Hypocrisy runs rampant. While Westergaard's case is one of freedom of speech, Sarrazin's isn't, but about "the consequences a book may have for the author within a specifically important public law institution", as she put it in her speech. Yeah, whatever.
Reactions from the usual suspects are hardly amazing. Aiman Mazyek, secretary of the "Central Council of Muslims", and a specifically ardent defender of freedom of speech, is quoted stating that "Merkel is honouring the cartoonist who in our view trampled on our prophet and trampled on all ... blah blah yabber yabber yack yack", and the Green Party, another haven of freedom of all sorts, don't like Merkel's appearance either. "I wouldn't have done it," said Green Party floor leader Renate Künast, and "...if a chancellor also makes a speech on top of that [the Danish cartoon affair], it serves to heat up the debate." And a heated debate is something we can't have. I'll remind Künast of that as soon as another CASTOR transport is about.
Shaking and old, freakish (I mean that in a kind way) cartoonist's hand doesn't cost much and will rake in a lot. He can always serve as the object for cheap good will and for brushing up one's image as a defender of free speech. However, a member of the establishment is different. He is a traitor to his class and must be harshly curbed and disciplined.
I mean, isn't it OBVIOUS?
Edited to add:
Benjamin Weinthal: Why is Merkel Protecting Iran's Terror Bank? -- Double standards:
[More]German Chancellor Angela Merkel is slated to honor today in the city of Potsdam, just outside of Berlin, the Danish caricaturist Kurt Westergaard, whose cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad and fanatical Islam triggered violent protests across the Muslim world in 2005. Westergaard will receive the “M100” media prize for his devotion (and unwavering courage) to press freedom.
It is also disturbing that the city of Hamburg would essentially be used as the European financial center of the Islamic Republic of Iran and that the EIH has essentially been used as a conduit for Iran's missile and nuclear program. That helps explain why the U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday designated the bank a terrorist entity. According to Stuart Levey, who is spearheading anti-terror measures across the globe for the U.S Treasury Department, "As one of Iran's few remaining access points to the European financial system, EIH has facilitated a tremendous volume of transactions for Iranian banks previously [blacklisted] for proliferation.
What is striking about Merkel's tribute to Westergaard's fight for the right to speak freely is her vehement opposition to shutting down the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank (EIH), a terror entity whose revenues help prop up the Iranian regime and suppress freedom of press in Iran.
15 comments:
Is this controversial book going to be translated into English?
Another good post, Editrix!
This 9-11 Americans might become like the Danish or Netherlands where Muslims will strike us based on some on-purpose provocation, an exercise of free speech. Previously, Muslims hit us just because of our "Great Satan" foreign policy, or that's what they'd have us believe. Thus, Americans will get a truer sense about what Islam is about, i.e., they'll kill us simply over someone burning a few Korans, or over a mass protest against a triumphal mosque at Ground Zero. If that occurs, and then Muslims around the world cheer, opinion about Islam and Muslims will take another well-deserved beating in the US. I wait with baited breath.
Seems to me Merkel is trying to escape the charge that she's been dhimmified. So she tries to make the case that one must have a nuanced approach to criticizing Islam. Mild cartoons, good. Burning Korans, bad.
There also this factor going on: it seems all the politicians are trying to get their say in ahead of the 9/11 Koran burning in Florida--Merkel, Obama, US overseas generals, and the Pope even! Then when the inevitable rage occurs, the message to Muslims will be don't hit American troops, Germany or Catholics, because we were against it from the get-go, and said so.
Beak, I doubt it. It is not a "thrilling" book. It's full of data and the inevitable conclusions FOR GERMANY. It doesn't contain a clever recipe or a political agenda for the salvation of the West. The controversy is not about Sarrazin's book, it is about whether the simple truth is bearable or not.
Bruce, here is what happened to the wannabe-Koran-burner already (via Lawrence Auster's VFR blog):
City of Gainesville has denied the church a burn permit.
RBC Bank has called in its mortgage on the property, meaning that there is now a limited time to pay it off.
Cotton All-Lines Insurance has canceled its commercial insurance policy on the church property, which puts the mortgage into immediate default.
Dove World’s internet provider Rackspace shut down the Dove World church website.
And AP has announced it will not distribute images of the Koran burning, based on AP’s policy under which it “has often declined to provide images, audio or detailed descriptions of particularly bloody or grisly scenes, such as the sounds and moments of beheadings and shootings, displays of severed heads on pikes and images of hostages who are displayed by hostage-holders in an effort to intimidate their adversaries and advance their cause.”
Some of the people who have spoken out against the Koran burning may not even be dhimmies, but serious defenders of what they perceive as respect and decency. What they don't twig is that Muslims don't see it that way. They don't understand concepts like respect and decency and have nothing but contempt for those people.
Thanks Speedy! Another vile bit of journalism from the main source of information on Germany for the English speaking world.
Not that I have much time for Evangelical Christians, to put it politely, but the attempt to pathologize Jones' "Islamophobia" is gutter journalism of the worst sort. (Not that this is new!)
I am going to try and go to the protests tomorrow. My health has been very poor and I am on solid food only for the last day or so.
My step daughter says she needs me and as sick as I am I must go. On the way back I will catch the protest in progress.
I am getting better slowly.
Go to the protest or you will regret it all your life, Beak. I wish I could be there.
Get really well soon! Best wishes to you and to all brave New Yorkers for tomorrow and the future.
Nora
Check out this rant in an an Australian newspaper:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-creepy-banker-fleshes-out-the-modern-fascist-20100904-14v4m.html
Sample:
"...German racism is another. It reared its head through the creepy voice of Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin, who caused an uproar with remarks plainly similar to Nazi comments, some blatant, some pseudo-scientific."
Yeah right. Here in the Anglo world if you don't agree with the leftist agenda in EVERY aspect, the first they do is call you a Nazi ("fascist" is another fave).
It trivializes the concept of what the Nazis really were and is not what I would call intelligent commentary.
Anne, that is so incredibly full of shit that I won't even BEGIN to reply to it. I am a vocal critic of my own country and I understand to a certain degree if people (and not just Jews) bear Germany and Germans a lasting grudge. I have been called all names in the book from self-hating German to Nazi, and they can all kiss my arse. I am just amazed that this little country, which has slipped by all reasonable standards into second-classness long ago, still evokes so much emotions, positive or negative. I just wish that all those critics would get a modicum of education first before they shoot off their big mouths. In this case, the author's praise for hardcore-Communist Merkel says it all.
Editrix
I knew Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany but I am not familiar with what her political position was before the fall of communism. Was she actually a member of the party?
I should have picked up on the writer's attitude when he started in on bankers. Wow, what a sinister occupation!
As for the pseudo-science, it is now quite well established that there is some genetic variation between different ethnic groups. It is very complex topic, and I my knowledge only comes from my lifelong interest in the following the sciences (graduated in Physics/Math). I am not a specialist!
The phrase used for people who spout off for political reasons about science topics about which they know not even the tiniest amount is "liberal creationist."
All I know about Sarrazin comes from reading the English version of Der Spiegel. Even from that openly biased magazine, I could tell from reading the articles that Sarrazin was mainly concerned about what seems (from my perspective in Canada) an extremely high rate of unemployment and welfare among these immigrants along with their high birth rate and distaste for even attempting to participate in the country they live in (some don't even speak German???)
Please understand, there are great variations within ethnic groups and I am positive there are plenty of exceptions.
Sarrazin didn't come across as racist to me at all. I doubt he would be complaining at all if the situation there was as it is in the city of Vancouver BC (west coast of Canada) where we have a large number of immigrants from Hong Kong, China and Korea (Japanese no longer emigrate, they have no reason to). In their culture, success in very important, whether in business or other chosen occupation. So clearly for them it is a very high priority that their children learn English. They really push their kids--ironically, more the people of Euro descent do. And their kids are doing very well!
Anne, you'll find information on Angela Merkel at this blog here and specifically here. Her background is quite interesting. Not that she had been a hardcore-Stalinist, but she went along nicely with the tide. She has a doctorate in physics, so dumb she isn't.
You absolutely got it right when you say that Sarrazin's main concern is about an extremely high rate of unemployment and welfare among Muslim immigrants along with their high birth rate and distaste for even attempting to participate in the country they live in. Some of them are living here in the third and fourth generation and don't speak German.
Yes, there ARE great variations within ethnic groups and there are plenty of exceptions of the rules. The funny thing is (and Sarrazin hasn't even thematized that) that we don't have any problems with immigrants like that, but with immigrants like that.
This one or those come to mind as well. So all those seemingly perfectly "integrated" immigrants with all their success stories are passively or openly hostile and contemptuous towards Germany and the West, while the ethnic Vietnamese Philipp Rösler, who was adopted and brought up as a Catholic, isn't. Why is that?
No, Sarrazin is definitely not a racist. Actually, Germans are generally pretty laid back about race. We never had those vicious white-on-white racial struggles, like, say, those between the English and the Scots, either. It's antisemitism with which they are obsessed. Preußen, the entity the allies destroyed after WWII because, for them, "Prussian militarism" was responsible for the Nazis, when the Nazis had, in fact, crawled out of the Bavarian beer cellars and not from the Prussian barrack squares, was enlightened and progressive when the rest of Europe was still wallowing in absolutist quagmires. Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Clausewitz invented the modern army and are still taught at the military academies of the world. Enlightened Prussia was the harbour for the prosecuted Huguenots of France, while Frederick Wilhelm, The "Great Elector" welcomed the Jewish refugees from Vienna in 17th century in Prussia.
TBC
Germany was never any more bigoted or racist than any other European country, probably even less so. Not even the Nazis followed an eliminatory policy regarding the few black German citizens who owed their existence to the minor German efforts at colonialism. Even the "Rhineland bastards" were "just" sterilized, something that happened to racial minorities in other countries ruled by the law as well. Jesse Owens was well received at the Olympic Games 1936 by the German hosts and the tale that Hitler refused to shake his hand is a politically correct lie. Hitler simply wasn't present when Owens won his Gold. There are quite a few records of black Americans who came to live in Germany post-WWII when racial segregation was still practised in the States. This is one of them, whom I introduce here because I met him once when I was a little girl of seven or eight. (A simply wonderful man and artist -- Unforgettable!)
Antisemitism is a phenomenon totally different from racism. What caused (and still causes) that deeply-rooted eliminatory German antisemitism (Yes, Goldhagen was largely right!) is thus a different question as well. The Jews who are whining now about "German racism" simply don't twig what Germany is about. To put it flippantly, maybe they want to falsify Sarrazin's statement that Jews are particularly bright. (Was that antisemitic now?)
They don't even seem to know that sucking up to Muslims has quite a long tradition in Germany, a tradition that turned out to be fateful to only too many Jews once and may be again in the future. But facts have never stood in the way of a really good prejudice.
You mention your East Asian immigrants. I am living in East Germany now, although I come from the West. The only alien faces I see here in the deepest rural backwaters are those of the former Vietnamese "guest workers", due to the beautiful peoples' friendship among the former GDR and North Vietnam. Their German is abysmal and I don't know how their children are doing in school, probably well. But at least they all seem to work, mainly in their own little businesses. I never see any idling the day away, like the countless Turks in West Germany, they are not aggressive, either. I wonder why is that?
I barely skimmed that article as I was on the way out of my sister's place to drive back to Vancouver (vacation over, back to salt mines).
I read it again and it really OVER THE TOP. Surely even a lefty German newspaper would not publish something with that tone?
Sigh. Back to work. No more time to wander through the blogs except at lunch hour.
Off topic for this post, but so weird! The United Church of Canada (union of Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist in 1920's) has gone way way lefty in recent years. They will do gay marriages, which are now legal in Canada.
Anyhow, it seems that their seminary is now training, I can scarely believe it, Muslims to be Muslim chaplains in prisons, the army, etc. Look, outreach sure. But can't they train their own fricking chaplains?
Article:
http://www.ucobserver.org/faith/2010/09/muslim_studies/
Here is one priceless sentence:
"It’s another day of work for Dwyer, the only full-time Muslim chaplain serving 11 federal jails in Ontario and about 400 Muslim convicts — a number that’s growing all the time."
It never occurs to the author that growing numbers of Muslim prisoners might just be a problem!
Gad! I left the United Church years ago, I am Eastern Orthodox now (for past 4 years).
No temptation to back. My sister is still United, and she couldn't bring herself to read the article. I went to a service with her during my vacation. They have two pastors, one an openly gay woman with a partner. She was dressed as a clown.
Nope, not missing them at all.
Anne, I don't think that your comment was off topic. The inaptitude and unwillingness of the people in the West to defend themselves is not limited to giving in to Islamisation. That is, I think, only the consequence of the ubiquitous contempt for their own traditions and values. Is it really thinkable that a lesbian pastorette with a "partner" and her enablers will be worried about Islam and what it might do to us (or to them, for that)?
By the way, I didn't twig to which article you are referring in your previous comment. Can you explain?
Editrix,
I was referring to the article in the Australian newspaper.
For example, this comment,
"Sarrazin is hanging in there, a fascist hero already to many. Proudly being a bigot is arguably a kind of moral treason in that country: it brings to attention the most barbaric aspects of human nature so graphically demonstrated in its recent history. My German friends, many consumed with the sins of their fathers, don't need this sinister banker reminding the world of the crimes against humanity that started with such pronouncements as Sarrazin writes in his new book."
and
"Anyone who has studied fascism knows it starts with provocations and polarising statements appealing to the uneducated and prejudiced. That this is happening in 2010, and in Germany of all places, is deeply disturbing."
It seems to me the comments are drifting into a suggestion that Germans are particularly obnoxious.
If you know even a little about the history of WW II, you know that the Nazi's found people in every country they went who were only too happy to help them with exterminating Jews. They would have found them in Britain too, if the English channel hadn't stopped them.
Besides, Germans have apologized repeatedly, paid reparations, teach the subject in their schools.
Meanwhile, in Turkey, there is total denial about the fate of the Armenians in WW I. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize winning Turkish author, decided a temporary relocation outside Turkey was adviseable, not because of anything to do with Islam, but because he called for starting a dialogue about the Armenians.
The double standards are just so unbelievable. The West is supposed to apologize and go on apologizing for ever and it will never be enough.
But outside the West? Hey, bad stuff never happens there.
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