Basically, the German data protection law embodies "informationelles Selbstbestimmungsrecht" the individual's right of self-determination regarding its personal data.

The law states that the processing and use of personal data shall be admissible only if this law or any other rules and regulations permit or lay down this or the individual has consented. But the law may be preceded by the interests of the state. It says that insofar as other Federal rules and regulations are applicable, such law shall take precedence over the provisions of the data protection law.

Fine. I suppose we always have to weigh two things against each other and finally make up our mind where we stand on the scale between surveillance state and anarchy (or, so I suspect, rather oligarchy).

What is largely missing from the discussion is not the balance between the rights of the state vs. the rights of its subjects, but the conflicting rights of the different individuals. Sure, different countries -- different sensitivities and here it would be unthinkable to publish the identity of a convicted child molester. It would be considered as pillory, whereas in the United States it is regularly done because the children's right not to be (potentially) molested is regarded as preceding the child molester's privacy rights. Just one example of many, of course.

Obviously, we Germans are on the whole not as interested in our neighbour's intimate details, or we would in the meantime have tabloids comparable to the British Sun or Mirror, which lets "our" Bildzeitung look like a parish paper. We like to keep private what's private (or maybe we are just not turned on by the unappetizing details of some dreary politicians' sex life like the sex-starved Americans are, which is a good thing). But do we really HAVE to cite our murky past to justify each and every current bullshit? But sure, even I have to admit that "Never Again!" and a pompous "A country which experienced Nazi and East German communist dictatorship and whose privacy laws are designed to prevent an all-knowing totalitarian state from ever emerging again" DOES sound better than "We just can't be bothered". To those hypocrites with an uncurable good conscience, that is.

About Honourable -- and Other -- Women

Headscarf Issue Rears its Head Again
From Deutsche Welle 02.12.2003­

"The decisive thing is not what’s on the head, but what’s in it," says a group of prominent German women who have launched a campaign against the government’s headscarf ban for Muslim teachers.

Over 70 women gathered in front of the symbolically significant statue of the Roman goddess Minerva -- the patron of teachers and the goddess of wisdom -- at the German parliament building in Berlin on Monday to plead for a more discerning and objective debate over the Muslim headscarf.

The group, which sees itself working independently of political and religious considerations, signed an "appeal against a headscarf law." Initiated by Federal Commissioner for Integration and Foreigners, Marieluise Beck, the protest initiative includes politicians from across the party spectrum, scientists and leaders from the church and media.

[...]

Headscarf doesn’t equal fundamentalism

The group resists equating Muslim women wearing headscarves with fundamentalism. Though they admit that the headscarf, veil and all-enveloping burkha are visible instruments used by Islamic fundamentalists to portray the repression of women, it insists that not all women wearing the headscarf are religious fanatics.

The protestors emphasize that many Muslim women don’t view emancipation and the headscarf as contradictory. "We shouldn’t exclude these women with a headscarf ban," the group warns.

Headscarf debate a recurring issue

The headscarf issue has rocked Germany and several parts of Europe with large Muslim populations in recent years with increasing frequency. The question of whether headscarf-wearing Muslim women should be allowed to take up posts in state-run schools and in public life and how far such a tradition compromises a western country’s constitutionally-enshrined religious neutrality has sparked furious debate.

In September this year, Germany’s highest court in Karlsruhe ruled that school authorities in Stuttgart were wrong to bar a Muslim woman from a teaching job because she insisted on wearing a headscarf in the classroom. At the same time, the court insisted that though Germany’s constitutional law did not explicitly forbid the wearing of headscarves in the classroom in state-run schools in the first place, the possibility remained for states to legally enact such a ban.

"What’s decisive is not what’s on the head, but what’s inside it"

Monday’s protest is now focussing on four German states, which are scrambling to impose a ban on headscarf-wearing teachers in the aftermath of the September ruling.

Marieluise Beck told Deutsche Welle about how the protest took shape. "It came about because we noticed that after the Karlsruhe ruling, emotions were much stronger than objectivity and rationality and that a discerning element to the debate was increasingly missing."

Beck added that the legislation hammered out by the four states attempting to enact the headscarf ban had "violated the clearly formulated constitutional command of the ruling, namely that it should be about the equal treatment of all religions." Beck said, "What we’re trying to say is that what’s decisive is not what’s on the head, but rather what’s inside it."

Headscarf ban an obstacle to emancipation

The protest appeal is also an attempt to make society understand women rights, the group says. The signatories say a headscarf ban limits a women’s freedom of choice as well as leads to a stigmatization. "A threatening situation has now arisen for women wearing a headscarf – not just for teachers, there aren’t so many, but for all women who wear a headscarf. It’s unsettling," said Berlin’s former commissioner for foreigners, Barbara John.

The protestors say a headscarf ban won’t just hinder Muslim women’s emancipation by making it difficult for them to take up a profession, but also reinforce old prejudices and work against the very values of tolerance and openness enshrined in the constitution.

[...]

But the appeal against a headscarf ban has come in for scathing criticism from the strongly secular Turkish Alliance Berlin.

"In a time of increased fundamentalist activity, such naivete is hard to understand," the organization said in a statement on Tuesday. The organization has demanded that "all political and religious symbols" should be forbidden by law in all walks of public service and reminded that the present headscarf ban only relates to working in public service and doesn’t amount to a general ban.

Of course, a bunch of bleeding-heart dumb leftist crones know better how to handle Islamic fundamentalism than Turkey. I guess it's their second X-chromosome that endowes them with such amazing wisdom.

Several years ago, the Federal Constitutional Court, in the spirit of religious freedom, generally ruled out any governmental force to place crucifix in classrooms of state schools - and rightfully so. Why the same court now takes a different stance regarding a headscarf ban and asks for individual laws from the federal states is incomprehensible, to say the least.

German policy makers have tolerated, if not tacitly approved, for almost thirty years now Islamist propaganda for a state system and lifestyle that is opposite to ours. The headscarf is a political, not a religious issue, just like the Neonazis' combat boots are not "just a garment", and this so-called tolerance grades the individual rights of some Muslimas over one of the basic principles of our state - the separation between church and state.

The alleged "threatening situation" has not arisen because of a head scarf ban, but because we have allowed fundamentalist Islam to become so influential in our society -- let me revise that: because fundamental Islam EXISTS -- and every headscarf-wearing teacher will send several clear messages to her students, one being the belief that there are "honourable" -- and other -- women.

"The decisive thing is not what’s on the head, but what’s in it" or so the protestors of a headscarf ban say. Yeah! And theirs are full of [bleep]!

Terrorism Is A Venial Sin

And not just Muslim Terrorism:

German President Pardons Former RAF Terrorist
From Deutsche Welle 03.12.2003

German President Johannes Rau has pardoned a former member of the notorious and now disbanded terrorist outfit RAF (Red Army Faction), his office confirmed on Wednesday. Rolf Clemens Wagner, who has spent the last 24 years in jail for being involved in the murder of German Employers' Association President Hanns Martin Schleyer among other crimes, is expected to walk free on December 10. 59-year-old Wagner was arrested in November 1979 in Zurich after a bank robbery after he shot dead a women and injured several others during his escape. Wagner was deported to Germany in 1982 after being sentenced to lifelong penal servitude in Switzerland and received a further life imprisonment sentence in Duesseldorf in 1987. The Red Army Faction, which had its roots in the radical leftist student movement of the late 1960s, carried out a campaign of killings, robberies and bomb attacks from 1971 to 1993 in Germany with the aim of destroying a society they condemned as imperialist and capitalist. The move starkly polarized West German society still struggling to reconcile its liberal democratic aspirations with its Nazi past.

For the record: Wagner was involved in and sentenced for the attempted bomb assault on then NATO commander-in-chief Alexander Haig as well.

One could argue that 24 years in prison are enough for any crime and that considerable doubts have arisen concerning the federal prosecutor's office's account, that Wagner killed Schleyer himself. As far as I know it's the latter that finally led to Wagner's release. Besides, Wagner has credibly renounced terrorism. But then he has shown criminal energy over a long time and even if he didn't kill anybody himself, he was without doubt an accomplice and as far as his renunciation is concerned... well saying sorry is not always enough.

But what is really worrying here is the fact that it will transport the message that terrorism is a venial sin, which is even less acceptable now as it was ever.

Why was Hitler banned?

Teabags are still wary of the Hun:

Adenauer tops Germans poll (Hitler barred)
By Ruth Elkins in Berlin
The Independent, 30 November 2003

German television viewers have chosen Konrad Adenauer, the postwar federal chancellor who sought to erase the legacy of Adolf Hitler, as the greatest German of all time, beating off challenges from Martin Luther and Karl Marx. Voting for Hitler was banned.

That was not the only example of nerves among the producers of Unsere Besten ("Our Best"), modelled on the BBC's Great Britons series which saw Winston Churchill come out top. ZDF, Germany's second public broadcaster, decided Great Germans might sound too insensitive, and changed the title of the three-week contest.

Adenauer, a strict Catholic credited with re-establishing democracy and prosperity in West Germany after the Second World War, received more than 750,000 votes registered by phone, internet and text message on Friday night's final, which had an audience of three million. Luther came second with more than 500,000 votes, closely followed by Marx. Albert Einstein, Johann Sebastian Bach, Bismarck, Goethe and Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, were all in the last 10.

"Adenauer was a great statesman," said Dr Burkhard Olschowlsly, a modern history lecturer at Berlin's Humboldt University. "I would say there were a lot of older Germans voting in Unsere Besten and I imagine this had a lot to do with the result. Many of them were young in the 1950s and 1960s and have unbelievably good memories of that golden era."
[...]
Disaffected youth are thought to be behind the strong showing of some trash TV stars and D-list celebrities, including pop producer Dieter Bohlen, the local equivalent of Simon Cowell, and Daniel Küblböck, a floppy-haired 16-year-old who was runner-up in the German version of Pop Idol. The present Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, whose tax cuts were rejected this month by the upper house, scraped into the top 100 at number 82.

"Are all our best people dead?" lamented Bild, but there was more dispute over who qualified as German. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ended up at number 20, even though some argued he should be excluded as an Austrian. If the organisers had agreed, it would at least have given them another way of keeping out Hitler.

What I'd really like to know why they had to ban Hitler from the vote. They were not thinking that all those afterborn, peace-minded, bleeding heart compassionates with the poor and oppressed of this world would actually -- dare I say it -- VOTE FOR Hitler?

No, I'm sure they only did it not to remind us that Germans, in their majority, voted for a man who would have laughed out of the door by any other civilized people in the world -- and that only 70 years ago.

That Germans still have a strong sense for their proud totalitarian traditions was impressively proven by the fact that Karl Marx, one of the most topical German thinkers, was awarded third prize!

By the way, Teabags, get your German history right. Mozart was born during the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Hitler wasn't.