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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; germany</title>
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		<title>&#8216;Cuddly&#8217; Justice For Muslim Terrorists in Germany</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/cuddly-justice-for-muslim-terrorists-in-germany/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cuddly-justice-for-muslim-terrorists-in-germany</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2014 05:09:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephen Brown]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[killers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[light sentences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorists]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245518</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Germans outraged by light sentences court gives to al-Qaeda killers.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/PHO-09Apr28-159822.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245519" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/PHO-09Apr28-159822-450x334.jpg" alt="-" width="325" height="241" /></a>While many Germans are calling the sentences a Dusseldorf court handed down to four convicted al Qaeda terrorists last week <i>‘ein Witz’ </i>(a joke), it is no laughing matter.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And it is no wonder Germans are taking such a gloomy view of their justice system. This latest group of Islamist killers to appear before a German court received what many regard as ‘soft’ sentences, ranging from only four and half to nine years, for planning homicidal acts of terrorism that were aborted only by their arrests. In this case, the ‘Dusseldorf cell’, as the German media dubbed them, intended to massacre as many Germans as possible with ‘<i>splitterbomben’ </i>(anti-personnel bombs) in carefully prepared attacks.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The sentences handed out last week for plotting such horrific and deliberate acts of slaughter, as well as the perceived kid-glove treatment of other Islamist and non-Islamist violent criminals by German courts in general, have earned the German justice system the nickname <i>‘Kuscheljustiz’</i> (‘cuddly justice’) among more law-abiding Germans.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“This verdict is shameful and a punch in the face for all those who have been killed by such types,” wrote one upset reader in a German newspaper. “Here, there can and should be only one sentence: imprisonment and isolation forever.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“Not bad for planned mass murder of infidels,” sarcastically wrote another of the light sentences, while a third writer commented that “tax evasion is punished more severely” in Germany.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The leader of the terrorist cell, 33-year-old Abdeladim El-Kebir, received the longest sentence of nine years, despite having been described as the “highest-ranking al Qaeda terrorist (to appear) before a German court until now.” In 2010, El-Kebir, a native of Morocco who has German citizenship, travelled to an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan where he received his terrorist education and had “direct contact” with al-Qaeda leaders. After his return to Germany, he wrote in one of his emails to the al-Qaeda leadership: “Oh, our sheikh, we shall keep our promise. We shall start the slaughtering of the dogs.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And Germans are not expected to be angry about El-Kebir’s <i>kuschel</i> sentence after reading this?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The planned terrorist attack in Germany appears to have had the approval of Osama bin Laden himself, indicating its importance. The German newspaper, <i>Die Welt,</i> reports that among the documents US Navy Seals seized during the raid on the bin Laden compound in 2011 that resulted in the al Qaeda leader’s much unlamented death was an unfinished note, hand-written by bin Laden himself, which, purportedly, contained El-Kebir’s name.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“The USA supplied an English translation of the Arabic letter to several European intelligence services, among them also Belgian intelligence,” <i>Die Welt </i>reported. “The possible reason for this is that bin Laden speaks of several terror cells in the letter and mentions other terrorist suspects by name.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">El-Kebir was taken into custody just five days before the raid on bin Laden’s compound. But it was warnings in the fall of 2010 about possible terrorist attacks that first put German intelligence, assisted by the CIA and Moroccan security agencies, on his trail. Three of the four terrorists, including El-Kebir, lived together near the University of Dusseldorf, where authorities kept them under 24-hour observation for more than a year.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“When the activities in the apartment and the purchases made by the men indicated the building of a bomb, the three were arrested…,” reported <i>Die Welt</i>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The fourth man, who was responsible for the cell’s financing and logistics, resided in Bochum, another Rhineland city near Dusseldorf. In doing his part to carry out the murder plot, he committed internet fraud with ebay accounts to raise money, rented several apartments, and obtained false identity papers, reportedly from Morocco. Strangely, he was not considered a member of the cell and received the lightest sentence of four years and a half years despite El Kebir having once emailed him: “Brother, let us carry through the work to the end.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Like El Kebir, the three other convicted Islamist terrorists are German citizens of Muslim immigrant background.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">German anger about the sentences is compounded by the fact that El-Kebir will most likely remain in prison only for six years, since he is eligible for a sentence reduction of about a third for ‘good behaviour’.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">But besides anger, there also exists a feeling of anxiety among Germans about the case. With good reason, some believe that after serving their short sentences, the four terrorists will simply take up where they left off in regard to trying to kill as many Bundesrepublik citizens as possible. After all, they will have plenty of time in prison to plan new strikes. America experienced a similar situation with some Guantanamo prisoners who returned immediately to terrorism upon their release. And such Islamist fanatics often leave prison angrier and more determined to kill infidels than before they went in.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In this particular case, it was reported none of the Dusseldorf cell members expressed any remorse for their homicidal actions. In fact, they remained silent during their two-year trial that saw 22 experts, including an FBI official, and 145 witnesses testify. No regrets and no admissions.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“In cases such as this one, our ideal of re-socialization is simply out of place,” commented one German observer.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And since it is all but impossible to integrate these Islamist criminals into German society and in order to protect themselves from possible future attacks, a growing number Germans are calling for two things. The first is that the Dusseldorf cell terrorists, and other convicted Islamists like them, be kept in isolation when in prison. This would help prevent them from both laying future plans for mass murder and from radicalising and recruiting other prisoners to help carry them out.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Such a move is not unprecedented in Germany. The Baader-Meinhof and other left-wing terrorists were isolated for similar reasons when imprisoned during their heyday in the 1970s. And while deadly, Germany’s leftist killers did not pose anywhere near as grave a threat to German lives and society as the Islamists do today.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The second measure concerned Germans want to see adopted is the immediate deportation of the four back to their countries of origin upon their release. Such a move would include stripping them of their German citizenship, a privilege they have more than abused. Only with permanent removal from their country would Germans know that they are safe from any further homicidal plots by these particular criminals.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">But besides security reasons, some maintain that deporting the Dusseldorf cell is the only measure that would remove somewhat the sting of the ‘soft’ sentences. As well, there are financial benefits for the German taxpayer in short sentences combined with deportation. Besides avoiding the obvious expense associated with longer prison terms, the Dusseldorf cell’s removal would save the taxpayer the costs of police observation upon their release, the social welfare benefits they will most likely receive, and the financial burden of any possible future trial and second prison term.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unfortunately, sensible Germans are under no illusion that their government, tied down by the fallacies of multi-culturalism and political correctness, will act soon upon such urgent, possibly life-saving measures. Instead, they expect to see Islamist criminals, like those in the Dusseldorf cell, continue merrily on their way upon release from prison, happily plotting the murder of innocent people and the destruction of German society while their “cuddly” justice system hands out sentences that do not protect them from, let alone deter, Islamic terrorism, but rather serve to encourage it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Max Blumenthal, Rejected by German Radicals</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/max-blumenthal-rejected-by-german-radicals/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=max-blumenthal-rejected-by-german-radicals</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2014 05:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[max blumenthal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Parliament]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245272</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But embraced by the left-wing establishment. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MaxBlumenthal.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245276" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MaxBlumenthal.jpg" alt="MaxBlumenthal" width="303" height="202" /></a>The Norwegians had their Quislings, and the Jews now have their Max Blumenthal. Blumenthal, a fringe gonzo journalist, Goebbels-like propagandist and BDS activist, who once worked for a pro-Hezbollah daily, represents today’s new face of anti-Semitism and is arguably one of the most reprehensible figures of the radical left.</p>
<p>Blumenthal routinely spews forth the anti-Semitic canard that compares Israelis to Nazis, referring to them as “Judeo-Nazis.” Recently, he compared the Jewish State to ISIS calling it “JSIL” – or the “Jewish State of Israel and the Levant.” Blumenthal’s views are so extreme that he is often cited approvingly by <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2014/04/antisemite-max-blumenthal-incites-murder-of-three"><span style="color: #0433ff;">neo-Nazi groups</span></a> as well as depraved murderers.</p>
<p>His vitriol and depravity know no bounds and earned him a spot in the Simon Wiesenthal <a href="http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/TOP-TEN-2013.PDF"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Top 10</span></a> list of anti-Semitic, anti-Israel slurs, placing him in the company of such lovely bottom feeders as Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei and Turkey’s grand Islamic narcissist, Recip Erdogan.</p>
<p>Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are warped ideologies that go hand-in-hand and so it’s unsurprising that Blumenthal has expressed rabidly anti-America views as well. Among some of his more zany <a href="http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/occupation-%E2%80%9Coccupy%E2%80%9D-israelification-american-domestic-security"><span style="color: #0433ff;">conspiracy theories</span></a> is that American law enforcement is “schooled in Israeli killing methods” and law enforcement personnel are trained in Israeli methods of torture. These risible allegations were first published by Blumenthal for the Hezbollah mouthpiece <em>Al-Akhbar</em>, where Blumenthal worked as a staff writer, but were quickly discredited as arrant nonsense when it was revealed that Blumenthal simply <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/did-israel-train-american-interrogators-in-torture-updated/249630/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">invented fictitious quotes</span></a> to support his fabrications.</p>
<p>Recently, Blumenthal’s antics caught the attention of Germany’s main opposition party, Die Linke<i> </i>(“The Left”), a radical leftist party considered the successor to the former ruling Communist Party in East Germany. Two party members with anti-Israel affiliations, Inge Höger and Annette Groth, invited Blumenthal to speak at a party seminar at the German parliament on November 10, just a day after the anniversary of the <a href="http://www.dw.de/november-9-a-fateful-day-for-germany/a-15515692"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Kristallnacht</i> outrage</span></a>. But as it turns out, Blumenthal’s odious views proved too extreme even for the Communists who scrubbed his appearance.</p>
<p>As expected, the narcissistic and paranoid Blumenthal blamed his repudiation on the vast Zionist network stretching from Sheldon Adelson to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. And as expected, Blumenthal and another one of his Brown Shirt associates entered the parliament building where they harassed and bullied Die Linke’s party leader, Gregor Gysi. Blumenthal’s antics earned him an immediate and deserved <a href="http://www.dw.de/israel-critics-visit-to-bundestag-turns-ugly-for-gysi/a-18059221"><span style="color: #0433ff;">lifetime ban</span></a> from the German federal parliament building.</p>
<p>It is rather ironic and strange that while German Communists have enough commonsense to recognize Blumenthal as nothing more than a purveyor of anti-Semitism, elements within the American Left and more disturbingly, within the highest levels of the Democratic Party, continue to entertain his views and provide him with a platform.</p>
<p>Despite his overt anti-Semitism, Blumenthal’s articles are still featured in the leftist blog Mondoweiss. Moreover, the New America Foundation (NAF), a Washington think tank headed by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former high-level Obama-administration official, provided Blumenthal with a <a href="http://www.brandeiscenter.com/images/uploads/articleuploads/marquardt-Bigman_research_paper.pdf"><span style="color: #0433ff;">platform</span></a> to peddle his book, <i>Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel</i>, a screed widely recognized as anti-Semitic (one prominent leftist writer noted that it could have made the <a href="http://forward.com/articles/186557/max-blumenthals-goliath-is-anti-israel-book-that-m/?p=all"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club</span></a>) and adopted by the world’s most virulent and notorious anti-Semites. It should be noted that the NAF receives funding from organizations like the Ford Foundation and the State Department. While Mondoweiss is recognized as a fringe partisan blog that routinely features guttural gibberish, the NAF is viewed as a prestigious think tank and its actions with respect to the promotion of Blumenthal’s book served to bolster world-wide anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Just as troubling is Hillary Clinton’s association with Sidney Blumenthal, Max Blumenthal’s father as well as his defender. Sidney Blumenthal advised Clinton during her 2008 campaign and was <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/11/08/Dershowitz-Warns-Clintons-Blumenthal-s-a-Problem-for-2016"><span style="color: #0433ff;">rumored</span></a> to have nearly landed a job in the State Department following her appointment as Secretary of State. Sidney is also a <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/clinton-adviser-sid-blumenthals-new-cause-his-sons-anti-isra"><span style="color: #0433ff;">passionate defender</span></a> of his son’s anti-Semitic book, attacking with single-minded purpose those critics who found its repulsive contents to be beyond the pale.</p>
<p>Critics of those who warned about Barack Obama’s close associations with the likes of <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/the_saidkhalidiobama_connectio.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Rashid Khalidi</span></a>, Bill Ayers, Edward Said and Jeremiah Wright were dismissed as being paranoid. Jeffrey Goldberg went so far as to call those sounding the alarm “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2008/10/dear-jews-stop-the-obama-paranoia/8913/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">rumor-mongering, fever-headed Jewish conspiracists</span></a>.” Well, we now know that those rumor mongering conspiracists were <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/ditching-israel-embracing-iran_817766.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">spot-on</span></a> in their analysis and, if anything, underestimated Obama’s disdain for America’s closest ally in the Middle East and one of its closest in the world.</p>
<p>Sidney Blumenthal has failed to disassociate himself from the views expressed by his son in his anti-Semitic screed but continues to maintain close relations with Clinton. Another high-level Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, has <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2556"><span style="color: #0433ff;">confirmed connections</span></a> to the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Those who warned us about Obama’s past radical ties and the negative influence they had on him were scorned and ridiculed but were ultimately proven right. Hopefully, the American electorate, deemed to be <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/13/pelosi-cited-obamacare-architect-in-push-for-law-now-claims-hasnt-heard-him/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">shallow and stupid</span></a> by the current administration, has learned its lesson and understands the ramifications of the old adage, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Berlin Wall Does Not Rest in Peace</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/the-berlin-wall-does-not-rest-in-peace/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-berlin-wall-does-not-rest-in-peace</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:10:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GDR]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244489</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Remembering the Communism-Terrorism Axis.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/berlinwall1.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-244490" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/berlinwall1-450x270.jpg" alt="berlinwall1" width="362" height="217" /></a>Twenty-five years ago, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. The anniversary prompts a meditation on some realities that escaped the old-line establishment press, and which may remain unknown entirely to those growing up in the Age of the Tweet.</p>
<p>The wall was a project of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a one-party totalitarian dictatorship and the most slavish ally of the Soviet Union, which under Joseph Stalin grabbed half of Germany in the wake of World War II. The GDR was also the Communist state most involved in terrorism against the West in general and the United States in particular.</p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The official name of the wall was the </span><i>Antifaschistischer Schutzwall</i>, the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” the familiar inversion of reality. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-communism.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">As the late Susan Sontag observed during the 1980s, “Communism is fascism.”</span></a> So the GDR was actually the fascist state, with goose-stepping troops decked out very much like those of the National Socialist regime under the <i>Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei</i>, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known as Nazis. Sontag was not the first to make this observation. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/hans-massaquoi-who-grew-up-black-in-nazi-germany-dies-at-87/2013/01/23/3faaa5bc-64b1-11e2-b84d-21c7b65985ee_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">The late Hans Massaquoi</span></a>, son of a Liberian father and German mother, who in <i>Destined to Witness</i> told of growing up black in Nazi Germany, saw no difference at all between the Nazis and Communists.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">The Communist regimes were so repressive that people fled at any opportunity, leaving loved ones behind. More than 3 million people fled the GDR and no Stalinist dictatorship could allow people to vote with their feet.  So in August 1961 the regime put up the wall, along with barbed wire and guard towers holding vigil over the “death strip,” as it came to be known, embedded with anti-personnel mines.</p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">So the GDR made emigration an exciting experience. Some 5,000 made the attempt to breach the wall, among them the Strelzyk and Wetzel families, who flew to freedom in a hot-air balloon. In the 1982 Disney film </span><i style="color: #272727;">Night Crossing</i><span style="color: #272727;">, Peter Strelzyk (John Hurt) calls GDR oppressors “pigs,” a rare case of </span>truth in <span style="color: #272727;">cinema dealing with Communism. For those who remained, life was bleak.</span></p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Marxist ideology guaranteed that the GDR would be an economic basket case, less consequential to the world economy than Hong Kong. The GDR’s crowning industrial achievement was the Trabant, doubtless the most inferior automobile ever produced. But as John O. Koehler showed in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stasi-Untold-German-Secret-Police/dp/0813337445"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police</i>,</span></a> the Stalinist regime was efficient at repression.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Beyond North Korea and Albania under Enver Hoxha, perhaps no regime has exercised such complete control over the people. Koehler documents the repressions of the “Red Gestapo” against both Germans and the West. The material on Stasi operations against the United States and NATO remains relevant, along with Stasi operations in the Third World.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">In “The Stasi and Terrorism” chapter Koehler detailed the bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin a “massacre” carried out by the Libyan regime of Moamar Qaddafi. Koehler provides the full cast of characters, including Yasser Chraidi, the Libyan terrorist who planned the attack with Musbah Albugasem Eter, Musbah El Ablani and others who were not members of the Libyan People’s Bureau. Those included Mohamed-Suleiman Benali, a Moroccan “residing in West Berlin on welfare.”</p>
<p>The GDR was also a “playground for international terrorists,” such as Abu Daoud, leader of the Black September group that masterminded the 1972 Olympic attack that claimed 11 Israelis. The regime made Daoud a “guest of honor” at a Communist Party Central Committee event and housed at the Metropole, East Germany’s most luxurious hotel. “He was also given a reception at the mission of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and met with officials at the Syrian and South Yemeni embassies” before moving on unscathed. East Germany was also a safe haven for Carlos “the jackal,” Abu Nidal, and others.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><i>Stasi</i> provides a thorough account of how and why the Berlin Wall came down. But on the intelligence and terrorism sides, many loose ends remain. Libya is once again a playground for terrorists, and they now understand that they can kill American diplomats and torch the diplomatic compound with impunity. Not only so, but the U.S. Secretary of State will blame everything on a video and say “what does it matter?”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, 25 years after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, Barack Obama remains shrink-wrapped in statist superstition. Omnipotent government may have failed elsewhere, but in his view it remains precisely what America needs, along with more surveillance of the people. So no surprise if the anniversary draws no comment from the President of the United States.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bloodguilt Over Jews Leads to Blood Libels Against Jews</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/bloodguilt-over-jews-leads-to-blood-libels-against-jews/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bloodguilt-over-jews-leads-to-blood-libels-against-jews</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jul 2014 04:45:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Holocaust]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236374</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What better way to relieve national guilt for the Holocaust than turning Jews into the villains? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/zionazi2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236375" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/zionazi2-450x331.jpg" alt="zionazi2" width="256" height="188" /></a>If there&#8217;s one place on Earth that should understand the danger of Jew hatred, it is Frankfurt, Germany. In 1933, boycotts targeted Jews; by 1938, Germans were burning synagogues down. Between 1933 and 1945, the Jewish population of the city was decimated, dropping from 30,000 to 602. Few Jews, most of them Soviet expatriates, live in the city now.</p>
<p>So Frankfurt seems an odd place for a new blood libel against the Jews. Nonetheless, this week, 2,500 protesters, including Muslims and neo-Nazis — allied once again — showed up downtown to scream about Israel&#8217;s defensive action against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Police reportedly helped out the protesters, allowing them to utilize a loudspeaker and a vehicle to shout anti-Israel diatribes. &#8220;You Jews Are Beasts,&#8221; read one sign.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in Paris, Muslims attacked two Jewish synagogues, including one in which 150 Jews had gathered to mourn the deaths of three Jewish boys, who were murdered by Hamas operatives. Those Muslims, brandishing bats and chairs, attempted to break into the synagogue and ended up injuring several Jews. In recent years, thousands of Jews from France have emigrated to Israel, amid shocking reports of beatings, stabbings and an ax attack.</p>
<p>The Europeans, it seems, are becoming increasingly comfortable with old-fashioned Jew hatred in their midst, whether homegrown or imported.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a reason for that. In much of Europe, bloodguilt over the Holocaust still hangs over the heads of the population. According to a 2012 Anti-Defamation League survey of European countries, 45 percent of Austrians, 35 percent of French, 43 percent of Germans, 63 percent of Hungarians and 53 percent of Polish citizens felt that it was &#8220;probably true&#8221; that &#8220;Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.&#8221; Many of those who wish to move beyond the Holocaust, therefore, look for a rationale to relieve national guilt — and what better way to relieve national guilt than to label the Jewish State an aggressor? After all, if the Jews have become the villains, then why spend too much time thinking about their victimization?</p>
<p>Of course, the labeling of Jews as bloodthirsty villains led to the Holocaust in the first place.</p>
<p>Adolf Hitler saw the Jews as bloodsuckers driven by greed and dual loyalty. So did much of the rest of Europe. In the minds of those who murdered Jews en masse, Jews had it coming, because, in the words of Hitler: &#8220;The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between us — between Germans and Jews. All else is facade and illusion.&#8221;</p>
<p>Those who today label Israel the font of all evil use Hitler&#8217;s rationale to relieve guilt over Hitler. That&#8217;s why the same protesters in Frankfurt threatening Jews carried posters comparing Israel to the Nazis: If Jews are the new Nazis, fighting the Jews becomes an obligation.</p>
<p>Every Passover, Jews recite a paragraph: &#8220;in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand!&#8221; The names change, but the rationale does not. And the God of Israel is always watching, even if those who attack the Jews have convinced themselves that He will turn a blind eye.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Pro-Taliban Holocaust Denier Invited to Concentration Camp</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/pro-taliban-holocaust-denier-invited-to-concentration-camp/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pro-taliban-holocaust-denier-invited-to-concentration-camp</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Jun 2014 12:50:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233610</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[He's a 9/11 Truther who claims that Germany lives under American Colonial Rule. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/horstel.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-233611" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/horstel.jpg" alt="horstel" width="370" height="236" /></a></p>
<p>Christoph Hörstel is a great guy. He&#8217;s a 9/11 Truther who claims that Germany lives under American Colonial Rule. He lives on unemployment benefits, like so many of his Islamic colleagues, and spends a lot of time denouncing Israel.</p>
<p>Hörstel was the only Western journalist in Kabul in 2001 during the fall of the Taliban. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called him a Taliban lobbyist.</p>
<p>He founded the New Center party, which flopped, and then founded a German Center party, because the problem was just in the name.</p>
<p>Not only is he a three time winner of the New New Center Party&#8217;s &#8220;Leader who looks most like a Nazi contest&#8221;, but he&#8217;s also in bed with Putin and <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Holocaust-deniers-invitation-to-concentration-camp-memorial-nixed-after-media-expos%C3%A9-355719">then there&#8217;s his friendliness to Iran</a>&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>He has spoken at the annual Al-Quds Day March in Berlin, which attracts more than 1,000 supporters of Hezbollah and Iran, and calls for the elimination of Israel.</p></blockquote>
<p>Also he&#8217;s kinda flirted with Holocaust denial.</p>
<blockquote><p>When someone asked about revising the Holocaust, Hörstel replied, “All in good time.”</p></blockquote>
<p>So on the list of people you don&#8217;t invite to an event to a concentration camp, he would be high on the list. Unless you&#8217;re looking for someone to take a position in a guard tower.</p>
<blockquote><p>German journalist Christoph Hörstel, a zealous supporter of Iran’s regime and Hezbollah and an alleged denier of the Holocaust, was invited to an event at the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp to commemorate the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler by German officers.</p>
<p>A number of the participants in the 1944 attack on Hitler were incarcerated at Sachsenhausen.</p>
<p>Organizers of the Sachsenhausen memorial cancelled Hörstel’s appearance the same day.</p></blockquote>
<p>Fortunately he has plenty of appearances on Russian propaganda outlets to keep him busy.</p>
<p>If you can&#8217;t have a Hitler, you have to settle for an Ayatollah and a Vladimir.</p>
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		<title>&#8216;Eternal Nazi&#8217; Goes Easy on Soviet Collaborators</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/eternal-nazi-hunt-goes-easy-on-soviet-collaborators/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=eternal-nazi-hunt-goes-easy-on-soviet-collaborators</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 04:35:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Aribert Heim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eternal Nazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicholas Kulish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Souad Makhennet]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Inconvenient realities overlooked in a new book on the hunt for an SS doctor. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/heim_38447718.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224234" alt="heim_38447718" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/heim_38447718-447x350.jpg" width="313" height="245" /></a>Nicholas Kulish and Souad Makhennet recently appeared on CSPAN to promote their new book </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Kulish and Makhennet did not find Dr. Heim, who died more than 20 years ago, but their relentless pursuit proved enlightening in several ways.</span></p>
<p>The authors find Dr. Heim remarkably unlike the “superhuman Nazi of popular imagination” from films such as <i>Marathon Man</i> and <i>The Boys From Brazil</i>. The Austrian Heim excelled at ice hockey and easily mastered foreign languages. He completed his medical studies in Vienna at the age of 25 and was drafted into SS. His wartime duties included service in 1941 at Mauthausen. Survivors of the concentration camp there charge that Dr. Heim killed inmates by injecting gasoline into their hearts and that he decorated his desk with the skulls of selected victims.</p>
<p>After the war Heim spent three years as a POW, treating other prisoners as a medical doctor. His record at Mauthausen somehow failed to emerge and in 1947 he was set free and soon living the good life in a resurgent West Germany. In the early 1960s, about the time the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, Heim began to get nervous. He fled, but not to South America like other Nazi war criminals.</p>
<p>He decamped for Tangier then moved on to Egypt, where German military officers received a warm welcome, a legacy of support for the Axis powers in World War II. The authors also observe that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Husseini, worked with the Nazis and even visited concentration camps.</p>
<p>In Egypt Heim was able to maintain his German properties by remote control. He eventually converted to Islam and adopted the name Tarek Hussein Farid. In 1979 he made the cover of <i>Der Spiegel</i> but the authors show how sleuths such as German policeman Alfred Aedtner were unable to reel him in. So was celebrity Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who gets rough treatment in <i>The Eternal Nazi</i>. The authors show how Wiesenthal got it wrong on UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and his lies about his wartime service in areas where Jews were being deported to concentration camps. As the joke had it, he suffered from “Waldheimers Disease,” which made him forget he was a Nazi.</p>
<p>No Nazi hunter or government spy agency was able to bag “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, the big prize, and Treblinka guard John Demjanjuk turned out not to be “Ivan the Terrible.” Likewise, nobody was able to pry SS doctor Aribert Heim out of Egypt where he died in 1992. The authors tracked down his briefcase, full of revealing documents, and put together the story. Along the way they fail to flag some key collaborators.</p>
<p>For example, during the 1939-1941 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact the authors write that Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide up Poland. The authors fail to note that during the pact the Soviets also handed over German Jewish communists to Hitler’s Gestapo. Some of these Jewish communists could have wound up in Dr. Heim’s tender care at the Mauthausen concentration camp.</p>
<p>After World War II, the authors say, “the focus of American enmity was rapidly shifting away from the defeated Nazis and toward the Soviets’ rising ambitions in Europe.” Note that the Americans had “enmity” but the Soviets only “ambitions.” Further, Eastern Europe was “slipping into the Communist camp.” Actually, Stalin grabbed it by force and the Soviet Union occupied and oppressed those countries for the next half century.</p>
<p>As a former Berlin bureau chief for the <i>New York Times</i> Nicholas Kulish should know that. Souad Mekhennet, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a journalist who worked for the Times, should know that the conflict between the USA and USSR was more than a “rivalry.” But this wasn’t the first time that somebody from the <i>New York Times</i> got it wrong on the Soviets.</p>
<p>In 1932-33 Josef Stalin’s Communist regime starved to death millions of Ukrainians. Walter Duranty, the <i>New York Times</i> Moscow correspondent at the time, denied that any such thing had taken place and claimed that under Stalin’s wise leadership the Ukraine flowed with milk and honey. Duranty’s articles, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, played a role in U.S. recognition of the Soviet state.</p>
<p>To unravel all that would take considerable courage. It’s easier and safer to write a book about old Nazis. Readers will hear the sound of a barrel being scraped.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Swastika Passport</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/the-swastika-passport/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-swastika-passport</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2014 04:30:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[passport]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poland]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[swastika]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yaakov Frommer]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224244</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Remembering one family's incredible story of survival in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ruth_Tirbauer_1938-12-Klein-r100.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224248" alt="Ruth_Tirbauer_1938-12-Klein-r100" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ruth_Tirbauer_1938-12-Klein-r100.jpg" width="285" height="218" /></a>The story of Yaakov Frommer, his Swastika Passport, and the personal intervention by Winston Churchill is told in the weekly magazine &#8220;<i>Matzav Ruach</i>,&#8221; which is one of the pamphlets distributed in Israel through synagogues on the sabbath.  It is not available online.  I am about to summarize the story in my words, although nothing is original here and I am simply paraphrasing the story as it appears in the pamphlet.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the 1930s the Frommer family lived in Haifa.  The father was Dov Frommer, who &#8211; with his wife &#8211; had made aliyah to Eretz Israel in 1935 from Olkusz, a small town in southern Poland.  He lived with his wife Leah Rosa and their two small sons.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 1939, Leah Rosa felt an irresistible yearning to return for a visit to her home town in Poland to see her family there. She decided to take her two sons with her.  She was in the early stages of pregnancy.  They sailed from Mandatory Palestine, that is, the British-ruled colony in Eretz Israel, arriving in Danzig, the German port city on Poland&#8217;s Baltic coast.  It was after the Munich accord, and after the German aggression against Czechoslovakia.   It was also smack in the middle of the days of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Hitler and Stalin were plotting to conquer and divide Poland between themselves.   Leah Rosa felt safe, since she was traveling on British papers.  As residents of Mandatory Palestine, they were citizens of the British Empire, and Great Britain was not yet at war.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It was only four days after the mother and children reached Olkusz when the Nazis invaded Poland.  Hours later Britain declared war and the family was marooned in the heart of the territory in which the Holocaust would reach its most horrific dimensions.  There were no ways in or out. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The father of the family, Dov, began a feverish campaign of letter writing with the British authorities to try to win the release of his family in what was now German-annexed Polish territory, in essence part of the Third Reich.  The months dragged on. Leah Rosa gave birth there to her third son, naming him Yaakov.  But the situation was deteriorating and getting more desperate.  The Jews of Olkusz were ordered to wear yellow stars and move into a part of the town that would serve as a ghetto.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 1940 a glimmer of hope appeared on the horizon.  There were numerous civilians from the British Empire that were stranded in the territories conquered by Germany, but there were also German civilians in the British Empire.  In particular, &#8220;Palestine&#8221; held a large population of German &#8220;Templers.&#8221;  These were German Protestant pietists who had migrated to &#8220;Palestine&#8221; in the 19th century and set up several colonies, including in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem.  In the 1930s many of these became devoted Nazis and, bizarre as it sounds, there were pro-Nazi marches complete with swastikas and Heil Hitlers on the streets of Israeli cities, organized by these Germans. </span></p>
<p>Negotiations began for exchanges of the stranded civilians of the two sides.  The US, still a neutral power, aided the efforts. In particular, a deal was in the offing for an exchange of German Templer civilians, mainly women and children, for civilians from Mandatory Palestine in Poland.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There was a snag, however.  While Leah Rosa and her two older sons were citizens of the British Empire, having been born in &#8220;Palestine,&#8221; the youngest child, Yaakov, was not.  He had been born in German-annexed Poland and the Germans were unwilling to acknowledge him as a British national.  He was also not a Polish national, since Poland had ceased to exist.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The father back in Haifa was conducting frantic correspondence with the authorities in London.  Somewhat incredibly, Winston Churchill himself took a personal interest in the family&#8217;s plight and wrote to the father in his own handwriting.  (A photo of the letter appears in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Matzav Ruach</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> pamphlet upon which I am relying.)   Fearing the barbarism that was clearly approaching, relatives in Poland urged Leah Rosa to take the two older boys and escape for freedom, leaving the baby in their care, but the mother would hear nothing of it.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Eventually a deal was reached under which the baby Yaakov, officially a citizen of German-ruled Poland, would be allowed to leave with the rest of his family.   Relatives in the Olkusz ghetto still felt relatively safe in those days, as the mass exterminations had not yet begun, and suggested to Leah Rosa that perhaps she might be better off staying there with them rather than going off to the backwaters of &#8220;Palestine&#8221; with its many dangers and acts of barbarism about which they had heard.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It was shortly after Pearl Harbor when the family was allowed to escape as part of the exchange of the stranded populations.  They reached Vienna, and from there took a ship down the Danube to the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea, and from there reached home.  Baby Yaakov Frommer had been equipped with a special Nazi passport, issued by the Reich authorities in control of Poland.  It featured the Nazi eagle emblem and swastikas.  From its serial number, it was the very first passport issued by the Nazi authorities in Poland.   Yaakov made aliyah on a Nazi passport, complete with swastikas. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Once reunited in Haifa, the family resumed life as normal.  Yaakov grew up to be an electronics technician.  His oldest brother became a scientist at the Weizmann Institute, specializing in water treatment.  The middle brother became an air force navigator, headed an air force training school, and was captured during the Yom Kippur war when his plane fell in Lebanon.   A fourth younger son was born later and became a well-known psychologist.   The father of the family was one of the founders of the religious neighborhood Kiryat Shmuel near Haifa and was a principal at its religious high school.  Four years ago, Leah Rosa passed away at the age of 98.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Baby Yaakov, today 74 years old, allowed the magazine to photograph his swastika passport.   </span></p>
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		<title>German-Israeli Relations Sliding Downward</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/german-israeli-relations-sliding-downward/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=german-israeli-relations-sliding-downward</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2014 05:05:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[european union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[relations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217264</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A reliable friend changes course. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/pic8.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217274" alt="pic8" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/pic8-450x347.png" width="315" height="243" /></a>Earlier this month (January 12, and 13, 2014), Israel welcomed the freshly appointed Social Democrat (SPD) German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Considered a close friend of Israel, Steinmeier has returned to the post he held during Christian Democrat (CDU) Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first term that began in 2005. This visit is Steinmeier’s first foray outside Europe, ostensibly to attend former Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon’s funeral. It is the deteriorating relationship between Germany and Israel, particularly as it related to Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria that is in the background of Steinmeier’s visit.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Speaking to journalists in Jerusalem, Steinmeier pointed out that the destination for his first non-European official visit in his second term of office “bore </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/48c45d451d089bf585257c60006f4737?OpenDocument">testimony</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the close relations between Germany and Israel.” While in Ramallah however, Steinmeier said that he expected the ‘settlements’ to be a focus of discussion at the next EU Foreign Ministers meeting (January 20, 2014). Steinmeier stated that he already issued a public statement following the first announcement of new building in the settlements, describing it as </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/48c45d451d089bf585257c60006f4737?OpenDocument">destructive</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for Secretary of State Kerry’s efforts, and urged that there be no further announcements.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The historical irony is that Germany has been one of the few reliable friends Israel has had in the EU. The former Warsaw Pact nations of Czech Republic and Poland are the others. However for a long time, Germany was Israel’s closest friend in Europe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Germany and Israel have had a ‘special relationship’ since the Federal Republic of Germany was resurrected from the ashes of Nazi Germany. With the Nazi Holocaust perpetrated by Germans of the Third Reich as a backdrop, and the Murder of Six million European Jews, including a million and one half Jewish children, Germany launched the policy it called &#8220;Wiedergutmachung.”  It refers to reparations that the German government agreed to pay in 1953 to the direct survivors of the Holocaust, to those who were made to work as forced labor and those who otherwise became victims of the Nazis.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The moral responsibility Germans have towards Jews and the Jewish State goes beyond reparations. In Israel, throughout the 1950’s, any contact with Germany was a moral outrage, and the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin railed against accepting “blood money” from Germany. Germany’s historic guilt and moral responsibility is not just for the deliberate murder of European Jews, it is also to the “living Jews” in the Jewish State. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Christoph Heusgen, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s powerful advisor on national security, is one of those German’s who wants, as he calls it, to “normalize relations” with Israel at the expense of the “special relations” Germany has had with the Jewish state. What Heusgen seeks above all else is legitimization to remove Germany’s historical responsibility for its crimes against the Jewish people and treat Israel as all other nations, based on national interests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to a cable from the U.S. embassy in Berlin in 2010, revealed by WikiLeaks, Heusgen urged the U.S. to tone down its opposition to the UN’s anti-Israel Goldstone Report, (which Goldstone later recanted) in order to force Israel to freeze settlement construction (which are legal by anyone’s standards). Chancellor Angela Merkel’s often repeated declarations in Israel’s Knesset and to the U.S. Congress that the Jewish State’s security is non-negotiable for Germany, appears somewhat empty in view of her retention of Heusgen on her staff, with his anti-Israel positions.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A more recent row between Israel and Germany occurred in September, 2012, as the Palestinians sought to bring to the UN General Assembly their request to upgrade their status as an Observer State at the UN. Israel mobilized the former German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle to persuade the majority of its EU partners to abstain, but he failed. Germany agreed with Israel that in case it was unable to convince its partners to abstain, it would vote against the Palestinian request. In the moment of truth, Germany broke its promise to Israel and abstained rather than vote against the Palestinian upgraded status application. If it was up to Heusgen, Germany would have voted in support of the Palestinians along with the other EU members.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Germany is eager to throw the Holocaust guilt off its back, and with encouragement from the European media and academia, it has found the excuses in Israel’s alleged “bad” treatment of the Palestinians, and construction in the ‘settlements,’ which are in fact, communities and towns within Area C, legally administered by Israel. Anti-Semitic expressions in Germany are allowed as long as it is directed towards the Jewish State. According to a 2013 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.globescan.com/images/images/pressreleases/bbc2013_country_ratings/2013_country_rating_poll_bbc_globescan.pdf">BBC</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> World Service Poll, 8% of Germans view Israel’s influence as positive and 67% view it as negative.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chancellor Angela Merkel has been nevertheless, the most pro-Israel leader of Germany. She had arranged for the German and Israeli cabinet meetings in Israel in March, 2008, which was the first time the German cabinet met with another cabinet outside of Europe. During her unprecedented speech at Israel’s Knesset in March, 2008, Merkel spoke of Germany’s “Holocaust shame,” and pledged her support for the Jewish state. She said that “The “Holocaust fills us with </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/18/germany.israel/index.html">shame</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. I bow my head before the survivors and I bow my head before you in tribute to the fact that you were able to survive.” Referring to Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s threat “to wipe Israel off the map,” Merkel said, “Israel’s right to exist is not open to negotiation. These are not just empty words; Germany would support further sanctions on Iran if it fails to cooperate.” </span></p>
<p>Merkel went on to say “what do we do when a majority says the greatest threat to the world comes from Israel and not from Iran? Do we bow our heads? Do we give up our efforts to combat the Iranian threat? However inconvenient and uncomfortable the alternative is, we do not do that. If we were to do that, then we would not have understood our historical responsibility, nor would we be able to properly develop a way to deal with the challenges of our day…” Yet, Payvand Iran News reported on December 2, 2008 that “total German-Iranian <a href="http://www.payvand.com/news/08/dec/1021.html">trade volume rose 7.8%</a> between January and September (2008) compared to the same corresponding period in 2007. The overall bilateral trade volume stood at 3.233865 billion euros. German exports to Iran increased 8.9% and comprised 84.7% of the total German-Iranian trade volume.”</p>
<p>Germany is moreover a signatory to the six-month interim agreement with Iran, signed by the P5+1 (Iran, and U.S., UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China) on November 24, 2013. The agreement clears the way for the partial suspension of U.S. and EU sanctions, and would see thousands of German companies flocking to Iran to do business deals. Around 50 German firms have their own branch offices in Iran and more than 12,000 firms have their own trade representatives in Iran.</p>
<p>Merkel’s words about Iran in her 2008 speech in Israel’s Knesset, and her statements about Germany’s responsibility and support for the Jewish State’s security are negated by Germany’s recent actions. Germany’s continued trade with Iran is a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people, especially since the Islamic Republic of Iran is committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Germany’s position on the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is skewed as well. Berlin has chosen to overlook the Palestinians quest to replace the Jewish state with an Arab-Muslim one. Germany has preferred to ignore Ramallah’s incitement against Israel by official actions and pronouncements in the Palestinian media, schools, and mosques. Steinmeier’s visit cannot change the fact that Germany seeks to end its “special relations” with the Jewish state, and join the EU anti-Israel chorus.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Japan’s PM Accused of Honoring War Criminals</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/japans-pm-accused-of-honoring-war-criminals/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=japans-pm-accused-of-honoring-war-criminals</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jan 2014 05:15:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brutality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CRIMES]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[honor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Japan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[world war ii]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216766</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Stirring memories of fascist Japan. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-01-14T002607Z_2_CBRE90C1M1I00_RTROPTP_3_NEWS-US-JAPAN-POLITICS-STRATEGY_JPG_475x310_q85.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216813" alt="2013-01-14T002607Z_2_CBRE90C1M1I00_RTROPTP_3_NEWS-US-JAPAN-POLITICS-STRATEGY_JPG_475x310_q85" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-01-14T002607Z_2_CBRE90C1M1I00_RTROPTP_3_NEWS-US-JAPAN-POLITICS-STRATEGY_JPG_475x310_q85.jpg" width="304" height="217" /></a>Japan and Germany, now strong democracies and close allies of the United States, have dealt very differently with their dark pasts. Post-World War II German leaders have expressed shame and remorse for the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by Nazi Germany. Japanese leaders, even today, are ambivalent in how they deal with past atrocities committed by Japanese warriors before and during World War II.</p>
<p>Consider the choice of symbolic sites chosen by the German and Japanese leaders to visit last year. In August 2013, Angela Merkel became the first German Chancellor to visit the Nazi concentration camp Dachau. She remarked that the camp filled her “with deep sadness and shame,&#8221; adding that the camp stood for “a horrible and unprecedented chapter of our history.”</p>
<p>Chancellor Merkel did not visit Dachau or any war memorial to honor the German soldiers who fought and died in the service of the Nazi regime. She visited Dachau to pay tribute to its victims.</p>
<p>In contrast, on December 26, 2013, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe paid homage to the Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 Class-A war criminals from the World War II period and many more Japanese soldiers with the blood of innocent civilians on their hands are honored. Millions of Chinese civilians and soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Koreans, died as a direct result of Japan&#8217;s past history of military aggression and brutality. Yet when China, along with South Korea, criticized Prime Minister Abe’s decision to visit this controversial shrine, a top aide to the prime minister dismissed such criticism as interference in Japan’s “domestic affairs.” And in responding to disappointment expressed by the Obama administration regarding the prime minister’s shrine visit, this same aide compared Yasukuni Shrine with Arlington National Cemetery that honors U.S. veterans. There is no expression of sadness or shame in such defensive rationalizations for an insensitive homage to Japan’s inglorious military history.</p>
<p>The shrine Prime Minister Abe chose to visit honors the war dead who served the Emperor of Japan during wars from 1867–1951, encompassing World War II.  1,068 of the enshrined war dead were POWs convicted after World War II of some level of war crime, including the notorious Hideki Tōjō. This war criminal served as a general of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), the leader of the Taisei Yokusankai (Japan&#8217;s para-fascist organization) and the 40th Prime Minister of Japan during World War II when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. Tojo had been part of the Japanese Army stationed in Northeast China in the first half of the 20th century where he cracked down on the anti-Japanese struggle of the people in Northeast China and then led invasions into other parts of China.</p>
<p>Thus, it is little wonder that the Chinese foreign ministry condemned Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, in which Tojo is one of the honorees, saying: “Honoring the shrine is, in its essence, embellishing and falsely beautifying Japan&#8217;s military invasion and colonization.&#8221;</p>
<p>China&#8217;s United Nations Ambassador Liu Jieyi told UN correspondents on January 8<sup>th</sup> that &#8220;It all boils down to whether the leader of a country should stand on the side of maintaining the principles and purposes of the charter of the UN or to side with war criminals. The international community should remain vigilant and issue a warning &#8230; that Abe must correct his erroneous outlook of history, he must correct his mistakes and he must not slip further down the wrong path.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a white paper distributed to UN correspondents, China described its perspective of what was really being honored at the Yasukuni Shrine:</p>
<p>“At present, 14 Class-A war criminals and over 1,000 Class-B and Class-C war criminals of WWII are worshiped in the Yasukuni Shrine. In the Shrine compound, there is a stone stupa where such atrocities as Japan’s occupation of Taiwan in 1895 and the September 18th Incident perpetrated by the invading Japanese troops in Northeast China in 1931 are engraved and depicted as the glorious achievements of the militarist Japanese troops. Also located in the Yasukuni Shrine is the Yushukan Museum which blatantly whitewashes the war of aggression and advocates Japan’s erroneous view of history.”</p>
<p>China’s white paper provided a dramatic example of the disparity between fact and fiction that it believes exists with regard to the shrine and the exhibits displayed at the museum:</p>
<p>“Among the exhibits, there is a C56 steam locomotive used on the Burma-Thailand railway, which is claimed by the Museum to have brought ‘enormous economic benefits’ to Southeast Asian countries. But in fact, the railway, known as the ‘Death Railway’, was built at the cost of the lives of 13,000 prisoners of war of the Allied Forces and 90,000 laborers from Myanmar, Malaysia and other countries.”</p>
<p>South Korea also harshly condemned the Japanese prime minister’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine as a “deplorable and anachronistic act.” The South Korean government declared in a statement that “Mr Abe’s visit to the shrine reveals his wrong understanding of history.”</p>
<p>In a Note to Correspondents regarding the shrine visit issued by the Spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is South Korean, the spokesperson stated that it was “highly regrettable that tensions from the past are still plaguing the region” and that it was important “to be sensitive to the feelings of others, especially memory of victims.”</p>
<p>Responding to criticisms of the shrine visit, Japan&#8217;s UN Ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa said in a statement that Prime Minister Abe’s purpose was “to pay his respects and pray for the souls of the war dead and renew the pledge that Japan shall never again wage war. It was nothing more and nothing less.”</p>
<p>However, some observers have put Prime Minister Abe’s visit to the military shrine into the larger context of his recent initiatives to strengthen Japan’s military, including his discussing the possibility of amending Japan’s pacifist post-World War II constitution under which its military is currently limited to self-defense.</p>
<p>Whatever Prime Minister Abe’s true motivations for his visit to the shrine, his spin on the controversy created by his visit was to say that he meant no harm: “Regrettably, it is a reality that the visit to Yasukuni Shrine has become a political and diplomatic issue. It is not my intention at all to hurt the feelings of the Chinese and Korean people.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, his provocative visit stirred up the feelings of hurt engendered by fascist Japan’s past aggression against its Asian neighbors and the United States. Prime Minister Abe should have followed German Chancellor Merkel’s lead and chosen to honor the victims of its past aggression, not its perpetrators.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Iraqi Muslim Rapes Blind German Senior Citizen, Gets Parole and $4800 Fine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/iraqi-muslim-rapes-blind-german-senior-citizen-gets-2-years-parole-and-4800-fine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=iraqi-muslim-rapes-blind-german-senior-citizen-gets-2-years-parole-and-4800-fine</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 19 Jan 2014 15:20:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamizationofeurope]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rape Jihad]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216708</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But the taxi authority may consider suspending his license.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Germany-Iraqi-taxi-driver.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-216709" alt="Germany-Iraqi-taxi-driver" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Germany-Iraqi-taxi-driver-450x225.jpg" width="450" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>But the good news is that <a href="http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2014/01/germany-64-year-old-blind-pensioner.html">the taxi authority may consider suspending his</a> license.</p>
<blockquote><p>For two years, an Iraqi taxi-driver drove his blind customer: he helped with shopping and picked her up at the doctor&#8217;s. He called her &#8220;sweetie&#8221;. Then he raped her.</p>
<p>The trial of Hannover&#8217;s worst taxi-driver, Nihad S. (49) has begun.</p>
<p>In July 2013 this family man (father of three) brought pensioner, Brigitte C., to her apartment. Then he became intrusive. The prosecutor Stefan Dach said, “In her apartment, he pushed her onto her bed. The woman tried to push him away.”</p>
<p>At the trial, the German-Iraqi admitted everything. “I am a helpful person, driving many women, I have never had any problem. I am sorry.”</p>
<p>Victim advocate Anke Geißler said, “That was some brutality there. My client thought that at her age she would be safe from sexual attacks.”</p>
<p>The verdict: two years on parole (i.e., suspended sentence). In addition, the taxi driver must pay the victim €3600. Judge Jörn Thyen said, “He has shown remorse, and has spared the victim from testifying.”</p>
<p>The taxi firm where the horror-driver worked has fired him. The city is reviewing the case, with a view to withdrawing his taxi license.</p></blockquote>
<p>Oh he&#8217;s shown remorse. Well that&#8217;s different then.</p>
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		<title>Boycotting the Israel Boycotters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/boycotting-the-israel-boycotters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=boycotting-the-israel-boycotters</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Dec 2013 05:40:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BDS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nazis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213769</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Fighting fire with fire.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/choc-protest-420x0.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213805" alt="choc-protest-420x0" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/choc-protest-420x0.jpg" width="306" height="242" /></a>Eighty years ago, the Nazis dispatched thousands of SA thugs to enforce their boycott of Jewish businesses. Stars of David were painted on windows. Leaflets listing the crimes of the Jews were handed out. Cameras were set up outside stores to photograph anyone violating the Nazi BDS campaign.</p>
<p>Like modern BDS campaigns, it went beyond businesses to Jewish hospitals, Jewish professionals and Jewish academics. Its goal was to pave the way for mass murder by isolating the Jews of Germany.</p>
<p>Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, called the boycott a “great moral victory.” Modern BDS activists echo his rhetoric calling their attacks on Jewish businesses and academics a “moral victory”.</p>
<p>The Muslim boycott of Jewish businesses in Israel began in the twenties and predated the Nazi boycott. It may have even helped to inspire it. This was followed by the Arab League boycott of Israel after the Holocaust. The modern BDS boycott is the direct successor of a Saudi policy under a progressive flag.</p>
<p>The BDS boycott of Israel has no peaceful agenda. It does not take breaks during peace negotiations. Its activists do not care whether there are negotiations or not. They just want Israel gone.</p>
<p>Boycotts isolate a group, cutting it off from support, dehumanizing it and then destroying it. The academic boycott of Israel by the American Studies Association, a radical left-wing group that has declared that opposition to American imperialism is at the center of its field, holds to that aim.</p>
<p>The only way to fight a boycott is with a boycott. Either you isolate the people whose goal is to cut you off from the larger society or they cut you off. The dueling boycotts in the 1930s settled the question of who would be isolated as a problematic group, the Nazis or the Jews, when the world accepted the Nazi regime and rejected the Jews. The question was only truly reopened with the invasion of Poland.</p>
<p>Today the question is whether the Jews or the terrorists trying to kill them will be the ones isolated.</p>
<p>The Nazis began as a fringe group. They took over because there were too few decent people willing to stand up to them. Like the rest of the BDS movement; the ASA is a fringe group. The question is will anyone stand up to the BDS movement and its ASA allies?</p>
<p>In the seventies, the United States responded to the Arab League boycott by banning American companies from complying with it. The modern progressive rebirth of that boycott should be met by banning the use of American taxpayer money to fund any organization or event that provides material aid to terrorists by boycotting the Jewish State.</p>
<p>The ban on the use of public funds to subsidize boycotting groups could be used to not only to cut direct funding of such organizations, but would require organizations that provide them with funding to prove that no Federal grant money is being used to subsidize boycotting groups or events by these groups.</p>
<p>The practical effect of such measures would be a boycott of the boycotters forcing non-profits and government organizations to either end funding of these groups or to make their funding process so difficult that the flow of money would diminish.</p>
<p>Bills such as these can be passed by Congress and by states, cities and towns to ensure that any boycotting organization is boycotted by preventing taxpayer money from flowing to it. Efforts to kickstart bills may be easiest in a few heavily Jewish municipalities—including New York City.</p>
<p>Individuals can lead the way by writing to pro-Israel council members, state senators, senators, congressmen and other legislators at all levels of government urging them to advance such a bill.</p>
<p>The sooner action begins; the less likely it will be that any major university will cross that red line. If it does cross that red line then the legislation will be burdened by protests from students and faculty.</p>
<p>While BDS activists target companies and individuals, they have had their biggest successes with non-profits. And non-profits are vulnerable because they are parasitically dependent on outside money.</p>
<p>Until the government acts, individuals who are asked to donate to colleges should reply that they will only donate if it is established that their money will not in any way go to fund members or groups that conduct a boycott of Israel. Enough such requests will lead to an internal “boycott” within academic institutions forcing them to carefully source funds to and segregate funds around boycotting groups.</p>
<p>Even a public conversation about such measures will encourage the remaining 81 schools that are institutional members, such as Rutgers, Brigham Young University, the University of Texas and NYU, to join the schools such as Penn State that have done the right thing by pulling out.</p>
<p>Boycotts, like all forms of bullying, are easy when the bully doesn’t pay a price. A minority of ASA members voted to boycott Israel because it was easier for them to go along than to stand up to the radicals who had hijacked their organization. That will change when there are real consequences, not just for the people whom they are boycotting, but for them as well.</p>
<p>An unfortunate truth of human nature is that many people unthinkingly follow orders. And that is as true of the academics of the American Studies Association as it is of the shoppers in the plazas of Berlin. There were those good Germans who defied the Nazis and their boycott and there are those good ASA members who have chosen to cut their ties with it, rather than be complicit in its bigotry and hate.</p>
<p>But the majority often takes the easy way out by going along with those who are shouting the loudest until they are confronted with the terrible consequences of their actions.</p>
<p>A boycott represents a power relationship. Those who boycott presume that they have the right to cut off a group from society because society hates the group that they have targeted as much as they do. Now is the time to test this faulty premise of the BDS movement and the American Studies Association and see whether Americans, who invariably poll pro-Israel, support Israel or the Muslim terrorists.</p>
<p>The United States is not Nazi Germany even if some academics talk like it is and act like it is. Those academics who try to play Goebbels may have a nasty surprise waiting for them when Americans reject them and everything that they stand for.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Germany&#8217;s Christian Democratic Union Party Gains First Muslim Parlimentarian</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/germanys-christian-democratic-union-party-gains-first-muslim-parlimentarian/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=germanys-christian-democratic-union-party-gains-first-muslim-parlimentarian</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:05:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamizationofeurope]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205090</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["Religious people, whatever religion they belong to, have shared interests. Both Muslims and Christians in Germany want for example to have religion taught at school." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Cemile-Giousouf.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-205091" alt="Cemile Giousouf" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Cemile-Giousouf-450x288.jpg" width="450" height="288" /></a></p>
<p>Why<a href="For the first time in their history, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats have put forward a Turkish-Muslim candidate, Cemile Giousouf, to run for the federal election.  The 35 year old Giousouf is confident that the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will attract Turkish voters and show growing interest in addressing the political demands of immigrants in the next legislation period.  “There has been a significant change in the CDU’s approach towards immigrants,” Giousouf said on Thursday in an exclusive interview with AA.  “This is not only symbolic. The CDU is strongly investing in integration policies, policies towards immigrants” she added. "> should the CDU be any</a> different than the Tories or the Republican Party?</p>
<blockquote><p>For the first time in their history, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats have put forward a Turkish-Muslim candidate, Cemile Giousouf, to run for the federal election.</p>
<p>The 35 year old Giousouf is confident that the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will attract Turkish voters and show growing interest in addressing the political demands of immigrants in the next legislation period.</p>
<p>“There has been a significant change in the CDU’s approach towards immigrants,” Giousouf said on Thursday in an exclusive interview with AA.</p>
<p>“This is not only symbolic. The CDU is strongly investing in integration policies, policies towards immigrants” she added.</p>
<p>In the past, Turkish immigrants largely favored the Social Democrats and Greens in general elections but the recent opening of the CDU towards immigrants may introduce a change, according to Cemile Giousouf, whose parents belong to the Turkish minority in Greece.</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s bound to change now. Look at all the commonalities.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Religious people, whatever religion they belong to, have shared interests. Both Muslims and Christians in Germany want for example to have religion taught at school,&#8221; Giousouf told broadcaster Deutsche Welle recently.</p></blockquote>
<p>Also both want the death penalty for adultery. Wait&#8230; no.</p>
<blockquote><p>Cemile Giousouf pointed out that there are different ideas inside the CDU on the issue of dual-citizenship, a major demand of Turkish immigrants, and the divisive issue of Turkey’s EU membership.</p>
<p>While Chancellor <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/mod/tag/merkel">Merkel</a> had long been skeptical about Turkey’s EU membership and opposed dual-citizenship for Turkish immigrants, CDU leaders in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), including former integration minister Armin Laschet, are supporting the demands raised by immigrants.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course they are.</p>
<blockquote><p> Cemile Giousouf is delighted with the strong support she received from the young generation of German-Turks in the city of Hagen during her campaign. Giousouf says that if she is elected, her main priorities will be developing policies towards ensuring equal opportunities in education and employment, as many immigrants still face discrimination in entering high-ranked schools and securing employment.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course she is.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>German Converts to Islam Ethnically Cleansing Christians in Syria</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/german-converts-to-islam-ethnically-cleansing-christians-in-syria/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=german-converts-to-islam-ethnically-cleansing-christians-in-syria</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 08 Sep 2013 17:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syrian Civil War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203429</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Nazis are back. They just had to stop by a mosque and convert to Islam first.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/moh2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-203430" alt="moh2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/moh2-235x350.jpg" width="235" height="350" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/krise-in-der-arabischen-welt/syrien/islamisten-in-syrien-deutsche-sind-an-ermordung-syrischer-christen-beteiligt_aid_1087537.html">The Nazis are back</a>. They just <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/German-jihadis-kill-Syrian-Christians-325495">had to stop by a mosque and convert to Islam first</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>German Islamists participated in the murders of Syrian Christians in an early August attack on the Turkish-Syrian border, according to a report in the German magazine FOCUS.</p>
<p>The magazine reported last week the involvement of nearly 100 “fanatical” German Muslims, including Germans who converted to Islam, in the Syrian civil war.</p>
<p>A German police official told the magazine that “the complicity of Germans in the extermination and ethnic cleansing in Syria is a sheer intolerable condition.”</p>
<p>Prosecutors are examining whether the German Muslims can be charged with participation in a terrorist organization.</p></blockquote>
<p>Why not charge them with crimes against humanity? For that matter why not treat them and the rest of the Al Qaeda-Muslim Brotherhood gang the way that NATO treated the Serbs?</p>
<p>Nuremberg established that following orders is not an excuse. Even when they are the orders of a warlord who has been dead for over a thousand years. But this intolerable state of affairs is due entirely to the mosques on German soil whose faith preaches the subjugation or extermination of non-Muslims.</p>
<p>Islam is the new Nazism in Europe.</p>
<blockquote><p>In a video cited in the FOCUS report, which appears in German and Arabic, German jihadists praise the expulsion of Christians from the Syrian villages. The video shows between nine and 10 jihadis walking by dead people. Baehr said it is difficult to ascertain if the dead individuals are Christians.</p>
<p>One Islamic combatant strikes the head of a dead Syrian soldier in the video.</p>
<p>Former gangster rapper from Berlin, Denis Cuspert (a.k.a Deso Dogg), is believed to be fighting with the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front. German counter-terrorism officials view Cuspert as a powerful recruitment tool. He made a video before his departure to Syria, urging Muslims to join the jihad in Syria.</p></blockquote>
<p>Deso Dogg,<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/germany-is-a-war-zone-says-jihadist-rapper-deso-dogg/"> whom I&#8217;ve written about in the past</a>, is the product of an African father and a German mother, whose stepfather was a US soldier stationed in Germany, who eventually converted to Islam. And Dogg&#8217;s plans for Islamic terror extend far beyond Syria.</p>
<blockquote><p>“You are not going to live in safety. You employ millions and billions for the war against Islam. And that’s why this country is here, the Federal Republic of Germany, is a war zone.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Clearly this is a problem that can only be solved with more Muslim immigrants.</p>
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		<title>United Nations&#8217; War on Free Speech Continues</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/united-nations-war-on-free-speech-continues/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=united-nations-war-on-free-speech-continues</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Sep 2013 04:20:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blasphemy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Censorship]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Stricter blasphemy laws on the horizon for Germany? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/102412-un-speech-lg.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203253" alt="102412-un-speech-lg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/102412-un-speech-lg.png" width="232" height="184" /></a>German federal authorities have responded to earlier criticism by the United Nations’ (UN) <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/">Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination</a> (CERD) of lax German hate speech measures with troubling proposals to restrict further freedom of expression.  These developments in a case <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod-and-sam-nunberg/un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech-hysteria/#comments">previously documented by my Legal Project (LP) colleague Sam Nunberg and me </a>demonstrate once again the dangers for freedom that foreign organizations can present, especially in light of international campaigns against “Islamophobia.”</span></b></p>
<p>An <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">April 4, 2013, CERD decision</a> had condemned the German refusal to prosecute former German central bank board member <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thilo_Sarrazin">Thilo Sarrazin</a> for hate speech against Arabs and Turks.  CERD deemed the discontinuance of Sarrazin’s criminal investigation a violation of German commitments under the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx">International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination</a>.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/stellungnahme-zum-fall-sarrazin-bundesregierung-antwortet-auf-rassismus-vorwurf-der-un/8485086.html">July 1 verbal note</a> to the Geneva-based CERD, the German federal government responded that it “currently is examining German legislation for the punishment of racist statements in light of” CERD’s decision.  This examination, though, would take account of the right to free expression.  Federal authorities had furthermore requested of the relevant Berlin prosecutors “to review every possibility of reconsidering” Sarrazin’s case.  Yet, the prosecutors reported, this review of the case’s “factual and legal aspects” meant that the “cessation of prosecution stands.”</p>
<p>The German government received <a href="http://www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de/de/aktuell/news/meldung/archive/2013/july/article/institut-handlungsbedarf-bei-der-bekaempfung-des-rassismus-in-deutschland.html?tx_ttnews%5Bday%5D=15&amp;cHash=879f29b44be3fd910793fcda9cbd7be4">encouragement</a> in stiffening hate speech laws from the federally-funded nonprofit organization German Institute for Human Rights (<a href="http://www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de/en/about-us/structure.html"><i>Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte</i></a> or DIMR).  DIMR’s <a href="http://www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de/de/presse/biografien-mitarbeitende.html#c3202">Hendrik Cremer</a>, in particular, criticized in an <a href="http://mediendienst-integration.de/artikel/rassismus-auch-rassismus-nennen.html">interview</a> that an initial charge of Sarrazin under the German Criminal Code’s <a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html">Section 185</a> against “Insult” fell through.  Cremer found Sarrazin’s case “not untypical” as “current precedent” did not allow for “collective insults.” Even if statements are racist, “it is regularly assumed that they lack intensity” for an “insulting character” if directed “against a large number of persons.” Cremer criticized that racist speech convictions usually affected “only persons who clearly belonged to a rightwing extremist environment” while “racism from the middle of society” went overlooked.</p>
<p>These German developments make all the more worthy of review the <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-3.pdf">lone dissenting opinion</a> in the CERD judgment from the American representative, Georgetown University professor of law <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/members.htm">Carlos Manuel Vázquez</a>.  Vázquez determined that Sarrazin’s 2009 interview with a Berlin magazine resulting in prosecution “contains statements that are bigoted and offensive.” CERD precedent, however, “does not require the criminal prosecution of all bigoted and offensive statements.”</p>
<p>As “extensively explained in writing,” both the Berlin prosecutors and a reviewing General Procurator found no basis for insult or “incitement to racial hatred” (German Criminal Code <a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html">Section 130</a>) charges.  The procurator review, for example, found that “Sarrazin did not characterize members of the Turkish minority as ‘inferior beings’ or ‘bereave [sic] them of their right to life as an equally worthy person.’”</p>
<p>Yet CERD itself recognized that a convention violation demanded that a state “acted arbitrarily or denied justice,” a “deferential standard…particularly appropriate” with respect to speech. Here state authorities “have a far greater mastery” of the pertinent language than CERD members and a “far better position to gauge the likely impact of the statements in the social context prevailing.”  Moreover, the convention allowed for prosecutorial “discretion” in preventing both racist speech and any “‘chilling’ effect” on free speech presented by marginal cases. Issues such as a statement’s public significance, danger to public peace, or ability to give notoriety to otherwise insignificant persons could also factor into prosecutorial decisions.</p>
<p>Vázquez did not see Sarrazin’s main arguments as hate speech.  His “ideas for possible legislation” in the interview involved restricting immigration to skilled workers as well as social spending limitations for immigrants, not racial demagoguery. For Vázquez, “the concept of incitement to legislation is, to my knowledge, a novel one.”</p>
<p>Sarrazin also argued with respect to Turks and Arabs that the “culture or belief system that prevails among a national or ethnic group inhibits their chances of achieving a particular goal.” This is “not outside the scope of reasoned discourse” and “not prohibited by the Convention.”  Additionally, “Sarrazin’s main point” was that the “provision of social welfare leads to habits and ways of life that inhibit economic success and integration.”  “It is true,” Vázquez noted, that “Sarrazin at times employed denigrating and offensive language.” Yet “freedom of expression extends even to statements framed in sharp and caustic terms.”</p>
<p>Vázquez’s views from the Land of Liberty are far more reasoned than those Germans anxious to do the bidding of CERD’s members, most hailing from countries not noted for equality under the law. Stiffer hate speech laws would penalize many controversial political statements and involve the law in all manner of insults unrelated to public peace. It is to be hoped that Germany will ultimately heed Vázquez’s restraint, despite successive attempts to overcome rational German rejections of Sarrazin’s prosecution.  Observers outside of Germany, meanwhile, should take Sarrazin’s tale to heart as an example of foreign institutions infringing domestic freedom.</p>
<p><i>This article was commissioned by </i><a href="http://www.legal-project.org/"><i>The Legal Project</i></a><i>, an activity of the Middle East Forum.</i></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Muslims in Germany Celebrate Ramadan with Four Nights of Rioting</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslims-in-germany-celebrate-ramadan-with-four-nights-of-rioting/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslims-in-germany-celebrate-ramadan-with-four-nights-of-rioting</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2013 13:20:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamizationofeurope]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[On Thursday evening a mob attacked policemen. Last night they burned cars and hurled stones.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It&#8217;s entirely possible that there were also four nights of presents if enough stores got taken down. But <a href="http://vladtepesblog.com/2013/07/14/three-nights-of-muslim-rioting-in-hamburg-altona/">who are we to judge the religious customs</a> of another culture?</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5cLlmmM7-mA?feature=player_embedded" height="360" width="540" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<blockquote><p>For three nights in a row there have been heavy Muslim riots in Hamburg-Altona. On Thursday evening a mob attacked policemen. Last night they burned cars and hurled stones.</p>
<p>The battle cry “Allahu Akbar” can be heard in the video. About 150 young people gathered Friday night in Chemnitz Street and in Holsten Street. “They wanted to let loose,” said a police spokesman. First the rioters only lit firecrackers; later they torched cars.</p>
<p>In Karl Wolff Street a car was completely gutted. Another car was set on fire in Hospital Street, but was able to be extinguished. Some time later the tires of another car were burning. More than 100 police officers were out in force. They used pepper spray against the rioters. In response the mob hurled stones at the officers. A 21-year-old man was arrested.</p>
<p>The riots started on Thursday night when a group of youths blinded car drivers with a laser pointer. The police moved in – and suddenly saw a group of over 150 people moving towards them. 16 rioters were detained.</p></blockquote>
<p>You would think that fasting people would lack the energy to throw things and set cars on fires. Assuming that they really are fasting.</p>
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		<title>Islam’s Cartoon Jihad Strikes Again</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/islams-cartoon-jihad-strikes-again/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islams-cartoon-jihad-strikes-again</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2013 04:25:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[allah]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cartoon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[student]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vandalization]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Not even universities are safe havens for free speech. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Picture-12.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196996" alt="Picture 12" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Picture-12.png" width="211" height="136" /></a>A Muslim student’s vandalization of a university seminar’s cartoon exhibit at the <a href="http://www.uni-due.de/en/">Universität Duisburg-Essen</a> (UDE) in Germany’s Ruhr region has once again manifested Islamic intolerance of critical commentary and independent intellectual inquiry.  The affair’s aftermath, moreover, sadly shows yet again how democratic public authorities are often less than vigilant in defending freedom against the encroachments of Muslim faith.</p>
<p>The controversy began with the exhibit “<a href="http://www.uni-due.de/~hy0555/weblog/inhalt/ausstellung-what-comics-can-do-recent-trends-graphic-fiction">What comics can do &#8211; Recent trends in graphic fiction</a>,” opened by UDE’s <a href="http://www.uni-due.de/anglistik/">Department of Anglophone Studies</a> (DAS) on May 23, 2013, in the university library.  In the exhibit department students used posters to analyze the cartoon genre Graphic Novels.  The students examined 14 of these novels in which book-length cartoon series treat mature subject matter.</p>
<p>One of the Graphic Novels examined in collage posters was <a href="http://www.habibibook.com/about/"><i>Habibi</i></a>, a tale of child (sex) slaves in Muslim Arab society by the award-winning American graphic novelist <a href="http://www.habibibook.com/author/">Craig Thompson</a>.  As the <i>Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung</i> (WAZ) <a href="http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/essen/comic-ausstellung-an-uni-duisburg-essen-sorgt-fuer-eklat-id8123031.html">reported</a>, this widely available, 2011 published book has aroused no indication “of being orient-hostile.”  Thompson himself in a 2011 German <a href="http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/comics/interview-ich-bin-ein-hoffnungsloser-romantiker/5811122.html">interview</a> described <i>Habibi</i> as “among other things a reaction to the increasing Islamophobia in the United States after 2001.”</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/essen/uni-duisburg-essen-erstattet-nach-plakat-eklat-strafanzeige-gegen-muslimin-id8172671.html">Muslim doctoral student</a>, though, complained to library personnel multiple times that the UDE student poster presenting <i>Habibi</i> hurting her “religious feelings.”  The <i>Habibi</i> collage showed a rape scene from the book juxtaposed next to the word “Allah” in Arabic calligraphy along with an English-text explanation.  The doctoral student, <a href="http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/essen/ranghoher-uni-mitarbeiter-gibt-nach-plakat-eklat-erstmals-fehler-zu-id8152139.html">who had previously obtained notoriety</a> by devoting one of her class presentations to “Allah,” <a href="http://www.taz.de/!119656/">finally took it down on June 17, 2013</a>.</p>
<p>The following June 24, the doctoral candidate used scissors to cut out part of a poster analyzing the award-winning graphic novel <a href="http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?item=a451165f22c05b"><i>Exit Wounds</i></a> by Israeli <a href="http://www.icexcellence.com/prodtxt.asp?id=32">Rutu Modan</a>.  The destroyed book scene, viewable above and in a July 10, 2013 <a href="http://www.taz.de/!119656/">story</a> by Berlin’s left-wing <i>Tageszeitung</i> (TAZ), showed Israeli peace rally participants packing their bags with three signs inscribed with “Stop the Occupation” in Arabic, English, and Hebrew.  TAZ author <a href="http://www.beucker.de/">Pascal Beucker</a> speculated that the doctoral student&#8217;s anger derived from seeing the Arabic language depicted in the much-hated Israel.  “It is more than probable,” Beucker suggested in <a href="http://www.taz.de/Streit-um-Comic-Ausstellung-in-Essen/!119282/">an earlier TAZ article</a>, that the Muslim student had an “anti-Israeli, if not anti-Semitic motive,” given that <i>Exit Wounds</i> deals with the Palestinian terror threat faced by Israelis.  The UDE student government publication <a href="http://akduell.de/2013/07/eine-einseitig-gefuhrte-debatte/"><i>ak[due]ll</i></a>, in contrast, countered TAZ, stating that library director Albert Bilo explained to the student senate that the Muslim student took offense at what she considered as a depiction of a sign with “Allah” on it going into the trash.</p>
<p>The vandalism led to a <a href="http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/essen/professoren-der-uni-in-essen-verteidigen-das-vorzeitige-ende-der-comic-ausstellung-id8145373.html">premature closing of the exhibit</a>, described on its website as scheduled to last until the end of July but in various press accounts as only lasting a few more days.  DAS also took down an exhibit Internet posting.  DAS managing director <a href="http://www.uni-due.de/anglistik/heyl/">Christoph Heyl</a> stated that he wanted to avoid any impression of acquiescing in partial censorship.  Moreover, Heyl cited a desire to protect the involved students and normal operations of the library.  Security concerns at the university could be particularly acute, as that WAZ noted that over one-third of UDE’s student population comes from an immigrant background.</p>
<p>Yet although UDE social sciences dean <a href="http://www.uni-due.de/philosophie/ag-hartmann/ag-hartmann.shtml">Dirk Hartmann</a> understood in a <a href="http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/essen/ranghoher-uni-mitarbeiter-gibt-nach-plakat-eklat-erstmals-fehler-zu-id8152139.html">July 7, 2013 WAZ story</a> that security concerns prompted the exhibit’s closing in a “heated atmosphere,” he complained that UDE had not yet taken legal action against the perpetrator.  Hartmann considered her “active repression of freedom” to be “unacceptable.”  Likewise, an internal DAS letter to UDE rector <a href="http://www.uni-due.de/en/university_board_rector.php">Ulrich Radtke</a> considered the affair’s academic freedom implications “scandalous.”</p>
<p>UDE’s student government (<a href="http://www.asta-due.de/de/suche.html"><i>Allgemeiner Studierenden-Ausschuss</i></a> or AStA) similarly expressed “concern and astonishment” at the exhibit closure.  A July 10 <a href="http://www.taz.de/Kommentar-Comic-Streit-Uni-Essen/!119654/">Beucker TAZ editorial</a> as well judged university refusal to resume display of the posters as a “scandalous act of self-censorship.”  The conservative Christian Democrats (<a href="http://www.cdu.de/">CDU</a>) and libertarian Free Democrats (<a href="http://www.fdp.de/">FDP</a>) in Essen’s city government <a href="http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/essen/nach-eklat-uni-gegen-neue-ausstellung-mit-comics-id8142211.html">also expressed disappointment at the exhibit’s premature end</a>, proposing thereby that Essen’s city hall exhibit the posters.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.uni-due.de/de/presse/meldung.php?id=8107">July 3, 2013 UDE press release</a> on the affair, meanwhile, emphasized in the words of Radtke that a university could not tolerate “thought prohibitions.”  After the doctoral student refused to meet university officials, UDE lodged a criminal complaint on July 10.  “Whoever violates hard won basic rights like freedom of opinion and scholarship,” Radtke stated, “must count on serious consequences with us.”  Radtke <a href="http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/essen/uni-duisburg-essen-erstattet-nach-plakat-eklat-strafanzeige-gegen-muslimin-id8172671.html">apologized</a> for the delay in bringing charges for property destruction, citing a prudent desire to become fully informed of the case.  <a href="http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/essen/strafanzeige-gegen-studentin-nach-eklat-bei-comic-schau-in-der-uni-essen-aimp-id8134702.html">Already on July 1</a> the Essen lawyer <a href="http://www.kanzlei-essen.de/index.php?id=126">Marc Grünebaum</a> had brought charges in light of this “attack upon freedom of opinion and art by a religious fanatic,” his letter to authorities stated.</p>
<p>Yet the release stated that Islamic scholars would nonetheless examine how the posters might have offended Muslim sensibilities.  Beucker’s editorial deemed this step “ludicrous,” as it “implied that there could be a substantial justification for the censorship.”  A less than resounding defense of freedom also came from Ali Nuhi, chair of UDE’s Islamic Student Union (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/ISB-Islamischer-Studierendenbund-Campus-Essen/146771025398771"><i>Islamischer Studierendenbund</i></a> or ISB).  Citing UDE Muslim sentiment against the <em>Habibi</em> collage, Nuhi stated that “<a href="http://akduell.de/2013/06/verletzte-gebote-verletzte-gefuhle/">it was a good sign that the poster was not hung up again</a>.”  The two contributions of <i>ak[due]ll</i> on the affair, meanwhile, saw in the matter a need to discuss “<a href="http://akduell.de/2013/07/eine-einseitig-gefuhrte-debatte/">anti-Muslim racism</a>.”  Such is Germany’s uncertain chorus of freedom as the posters remain concealed from view pursuant to the perpetrator’s original <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler's_veto">heckler’s veto</a>.</p>
<p><i>This article was sponsored by </i><a href="http://www.legal-project.org/"><i>The Legal Project</i></a><i>, an activity of the </i><a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><i>Middle East Forum</i></a><i>.</i></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Hannah Arendt and the Catastrophes of the 20th Century</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/hannah-arendt-and-the-catastrophes-of-the-20th-century/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hannah-arendt-and-the-catastrophes-of-the-20th-century</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Jul 2013 04:26:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hannah Arendt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totalitarianism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A new film brings to life the persona of the much-debated philosopher. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p align="left"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hannah_arendt.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-196724" alt="hannah_arendt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hannah_arendt-256x350.jpg" width="256" height="350" /></a><em>“If I can be said to ‘have come from anywhere’ it is from the tradition of German philosophy.”–</em><em> </em><em>Hannah Arendt</em></p>
<p align="left">How can one preserve his/her humanity in dark times?  How and why does one lose his/her humanity? My reaction to the film about Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta, with Barbara Sukowa in the leading role, is that the director successfully translated the drama of ideas into a cinematographic narrative, despite daunting difficulties of such a task. The movie captures the stakes of the great polemics in which Hannah Arendt was involved. It renders persuasively the way in which she perceived thinking (<i>das Denken</i>) as the essence of human identity. Thought for Arendt could not be separated from morality, that is the specific capacity and the particular obligation that, as Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian put it, elevate us a step above zoology. According to Arendt, when thought is separated from action, or  vice-versa, when human action takes place in the absence of thinking the realm of liberty is endangered. She argued in her volume <i>The Human Condition</i> that “[t]he chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is always full of events which can ultimately be told as a story, establish a biography[.]” The promise of politics was for her the promise and imperative of living in truth.</p>
<p align="left">The script of the film is, to a large extent, faithful to the facts, as it encompasses extensive excerpts from her lectures and from Hannah’s correspondence (with Mary McCarthy, Heinrich Blucher, Karl Jaspers, or with Kurt Blumenfeld, a dear friend who brought her close, in her youth, to Zionism). We witness how she became the target of a veritable symbolic lynching because the thinker broke with certain taboos and dared to publicly wash such dirty linen, so to speak. This was not about legitimate and honest criticism. Influent people accused her of self-hatred, of reneging on her identity, of loathing the state of Israel, etc. In this context, she was even labeled an &#8220;enemy of the state of Israel.&#8221; Even her own colleagues indulged in what one calls<br />
&#8220;character assassination.&#8221; This woman (and I emphasize the word <i>woman</i>) was denied the right to publicly state her opinions. Or, even the right to hold such opinions. Arendt may have been wrong on many factual issues, yet her questions were invitations to uninhibited coming to terms with the past.</p>
<p align="left">What is missing from the movie, and I believe it should have been mentioned, is the fact that Hannah Arendt believed that radical Evil can be equally incarnated in Auschwitz and the Gulag. She did not use the concept of the Gulag, but she extensively wrote on the role of ideology in the Stalinist genocidal terror. Moreover, when <i>The New Yorker</i> decided to send her as correspondent for the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Arendt had already written her masterpiece about the catastrophes of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, <i>The Origins of Totalitarianism</i>. In this volume, she developed an analysis of radical Evil based on a Kantian intuition. My former PhD student, Benli Shechter, wrote a superb dissertation on how the discussion about totalitarianism unfolded in the pages of the famous magazine <i>Partisan Review</i> under the influence of Arendt’s writings. This was also the place where Mary McCarthy published an anthological pamphlet against Hannah’s detractors, in the aftermath of the publication of <i>Eichmann in Jerusalem</i>. I would add about Mary McCarthy, an important character in the movie and Arendt’s dear friend, that she was one of the most significant voices of the American, liberal, anticommunist Left and that she took part in the creation of the Committee for Cultural Freedom in the US, an anti-Stalinist initiative whose purpose was to challenge communist and fellow travelers’ propaganda offensives.</p>
<p align="left">Central to Arendt’ vision is the focus on the unique phenomenon of moral anesthesia, on the elimination of the difference between Good and Evil. The bureaucratic person carries out orders automatically. Thoughtlessness is the reason why radical Evil becomes banal Evil. When I use “becoming,” I mean it as the routinization of Evil. By no means do I think that the cold-blooded, morally emasculated planning of genocide is less of a manifestation of radical Evil. Those who read Himmler’s 1943 speech before SS cadres in Posen (Poznan) realize that Evil was justified on ideological bases without which the absolute crime that is the Final Solution could not be envisaged as the achievement of the Nazi’s historical mandate. In <i>The Origins</i>, Hannah Arendt quoted a Nazi ideologue, who defined the national-socialist state as a <i>Weltanschauungsstaat</i> (a state founded on a specific world-view), just as Lenin’s state was an ideocratic one. I discussed recently with a friend this topic. I believe that his standpoint ideally epitomizes my own views here: “What happens is that evil is no longer conceived of as evil, so, through <i>thoughtlessness</i>, it descends into everyday banality, when one is not required to take reasoned decisions, only administrative ones.” Writing about Arendt’s work, Romanian intellectual Monica Lovinescu remarked that the elimination of the moral and juridical person, of individuality, transforms totalitarianism into machinery manufacturing the absurd. Russian dissident Yuri Glazov wrote luminously about the moral abyss of the Soviet world.</p>
<p align="left">The eradication of moral perception via ideology – this is the greatest problem addressed with unwavering courage by Hannah Arendt. She died in 1975, so she did not have the possibility to write about <i>Gulag Archipelago</i>. I am certain that she would have published an essay on Solzhenitsyn, which she would have included in a new edition of her volume  <i>Men in Dark Times</i>. In 1967, fifty years since the Bolshevik coup d’état generally known in history as the October Revolution, Arendt participated, along with Isaiah Berlin, Shlomo Avineri, George Kennan, Leonard Schapiro, Marc Ferro, Adam Ulam, and Bertam Wolfe, at a seminar at Harvard, organized by Richard Pipes. This was the moment when one of the most important books on revolutionary Russia came about.</p>
<p align="left">I think it is worth emphasizing that the revisionist school of Sovietology, along with its present manifestations, attacked the very idea of the comparative study of communism and fascism as branches of the same totalitarian genealogical tree (the two totalitarian twins, as French historian François Furet put it). Another target was obviously the concept of totalitarianism proposed by Arendt during the fifties. The latter was disparaged for allegedly being an ideological legitimation of the Cold War.</p>
<p align="left">It seems that what Jean-François Revel called the totalitarian temptation has yet to disappear. Presently, we witness the panegyrics of “the communist hypothesis” or of “the communist horizon.” Elena Bonner rightly put it in her speech upon receiving the “Hannah Arendt” Award from the city of Bremen, the “Henrich Boll” Foundation and the “Hannah Arendt” Association:</p>
<blockquote>
<p align="left"><em>Reading Arendt is frightening even today. Her account of the general resemblance of the Nazi and Communist regimes has been confirmed by many others. On Hitler: “He was phenomenally false…lack of a sense of reality …indifference to facts” (Konrad Heiden). On Stalin: “revulsion for the truth of life,” “indifference to the real situation” (Nikita Khrushchev). In Germany: “The Führer is always right.” In the USSR: “The Party is never wrong.” Hitler: “The nation will be victorious or it must perish totally.” In the USSR, as a song put it, “Bravely we’ll go to war for the power of the Soviets and we will die as one in the fight.” Death camps and the Gulag. Gas was used in the former. The latter didn’t need to waste money on it—hunger and cold did the job.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p align="left">The perpetrator of radical Evil never troubles oneself with ethics because he is completely estranged from morality. Appearances are banal, the essence is radical. This type of individual does not act only from a blind sense of discipline, but also because it shares the totalitarian ideology. We now know enough historical facts to argue so. Adolf Eichmann was not a detached, cold, indifferent bureaucrat. He was obsessed by the role of the Jews. He considered them harmful vermin. Ideology therefore sets up the pattern for the de-humanization of the Other, of the alleged enemy. The bureaucratic system allows these “exterminators” to act with the conviction of their historical mission, of a providential command and of impunity…</p>
<p align="left">The scene of Arendt&#8217;s final lecture is truly poignant. Especially if one takes into account that there have been people of great intelligence (e.g., Hans Jonas, one of Martin Heidegger’s favorite students, an expert in Gnosticism) who reacted, as the movie shows, with great sadness to what they perceived as Hannah’s “arrogance.” As I already mentioned, Mary McCarthy defended her in Partisan Review and wrote scathingly  about those who called Arendt “Hannah Arrogance”:<em>  &#8220;</em>These people get worse as they get older, and in this case it is just a matter of envy. Envy is a monster.” No one was spared in this context, neither Saul Bellow nor Alfred Kazin, themselves harsh critics of Arendt.</p>
<p align="left">Hannah’s mentor, philosopher Karl Jaspers, showed understanding for her standpoint, but he was probably saddened by the fact that she accepted reconciliation with Martin Heidegger, whom he never forgave for his infatuation with Nazism. She would also be labeled Heidegger’s “literary agent.” But Karl and Gertrude Jaspers cared too much about Hannah to rebuke her for such things. They formally accepted her argument concerning Martin’s &#8220;naiveté.&#8221; I doubt though that they considered it valid.</p>
<p align="left">The main scandal concerned her evaluation of the role of the <i>Judenrats</i> that was rooted in Arendt’s attempt to shed light on some of the darkest and most unsettling pages of what she defined as “dark times.” For Hannah, the interrogation of the thorniest topics, telling the truth about things which others preferred to gloss over with suspect zeal, was a Socratic duty before humanity. She refused to fall back on what she considered “tribal” attachments. In a letter to Karl Jaspers, from 20 July 1963, discussing the ceaseless historical campaigns against her, Hannah confessed that, without realizing it, she enraged people highly influential in Israeli politics among whom were former members of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi era. Even so, she wrote, there was no reason to give in: “If I knew what would happened, I would probably still have done it.” (Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, “Correspondence, 1926-1969,″ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, p. 511.) In a wise response, Jaspers urged Hannah not to indulge in conspiratorial fantasies.</p>
<p align="left">When he broke with Hannah, thus ending their lifelong friendship, Kurt Blumenfeld spoke also for Gerschom Scholem, the  prominent Kabala expert, who had reproached her lack of love for the Jewish people. Her reply does not suggest coldness, but a different perspective on empathy. She loved her friends, she responded, but she did not feel love for a collectivity, ethnic or social. Did this mean that she was “arrogant”? I doubt it. Arendt and Scholem had been good friends with Walter Benjamin. She wrote the preface to <i>Illuminations</i>, published by  Schocken Books. In 1968, Scholem lambasted Hannah for her putative haughty detachment in relation with the cause that she once defended: “I knew Hannah Arendt when she was a socialist or half-communist and I knew her when she was a Zionist. I am astounded by her ability to pronounce upon movements in which she was once so deeply engaged, in terms of a distance measured in light years and from such sovereign heights.” Hans Jonas, in his turn, wrote in his memoirs that he was shocked by the anti-Zionist tone and especially by what he called “Hannah Arendt’s ignorance of Jewish matters.” Beyond their disagreements, on which, in later years, they ceased dwelling, Jonas was delivered a moving eulogy in honor of his old friend, in 1975, at the Riverside Memorial Chapel. The text was published in <i>Social Research</i>, the journal of the university where both of them taught (Hans Jonas, “Memoirs,” edited and annotated by Christian Wiese, translated form the German by Krishna Winston, Brandeis University Press, 2008). After she read a chapter of Jonas’s volume <i>The Imperative of Responsibility</i>, Arendt wrote to him: “One thing is certain. This is the book that the Good Lord had in mind when he gave life to you.”</p>
<p align="left">The wound of the <i>Judenrats</i>’ collaboration remains open. In fact, can we talk of collaboration in those circumstances? What were the alternatives? Were there any alternatives? Maybe yes, if one is to think of the insurrection at the Warsaw Ghetto or the Vilna partisans. <i>Bury Me Standing</i> is the title of a volume by Isabel Fonseca about the conditions of the Roma in contemporary Europe. In 1961 though, the Israeli audience, and not only them, were not willing to explore such an issue. Taboos functioned in an intensively prohibitive manner. For the young state of Israel, the Holocaust was a foundational collective narrative. Those were times of emergency when one could hardly take into consideration metaphysical debates on the phenomenology of Evil. Eichmann’s trial had a nationally pedagogical value. Arendt’s questioning of prosecutor Gideon Hausner&#8217;s rhetoric only made murky waters ever more troubled.</p>
<p align="left">At the time, historian Walter Laqueur wrote about the lack of empathy for victims in <i>Eichmann in Jerusalem</i>. I think he was mistaken. There is empathy in the book, but it is mixed with immense suffering for what Arendt saw as the great error of the communities doomed to extermination. I cannot imagine how Arendt would have reacted if she had seen the recent Israeli documentary <i>A Film Unfinished</i> on Nazi propaganda, the Warsaw Ghetto, and memory’s labyrinth. She did not wonder what she would have done if she had been caught in the deadlock of an impossible choice similar to the one of Adam Czerniakow’s, the leader of the Warsaw <i>Judenrat</i>, who killed himself just before the departure of one of the last trains transporting Jews to their death.</p>
<p align="left">The film presents Arendt&#8217;s relationship with Martin Heidegger as a sort of hermeneutical key for understanding Hannah’s spiritual biography. I find this excessive. Equally important were, from a philosophical point of view, her relationship with Jaspers or with Blucher. Arendt was not “a left Heideggerian,” as one author once wrote. She created her own original work and she did not take an apologetic approach toward the writings of her first great teacher of metaphysics. Dana Villa correctly underlines the fact that Hannah never contested the role of Reason in politics, but she defended a deliberative vision of the political space  that excluded monopolistic ambitions, regardless of their coloring: “She shares with liberals like Isaiah Berlin and conservatives like Michael Oakseshott a deep suspicion of rationalism in politics and the pretenses of theory to guide a transformative practice. From Plato’s ‘tyranny of reason,’ to the French revolutionary terror, to Marxism’s catastrophic fulfillment in Stalinist totalitarianism, political rationalism has shown itself every bit as capable of generating moral horror as either religion or Romantic nationalism.” (v. Dana R. Villa, “Apologist or Critic? On Arendt’s Relation to Heidegger,” in Steven E. Aschheim, “Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,” University of California Press, 2001, pp. 331-332).</p>
<p>Arendt learnt from Jaspers to be philosophical while loving humanity (<i>amor mundi</i>). She took from Heinrich Blucher a great admiration for Rosa Luxemburg and for workers’ councils as a form of direct democracy. Blucher’s ideas undeniably influenced her vision about what she called “the lost treasures of revolutionary tradition.” The sovereign heights, of which Scholem wrote so harshly, were actually that imaginary banister without which we descend into the abyss of self-destructive relativism and moral blindness.</p>
<p><em>Author&#8217;s note: For illuminating insights into the topics explored in this article, I recommend  Jamie Glazov&#8217;s symposium:<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/symposium-is-hannah-arendt-still-relevant/"> Is Hannah Arendt Still Relevant?</a></em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Former German Socialist Chancellor, &#8220;Islamic Immigration is the Problem&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/former-german-socialist-chancellor-islamic-immigration-is-the-problem/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=former-german-socialist-chancellor-islamic-immigration-is-the-problem</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/former-german-socialist-chancellor-islamic-immigration-is-the-problem/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 07 Jul 2013 13:02:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration Jihad]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=195866</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Helmut Schmidt should be around 95 now, so I assume he doesn't know that he's not supposed to say that sort of thing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Helmut-Schmidt.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-195868" alt="Helmut-Schmidt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Helmut-Schmidt-450x300.jpg" width="450" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Helmut Schmidt should be around 95 now, so I assume he doesn&#8217;t know that he&#8217;s not supposed to say that sort of thing. But I also doubt very much that he will get the Thilo Sarrazin treatment. Thilo Sarrazin was lynched for a distorted version of his statement when the real objection was his criticism of immigration.</p>
<p>Schmidt was SPD putting him on the left side of the dial. He was a Socialist leader, but he also has a history of taking positions that are more to the right. Especially after leaving office where <a href="http://www.atour.com/~aahgn/news/20001112a.html">he now opposes Turkey&#8217;s entry into the EU </a>and <a href="http://cfact.eu/2011/03/09/helumut-schmidt-calls-for-scientific-scrutiny-of-the-ipcc/">denounces Warmunism as &#8220;hysteri</a>a&#8221;. And he is skeptical of the guest-worker boom.</p>
<blockquote><p>Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt stated that bringing millions of Turkish guest-workers into Germany was a mistake and that multiculturalism can only work under authoritarian regimes. Schmidt told Hamburger Abendblatt reporters that:</p>
<p>“The concept of multiculturalism is difficult to make fit with a democratic society.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The <a href="http://www.atour.com/~aahgn/news/20001112a.html">common theme is culture</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Given the great cultural differences and geographical concerns I must &#8230; recommend against taking Turkey into the European Union,&#8221; writes Schmidt.</p>
<p>Islam is another issue of concern to the E.U. says Schmidt: &#8220;The outcome of the re-Islamisation process is uncertain and fundamentalism is possible.&#8221;</p>
<p>A further problem raised by Schmidt is immigration. Germany has 2.1 million Turkish nationals whom Schmidt says have failed to integrate in the sense of a melting pot.</p>
<p>&#8220;No real integration of additional immigrants can be expected and immigration thus need to be limited by the E.U.,&#8221; he says. Turkish membership in the European Union would throw open the bloc to free immigration by Turks.</p></blockquote>
<p>So Schmidt&#8217;s latest comments are not surprising.</p>
<blockquote><p>Helmut Schmidt: As regards Italy or Greece, there&#8217;s no problem. One day the Italians and the Greeks will go home or they&#8217;ll integrate into society in the course of time. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve seen for decades. The problem isn&#8217;t due to Italian, Greek or Spanish immigration. The problem is due to immigration from foreign cultures, for example cultures marked by Islam.</p></blockquote>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>German Left Ramps Up Attacks on Islam Critics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/german-left-ramps-up-attacks-on-islam-critics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=german-left-ramps-up-attacks-on-islam-critics</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:15:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Internet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193410</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The future for free speech in Europe gets darker. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/shutterstock_3359855.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193533" alt="shutterstock_3359855" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/shutterstock_3359855-450x300.jpg" width="270" height="180" /></a>National parliamentarians from <a href="http://www.die-linke.de/dielinke/aktuell/"><i>Die Linke</i></a>, Germany’s post-communist Left Party, recently presented the federal German government with a Minor Inquiry (<i>Kleine Anfrage</i> or KA) concerning the government’s policy towards the conservative German website <i>Politically Incorrect</i> (PI).  This is only the latest effort by left-wing multiculturalists to quash open discussion, and criticism on Islam by designating the discourse “anti-democratic”and “right-wing extremist.&#8221;</p>
<p>As the online <a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/btgo_1980/index.html#BJNR012380980BJNE011600311">rules of order</a> for the German parliament or <i>Bundestag</i> explain, the KA in <a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/btgo_1980/__104.html">Section 104</a> allows the <i>Bundestag</i>’s president to receive questions for the federal government about “certain delineated areas.” Normally the president calls upon the government to answer the questions in writing within 14 days, although agreement with the KA authors can extend this time limit.  As the German-language <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleine_Anfrage_(Deutschland)">KA Wikipedia entry</a> explains, this procedure serves as a means of parliamentary control over the government by calling upon it to give account of a given state of affairs.</p>
<p><i>Die Linke</i>’s May 13, 2013, KA (document 17/13573, available in PDF format <a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">here</a>) notes that “Islam-hostile internet portals” like PI with its “tens of thousands of visitors daily” and parties such as the Freedom Party (<a href="http://diefreiheit.org/home/"><i>Die Freiheit</i></a>) and Germany’s <i>Pro</i> movement (<a href="http://www.pro-nrw.net/"><i>Pro NRW</i></a><i>/</i><a href="http://www.pro-deutschland-online.de/"><i>Pro Deutschland</i></a>) “warn against a supposed ‘Islamization of Europe.’”  In PI reader comments, meanwhile, Muslims “are collectively humiliated and denigrated in a racist, xenophobic, insulting, hate-filled, and at times violence-glorifying manner.”</p>
<p>Referenced by the KA and previously reported by this author (see <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/74-year-old-german-woman-convicted-of-hate-speech-against-muslims/">here</a> and <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3619/euro-islam">here</a>), PI and <i>Die Freiheit</i>, with common members such as <a href="http://www.bayern.diefreiheit.org/michael-sturzenberger/">Michael Stürzenberger</a>, have conducted a petition drive for a referendum to stop a proposed Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (<a href="http://www.zie-m.de/"><i>Zentrum für Islams in Europa-München</i></a> or ZIE-M).  The KA references a story from the Munich-based German national newspaper <a href="http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/islamgegner-michael-stuerzenberger-der-grosse-agitator-1.1654428"><i>Süddeutsche Zeitung</i></a> discussing how Stürzenberger commonly compares the Koran with Adolf Hitler’s <i>Mein Kampf</i> and <i>Die Freiheit</i> rallies have featured signs stating “Christ is truth, Muhammad is a lie.” Previously reported by this author as well (see <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/silencing_speech_on_islam.html">here</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/german-government-ramps-up-monitoring-of-conservatives/">here</a>), the KA also notes that the Bavarian Office of Constitutional Protection (<i>Verfassungsschutz</i>) has recently begun monitoring Bavarian chapters of PI/<i>Die Freiheit</i> due to “anti-constitutional” sentiments.</p>
<p>A previous August 18, 2011, <i>Die Linke</i> KA (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">17/6823</a>)  had also dealt with PI/<i>Die Freiheit</i> in the wake of the July 22, 2011, massacre perpetrated in Norway by <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/anders_behring_breivik/index.html">Anders Behring Brevik</a>.  This earlier KA bemoaned in Germany an “increasing hostility to Islam precisely among high earners and people with high levels of education.” In this context “populist and xenophobic campaigns against ‘Islam’” appeared to the “extreme right in Europe” as a “recipe for success for their propaganda” and an “entrance ticket into the political middle.” <i>Die Freiheit</i> was one of several attempts to found “anti-Islam parties” while PI had become a “central forum of Islam haters in the German-speaking area.”</p>
<p>Yet in citing an article from Berlin’s leftwing <a href="http://www.taz.de/!75174/"><i>Tageszeitung</i></a> (<i>taz</i>), the 2011 KA noted that the federal <i>Verfassungsschutz</i> had not deemed PI’s outlook as anti-constitutional given PI’s self-professed “pro-Israeli, pro-American” character.  The article noted additionally PI’s “emphatic profession of loyalty to the <i>Grundgesetz</i>,” Germany’s Basic Law or constitution.</p>
<p>The government’s answer on September 5, 2011, (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">17/6910</a>) to the various questions concerning matters such as membership and statements of PI/<i>Die Freiheit</i> and other groups in the 2011 KA continued this analysis. With respect to <i>Die Freiheit</i>, there were “not sufficient indications” to classify <i>Die Freiheit</i> as “rightwing extremist.” The “overwhelming majority of PI entries,” meanwhile, “made no use of classical rightwing extremist argumentation patterns, but rather was to be situated within the Islam-critical spectrum.” While some PI contributions had “anti-Muslim or in parts even racist content,” these were “practically exclusively” in the comments section and were “even there the exception.” Thus a “rightwing extremist effort (still) did not allow itself to be discerned” at PI.</p>
<p>Not to be deterred, <i>Die Linke</i> responded on October 31, 2011, with yet another KA (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">17/7569</a>) about “anti-Muslim agitation” citing several sources such as newspapers warning against PI, <i>Die Freiheit</i>, and other groups.  In this KA, <i>Die Linke</i> indicated that it was not so much interested in a “secret service surveillance of the Islam- and Muslim-hostile scene” by the federal <i>Verfassungschutz</i> as a “societal ostracism of this body of thought just like every other form of racism and anti-Semitism.” Among other questions, <i>Die Linke</i> wanted to know what connections PI had to “religious groupings from the evangelical, dogmatic-Catholic, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Catholic_Church">old Catholic</a> milieus.” The government’s response (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">17/7761</a>) on November 17, 2011, however, reiterated the position taken in 17/6910 and noted that “individual statements” did not suffice to define an entity as “extremist” but rather demanded an “overall observation.”</p>
<p>In 17/13573 <i>Die Linke</i> repeated many of its previous questions and inquired whether the federal government still maintains its previous outlook in light of recent Bavarian decisions.  This is the latest <i>Die Linke</i> salvo in an ongoing campaign to bring about a self-proclaimed political “ostracism” of PI/<i>Die Freiheit</i> and other groups.  Yet the irony was not lost on Stürzenberger, who pointed out to PI that <a href="http://www.pi-news.net/2013/05/anfrage-der-linke-an-den-bundestag-zu-pi-und-freiheit-wegen-antimuslimischen-rassismus/"><i>Die Linke</i></a>, with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_(Germany)">much of its roots in East Germany’s Communist Party</a>, is itself an object of federal <i>Verfassungsschutz</i> <a href="http://www.welt.de/newsticker/news1/article116739259/Linke-kritisiert-Beobachtung-durch-Verfassungsschutz.html">surveillance</a>.</p>
<p>The future of a free and open discussion of Islam in Germany seems perilous with the likes of <i>Die Linke</i>, a totalitarian-legacy group, continually demonstrating its propensity to use the German federal government as a tool of intimidation against Islam’s critiques.</p>
<p><em>This article was commissioned by <a href="http://www.legal-project.org/">The Legal Project</a>, an activity of the <a href="http://www.meforum.org/">Middle East Forum</a>.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Germany Revives the Jewish Boycott</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/germany-revives-the-jewish-boycott/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=germany-revives-the-jewish-boycott</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/germany-revives-the-jewish-boycott/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Jun 2013 04:25:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[west bank]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193399</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Where are the calls for economic sanctions against real human rights abusers? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Boycot_Jews_april_1_1933.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-193434" alt="Boycot_Jews_april_1_1933" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Boycot_Jews_april_1_1933.jpg" width="294" height="248" /></a>China employs slave labor and illegally occupies Tibet. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the governments of the entire Arab Middle East are violators of human rights, deniers of religious freedom, and for that matter, undemocratic to boot. And yet, none of these miscreant states are subjected to economic boycott. Israel’s products, however, originating in the biblical regions of Judea and Samaria (also called the West Bank), are being boycotted by none other than the German government. Germany now says it supports the European Union&#8217;s plan to discriminatively label Jewish-made products in this region, the purpose of which is to stigmatize and mark the products for consumers to avoid. The EU campaign is designed to curry favor with the Arab world, which smacks more than anything of Jew-hating.</p>
<p>Ironically, in their senseless pandering, the Germans and the other Europeans have failed to evaluate the consequences of the boycott on the very people they allegedly seek to protect &#8211; the Arab Palestinians.  Reacting to a UN panel, which reportedly considered sanctioning Israel for expanding settlements by banning imports of West Bank goods, Yigal Palmor, Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman told the <i>Times of Israel</i> (January 31, 2013) “The report is so utterly misguided that it steps widely out of line in recommending a boycott that would <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-mission-encourages-boycott-of-west-bank-products/">harm</a> Palestinians and Israelis alike.”</p>
<p>Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, in response to the European Union&#8217;s (EU) new moves, called it “anti-Semitism.” Foxman explained that the EU initiative represented an “effort at singling out Israel when there is no outcry over so many human rights abuses everywhere.” Addressing the German government in particular, since it has recently passed legislation in support of the EU labeling scheme, he stated on Sunday (June 2, 2013) “If the only country you want to single out is Israel, that’s <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/foxman-singling-out-israel-as-in-labeling-west-bank-products-is-anti-semitism/">anti-Semitism</a>.”</p>
<p>Foxman dismissed the notion that the situation in the West Bank was unique and therefore might justify a unique response.  He argued that the focus on alleged Israeli human right abuses relating to settlements was an excuse to single out Israel.  Foxman pointed out that given the dismal human rights situation in so many places worldwide, “where people are being killed for who they are, and this is the only concern?” Foxman added, “Where are the sanctions against those who kill Christians [in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Turkey, to name a few]? Where is the <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/foxman-singling-out-israel-as-in-labeling-west-bank-products-is-anti-semitism/">outcry</a>?”</p>
<p>It is particularly galling that a German government would participate in boycotting products made in the Jewish State.  It is reminiscent of the Nazi era, when Hitler’s regime ordered the boycott of Jewish businesses.  Moreover, a boycott against Israel, which seeks territorial compromise with the Palestinians, while the Palestinians have instead chosen the destruction of the Jewish State and have refrained from negotiations with Israel to resolve the territorial issue, is nothing less than a renewal of government sanctioned Jew hatred.</p>
<p>Just weeks following the Six Day War of June 1967, Israel’s renowned Foreign minister Abba Eban, in an interview with the German weekly magazine <i>Der Spiegel,</i> coined the now famous phrase “The Auschwitz borders,” when referring to the pre-1967 borders of Israel. Eban stated in the interview that Israel’s return to the pre-1967 indefensible borders will bring danger and lack of security for the Jewish State.  Eban went on to say that “I am not exaggerating when I say that for us it holds the imagery of Auschwitz.”</p>
<p>Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, more than any other EU leader, must recognize the meaning of discriminatory branding.  While a yellow band with “Jude” written on it is unlikely in today’s Europe, any other discriminatory tag, badge, or ban on Jewish products will have the same anti-Semitic effect.</p>
<p>The EU states, including Germany, have excused their discriminatory moves against Israel as stemming from pure political motives, namely, their desire to advance human rights and peace in the region.  The intentional goal to hurt Jewish businesses however, removes their alleged quest for equality and justice, and exposes the ugly truth of racial and religious bias.</p>
<p>Not everyone in the EU supports this discriminatory boycott of Israeli products.  In 2009, in the wake of a proposed boycott of Israeli products, right and left-wing politicians in Rome came out in support of the city’s Jewish community.  Piero Fassino, a leftist opposition leader, described the proposal to boycott Israeli products as a stupid provocation: “To boycott means to negate. It’s a form of negation of Israel and its rights. But the peace in the Middle East cannot be achieved by negation, but by recognizing the rights of Israel and of the Palestinian people,” he said. Piero Marrazzo, governor of the Lazio region of which Rome is the capital, called the idea of boycotting Jewish shops <a href="http://www.euronews.com/2009/01/09/italian-politicians-condemn-anti-israeli-boycott/">blood-curdling</a> and met leaders of Rome’s Jewish neighborhoods to express his solidarity.</p>
<p>Currently, goods produced in Judea and Samaria are not eligible for the same preferential tariffs enjoyed by Israeli exports to the EU coming from within the Green Line. According to the World Bank (2012), the EU imports <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/30/european-union-trade-west-bank">$300 million</a> worth of goods from Israeli settlements a year &#8211; roughly 15 times more than the Palestinians.  Jewish settlements, however, provide better wages to local Arabs than Arab employers do. The Israel-based SodaStream Corporation, which produces a home beverage carbonation system, has 13 production facilities, three of which are located in Israel and the West Bank,<b> </b>and in 2012, employed 1,100 people.  Its main manufacturing facility is located in Mishor Adumim (next to Maale Adumim) and employs 900 Arabs, half of whom live in the Palestinian Authority, in places such as Jericho and Ramallah.  Therefore, constraining SodaStream exports in the EU will hurt the Palestinians</p>
<p>A 2007 report by the Knesset Research and Information Center indicates that 33,000 Arabs from Judea and Samaria were employed in Jewish settlements or Jewish industrial centers. According to Reuters (May 4, 2010), the number has declined to <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/05/04/us-palestinians-israel-settlements-idUSTRE64338Q20100504">25,000</a> in 2010.</p>
<p>What is astonishing is the EU interference in the growing relationships between Arabs and Jews in the West Bank.  One can easily find Palestinian Authority made products in Israeli stores, while Israeli products are readily found in Palestinian shops. This interdependency is contributing to a more peaceful coexistence, and in some areas fruitful cooperation between Arab villages and Jewish communities in the West Bank. Normalcy and good neighbor relations are being undermined by the activities of far-left provocateurs in cooperation with the EU.</p>
<p>The German government’s resolution that considers Judea and Samaria as not being part of Israel and thus supports labeling products from Jewish settlements was initiated by the Green Party, not by Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party. Nevertheless, making it law amounts to what Denis MacShane, former British Labor Party MP and expert on anti-Semitism called, ‘Kauf nicht bei Juden’ (“Do not buy from Jews”) policy.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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