The Nutcases Have Hijacked the Institution

At Gates of Vienna they are discussing in length and all seriousness whether Haider was assassinated.

Get over it! Nobody wanted or needed to kill that guy. He was the man everybody loved to hate, cinema at its grandiosest. And he was, with his anti-American politics, firmly established in the Germano-Austrian mainstream. For his less-than politically correct rhetoric: Didn't you know that over here, "right-wing extremists" are carefully cultivated? Why? Because without them and our "valiant fight" against them we wouldn't be able to prove how much we have "learned from our past". Hell, entire departments at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (homeland security) are living from them. His untimely death catapulted that man to heights of importance he could never really reach while he was alive.

And please get at least the simplest of fact right.

...it's rather strange that he would die in an accident on an inner-city road, doing less than 100 k/ph, driving a VW Phaeton - a car so safe it allows VW to market it as the car with the "safest passenger cabin ever".

Those who seem to be in the possession of a cornucopia of knowledge about the car he drove ought to know as well that he drove 142 km/h on a road that was designed for a maximum speed of 70 km/h.

Get real! Haider had, 15 years ago, survived a similar accident without an injury. Whether you call him a victim of statistics or of the fact that God was fed up with granting a man a third chance, who thought he could cheat the devil, is up to you, but stop the silly conspiracy theories, first because they are silly and second because they end almost invariably ... where?

Nationalists of Haider's stature are too significant a threat for the EU to ignore. But I think it might be useful to look at another angle. The Israelis were already spying on Haider, due to his reluctance to denounce the Iraq regime sufficiently, so it's entirely possible Mossad had a role in this. If you read the Israeli media, you will see they are celebrating Haider's death.

Yeah, right! The Israelis are known to celebrate their successful clandestine intelligence efforts in the public media and what threat the slightly buffoonish Haider was to the EU is beyond my knowledge. But as we are all aware, Americans know much more about us than we do.

I guess the Israelis are supposed to replace Yom Kippur with October 11 as their highest holiday now to properly honour the man who lauded the SS, who unabashedly lived on his "aryanized" estate, who praised the Nazi labour policy and who was known for his public contemptuous remarks about Jews -- only that even that would't let them off the hook.