on another personal note

I will be back to more or less regular blogging soon. I passed my shooting test on Friday (not brilliantly, but hey, who asks for the results! I passed!) There were 16 of us and it started at the indoor shooting range, first with full-bore rifle shooting at the 100-meter range. We got five bullets and the minimum requirement was three hits in the rings. (This is only a very approximate likeness of the target.) For those interested, we had the choice between two Blaser R93 repeaters, one with 222Rem, the other with .30-06 calibre, both with a red dot rifle scope. I chose the 222Rem because of the recoil, respectively the relative lack of it, as did all the women participating.

The second discipline was the running hare at about 30 meters. This is the best picture of such a range I could find online. The hare silhouette is made from steel and topples over when hit. (The effing thing is travelling pretty fast!) We had the choice between several guns, I chose a Brno (Czech) "over and under" gun. All the guns were not choked and we used regular hunting shot. Again we had to hit a minimum of three out of five shots.

The third discipline was the "running boar". Again this is the best picture of such a target I could find online. Here, two hits out of five bullets were the minimum for passing the test. The "boar" isn't travelling as fast as the tin hare, but the shooting has to be much more precise. Again for those interested: The 222Rem calibre wouldn't be sufficient for real boar hunting. One would have to go for a bigger calibre.

In the afternoon, there was the trap shooting at a different range. I had the same Brünner gun. We had to hit a minimum of 4 clays to pass the test, two shots for each clay. After I had hit 5, the examiners mercyfully pulled me out because I could hardly stand on my feet anymore. I was neither the oldest, nor the only woman doing the test, but at an age where other women are taking their grandchildren for a walk, it was pretty tough. The best of the guys hit 14 out of the 15.

Next week I will have to pass the written and oral examination and then I'll hopefully be the proud holder of a German shooting (what you Americans call hunting) license.

Why did I do it? Because now I can work under rules with my terriers and, should everything go right, build up a little pack for boar hunting and thus let them have the life they need. Boars have become sort of a pest here, so we will be even quite welcome. And maybe, just maybe, I will get a Weimaraner puppy later (the smooth coated variety whose specimens are killed in America when they -- the gene for the smooth coat is passed on recessively -- turn up in a short coated litter) and Weims, at least Weims from respectable breeders, are only sold to people with a hunting/shooting license here. And, again maybe, he will be as wonderful as my Bracko was, a castoff from a hunter who had no room in his life for the old dog anymore and thus gave me one of the best things I ever had.

But hey, I am rambling. I guess it's some post-stress thing.

It Stinks Where 'It' Thinks

Places we wished we had never visited...
...like, say, the German soul

Hans Filbinger, a German Christian Democrat politician of middling importance in the Sixties and Seventies, who was forced out of office in 1978 by a scandal surrounding his role as a military judge during the "Third Reich", died on April 1st at age 93.

Filbinger had been premier of the state of Baden-Württemberg in South West Germany from 1966 to 1978 until he quit, following revelations by the newspaper Die Zeit about his part as a naval judge in the execution of a sailor and death sentences he issued in absentia for two others, virtually days before the end of World War Two, in occupied Norway.

Filbinger, who was a member of the SA from 1934 until 1937 and between 1933 and 1936 of the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (NSDStB), the Nazi student organisation already and who had published 1935 an essay in a Catholic student magazine, which was based on parts of the National Socialist ideology of people's community and race (Volksgemeinschafts- und Rassenideologie), thus became a symbol of post-war West Germany's failure to deal honestly with the legacy of the "Third Reich".

Filbinger denied any wrongdoing, but negative publicity and increasing pressure from within his own Christian Democrats finally made him resign.

His reputation suffered even more when the newsmagazine Der Spiegel stated that he had defended his actions during the war by saying: "What was lawful then cannot be unlawful now", though he remained always adamant that the remark had been taken out of context.

After his resignation, Filbinger continued to defend himself against critics, saying that he had saved others from execution and had only served as prosecutor in one case when a death sentence was carried out on orders from above.

The two death sentences Filbinger ordered as a judge in March and April 1945 for murder and desertion had never been carried out, as the sailors had already escaped to Sweden at the time of the trial.

The trial against Walter Gröger, the 23-year old sailor sentenced to death, was hold on January 16, 1945 and Gröger was executed on March 16, 1945.

What had happened? Was Filbinger really "just carrying out orders"?

He certainly was. However, there had been similar cases where court and prosecutor had had the decency to procrastinate the trial until after the foreseeable Endsieg on May 8, 1954.

What about the argument that desertion is similarly punished in other armies as well in wartime? This, too, is a matter of practice, rather than of the written law. For example, the Americans executed during WWII only one deserter. The German military executed 48 soldiers during WWI. In WWII, there had been administered 24,559 death sentences as of January 31, 1945, and in the last months a further 5,000 or 6,000. Until the end of November 1945, 9,500 death sentences had been carried out.

Filbinger, not too surprisingly, remained a controversial figure and was the cause for another political brouhaha in 2004, when the Christian Democrats appointed him to an assembly, the Bundesversammlung, which comes together for the election of the German head of state, the Bundespräsident. At that time, Chancellor Angela Merkel had defended Filbinger's inclusion in the assembly.

Following his death, the leader of the Social Democrats in Baden-Württemberg, Ute Vogt, said it was now time to draw a line under the past and "The enmity ends with (his) death."

Which showed a remarkable lack of foresight and knowledge of human nature for somebody in such a position.

Last Wednedsay, Günther Oettinger, born 1953, the current premier of Baden-Württemberg, instead of bidding the old man when he was borne to his final resting place a friendly "About time", stated (I guess he wasn't able to escape the pressure of his German mind any more than millions of others) that:

Different from what some obituaries are saying, Hans Filbinger was not a National Socialist. He was an opponent of the NS-regime. However, he wasn't able to escape the pressure of the regime any more than millions of others.

Of course, there had been efforts to whitewash Filbinger during his lifetime as well. A notable one is that of Günther Gillessen (born 1928), a renowned German journalist, historian, former university professor for the sciences of journalism, and what is considered a "conservative" in this country, on the occasion of Filbinger's 90th birthday in 2003.

We, as a nation, are far removed from the necessary amount of detailed knowledge and a general overview, which a good historian will need to understand a different time.

Notabene: This remarkable bit of patience and compassion was published, equally remarkably, at the website of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a foundation that is related to the Christian Democratic party, and which offers, among other things, political education, conducts scientific fact-finding research for political projects, grants scholarships to gifted individuals and research on the history of Christian Democracy. Their budget, which is largely sponsored by tax money (as are the budgets of similar foundations of different political hues), amounts to around 100 million Euro.

The money on Gillessen was certainly well-spent. Here we have the same Günther Gillessen about whom the International Herald Tribune reported in 1994 under the headline "Shaping a New Identity, and Trying to Come to Terms With the Past":

Last month in Jerusalem, Günther Gillessen, a leading editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily, Germany's most important establishment voice, addressed a gathering of Germans, Israelis and American Jews with a plea for the creation of "a new taboo" against photographic or film representations of the Holocaust. "Memory should be permitted to sink in the sediment of time," he said. "The Shoah is a closed event. The second and third generations should be spared."

Criticizing institutional efforts to keep the past alive - meaning Washington's new Holocaust Memorial Museum and Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" - Mr. Gillessen said "awful crimes should not be permitted to become the pivot of our lives." He rejected the notion that the Holocaust was a unique event in history, saying that "Relativization is the historian's business."

Well, what can I say but: Any idea anybody why Israel granted the old goat an entry permit?

What I don't get is why a man like Oettinger, born several years after WWII and whom nobody has ever blamed for ANYTHING, just can't keep his silly trap shut. So he informed us that he had said it for the Filbinger family, not the public. Then why didn't he tell the audience how nice Filbinger was to his grandchildren or about the old man's admirable oenophile knowledge? Why the hell did he HAVE to bring up this chapter in Filbinger's life? That said, does a former politician of middling importance who had to resign from his office decades ago under less than straightforward circumstances HAVE to have a funeral with all the trimmings? Hadn't a much more low-key affair, where all the Filbingers could have happily told each other what a great guy grandfather was without further remorse, served just as well?

The answer is that, yes, Oettinger HAD to. "It" – the German Pavlovian reflex – spoke in him.

And of course, all this is, again, the Jews' fault and anyway they are just seeking attention again by protesting Oettinger's speech. Georg Brunnhuber, another Christian Democrat and member of the federal parliament, the Bundestag, supported Oettinger:

Exaggerated criticism by the Council of Jews only tends to make a lot of people say Oettinger was right.

Now what does that mean? Does the fact that the Jews dared to have an unfavourable take on Oettinger's views prove that Filbinger was a resistance fighter? Surely that can't be. He was what he was, whatever some Jew said about it and not even Brunnhuber can be quite that dumb. Then does it mean that the Jews oughtn't to be amazed that nobody likes them because they, uppity as they are, are responding to attempts to re-tell history? Will we one day, when the embarrassing Jews are finally shut up, be able, as Liza put it, to award the Nobel Prize belatedly to Josef Mengele, based on his merits in the field of twin research, a perennial achievement of German science, which has remained sadly unacknowledged for much too long?

Or does it simply mean that the "neverending history" people of Oettinger's and Brunnhuber's ilk are so noisily bemoaning is a product of their own stupidity, lack of common sense, lack of honesty and honour, plus some deeper urges I don't really WANT to follow any further? And NOT due to the machinations of a Jewish lobby?

It stinks where "it" thinks.

---

General Information:

SPIEGEL ONLINE

Monsters and Critics

Wikipedia German

Wikipedia English (Interestingly, the English Wiki article doesn't include the details about Filbinger's membership in SA/NSDStB and the controversial article in the Catholic student magazine.)

DIE ZEIT with a balanced account of Filbinger's past as a naval judge and the circumstances.

Hat tip: Liza

The Perennial Wish to Kill Jews by Proxy

Easter March Follow-Up

In Frankfurt/Main we have a rather endearing case of wanting ones cake AND to eat it:"For Peace and Western Values". Bless their hearts!

In 2007, too, we had, like every year, to suffer the ubiquitous nuisance of the Ostermärsche, Easter Marches, where hypocrisy goes rampant as always when Germans are trying to prove how good they are and how much they have learned from history and, as always, too, they are proving just one thing: That they are still nothing but their parents' children and grandparents' grandchildren and will always be.

Easter Marches have a fairly long tradition in Germany. After WWII, started by Germany and lost with disastrous results, it seemed to be the only fair-minded and just thing to do to opt for pacifism and, no doubt, for some it was a serious cause and honest sentiment. The Campaign against Atomic Death, who later organised the Ostermärsche, had been founded by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the trade unions in 1958 already, when the Adenauer Government announced their plans to acquire nuclear-capable equipment for the German Bundeswehr. In 1961, the first Ostermarsch, shaped after British example, took place in West Germany. About 23,000 people participated in the final rally. By 1964, more than 100,000 took part nationwide.

The West German movement did not try to win followers, like the British movement did, by showing pictures of governmental, police or military, violence, but of the apocalypse: pictures of bombed German cities and, increasingly, Hiroshima were used to link the campaign to the war experiences of the West German population, thus creating an absurd parity of German and American misdeeds. That Hiroshima was about defeating Nazi-Germany's ally, an ally, who had started "their" war as callously as Germans had done with theirs was forgotten already.

Germans – always good for a principled stance: German Bombers in the Hindu Kush – Suicide Bombers in Germany quite in the spirit of the Floriani Principle "O holy Saint Florian, spare my house, burn down others".

Increasingly, atomic death was connected with and compared to the Holocaust and comparisons between Auschwitz and Hiroshima found their way into the West German campaigns. The activists on the first Easter March already established a direct connection between Hiroshima and the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen, the Bavarian Easter Marches frequently stopped at the Dachau concentration camp to ram home the point that it was war who started Nazi barbarianism. That it was, in fact, the other way round: who cared – even then.

"Fascism is not an opinion, it's a crime!" In the Ruhrgebiet our Gutmenschen have long forgotten that "Fascism" (that is what the left likes to call the Nazi movement, thus to avoid the embarrassing "Socialism" bit) didn't go away by singing "Kumbayah".

In the meantime, any pretense of pacifism as an ethical stipulation has been dropped to be replaced by spinelessness and opportunism of the Dear- Crocodile-Eat-Me-Last-sort at best, shameless partisanship for any murderer, as long as he is only killing Jews, at worst. And all that in the proud and basically unbroken tradition of multi-culturalism Bubba Adolf had established to last a Thousand Years. Wasn't it Robert A. Heinlein who said something to the effect that the creed, that violence never settles anything, is both, historically untrue and thoroughly immoral? This becomes specifically obvious when a people, whose nightmarish fantasy could become reality only through appeasement and the cowardice of other nations, and whose plans of genocidal global domination could only be stopped by war, now elevates the same spinelessness, which allowed them to pervade Europe with genocide and the bloodiest war in history, to a piedestal where in more ethical societies religion can be found.

In Hanau it's "Hands off Iran" and "No Blood for Oil". They just (JUST!) don't dare to write "No Blood for Isra-oil" – yet...




…whereas in Hamburg the comrades are more outspoken about their specific idea of peace. The picture just allows a peek at a banner saying "Freedom for Palestine" and "… occupation" but one does get the general idea. Right! Peace is when murderous Arabs can go on killing Jews … in peace.

But it doesn't end here. If it only would.

Here, in Potsdam, we have what looks like a child hugging a tank with the caption (misquoting, not entirely unappropriately, Germany's National Poet Friedrich Schiller): "He who wants to become a murderer (in Schiller's original it's "master craftsman") must start practising young."

If this is a Palestinian child, and it may be, it would reconcile me a bit with the whole sad, pathetic business the peace movement is, however, it doesn't look like it. Pal children are usually clad by their admirably peace-minded parents in bandana and bomb belt plus there are – thank God for that – no tanks around – yet.















So we can safely assume that the most cynical abuse of children since Bubba Adolf's Hitlerjugend is not just thoroughly ignored, but actively supported by the multikulti kissyhuggy children and grandchildren of same Bubba's followers who would be, let's grant them that, appalled to be called what they clearly are. By the way, the bottom picture was taken at an anti-Israel "peace" rally in (are we amazed?) Berlin some years ago.

He (or she) who wants to become a murderer must start practising young indeed.

Last, I give you this little historic gem from the Leipzig Easter March 1999, just nine (9) years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The peaceminded Germans east of the former Iron Curtain, in the former Communist netherworld, were protesting against the "NATO Eastern Enlargement – Easter March for Peace instead of Nato March Eastbound", totally and blissfully oblivious of the fact that it was same "NATO March Eastbound" that enabled them to protest against it. Or to protest against ANYTHING, for that.

You can get the Germans out of the dictatorship, but not the dictatorship out of the Germans.

Or the wish to kill Jews, even if it is by proxy.

---

Source for the history and timeline of the Easter Marches: Holger Nehring, Politics, Symbols and the Public Sphere: The Protests against Nuclear Weapons in Britain and West Germany, 1958-1963, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 2 (2005)

Hat tip: Philologisches Klo and Lizas Welt.

untruth does not go away just because it is buried in the blog bilges -- redux

Robert Spencer replied to my post. He said that he was taking down the blog entry although he trusted the source.

untruth does not go away just because it is buried in the blog bilges

I didn't head my entry dating last Wednesday "The Sheer Monstrosity Defies Belief" for nothing and I made it clear that I was putting up this piece of news on the strength of Robert Spencer's and JihadWatch's authority and reputation only. Now it turns out that JihadWatch's only source of this news report, the Catholic Herald, have removed the page from their website.

I feel very strong about this. To be biased is one thing. In fact, it is good as long as you make clear where you stand. To publish falsehoods is another one, and the issue with which we are all dealing is too important to be gung-ho about it. If the report is false (and to fall for canards can happen to the best) it should be retracted. This is what I just wrote to JihadWatch via the contact interface at their website:

Dear Mr. Spencer,

I have at my blog published the news reported under the above link on the strength of your reputation, as have, no doubt, others.

http://editrixblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/sheer-
monstrosity-defies-belief.html

Now I notice that the only source, the Catholic Herald, has removed the page to which you linked.

Can you verify the report or are you willing to put up a retraction? It would do the cause for which you (and others, myself included) are fighting good.

It would be a shame should this – your – site dwindle from an opinionated, principled stance down to the merely sensationalist.

We all and the cause for which we stand up would suffer.

And no, untruth does not go away just because it is buried in the blog bilges.

Best regards

I will keep you informed whether I get an answer and if yes, what it says.

Media Darlings of the Unenlightened Masses

... or: Sheer and Undiluted Shittyness

The release of the fifteen British soldiers triggered off the inevitable German media ritual to let the inexorable "Iran-experts" have their say. The most inescapable among those is the unavoidable Bahman Nirumand. His love affair with the German media beats the longevity of 98% of marriages in this country and he is always good for a howler. This time he sees the bizarre staging a "coming around" regarding the hostage-crisis, which is "a defeat for the president". And he even managed to keep a straight face.

The amnesty surely wasn't his [Ahmadinedjad's] will, but that of his adversaries who obviously managed to rein him in and thus to avert an imminent danger from the the country.

Which will, according to Nirumand, lead to a decision of crucial importance:

Iran is at the crossroads. Either the radical Islamists around Ahmadinedjad ... will succeed to monopolize the power or his critics, the moderates, the reformers, will manage to to take over the helm. This round goes to the moderates.

A superfluity of metaphors doesn't make the reasoning any more lucid and the fairytale of the "moderate" Muslim who needs nothing but support to bring peace to the world any less moronic. Following this logic from the nuthouse, the kidnapping was even a good thing because it somehow weakened Ahmadinedjad, Liza observes.

Nirumand was born in Tehran in 1936 and went to Germany as a student in the Fifties. He read German philology, philosophy and Iranic studies, his doctor's thesis was about Bertolt Brecht. He returned to teach in Iran, then had to flee the regime of the Shah, went back to Germany, where he became one of the leading members of the "Movement of 1968" at the German universities in the Sixties and early Seventies, which is still considered by the mainstream an anti-autoritarian revolt, while its main achievement was to firmly replace German historical guilt by that of America (famous chant: "USA -- SA -- SS") and to change America's role from that of a liberator to that of an oppressor, not just of Germany, but of the world.

The banners say: "Amis out of Indochina", "Class War intead of war between peoples" and "For the set-up of the IVth Internationale".

After the Shah's demise, Nirumand returned a second time to Iran to flee once again when the Mullahs came to power.

1989, Nirumand's book Leben mit den Deutschen (Life with the Germans) appeared. As a series of letters he writes to a relative in Iran who is considering to come to Germany about his experiences with the culture of the post-war Teutons, including gems like being invited for dinner, then being charged for his meal, or people being reprimanded for turning up for an appointment at 2:02 when it was scheduled for 2:00. Such clichés, bordering on the slanderous, come, mind you, from a confessing "lover" of German culture and almost lifelong resident in this country and are, in a culture of intense self-hatred, guarantors for adequate sales figures, specifically with multi-kulti appeal thrown in.

At this point it is, maybe, not all that amazing anymore to learn that this is the same Bahman Nirumand, who compares "Christian and Jewish fundamentalism" with Islamism, who are all (ALL!) "instrumentalising the faith to mobilise the unenlightened masses for their goals", notabene in the mouthpiece of the post-GDR-Communist PDS, Neues Deutschland, and Israel's ownership of nuclear weapons with that of Iran.

All that has nothing to do with neither, religion nor culture. That is naked safeguarding of interests.

Having learned now from Father Nirumand that the wish of the Jewish state to survive among a host of aggressive and armed-to-the teeth neighbours is more precisely described as "naked safeguarding of interests" (we are relieved!), Nirumand Daughter goes on -- Habemus Papam -- to explain us the nature of comparisons in even more detail:

Many Catholics who are trying to live with their church's guidelines, are shattered by the election of Cardinal Ratzinger. On the other hand, some intellectuals are revelling in submissive gestures and self-flagellation rituals that put a Shiite in Kerbala to shame ... What is supposed to be ethically relativist, and thus somehow arbitrary, about the stance that divorce is better than a broken down relationship? To some, the unborn life in the petri-dish is sacred, to others the freedom of individual decision -- why is one ethical and the other relativist? Some consider euthanasia hubris, others a deed of mercy -- where is here the indifference?

Whether this professed (albeit recent) "conservative" is really as dumb as she looks and really hasn't twigged what ethical relativism is about or whether she is spouting calculatingly Daddy's "Islamism Light" is beyond me.

But don't take Mariam Lau née Nirumand, who made the transgression from film editor at the leftist taz to chief correspondent for the "conservative" Die Welt seemingly without hangups and whom obviously nobody told that her time as a cheeky media brat had been outstayed decades ago, verbiage about our pope too seriously. She can be nice to us Germans as well. After all, didn't she do us the immense favour to call Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners "pulp fiction with sociologic camouflage code" in an article headed "Little Historians" in taz vom 13./14. April 1996, and the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial for for victims of the former East German Ministry of State Security ('Stasi') an "educational shock treatment" in Die Welt, which each hit the center of the German Zeitgeist with stunning accuracy, regardless of the ten years between those two statements, the different media in which they appeared and the professed change of political stance of the writer.

Gosh, and there was I, thinking that Daddy Bahman's thingy about calling Israel's wish to defend herself "naked safeguarding of interests" was unbeatable in its sheer and undiluted shittyness!

My take on all that? Only in a country like Germany, with that dangerous mixture of self-hatred and denial and without any moral and ethical compass, phonies like Nirumand père et fille can become the media darlings of the unenlightened masses, while they are making up their bull, somehow arbitrarily, while they are going along. In any sane society they would have been laughed out of the door ages ago.

Happy Easter

The Sheer Monstrosity Defies Belief

If Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch, who have a reputation to lose, hadn't published this -- I hadn't. Why not? Because the sheer monstrosity of it defies belief.

Under the headline "We must not let this ancient Church slide into oblivion" about Iraq’s Assyrian Christians who are facing extinction, the Catholic Herald reports the following detail of the atrocities they are facing:

“When they cook a dish in the Middle East, it is traditional to put the meat on top of the rice when they serve it. They kidnapped a woman’s baby in Baghdad, a toddler, and because the mother was unable to pay the ransom, they returned her child – beheaded, roasted and served on a mound of rice.” The infant’s crime was to be an Assyrian, but this story, reported by the Barnabus Fund, went unnoticed in the West, like so many other horrific accounts of Christian persecution in Iraq.

It defies comment as well. Just two things: SHOULD this be true, then the silence of the West is as monstrous as the crime. And yes, the people who did it are the same who are keeping the blood libel alive and thriving.

I first intended to head this entry "Happy Passover", but it defies cynicism as well.

Hat tip: MNM!

The Strange Effects of Mountain Air

Kurt Beck, chairman of the German Social Democrats, proposed after a trip to war-torn Afghanistan to host an Afghan peace conference in Germany where "Taliban moderates" could discuss terms with Kabul authorities.

Beck said Tuesday after meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai that he saw "signals" that pointed to a "possibility for a new conference" and added the Taliban could be involved, a proposal seconded by foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier.

Beck had said that it was desirable to talk to moderates among the Taliban, telling the Deutsche Welle radio service that the idea could not be rejected out of hand, but, so Beck:

Anyone who murders people cannot be a partner for negotiations. But there are basic sympathisers [whatever that is] who do indeed have influence in the restless regions and who ought to be checked out politically whether there is a chance to stipulate something binding.

Yeah, stipulate something binding... Maybe the Taliban cook or gardener will oblige.

Funny as it may sound, but I think he is being more of a bumbling, pompous old fart than a dhimmi. He thinks he can win votes this way, though, and is thus twice an opportunist. A mere shit-scared dhimmi is probably even less unpalatable.

I have learned a new word today: Fremdscham, which I translated as "extrinsic shame". And that is exactly what I am feeling right now. My flesh is creeping in embarrassment because a fellow German -- no, make that: a fellow human being -- was able to say something quite that moronic.

Some Facts about Leeds University

About two weeks ago, the lecture of the German political scientist Matthias Küntzel (picture) scheduled at Leeds University was cancelled.

The as usually well-informed and level-headed Melanie Phillips informs us at her blog and she -- chapeau -- even gets his name right, Umlaut and all :

… A non-Jewish German academic, Dr Matthias Küntzel, was shocked when his planned lecture, ‘Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East’, was abruptly cancelled by the university along with two smaller scheduled seminars.

The university insisted its decision had nothing to do with freedom of speech; nor was it bowing to threats or protests from interest groups. The meeting had been cancelled on safety grounds alone, and because ‘contrary to our rules, no assessment of risk to people or property has been carried out, no stewarding arrangements are in place and we were not given sufficient notice to ensure safety and public order.’

But there was no security risk. No threats had been received. The only ripple was a couple of protests from Muslim students, who claimed the lectures would increase hatred and threaten their ‘security and well-being’ on campus. The university’s excuse was absurd.
[…]
Now, fresh information has reached me which reinforces the view that the cancellation was indeed designed to suppress Küntzel’s views. After meeting the university authorities the head of the German department, Professor Stuart Taberner, told his staff that, although he didn’t think censorship was the issue, if Küntzel were to be re-invited the university would have to ‘look closely’ at the subject of his talk.

‘Having now found the text of what I take to be his talk on the web,’ he said, ‘I’m convinced that the university would want to be reassured that it was striking the correct balance between free speech — the expression of ideas — and its obligation to be mindful of the language in which these ideas are framed’.

The real reason for the cancellation was thus laid bare. It was because of what Küntzel was saying… Indeed, Küntzel sees a seamless connection between Nazism and the jihad against the west. Hitler, he says, fantasised about the toppling of the skyscrapers of New York, the symbol of Jewish power. And the Hamburg trial of terrorists associated with 9/11 heard evidence that New York had been selected for the atrocity because it was a ‘Jewish city’.
[...]
The result is that Leeds has now joined the growing list of universities which have spinelessly given up the defence of free speech, and thus, in the great battle for civilisation against barbarism, run up the campus white flag.

So far, so bad. What amazes me, however, is that nobody took the trouble to look at background and infrastructure of Leeds University, which would have clarified that Leeds is far more than just another spineless university.

Well, maybe the following is obvious to residents of the UK, so take this brief information to be for non-UK readers: Leeds, together with its neighbouring city Bradford, is the Islamic heartland of the north, infamous for localised sharia law, home of some of the London Tube bombers, religious riots, segregated schools and other segregation issues.

But back to Leeds University:

In the November Referendum 2004 of the Leeds University Union, two of five motions, number 2 and 5, were about such pressing issues like "Palestinian Students’ Right to Education" (thwarted by – you guessed it – the Jews), proposed by Akram Awad and seconded by Mariam Al-Jaajaa, and "LUU Policy towards PSG [i.e. Palestinian Solidarity Group] and Other Politically Active Societies" proposed by Akram Awad and seconded by (are we amazed?) Mariam Al-Jaajaa. In the latter, the aspiring academics are defining, quite in the spirit of Hermann "Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich" Goering who is a Jew and who isn't. You don't believe me? Read it!

Not too surprisingly, the student voted "most powerful on Leeds University campus" in the "Leeds Student", notabene Britain's biggest weekly student newspaper, is one Hind Hassan (self-description: "British Iraqi, live for the battle"). She writes a near-weekly column for the newspaper, makes frequent appearances on BBC radio Five-Live, BBC Yorkshire and blogs at BBC online.

When this "passionate anti-war Respect [i.e. the party of George "You are totally wrong in saying that in most people’s eyes Hezbollah are terrorists. In most people’s eyes Israel is a terrorist state" Galloway] activist" isn't talking politics, she is writing juvenile (which would be forgivable) and simperingly self-serving (which is not) drivel like "Do you ever remember not having a mobile phone?":

Gone are the days when friends would arrange to meet for lunch at a particular time and place in person or on the old fashioned corded dog and bone . I yearn for those days, but why I hear you all cry out. Why would one, so clearly progressive in all other aspects of society hold such reservations against a harmless lump of plastic?

Have I caught tinnitus or is that Mr. Pulitzer rotating in his grave?

However, class war is never far away from this passionate anti-war activist's mind. Little Miss (excuse me: Ms.!) Equality and Diversity informs us:

The one good use of the cordless portable media phone thingy is throwing it in the direction of that annoying cow who won’t shut up about her pony from daddy dearest.

Well, it clearly wasn't that infantile bilge her skill for social analysis that made her eligible for frequent appearances on BBC radio Five-Live, BBC Yorkshire and blogging at BBC online. Then, what was?

Maybe it's her political savvy. At her website, gems like

Dictatorship:
Pseudo definition
Middle East.
True definition
A country that continually veto’s resolutions backed by majority of Nations so as to protect their own interests.
[…]
A country that jails a man and places him in solitary confinement for exposing the largest Nuclear weapons program in the Middle East.
A country that arrests and tortures innocent humans without charge just because they can

(and so on, I think you get the gist) can be found. I wonder if that swollen-headed little bitch REALLY thinks the Middle East is preferable to the Americanised West or whether she is just being deliberately obnoxious.

I wonder, too, why she is suffering the awful conditions of a Western cesspool when the entire Middle East with all its freedom, respect for human rights, diversity and equality (specifically for women) is open to her and whether she has ever asked herself what might happen to people there who'd out themselves as "lifelong Christians" when she is free to make herself known as what she is in the despised West.

(As an aside: Why the editor wasn't interested in a Christian perspective must have something to do with the fact that in Britain more people are attending mosques than the Church of England and making demands. So he is, after all, only adhering to democratic standards when he does that, or isn't he. That must be the reason, too, why a fledgeling hack as singularly untalented as Little Ms. Social Justice is courted by a medium of the importance of the BBC.)

But there is more to Hind Hassan than her valiant fight against little upper middle class girls with ponies and for the clearing of the name of Middle Eastern dictatorships havens of human rights, racial and gender equality. So it doesn't amaze us all that much that she was instrumental, too, in the ousting of Dr. Frank Ellis. Who is Frank Ellis? Ellis used to be a lecturer at Leeds University. He was thoughtless enough to express his support for the outcome of scientific research done by others, namely the "Bell Curve". The Al Guardian, in an unappetising huff over such an appaling display of such non-politically correct scientific findings, even transcended their usual lopsided reporting to lie outrightly:

Yesterday more than 300 students and staff gathered in Leeds to call for him to be sacked and campaigners said the struggle was picking up momentum at other universities. Hind Hassan, treasurer of Unite Against Fascism at Leeds University, said: “This is a fight that is going to go on and on until we get rid of this man. It has gone beyond an issue of freedom of speech or academic freedom and now directly impinges on the rights of students to live and work in a safe and tolerant environment. How can female students or those from ethnic minorities possibly get a fair educational experience?”

Well, apart from the fact that there is no "right" for students who do not hold a British passport to live and work in a British environment at all, I wonder what "educational experience" women would get in the fatherlands of those ethnic minority students, or why European and US-American students aren't crowding the educational institutions in same countries to get a wonderful alternative educational experience of high-class academic standard, enlightenment and racial equality.

Students from several universities attended the rally. Shaheed Fazal, who travelled from Warwick University, said: “It is completely inappropriate for a lecturer in his position to push these views.”

Pav Aktar, NUS anti-racism organiser, said the campaign was gathering national momentum…

What Ellis really said can be read here.

My take on that? As long as students Hind Hassan, Pav Aktar and Shaheed Fazal can oust lecturer Dr. Frank Ellis, things can't be quite so racially unbalanced as they seem to think they are in Britain.

Or rather: not in the way they think they are.

However disgusted by it, the Al Guardian nevertheless found the case of Frank Ellis useful to discredit another academic presenting other unpopular facts, namely Matthias Küntzel and thus our circle closes.

The University of Leeds this morning hit back at critics accusing it of censorship after it cancelled a public lecture on 'Islamic anti-semitism' due to be delivered by a visiting academic.

The university said it had cancelled the lecture on security grounds and insisted it had nothing to do with "academic freedom, freedom of speech, anti-semitism or Islamophobia."

The university's secretary, Richard Gair, said: "Those that are claiming that is the case are making mischief."
[…]
Dr Küntzel is a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon international centre for the study of anti-semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He had been due last night to deliver a lecture called 'The Nazi legacy: the export of anti-semitism to the Middle East'.
[…]
This is the second time in less than a year that Leeds has found itself at the centre of accusations of preventing academic freedom of speech.

Last March, Frank Ellis became the first university lecturer to be suspended under the new Race Relations (Amendment) Act. The decision by Leeds came after he told the university's student newspaper that black people and women were genetically inferior.

Dr Ellis, who worked in the same school of modern languages and cultures which is at the centre of this latest row, took early retirement last summer.

A spokeswoman for the university said the two cases were unrelated and neither were to do with academic freedom of speech. "The Ellis case had nothing to do with freedom of speech, neither does this [latest] case."

No and presumably neither has a comparison of Küntzel with Ellis, who had defended controversial findings outside his own field of research (I am NOT justifying Ellis' ousting, mind you, any further discussion would just go beyond the scope of this blog entry), whereas Küntzel was presenting rock-hard evidence within his very own field of research.

And surely the fact that Küntzel was fussily introduced by the Guardian as a "research associate at the Vidal Sassoon international centre for the study of anti-semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem" whereas the information that he is a German gentile was NOT mentioned is purely accidental as well…

The only fact that is not accidental is the fact that those not graced with minority status at Leeds University are scared shitless.