Nobel Laureate Cancels Trip to Germany

The Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has decided to cancel a trip to Germany at short notice, where he was due to receive an honorary doctorate at Berlin's Free University, prior to a reading tour that was supposed to cover major German cities. The reason for the cancellation was the recent murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, so SPIEGEL ONLINE reported.

...Threats shouted at Pamuk by the alleged mastermind behind that murder seem to have persuaded the author to keep a low profile for the time being.
[...]
Pamuk is believed to be concerned about travelling following the assassination of Hrant Dink on Jan. 19. Yasin Hayal, the alleged mastermind behind that murder, declared on his way into court on Jan. 24: "Tell Orhan Pamuk to wise up!" The nationalist is accused of initiating Dink's slaying, having admitted to police that he urged the underage Ogün Samast to carry out the killing and even provided him with the weapon.
[...]
The chair of Germany's Islamic Council, Ali Kizilkaya, expressed his disappointment at Pamuk's decision. "A Nobel Prize winner who can't travel is something regrettable," he told the news agency DDP. He called on the author to visit Germany at a later date. "Freedom can't be restricted through threats," he said.
[...]

It can and it is -- all the time and to a considerable extent it's not German-, but Sharia law that rules this country. Maybe it is worth a thought whether the presence of a considerable Turkish minority in Germany, well-protected by the state from all impertinent impositions of integration, might have added to Pamuk's decision.


Hat-tip: PI!

Family Reproves Adultery Muslim Style

"Familie ahndet Ehebruch" is the coy headline of a report dated January 30 from the website of the German TV-channel n-tv.

Only the next line: "Paar zu Tode gesteinigt" tells us what the "reprieval" was really about, namely that a couple was stoned to death.

In Pakistan a couple was tied to a tree and stoned to death because they were accused of adultery. Man and woman involved have been related, so the Police told.
[...]
In Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country, hundreds of people are killed every year because of alleged violations of the family honour. Most victims are women in rural areas.

(Translation mine!)

And believe me, dear reader, should you try my new gimmick in the sidebar and find out that "ahnden" stands for "avenge", in everyday usage it's more likely something like "reprimand" or "rebuke".

But then, we must understand that this is not cruel and beastly, it's just part of their culture and who are we to judge other people's cultures!

Specifically we as Germans, with OUR past!

Incidents like that shouldn't be reported at all because that's Islamophobic and racist.

And finally: This has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a religion of peace and everybody who doesn't agree is racist and an Islamophobe.


Hat-tip: PI!

A Day to Remember

Because all attempts to picture the disaster are inadvertently aestheticising it, I show here the last known photo of the Gustloff, taken as she left the port of Gdingen around 12:30 PM on January 30, 1945. It is from the website I credited in the footnote.

On a bitter cold night exactly 61 years ago in the Baltic Sea, the deadliest maritime disaster in history by means of a single sinking occurred. Yet many have never heard about the Wilhelm Gustloff. The loss of life was equal to more than six sinkings of the Titanic.

The Wilhelm Gustloff was a passenger ship built by the Blohm and Voss shipyards in Hamburg, and was named after a leading Nazi. She and her sister ship Robert Ley (named after another odious Nazi), were the world's first purpose-built cruise ships, that is to say for the KdF (Kraft durch Freude -- Power through Joy) Nazi holiday scheme. In fact, she should become its flagship. The Wilhelm Gustloff was launched on May 5, 1937.

The ship's final voyage was to evacuate civilians, wounded soldiers and sailors from Gdingen (now Gdynia) near Danzig (now Gdańsk) to Kiel. The ship's passenger lists totaled 6,050 people on board but this did not include many refugees who boarded the ship without being recorded. The real number may have been closer to 10,000. Although the Gustloff was built for fewer than 2,000 passengers, it had the capacity to board many more for a short trip by using its public recreational spaces, but it was carrying much too few rescue gear necessary for the extra passengers.

The ship left Gdingen early on 30 January 1945, accompanied by the passenger liner Hansa, also filled with refugees, and two torpedo boats. The Hansa and one torpedo boat developed problems and could not continue, leaving the Wilhelm Gustloff with only one torpedo boat escort. The ship had four captains on board, three civilian and one military, and they could not agree on the best course of action to guard against submarine attacks. Against the advice of the military commander, a submariner who had argued for a course in shallow waters close to shore and without lights, the senior civilian captain decided to head for deep water. When he was informed by radio of an oncoming German minesweeper convoy, he decided to switch on his ship's navigation lights so as to avoid a collision, thus making his ship an easily visible target.

The ship was soon sighted by the Soviet submarine S-13 (ironically, a German-designed boat) which hit her with three torpedoes, about 30 km offshore between Großendorf and Leba soon after 21:00 (CET). In under 50 minutes after being struck, the Wilhelm Gustloff sank in a depth of 45 meters (roughly 150 feet). German forces were able to rescue some of the survivors. The water temperature in the Baltic Sea at this time of year is usually around 4°C. However, this was a specifically cold day, with an air temperature of -10° to -18° C and ice floes covering the surface. Most of the deaths that were not directly caused by the torpedoes, were caused by drowning in the incoming water. Others were crushed in the ensuing panic on the stairs and decks, and many jumped into the icy, dark Baltic Sea. Many reports tell children were clinging on to adults and women tried to save babies, though constant waves dragged them away from them, many not to be seen ever again. Small children fitted with lifejackets for adults drowned because their heads were under water while their legs were in the air.

The final death count amounted to more than 9,000 people.

News of the Gustloff’s sinking were not reported within what had remained of the "Third Reich". With the exception of minor mentionings in a couple of newspapers, it also remains largely unreported in western Allied countries -- until today.

Why? There are several reasons for that. The most important is certainly that it occurred during wartime and that it happened to people of the losing side and that WWII, specifically on the Eastern front, had not been led as an "ordinary" war by Germany from the start.

Then, of course, only too many Germans hesitate to mourn, lest they be accused of setting off German suffering against Nazi atrocities (which of course, breeds resentment to the opposite effect).

Important is, too, that there is no "Hollywood profile" or glamour effect. In a probably inevitable comparison to the Titanic: The rich, famous or glamorous were notably absent.

The Wilhelm Gustloff was evacuating mostly civilians. Opinions about the sinking vary from praise to accusations of war crime. Defenders argue that the ship was armed, was not marked adequately as a hospital ship and was carrying more than 1,000 military forces, including submarine trainees, female naval auxiliary aides, anti-aircraft forces and Croat volunteers. Strictly within the boundaries of international law, it may have passed as a legal military target.

But it was not my point to discuss that. My point was to remember those who do not deserve to be forgotten, those who perished that night in the Baltic Sea 61 years ago.


For additional information go to the Wilhelm Gustloff website.

Islam Is Mercy and Tolerance

From: The 11th Annual International Picture Contest: PHOTOJOURNALISM
By The Popular Photography & Imaging Staff
January 2005

The caption reads:

PHOTOJOURNALISM: 1ST PRIZE
JUVENILE PUNISHMENT
G.M.B. Akash, 28
Photographer
Dhaka, Bangladesh

You're initially drawn in by the youngster's sad eyes, but then react in horror to the lock and chains wrapped around his ankles. G.M.B. Akash was visiting a [Quran] village school in Dhaka, where this young boy was restrained as punishment for refusing to study.

So what, one might say. The picture is heartbraking, but we have seen worse from the religion of peace. At least the little fellow has still got all his limbs, eyes and seems to be generally physically unharmed.

GMB Akash, photographed by Tajnur Jahan Trisha.

But the story doesn't end here. Yesterday, the German newsmagazine SPIEGEL ONLINE reported, that this photo was not without consequences for G.M.B. Akash. In spite of warnings, he insisted on the publication of the picture and the influential and much read Nepalese glossy "Himal" put it up on its frontpage.

Akash gets threatening phone calls from Islamist extremists. he tries to explain. He intends to help the Koran school to change its way, he says. The voice at the other end of the line says: "If you are doing it like that, you are lost." Some days later, five men are visiting Akash's parents' house. Akash stops going to the office. Just at that time, a series of Islamist bomb attacks is ravaging Dhaka. Akash remains silent. "They threatened that if I say anything they will punish me." The police? "Policemen are evil people. If you need help, they laugh at you."

Since two weeks now, G.M.B. Akash is living in Germany. The charitable foundation "Hamburger Stiftung für politisch Verfolgte" granted him and his wife a stipend and made it thus possible for them to stay for a year here. He says "I wish to reach two goals with my photographs … to change grievances and to make people to value more what is good."

A slide-show of G.M.B. Akash's work can be seen HERE. The captions are German, but the pictures are self-explaining.


Hat-tip: PI!

Baghdad Bob à l'Allemagne

Side-splitting, floor-rolling, pant-pissing, thigh-slapping, ass-off-laughing funny!!!




This inspired bit of photoshopping shows Friedel Frechen, press officer of the City of Bonn and every bit as funny as Bob.

Hell, I didn't even notice before that the guy looks like an old man who looks like an old woman!

Thanks to Robin Renitent (Rebellog), who did it, and to PI!

Who but a few Catholics and truth-loving people cares?

The Sage from Texas sent me the link to the following article, which appeared yesterday at NRO.

Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc, adds a totally new dimension to the smear campaign against Pius XII. Frightening stuff!

Moscow’s Assault on the Vatican
The KGB made corrupting the Church a priority.

[...]
In my other life, when I was at the center of Moscow’s foreign-intelligence wars, I myself was caught up in a deliberate Kremlin effort to smear the Vatican, by portraying Pope Pius XII as a coldhearted Nazi sympathizer. Ultimately, the operation did not cause any lasting damage, but it left a residual bad taste that is hard to rinse away. The story has never before been told.

BATTLING THE CHURCH
In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a super-secret plan for destroying the Vatican’s moral authority in Western Europe. The idea was the brainchild of KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin and Aleksey Kirichenko, the Soviet Politburo member responsible for international policies. Up until that time, the KGB had fought its “mortal enemy” in Eastern Europe, where the Holy See had been crudely attacked as a cesspool of espionage in the pay of American imperialism, and its representatives had been summarily jailed as spies. Now Moscow wanted the Vatican discredited by its own priests, on its home territory, as a bastion of Nazism.

Eugenio Pacelli, by then Pope Pius XII, was selected as the KGB’s main target, its incarnation of evil, because he had departed this world in 1958. “Dead men cannot defend themselves” was the KGB’s latest slogan. Moscow had just gotten a black eye for framing and imprisoning a living Vatican prelate, József Cardinal Mindszenty, the primate of Hungary, in 1948. During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution he had escaped from jail and found asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, where he began writing his memoirs. As the details of how he had been framed became known to Western journalists, he was widely seen as a saintly hero and martyr.

Because Pius XII had served as the papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin when the Nazis were beginning their bid for power, the KGB wanted to depict him as an anti-Semite who had encouraged Hitler’s Holocaust. The hitch was that the operation was not to give the least hint of Soviet bloc involvement. The whole dirty job had to be carried out by Western hands, using evidence from the Vatican itself...

...the KGB needed some original Vatican documents, even ones only remotely connected with Pius XII, which its dezinformatsiya experts could slightly modify and project in the “proper light” to prove the Pope’s “true colors.” The difficulty was that the KGB had no access to the Vatican archives, and that was where my DIE, the Romanian foreign intelligence service, came in. The new chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, had created the DIE in 1949 and had until recently been our chief Soviet adviser; he knew that the DIE was in an excellent position to contact the Vatican and obtain approval to search its archives. In 1959, when I had been assigned to West Germany in the cover position as deputy chief of the Romanian Mission, I had conducted a “spy swap” under which two DIE officers (Colonel Gheorghe Horobet and Major Nicolae Ciuciulin), who had been caught red-handed in West Germany, had been exchanged for Roman Catholic bishop Augustin Pacha, who had been jailed by the KGB on a spurious charge of espionage and was finally returned to the Vatican via West Germany.

INFILTRATING THE VATICAN
“Seat-12” was the code name given to this operation against Pius XII, and I became its Romanian point man. To facilitate my job, Sakharovsky had authorized me to (falsely) inform the Vatican that Romania was ready to restore its broken relations with the Holy See, in exchange for access to its archives and a one-billion-dollar, interest-free loan for 25 years. (Romania’s relations with the Vatican had been severed in 1951, when Moscow accused the Vatican’s nunciatura in Romania of being an undercover CIA front and closed its offices. The nunciatura buildings in Bucharest had been turned over to the DIE, and now housed a foreign language school.) The access to the Papal archives, I was to tell the Vatican, was needed in order to find historical roots that would help the Romanian government publicly justify its change of heart toward the Holy See. The billion (no, that is not a typographical error), I was told, had been introduced into the game to make Romania’s alleged turnabout more plausible. “If there’s one thing those monks understand, it’s money,” Sakharovsky remarked.

My earlier involvement in the exchange of Bishop Pacha for the two DIE officers did indeed open doors for me. A month after receiving the KGB’s instructions, I had my first contact with a Vatican representative. For secrecy reasons that meeting — and most of the ones that followed — took place at a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. There I was introduced to an “influential member of the diplomatic corps” who, I was told, had begun his career working in the Vatican archives. His name was Agostino Casaroli, and I would soon learn that he was truly influential. On the spot this monsignor gave me access to the Vatican archives, and soon three young DIE undercover officers posing as Romanian priests were digging around in the papal archives. Casaroli also agreed “in principle” to Bucharest’s demand for the interest free loan, but he said the Vatican wished to place certain conditions on it. (Up until 1978, when I left Romania for good, I was still negotiating for that loan, which had gone down to $200 million.)

During 1960-62, the DIE succeeded in pilfering hundreds of documents connected in any way with Pope Pius XII out of the Vatican Archives and the Apostolic Library. Everything was immediately sent to the KGB via special courier. In actual fact, no incriminating material against the pontiff ever turned up in all those secretly photographed documents. Mostly they were copies of personal letters and transcripts of meetings and speeches, all couched in the routine kind of diplomatic language one would expect to find. Nevertheless, the KGB kept asking for more documents. And we sent more.

THE KGB PRODUCES A PLAY
In 1963, General Ivan Agayants, the famous chief of the KGB’s disinformation department, landed in Bucharest to thank us for our help. He told us that “Seat-12” had materialized into a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII, entitled The Deputy, an oblique reference to the pope as Christ’s representative on earth. Agayants took credit for the outline of the play, and he told us that it had voluminous appendices of background documents put together by his experts with help from the documents we had purloined from the Vatican. Agayants also told us that The Deputy’s producer, Erwin Piscator, was a devoted Communist who had a longstanding relationship with Moscow. In 1929 he had founded the Proletarian Theater in Berlin, then sought political asylum in the Soviet Union when Hitler came to power, and a few years later had “emigrated” to the United States. In 1962 Piscator had returned to West Berlin to produce The Deputy.
[...]
The Deputy saw the light in 1963 as the work of an unknown West German named Rolf Hochhuth, under the title Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). Its central thesis was that Pius XII had supported Hitler and encouraged him to go ahead with the Jewish Holocaust. It immediately ignited a huge controversy around Pius XII, who was depicted as a cold, heartless man more concerned about Vatican properties than about the fate of Hitler’s victims. The original text presents an eight-hour play, backed by some 40 to 80 pages (depending on the edition) of what Hochhuth called “historical documentation.” In a newspaper article published in Germany in 1963, Hochhuth defends his portrayal of Pius XII, saying: “The facts are there — forty crowded pages of documentation in the appendix to my play.” In a radio interview given in New York in 1964, when The Deputy opened there, Hochhuth said, “I considered it necessary to add to the play a historical appendix, fifty to eighty pages (depending on the size of the print).” In the original edition, the appendix is entitled “Historische Streiflichter” (historical sidelights). The Deputy has been translated into some 20 languages, drastically cut and with the appendix usually omitted.

Before writing The Deputy, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma (Abitur), was working in various inconspicuous capacities for the Bertelsmann publishing house. In interviews he claimed that in 1959 he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Rome, where he spent three months talking to people and then writing the first draft of the play, and where he posed “a series of questions” to one bishop whose name he refused to reveal. Hardly likely! At about that same time I used to visit the Vatican fairly regularly as an accredited messenger from a head of state, and I was never able to get any talkative bishop off into a corner with me — and it was not for lack of trying. The DIE illegal officers we infiltrated into the Vatican also encountered almost insurmountable difficulties in penetrating the Vatican secret archives, even though they had airtight cover as priests.

During my old days in the DIE, when I would ask my personnel chief, General Nicolae Ceausescu (the dictator’s brother), to give me a rundown of the file on some subordinate, he would always ask me, “For promotion or demotion?” During its first ten years of life, the Deputy leaned toward the Pope’s demotion. It generated a flurry of books and articles, some accusing and some defending the pontiff. Some went so far as to lay the blame for the Auschwitz atrocities on the pope’s shoulders, some meticulously tore Hochhuth’s arguments to shreds, but all contributed to the huge attention this rather stilted play received in its day. Today, many people who have never heard of The Deputy are sincerely convinced that Pius XII was a cold and evil man who hated the Jews and helped Hitler do away with them. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov, the unparalleled master of Soviet deception, used to tell me, people are more ready to believe smut than holiness.

FALSEHOODS UNDERMINED
Toward the mid 1970s, The Deputy started running out of steam. In 1974 Andropov conceded to us that, had we known then what we know today, we would never have gone after Pope Pius XII. What now made the difference was newly released information showing that Hitler, far from being friendly with Pius XII, had in fact been plotting against him.

Just a few days before Andropov’s admission, the former supreme commander of the German SS (Schutzstaffel) squadron in Italy during World War II, General Friedrich Otto Wolff, had been released from jail and confessed that in 1943 Hitler had ordered him to abduct Pope Pius XII from the Vatican. That order had been so hush-hush that it never turned up after the war in any Nazi archive. Nor had it come out at any of the many debriefings of Gestapo and SS officers conducted by the victorious Allies. In his confession Wolff claimed that he had replied to Hitler that his order would take six weeks to carry out. Hitler, who blamed the pope for the overthrow of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, wanted it done immediately. Eventually Wolff persuaded Hitler that there would be a great negative response if the plan were implemented, and the Führer dropped it.
[...]
A few years later, Pope John Paul II started the process of sanctifying Pius XII, and witnesses from all over the world have compellingly proved that Pius XII was an enemy, not a friend, of Hitler. Israel Zoller, the chief rabbi of Rome between 1943-44, when Hitler took over that city, devoted an entire chapter of his memoirs to praising the leadership of Pius XII. “The Holy Father sent by hand a letter to the bishops instructing them to lift the enclosure from convents and monasteries, so that they could become refuges for the Jews. I know of one convent where the Sisters slept in the basement, giving up their beds to Jewish refugees.” On July 25, 1944, Zoller was received by Pope Pius XII. Notes taken by Vatican secretary of state Giovanni Battista Montini (who would become Pope Paul VI) show that Rabbi Zoller thanked the Holy Father for all he had done to save the Jewish community of Rome — and his thanks were transmitted over the radio. On February 13, 1945, Rabbi Zoller was baptized by Rome’s auxiliary bishop Luigi Traglia in the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. In gratitude to Pius XII, Zoller took the Christian name of Eugenio (the pope’s name). A year later Zoller’s wife and daughter were also baptized.

David G. Dalin, in The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis, published a few months ago, has compiled further overwhelming proof of Eugenio Pacelli’s friendship for the Jews beginning long before he became pope. At the start of World War II, Pope Pius XII’s first encyclical was so anti-Hitler that the Royal Air Force and the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany.

Over the past 16 years, the freedom of religion has been restored in Russia, and a new generation has been struggling to develop a new national identity. We can only hope that President Vladimir Putin will see fit to open the KGB archives and set forth on the table, for all to see, how the Communists maligned one of the most important popes of the last century.

My take on that? Fat chance!

However, Pacepa is saying that ultimately, the operation to smear Pius XII's reputation did not cause any lasting damage. How's that if everybody from toddler to grandma in Germany, granted they have ever heard of Pius' existence, is convinced that he was a "Nazi"? I tested it.

What about the dramatic loss of Christian spirituality and authority in the Western world? Not just of the Catholic church, but of Christianity generally? What about mass defection to tin gods like Scientology, Wicca, Shamanism, animal rights or "Green" causes, the new Ersatz-religion? What about the vilest of all those symptoms, the ever-growing number of Muslim converts? Now, Pius XII's reputation seems to be fairly restored -- frankly, who but a few Catholics and decent, truth-loving people cares?

A mindset freed from bothering with reality

Rabbi David Gil Dalin is a Conservative rabbi, and author and co-author of several books on Jewish history. He is currently a professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University, and was previously associate professor of American Jewish history at the University of Hartford.

Dalin received a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, a master's and doctorate from Brandeis University, and his Rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

He has recently published The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis.

I grew up with the picture Rolf Hochhut's (gentile, religious affiliation unknown to me) play "Der Stellvertreter" (The Deputy/Representative, 1963) painted, namely that of a cold cynic and a conniving politician who thinks that Communism is a far bigger threat to the Catholic Church than the Nazis. I would say that this picture is still the prevailing one in Germany, a country, which has never gotten over the Kulturkampf, the bitter struggle on the part of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to submit the Roman Catholic church to state control, which spanned much of the 1870's and 1880's. This "hot family feud" within German society dominated the formative period of the German party system and had a long-term impact on Germany's political culture well into the twentieth century and, as far as I can see, it is still very much alive and kicking.

Hochhuth's next play, "Soldiers, Necrology on Geneva" (1967) showed the Allied bombing campaigns as war crimes and Winston Churchill as a war criminal. The play was largely based on the work of the young historian David Irving. Since that time, Irving and Hochhuth have been close friends and in 2005 Hochhuth hit the headlines by defending his friend against being a holocaust denier, calling the allegation "simply idiotic" and Irving "an honourable man" in an interview with the "Junge Freiheit" (issue 08/05, February 18, 2005), the mouthpiece of the youth organisation of the NPD, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. He later expressed a lukewarm apology, saying that he didn't know that his friend of many decades was just that.

So much for the antisemitic statement that only Jews are adverse to Pius XII, whereas the rest of the world would gladly embrace his sainthood. ("Jews Veto Sainthood for Pius XII"). Or even ALL Jews. Or even a majority of Jews.

One of Pius' shrillest critics, John Cornwell (Roman Catholic) informed us in his self-explainingly titled book "Hitler's Pope" that Pius XII was a willing collaborator with the Nazi policy. To do him justice, Cornwell has recently renounced (in his recent book "The Pontiff in Winter", a critical evaluation of the papacy of John Paul II) his hypothesis, a significant event of which, even more significantly, the media, have taken little note.

Significant is, too, that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's shattering condemnation of Pius XII, "A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church during the Holocaust and Today", received widespread and altogether favourable attention, different from his controversial book "Hitler's Willing Executioners", which was, sometimes fairly but generally unfairly, torn to shreds by the media and his colleagues.

Go figure!

(Please note that Goldhagen's scholarship in his criticism of Pius XII was severely criticised by, among others, such a renowned historian of Germany as Columbia University’s Fritz Stern, a Jew.)

Places we wished we had never visited...

Like, say, the German soul.

Liza discovered the following headline from December 27, 2004 in the shortnews of the online version of the magazine DER STERN (of Hitler diaries fame):

Kommunalwahlen in Israel: Fatah weiterhin stärkste Partei

"Which translates to: "Local elections in Israel: Fatah strongest party".

This is, so far, only beaten by the headline "Israel droht mit Selbstverteidigung" ("Israel threatens to defend herself" -- Yeah, trust those shifty Jews to do just that!) the newsmagazine FOCUS concocted some time ago.

The playwrite Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in "Garbage, the City and Death", described this cerebral phenomenon succinctly by letting his antisemitic protagonist say: "Es denkt in mir." I.e. "It thinks inside me."

The selective politically correct perception of who makes victim fodder

The North British Person has got an excellent didactic play on political correctness for us:

TV contestant's racist views leave parents on a tide of bad PR
FERGUS SHEPPARD MEDIA CORRESPONDENT (fsheppard@scotsman.com)

IT WAS simultaneously a nightmare for any parent and a demonstration of the extraordinary power of reality TV in modern Britain.

A middle-class Edinburgh couple yesterday found themselves forced into the unfamiliar world of public-relations spin control as a row over their daughter's racist remarks on television came to the doorstep of their Georgian home.

David Buchanan, father of 18-year-old Lucy Buchanan, enlisted Edinburgh PR firm Profile Plus to issue a statement which amounted to a "wholehearted" apology for their daughter's conduct.

Lucy, a former pupil of the £19,662-a-year St Peter's School in York, won a place on a Channel 4 reality show in a gap year before going to Bristol University.
[...]
Lucy - who lists her hobbies as lacrosse and shooting - gave her fellow contestants camped on the South Pacific islands of Motoraku and Rapota a crash course on her views on society.

She said Britain was home to "way too many cultures", adding: "Britain is a complete mess. I just don't appreciate people coming into our country and taking over our culture." In another aside, the teenager declared: "I'm for the British Empire and things. I'm for slavery, but that's never going to come back."

The Buchanans were forced into defending their daughter as journalists descended on the family home. Mr Buchanan is understood to be an IT executive while his wife, Nicola, is a former model.

In his statement, Mr Buchanan said: "Lucy has been brought up in a loving and caring home, she has been privately schooled, as is already known.

"By definition, she has had advantages in life, which mean that she has been cosseted in a way that for most children is simply not available to them. It is our firm belief that Lucy, as a naïve teenager, made these silly and very unfortunate remarks on the back of her excitement at being on Shipwrecked."

The statement claimed Lucy had been "challenged" by teammates on the show, a process which had altered her views over five months of filming.
[...]
Mr Buchanan added: "We hope that on Lucy's return she will be afforded the opportunity to use this life experience in a positive way to demonstrate that she can act as an ambassador for change and moderation."

Lucy's trenchant views have extended to more than race. She has also described fat people as "disgusting", calling for them to get their stomachs stitched, and branded lesbians "sinister".
[...]
The Commission for Racial Equality said it was monitoring Shipwrecked.

Campaign group Anti-Slavery International actually backed Channel 4's decision to screen Buchanan's remarks, arguing they illustrated how little slavery was understood.

Group spokeswoman Beth Herzfeld said: "These sorts of comments and the cavalier attitude to slavery clearly show a lack of recognition that slavery does continue to exist, as well as an understanding of what the transatlantic slave trade involved."
[...]

We are living in a culture of envy. If Lucy'd attended, say, the local comprehensive, nobody would have given a damn. The fact that the article revels oh-so-subtly in the details of her privileges ("Lucy - who lists her hobbies as lacrosse and shooting...") makes it a perfectly vile bit of journalism.

The parents are spineless morons,
1) because they apologised for their daughter's opinions,
2) because they let their daughter, whose education they obviously intended to be elitist, prostitute herself at such a crappy TV show. No... that's an oxymoron. Make that ANY TV show,
3) because they are using politically correct lower-middleclass-isms like "caring" and "privately schooled", which, so I suspect, are anathema at the school for which they forked out all that money.

So The Thought Police Commission for Racial Equality is monitoring Shipwrecked. What sort of importance do they grant the bimbos in a pathetic travesty like Shipwrecked? Besides, apart from the slavery bit, which was pretty brainless (Yeah! Too bad about all those school fees...!) Lucy didn't say anything about race and made perfectly good points and I doubt that her views extend to her duskier class mates at St Peter's from the former colonies, which would prove that it's really about culture and not about "race". (I may be wrong.)

Did it ever occur to those moronic parents that their "cosseted" daughter who, according to her father "made these silly and very unfortunate remarks on the back of her excitement at being on Shipwrecked" that she made these remarks not out of "excitement" but PRECISELY BECAUSE SHE WAS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE EXPOSED TO THE REALITY OF YOB-LIFE?

I have been at the receiving end of quite some aggro for similar views to those Lucy espressed on fat people.

That is, I can understand that it is vile and unfair to discriminate against people who can't do anything about their condition, be it colour, handicap or whatever. Fat people CAN. At least the vast majority of them. Why are they still mollycoddled and protected as "victims" by the politically correct brigade? To quote myself: After holocaust survivors, cancer survivors, rape survivors, abuse of various sorts survivors, we now have - obesity survivors! The terminology reveals the agenda: "Something bad has happened to me; it must be someone else’s, preferably the men's, doing".

By standing up for fat women, feminism [incidentally another ideology of envy] creates a perverted system of female solidarity. Fat women get encouragement, support and even acclaim for an unhealthy lifestyle. Feminists WANT women fat. They want to proselytize women who feel that they are ugly or potentially rejected by men. These are the first and easiest prey for an ideology that fosters men-hating.

It's not men who force their views on women; it's a women-shaped society that forces its views on women and it is not beyond feminists to fish even at the very bottom of that self-made foodchain.

Thank you for your acclaim. I think that was rather good, too.

And lesbians... who would care what they are doing if it were behind closed doors. I wouldn't and, so I presume, Lucy wouldn't either. Hell, I don't even WANT to know what sort of activities people prefer behind closed doors. It's the fact that so many of them are aggressively flaunting their sexuality, which makes them (and homosexuals) so unpalatable. They are cramming their sexuality down our throats, and we, who don't share such proclivities, are supposed to like it -- and AGAIN in the name of the new tin god political correctness.

Not to mention the disgusting hypocrisy of all those who are now appalled that a yobbo-programme, designed to be sensationalist, turned out to be just that and are targeting the young woman instead of the makers of that cynical bit of taste- and soul-corrupting dirt.

All that said, the article, in all its political correct righteous outrage, misses entirely the probably most crucial point, namely that Whites were rather gifted amateurs when it came to enslaving people and the professionals were (and, worse still ARE) people of various Middle Eastern and North African extraction who enslaved Whites as well.

But to say all that is, of course, racist. And it might, mind you, hurt the overdeveloped sensitivities of the followers of the "Religion of Peace".

The politically correct perception of who makes victim fodder and who doesn't is pretty selective.

A list of titles at amazon.com for further education:

Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (Early Modern History) by Robert C. Davis

White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves by Giles Milton

They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America by Michael A. Hoffman

White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives by Paul Baepler

Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry by Bernard Lewis

Political Dialogue with Professionalism and Style

Politically Incorrect is the most popular one among those German blogs with a clear pro-American stance. According to blogcounter.de PI is holding place number 7 with 6082 visits and 27385 clicks yesterday. PI is owned by Stefan Herre.

Herre and his co-bloggers speak up against the undermining of basic values of our Western democracy, for example by the pre-emptive obedience and submission in the face of anti-democratic demands from Muslim immigrants.

Yesterday, PI received the following email:



The text, albeit short, is not easily translated:

Hallo Mr. Herre, don't you think yourself that the right-wing populist drivel in your blog is pukeworthy?

Best regards

It is not easily translatable because it is difficult to catch the same level of obnoxiousness and vulgarity in a different language, but I hope I managed.

But now for the really interesting bit. The sender of the email is Friedel Frechen, the press relations officer of Bärbel Dieckmann, the mayor of the city of Bonn, and he sent that email, as proven by the signature, full address, title and all, in his official capacity as the spokesman of the mayor of Bonn. Dieckmann is now in her third term of office and since November 2005 additionally one of the deputy leaders of Germany's Social Democratic Party. She is married to Jochen Dieckmann, former Minister of Finances of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Bärbel Dieckmann is hosting the Islamist King Fahd Academy within her city, a school for Saudi children, mosque and all, which is not subject to the German curriculum and was almost closed down once because of anti-constitutional activities and has dubbed it "The unique prerequisite for an examplary German-Arab and Christian-Muslim dialogue, which champions peacefully living together."

Obviously, Dieckmann and her spokesman are less interested in a "dialogue" and "peacefully living together" with people who happen not to share their views of peacefully living together.

Not to speak of the style and professionalism of the discourse. But about taste, there is no arguing.

How to play mind games with stupid Germans

From Monday's issue of the newspaper Die Welt, one of the assumed strongholds of conservative media in Germany, comes a stunning piece of journalism:

More Jokes about Muslims Please!
The Secretary General of the Central Council of Muslims [in Germany] wants to laugh at his fellow-Muslims more often. At WELT.de he criticizes how uptight German comedians and artists are, as soon as it's about Islam: One can very well make fun of a Muslim without hurting his dignity.

By Aiman A. Mazyek
[...]
I, too, would have liked to smile and laugh at Muslims. Is that not permitted? Who is prohibiting it? Maybe a Fatwa? A body of censors? Notabene, I am talking about laughing, not hurtful sneering at or dirty jokes about Islam. One can very well make fun of a Muslim without hurting his dignity or can't one? One can waffle about his putative flaws without besmirching his religion.
[...]
Granted, the narrow-minded and know-alls in our community will speak up and tell us in their repressed way that they don't understand a thing. They are not just suffering from a blatant deficit in humour but from their own belief as well, which they wish to live rather as stone-age Islam... the Islamic tradition knows many prominent examples, where one's own or the leg of somebody else is pulled. Thus, the Prophet Mohammed has often shown wit and mockery.
[...]

(Translation mine!)
Without doubt! And specifically at the stonings (snicker), the amputations (giggle), the beheadings (chuckle) he attended.

I mean this is so rock-hard, impregnably, intransigently, indissolubly and resolutely dumb that it leaves me speechless. Well, almost.

We have seen worldwide riots by followers of this faith and people losing their lifes over a couple of cartoons as acid as thin lemonade and as exciting as Paris Hilton's antics. We are seeing a faith, or better: a polit-cult, that promotes "honour" killings of women who decide to live like Western women, a faith whose followers perform beheadings of hostages on television, stonings, floggings, limb amputations, hangings of teenagers and children, terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, women and children and other hilariously funny gimmicks.

But what I like best is:

One can waffle about his putative flaws without besmirching his religion.

But one can not talk seriously about his real "flaws", right?

And in this country a so-called conservative newpsaper does not just print that cooly calculated and cleverly simpering drivel in all seriousness, they even sell it as an example of "enlightened" and "moderate" Islam.

Mind you, stupid is not that man, stupid are the chaps from DIE WELT who let themselves be led around like tame dancing bears at their nose rings by printing that neat little bit of propaganda.

He was yanking their chains, and ours as well. Or, to use another and even more hackneyed metaphor: He was testing the water.

I bet Mazyek, who has a Syrian father and a German mother and who is the leader of the local Free Democrats at his hometown Alsdorf, near Aachen, finds it pretty warm, cosy and agreeable.

The Fox and The Henhouse

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran report at their website:

Mullahs’ regime announces it will soon carry out limb amputations in Iran
Thursday, 11 January 2007

NCRI - The chief of the regime’s judiciary in the western city of Kermanshah, Allah-Yar Malik-Shahi yesterday said, “Soon there will be a number of limb amputations in public in connection with robberies in [Kermanshah] Province.” (Official news agency IRNA, January 10, 2007)

He said, “The judiciary will cut off the hand which steals people’s properties in order to serve as a lesson for others… Carrying out several sentences in public will greatly decrease such crimes in society.”

The medieval regime has resorted to extreme measurers, such as limb amputation, eye gouging, flogging, and the degrading punishment of parading prisoners around towns, to combat the rising tide of popular uprisings and demonstrations in various provinces across Iran.

The Iranian Resistance calls on all international human rights organizations to condemn the medieval regime’s punishments and take urgent action to stop the barbaric and systematic violations of human rights in Iran.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
January 11, 2007

Yes, that is the same Iran, Green politician Angelika Beer called "a fascinating country with a young well-educated society" and about which nobody laughed.

Elsewhere, Germany highlighted Iran's role in Iraq peace efforts.

Berlin, Jan 18, IRNA
There will be no solution to the Iraqi conflict unless Iran and Syria are also involved in international efforts to restore peace to the war-stricken country, German deputy foreign minister, Gernot Erler reiterated Thursday in an interview with German radio.

Erler urged for a greater political approach to the Iraq crisis which would integrate "important actors like Iran and Syria in a constructive policy".
[...]
Berlin has repeatedly stressed Iran's important regional role for peace and security in the Mideast.

I wonder whether Erler can say: "Fox -- Henhouse".

What the colleagues are saying...

Gudrun Eussner titles her article about the film "Mein Führer…" "Adolf for everybody, from the Gröfaz from Braunau to the victims at Auschwitz" and states that

"The Jews as really existent human beings are extinguished… by Dani Levy. There is method behind it, because otherwise he couldn't have made this film for the purpose of his personal liberation and the audience would heve choked as well on their laughter about the Führer in the bathtub. Such a liberating laughter about the thorny youth of the Führer is not just for Dani Levy to break down his own childhood trauma, the Germans need it too. For that, they are buying tickets, for that, public TV-stations are sponsoring the film, for that, the state of Northrhine-Westphalia is opening its coffers. Germans let no opportunity pass to ransom themselves. They are foistering their money on the Jew Dani Levy because he delivers them a wee little bit from the responsibility of the past.

And Liza adds:

X-Filme-producer Stefan Arndt couldn't, in an interview with the newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger about … Professor Adolf Grünbaum, for the life of him not inderstand why the latter's name shouldn't be ridiculed in Dani Levy's grotty film and his biography stripped of reality. "Why, we can't apologize to each and every Jane Doe who may appear in a film." That said, he magnanimously offered to send a copy of the film to the old man and that was that. Yes, it is that easy in post-Nazi Germany: The names of those murdered and the survivors of the Shoa are nothing but transient shadows, exchangeable at will, forgotten. Jews are not sorted by numbers here anymore, but that doesn't mean that one can't use their names without permission for Führer-films and expose the bearers of those names to ridicule.

Links to my other posts are HERE and HERE.

Murdering Adolf Grünbaum AGAIN

Dres. Clemens Heni and Gudrun Eussner, Liza and myself share the feeling of a mutual job well done, although we all would have preferred not having to do it in the first place. At least a part of the media on both sides of the Atlantic signalled interest in the abominable gaffe of "Mein Führer...".

And there is Dr. Adolf Grünbaum, the REAL Adolf Grünbaum, that old man over in Pennsylvania, who is grateful and relieved that finally somebody recognized his misery. As of now, he doesn't intend to sue the maker of that film. He is 83.

Dani Levy, who made the film, enjoyed his role as a "taboo breaker" much too much to be bothered with a simple Google search. The coldness towards the victims is amazing.

But it doesn't end here.

"I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger" wrote the 19-year-old boy before he was murdered in Vilna in 1941.

The Nazis did all they could to rob the Jews of their identities. They gave them numbers, they shaved their heads, they burnt them or – sort of – buried them in mass graves. But each and every person had a name, a life, a history and a place in the world.

What Clemens Heni found out, and what Dani Levy failed to find out before he made his abominable film, is that there had been many more Adolf Grünbaums who were not as relatively lucky as Dr. Grünbaum in Pittsburgh. They perished in the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem keeps an online database of Holocaust victims at www.yadvashem.org. It contains more than 3 million names, together with photos, biographical information and remembered details provided by surviving family members and friends.

This database is accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world.

Here is what Clemens Heni found:

Adolf Grunbaum was born in Horlyo, Czechoslovakia in 1867. He was a businessman and married. Prior to WWII he lived in Horlyo, Czechoslovakia. During the war was in Horlyo, Czechoslovakia. Adolf perished in 1944 in Auschwitz. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed to the left) submitted on 22/09/1999 by his family from United states, a Shoah survivor.

Adolf Grunebaum was born in 1885. Prior to WWII he lived in Lodz, Poland. During the war was in Lodz. This information is based on a List of Lodz ghetto inmates (displayed to the left) found in the Lodz Names - List of the ghetto inhabitants 1940-1944, Yad Vashem and the Organization of former residents of Lodz in Israel, Jerusalem 1994.

Dr. Adolph Grünbaum was born in Poland. He was a lawyer and married. Prior to WWII he lived in Prezhemisel, Poland. During the war was in Prezhemisel, Poland. Adolph perished in the Shoah at the age of 50. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed to the left) submitted on 26/04/1999 by his niece.

Adolf Grünbaum was born in Opalyi, Hungary in 1927 to Miklos and Frida nee Weisz. Prior to WWII he lived in Mateszalka, Hungary. Adolf perished in 1944 in Auschwitz at the age of 17. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed to the left) submitted on 23/05/1999 by his half brother/sister.

Try another – ANY OTHER – "Jewish sounding" name and you'll get similar results.

My take on all that? The whole affairs has two outcomes.

1) It demonstrates first-hand the devastation of the Holocaust.

2) It shows that anybody who attempts making a film, let alone a "comedy", about it, ought to have his head examined.

Or maybe rather his heart.


Clemens Heni's article, including all sources, can be found HERE at Gudrun Eussner's site.

Sanctimoniousness Extraordinaire

Here is a brief excerpt from an entry at my all-time favourite blog Lizas Welt. Liza informs us that the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), the highest German court, ruled that the usage of the slogan "Ruhm und Ehre der Waffen-SS" (Glory and Honour to the Waffen-SS) is legal, whereas a provincial German court fined a student 2,400 Euro for using the book cover for a flyer. They took issue with the "Hitlergruß" the Pals are performing. Not with the fact that they do it, mind you, but with the fact that somebody used the photo.

Both trials were based on § 86a StGB (the German penal law), which covers the usage of symbols that violate the constitution.

side-splitting, floor-rolling, pant-pissing, thigh-slapping, ass-off-laughing funny

I don't know whether this news report is based on facts, but it's too good to be missed. According to YNetNews, Moshe Aryeh Friedman, the senior Neturei Karta member, who passionately kissed the as unwashed as -shaved monstrosity Adolfdingbat, will now have to find a female who will consent kissing HIM, as his wife has decided not to kiss same spots again and forsaken him, following her parents’ sage advice.

The 'Ultra-Orthodox Voice' service reported that when Friedman returned to Vienna he found out that his wife had fled to the Satmar community in Williamsburg, New York City. There she approached rabbis and asked them to help her divorce her husband due to his misdeeds.

HotAir reports it as well, and as well with a grain of salt. The comments there are hilarious!

I wonder what line he told his wife when he was leaving for the “Conference”. “Bubbie, I’m going out to shmooz with the shiksas, eat some pork sandwiches and wash it down with a nice milkshake. See you on the flip side bubbala!” “Gay avek!” the wife yells in idiot glee. “Just as long as it’s not a holocaust denial conference, it’s Kosher. Mazel Tov!”

I find the idea that the good rabbi might catch STD (or at least crab lice) worth a thought as well and lets hope that Mrs. Friedman will find her Prince Charming soon, now she's had her fair share of frog-kissing.

What is considered a "healthy debate" in Germany

Finally, the Germans have found a congenial, humorous (some say not even humorous enough) interpretation of their bothersome recent past. Of course, those party-pooping Jews have kept us far too long from seeing what a big joke killing Jews, and specifically in the millions, is, but finally this film relieves us and lets us whooping it up mightily!

Levi's film is a fictive look at the week between Christmas and New Year's in 1944-45, when it started to dawn on Hitler he was losing the war. Hitler ... is in a severe state of depression, though he is scheduled to deliver a rousing speech to the nation on New Year's Day. Goebbels ... then decides that what the Führer needs in order to deliver a speech that inspires the nation is some help from his former theatre teacher and namesake Adolf Israel Grünbaum -- a Jew...

Of course, what is most interesting about Levy's work is the sort of societal and historical dynamics that surround the release of his audacious, ground-breaking ideas. His films are much more than entertainments, exactly because he treats the plots of his films like normal subjects for a comedy or farce, when in truth these have been, erm, nonkosher for the past sixty years in Germany. In that sense, his films contribute to the healthy debate about how Germans should treat their own recent past...

The same people who are deeply concerned about the evil influence of the "Holocaust industry" are in side-splitting, thigh-slapping, pant-pissing mirth about this film. It is called "Mein Führer – Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler" (Mein Führer – The truly truest truth about Hitler) and tells us that the Germans only killed the Jews because they got their butts paddled once too often or ate too many paint chips as children or something to that effect. At this level of discourse, it isn't surprising that director Daniel Levy named his Hitler-antagonist Adolf Grünbaum.

You get the gist? A Jew *LOL*. A Jew called Grünbaum *ROFL*. A Jew with the first name "Adolf" *ROFLMAOPMP*. Why, that's the kind of entertainment that is dubbed "grotesque", "funny", "subversive", "intelligent" and a "healthy debate about how Germans should treat their own recent past" here!

The political scientist Clemens Heni has found out more:

The Truth about Adolf Grünbaum

How the recent film about Hitler bastardises the life of a Jew who fought as a soldier against Nazi-Germany.

Charlie Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator" attempts to fight the Nazis by means of satire. Goebbels, for example, goes by the name Garbitsch (=garbage) The recent German Hitler film "Mein Führer – Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler" (Mein Führer – The truly truest truth about Hitler) by Dani Levy, however, sticks to the real names of the Nazi-celebrities. Goebbels, Himmler, Eva Braun and, of course, Adolf Hitler himself. Just the second protagonist and his wife get – ostensibly – fictitious names: "Adolf Grünbaum" respectively "Elsa Grünbaum". Other people have written about the absurd, anti-educational implications of the film already... But nobody bothered so far to check whether "Adolf Grünbaum" is really a fictitious name.

The film informs us that Grünbaum spares Hitler, even pities the poor German bathtub- splasher with the troubled childhood. "Grünbaum", however, is shot dead.

All this considered, the email the author received yesterday is rather noteworthy.

"It was very kind and thoughtful of you to write me and to have published a short text against the ill-conceived new German Hitler film. (...) I wish I could find out from the producer why he chose my particular name for the pedagogue, but I assume that I would not receive an answer from him if I wrote him; (...) Let me mention that I was born in Koeln/Rhein in 1923 and lived there until my family and I emigrated to the USA in February 1938. I studied philosophy, physics (Master of Science degree, Yale University, 1948, and Ph.D. in Philosophy, also at Yale, 1950/1951, with a doctoral dissertation in the Philosophy of Science). During World War II, I served in US Army Military Intelligence and went into Berlin with the advance party of the US Army, being stationed there in the Wannseehaus, where the then suburban Gestapo Headquarters was the site, as you probably know, of the 1942 planning session of the "Final Solution."

Since 1960, I have held a Chair as Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. I have written books in the philosophy of space-time, and two books very critical of Freudian psychoanalysis (Reclam published a German translation of one of them: Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse: Eine philosophische Kritik, about 1988)

At present (2006/2007), I am the President of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science. Perhaps I should mention that my website is
http://www.pitt.edu/~grunbaum/

Warm best wishes and many thanks,
Adolf Grünbaum"

So Adolf Grünbaum was really born 1923 in Cologne, a Jew who was lucky enough to escape – just – with his family to America, who came back in WWII and had to lodge at the Wannseehaus in Berlin, who studied physics and philosophy and who is currently one of the worldwide most renowned philosophers of the logical empirics of the former Vienna Circle. No film could be more absurd in his concept, more German and more grotesque than Dani Levy's Mein Führer – The truly truest truth about Hitler. It takes half a second to find out that there, in fact, is a real person called Adolf Grünbaum, but it seems plausible that Levy didn't even attempt to do that. And should he have done – even worse. Then it can be safely assumed that he took pleasure in making his film the travesty of a Jew, to ridicule him and to have him killed in the end. However, let's assume that this director did not ask Google but just made-up the name. Then he has just one option left, really. He will have to retire his film Mein Führer and apologise for the infamous derealisation of the real Dr. Adolf Grünbaum's history and to apologise. During the reign of National Socialism, to be precise late in 1944, the period, in which the film is set, Grünbaum fought as a Jewish soldier and interrogator in the US-Army. Dani Levy, however, who can be described as ignorant at best, the director of a film that lends a totally new dimension to the Theatre of the Absurd, plays coquettishly with the death of a Jew who is, in reality, alive – Just like Martin Walser in Death of a Critic (Tod eines Kritikers).

Levy and his Crew – namely Ulrich Mühe, this old GDR-actor – are using the well-known name of a well known professor of philosophy to spread their primitive anti-educational theory. Adolf Grünbaum has to serve as a collaborator to satisfy the German longing for Hitler's exculpation. Since 1945, the German society is working to marginalise, to conceal or to relativise the Nazi-crimes and now this film even manages to boost the knee-jerk secondary antisemitism by fending off remembrance. It exploits the name of a man, easily retrievable in the times of unlimited research opportunities, not to tell the true story of a Jew who was born in Cologne in 1923, who had to free "his country" 1945 from itself. None of that. This story is dismissed, as if Adolf Grünbaum, the real Adolf Grünbaum, had never lived.

How must Adolf Grünbaum from Pittsburgh feel if even the New York Times publishes an article about this new Hitler-film and he has to read his name several times there? What will Konstanz University say, who awarded an honorary doctorate to Adolf Grünbaum, when they discover how this great name is besmirched by a German "comedy"? How could it happen that feature writers and pundits didn't twig that Levy, different from Chaplin (who, as we know, wouldn't have made his "Great Dictator" in the same way post-Auschwitz), didn't alienate the names of his main characters – apart from this obscure "Adolf Grünbaum"? Without the outstanding flair for spotting correlations of the publicist Gudrun Eussner, I wouldn't have found this Adolf Grünbaum. But now the name is clearly and unmistakably deciphered.

It is now up to Dani Levy to retire his film Mein Führer – The truly truest truth about Hitler, to apologise and, when embarking on his next film (which we will not miss should he refrain from making it) to have a brief look at Google before he robs another true story of its reality, like this one about a Jew from Cologne in the uniform of the US-Army.

I, personally, think that Clemens Heni is expecting too much. Dani Levy, the man who is too dumb, lazy or uninterested to perform a simple Google search, will do NOTHING of that sort. He won't even understand the issue. After all, we are talking about the man who is playing with "his audacious, ground-breaking ideas" court-jester for the same people who chased a man like Adolf Grünbaum, the real Adolf Grünbaum, away.


Clemens Heni's article was translated by me and I say "thank you" for letting me have it. The German version appeared at my all-time favourite blog Lizas Welt together with Liza's own interpretation.

Yanking the Leash

Muslims are miffed, Muslims make demands. So what else is new? MSNBC News report:

Booze, dogs too much for some Muslim cabbies
Drivers refuse service to passengers, Minn. airport officials put up a fight
Updated: 3:17 p.m. ET Jan. 4, 2007

MINNEAPOLIS - Some Muslim cab drivers are refusing service to a growing number of passengers with alcohol or dogs, and officials at Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport are trying to fight it.

"Our expectation is that if you're going to be driving a taxi at the airport, you need to provide service to anybody who wants it," said Patrick Hogan, spokesman for the Metropolitan Airport Commission.

Each month, about 100 people are denied cab service at the airport, and refusals for religious reasons have grown in recent months, airport officials said. About three-quarters of the 900 taxi drivers at the airport are Somali, many of them Muslim.

The belief that carrying alcohol or dogs, including those that help people with disabilities, violates religious beliefs is "unfortunate," Airports Commissioner Bert McKasy said.

Officials on Wednesday asked the commission for permission to hold public hearings on a proposal that would suspend or revoke drivers' airport licenses for refusing service for reasons other than safety concerns. The commission is expected to vote Jan. 16.

A driver who refuses to transport a passenger with a service dog, in violation of the federal American with Disabilities Act, already faces a 30-day suspension of the airport license, Hogan said. A driver who refuses to transport someone carrying wine is told to go to the back of the taxicab line.

Last year, the airports commission received a fatwa, or religious edict, from the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society saying "Islamic jurisprudence" prohibits taxi drivers from carrying passengers with alcohol, "because it involves cooperating in sin according to Islam."
[...]

Yesterday it's Muslim mothers in Austria protesting their children's arithmetics because the plus sign (yes, THAT: +) because it resembles a cross, today it's booze and curs. I suppose the Muslim taxi drivers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport aren't there since yesterday. So why do they suddenly detect their religious conscience?

Why? Because they will take up any (but ANY) power struggle and no grovelling will ever be good enough. Even if we replace the cross sign with something sufficiently neutral -- say, a circle --, poison all our dogs and pour all booze down the drain, it will NEVER be enough. Ever.

Perfect Infidel Dog

Gutmenschen Lookalikes

I got the following post from one of my readers:


Dzembritzki...... .....Carter

Madam,

Has any of your readers noticed the startling resemblance between the worst president in American history and a certain German lawmaker?

Are they perchance related or does rubbing shoulders with murderous scum change one's physiognomy?

Oughtn't we be informed?

Respectfully

----------

Thanks to Pastorius and Private Eye for inspiring me.

Rotten to The Core

The man who coined the, no doubt inadvertently, funny phrase: "Sexual perversion leads to death. That is why the Jews promote it." (If it only did!) was arrested on charges of possessing child porn. No doubt, it's all the Jews' fault! Thanks ABC News for that little gem:

White Supremacist Busted on Child-Porn Charge
Leading Intellectual of Racist Movement Was Arrested by Federal Agents
By MARCUS BARAM

Jan. 4, 2007 — A leader of the white supremacist movement was arraigned today on charges of possession of child pornography and witness tampering after being arrested by FBI agents Thursday night at his home in Charlottesville, Va.

Kevin Alfred Strom, founder of the National Vanguard white supremacist group, was considered the leading intellectual of the movement since the death of William Pierce, the author of the notorious "Turner Diaires."

Strom was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, charged with the two counts, and is currently being held at a facility in the city. According to the indictment, he allegedly possessed or attempted to possess "multiple images of child pornography" on his computer's hard drive.

Strom was also charged with witness tampering, which involved physically assaulting and mentally intimidating a witness to his criminal activity.

Last July, Strom took a leave of absence from National Vanguard, citing "family and health matters" and saying that he had "made mistakes, sometimes serious ones," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacist activity.
[...]
Strom wrote frequently about art and beauty, often rhapsodizing about the physical attributes of white women and girls.

In an 2003 essay titled "Millstone for the Mogul" for the National Alliance's Web site, he condemned the producers of the movie "Thirteen" for "what they are doing to our little children -- teen and preteen White children -- to normalize perverse and degenerate sexual behavior for them, to normalize homosexuality, to prematurely sexualize them, and to make interracial sex fashionable to them -- can never be forgiven, can never be explained away. The media moguls who are doing this to our children deserve to be tried and punished for conspiracy, rape, gang rape, murder and attempted murder."

Later in the essay, he goes on to describe his desire to give children "self-respect, respect for their ancestors, respect for the future of their people, a deep respect for their own sexual nature, and respect for the members of the opposite sex who will be their mates and life companions."

That would be so funny weren't it so vile! Doesn't that guy positively SHOUT: "Look at me, I am a poofter!"? Many of those who are waxing a tad too lyrically about preserving children's "innocence" are only interested in preserving it for their own use. So this shouldn't come as too big a surprise.

The Hyphenisation of the German Political Culture

Professor Dr. Hakki Keskin (born 1943 in Turkey), is a model "Germano-Turk".

He is a professor of Political Science and was the first "German of Turkish descent" (as the politically correct definition goes) to become a member of a German parliament (the Bürgerschaft in Hamburg), and the founder of the Türkische Gemeinde in Deutschland is seen as one of the prominent leaders of the country's Turkish community. In fact, he was one of the Turkish deputies who accompanied German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Turkey last October.

Hakki Keskin is known for unapologetic statements like

the EU must not be reduced to Christian values only

or for dubbing then CDU-chair Angela Merkels musings on a Turkish EU-membership (she was against it) as a

kind of declaration of war against Turkey and the Turks living in Germany*

or his disappointment at the SPD's "neo-liberal" social and economic reforms which, so the professor, have hit poorer Turks.

In the meantime, Hakki has become somewhat of a loose cannon. He is giving interviews to Turkish newspapers and TV stations, denying (or at least substantially relativising) the Armenian genocide by the Turks. SPIEGEL ONLINE asked Keskin for a clarification, which they, indeed, got.

There is "no proof of a genocide", so Keskin. Yes, Armenians died, "but was this a planned and intended destruction of the armenian population?", asked Keskin. At that time, "hundredthousands of Turks were killed" as well, which was not recognised by the "biased reporting in the European media".

Predictably, Hakki's party is all in a flutter now, but our multi-ethnic paragon refuses to budge. (Oh yes, I ought to mention that he had in June 2005 withdrawn from the Social Democratic Party and joined the post-Communist DIE LINKE -- The Left -- party for which he became a member of the Bundestag after the September 2005 elections.)

Isn't that a wonderful omen for a parlamentarian cooperation between Germany and Turkey? And the man doesn't even have the hackneyed excuse of being poorly educated.

The same applies to another, sadly long forgotten, controvery that was started by another hyphen-German in April 2002 when Jamal Karsli, a "German of Syrian descent", member of the Northrhine-Westphalian state parliament, was forced to resign from the Green Party after accusing Israel of using "Nazi methods". He also criticised, proving that he was not a man of really original notions, the "frightening influence of the Zionist lobby" in an interview to the mouthpiece of the youth organisation of the NPD, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands Junge Freiheit on 3. May 2002. Subsequently, Karsli was welcomed into the ranks of the FDP (Free Democratic Party) by their deputy chairman Jürgen Möllemann, who also headed (surprise, surprise!) the DAG, i.e. the German-Arab Association, an important lobby for business with the Middle East.

The ensueing spat was further intensified when Möllemann expressed understanding for Palestinian suicide bombers. After he had accused Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the then vice president of the Jewish Community in Germany, Michel Friedman, of inciting antisemitism in Germany (don't we all know that antisemitism is the Jews' fault?), a bitter conflict between the Jewish community and the FDP broke out. Then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (who had dubbed the incident the 'Haiderisation' of the Free Democrats) interfered, denouncing Möllemann’s statements. Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that Möllemann's revival of the old Nazi mantra that Jews themselves are responsible for antisemitism was the biggest anti-Jewish insult made by a political party-representative in the history of the Federal Republic. Karsli later resigned from the FDP, but the debate continued and antisemitism became an issue for the first time in a postwar German election campaign.

And here am I, thinking that we simple and unhyphenated Germans had a lousy political style.

---

* (For that and other statements go to the press release section of the Türkische Gemeinde in Deutschland website.)

The Writing on the Lectern

It is not quite brand hot news that the plans for a mosque in one of the Berlin suburbs that used to belong to the former East Berlin, were met with outspoken protest. The newsmagazine SPIEGEL ONLINE reported on December 28 that

A citizens' group in Berlin turned out this week for a candlelight vigil to protest plans for a new mosque in their neighborhood. It will be the first to be built in the former East Berlin, where almost no Muslims live -- but no one can quite explain why it shouldn't be there.

Well, shouldn't the first step be to explain why it SHOULD be there?

Surprisingly, SPIEGEL ONLINE then went on contradicting themselves by delivering a host of good points exactly WHY the mosque shouldn't indeed be there:

They want to have a minaret with a muezzin who gives the call to prayer five times a day. Can you imagine? Five times a day over our rooftops.

And although the guy who said it was supposed to look like a moron, he didn't. He made a valid point. (Mind you, those SPIEGEL ONLINE schmocks are exactly of that lets-move-to-the-country-because-it's-so-quaint-and- somehow-earth-motherish ilk, who then sue the church because of the noise pollution of the bells and the farmers for crowing roosters -- and win the lawsuit.)

But there is more:

Their objections included traffic chaos and falling property prices, but the longest paragraph in the petition expresses concern about "an Islamic-Ahmadiyya parallel society, which would have the goal of overturning our liberal-democratic order."

But whatever. Today, I give you Detlef Dzembritzki.

Dzembritzki, kindergarden teacher become Sociologist, member of the German Bundestag for the Social Democrats and a paragon of everything that is considered good, noble and virtuous in Germany, plays maybe not a key- but a not totally negligible role in Germany's foreign, specifically Middle Eastern, politics, as his status as deputy-chairman of the parlamentarian committee for international economical cooperation and development with the key-topic "Politics instead of War" ("Politik statt Krieg") and Bosnia Commissary of the Bundestag, who is involved in Afghanistan- and Iraq-affairs as well (so the self-description at his website) is indicating.

Dzembritzki made the headlines last May when he met, together with two other German lawmakers and against all decisions of the Federal Government and the EU (Sweden had broken ranks to issue a visa to Palestinian Refugee Minister Atef Adwan enabling him to travel freely around the EU and enter Germany against the government's explicit wishes) a member of the terrorist gang Hamas.

The picture is copyrighted, so please click on the thumbnail to see it at its original location.

It was the same Dzembritzki, I guess he couldn't help it, who performed as one of the speakers at the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone on January 2 for the -- and now the story comes full circle -- controversial Ahmadiyya mosque mentioned above.

Yes, the writing on the lectern says: "Nobody is worth worshipping but Allah, Muhammad is Allah's messenger".

Ceremonial laying of the foundation stone for the Ahmadiyya mosque in Berlin on January 2. (dpa photo)

Last May, the old curmudgeon Henryk Broder asked whether it was admiration for a gangster in pinstripes or sheer and undiluted bumbledom that made Dzembritzki and the other lawmakers meeting the Hamas official. I'd say it is neither. Dzembritzki is just standing in the proud German tradition of the Germano-Arab brotherhood.

The new thing is just that nowadays one can side with the enemies of our culture and genocidal scum and STILL remain a Gutmensch.

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Thanks to Gudrun Eussner for pointing me at the picture and correcting some factual mistakes!

Ending the Dialogue Dialie?

This made the headlines today in the Swiss- and, to a lesser extent, in the Austrian media. Let's hope Germany will follow soon:

Pope striving for examination (of Christianity) by religious leaders
Rome - During mass, celebrating Epiphany, Pope Benedict XVI has asked the leaders of other religions to embark on an examination of Jesus Christ. (ht/sda)

He invites them to approach the "light of Christ" who went into being to "complete" the religious history of civilisation, "not to dismiss it", the church father said in his sermon at St Peter's Cathedral.

Benedict compared The Adoration of the Magi with the "three constitutive dimensions of modern mankind: politics, science and religion", which all three need "the light of Christ".

After the service the pope prayed Angelus for thousands of worshippers from the window of his office at St Peter's Square.

(Translation mine!)

May God grant a long life to the lonely old man in the Vatican.


55 Years ago: Brothers Georg and Joseph Ratzinger at their ordination.

Just to retrieve this from the blog-bilges...

All you hypocritical politicians, men of the cloth, writers and general bleeding heart do-gooders who are now pissing and moaning over the death of Saddam:

WHERE WERE YOU, WHERE WERE YOUR VOICES, WHEN FARIBA TAJIANI-EMAMQOLI WAS HANGED?

Hitchens on Saddam's Death

Christopher Hitchens, a man with a lot of positions that are contrarian and with which I rarely agree, has published a brilliant piece at Slate:

The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against "the Persians" and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.

How could it have come to this? Did U.S. officials know that the designated "executioners" would be the unwashed goons of Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army"—the same sort of thugs who killed Abdul Majid al-Khoei in Najaf just after the liberation and who indulge in extra-judicial murder of Iraqis every night and day? Did our envoys and representatives ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions? According to the New York Times, there do seem to have been a few insipid misgivings about the timing and the haste, but these appear to have been dissolved soon enough and replaced by a fatalistic passivity that amounts, in theory and practice, to acquiescence in a crude Shiite coup d'état. Thus, far from bringing anything like "closure," the hanging ensures that the poison of Saddamism will stay in the Iraqi bloodstream, mingling with other related infections such as confessional fanaticism and the sort of video sadism that has until now been the prerogative of al-Qaida's dehumanized ghouls. We have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame.
[...]
Reporting from defeated Germany in 1945, and noticing some brutal treatment of captured SS men, George Orwell wrote a brilliant essay called "Revenge Is Sour." I hadn't thought of it for a while but pulled it down from the shelf when I returned from Iraq. Here is the key passage:

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, "Those are for my five sons!" It is the kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get near enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a corpse.

The shabby, tawdry scene of Muqtada Sadr's riffraff taunting their defenseless former tyrant evokes exactly this quality of hysterical falsity and bravado. While Saddam Hussein was alive, they cringed. Now, they find their lost courage, and meanwhile take the drill and the razor blade and the blowtorch to their fellow Iraqis. To watch this abysmal spectacle as a neutral would be bad enough. To know that the U. S. government had even a silent, shamefaced part in it is to feel something well beyond embarrassment.

Saddam may have deserved death and, as I said before, he died a lot easier than many of his victims. But I was unable to pinpoint what made me, apart from my principal stance against capital punishment, still so uneasy about Saddam's death. Hitchens says it loud and clear: It was a lynching, not an execution. A lynching unworthy of the Western values, for which America and others went to war. And they let it happen.