RUTHFULLY YOURS

BERLIN—The leaders of France and Germany condemned Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s verbal attacks on European states Thursday, in a sign that some European countries are closing ranks against the Turkish leader’s increasingly outspoken remarks against his next-door allies.

But the joint statement by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande stopped short of threatening any consequences, underscoring the political tightrope Europeans have to walk as they try to quell domestic anger without escalating the conflict with a crucial ally.

“Comparisons with Nazism and aggressive statements against Germany or other [European Union] member states are unacceptable,” the offices of the two leaders said in their written statement.

Mr. Erdogan has lashed out at Germany and the Netherlands, comparing their governments to the Nazis after authorities in those countries prevented Turkish officials from holding campaign events there.

The two leaders said the type of Turkish campaign events that have sparked the dispute could still be allowed in their countries as long as they were properly registered.

Other European politicians have gone further, blocking appearances by Turkish politicians. Dutch authorities over the weekend deported a Turkish minister from Rotterdam as she attempted to hold an unauthorized political rally to promote an April 16 referendum on changes to Turkey’s constitution that would boost the authority of Mr. Erdogan.

German local authorities have pulled the permits for several rallies, including in the city of Hannover on Thursday for an event Friday featuring a senior pro-Erdogan politician.

I can’t imagine how Bill Leak coped as bravely and for as long as he did, not with the authorities and Muslim fanatics each determined to put his head on a pole. This is Australia’s disgrace: a relentless, speech-enforcing bureaucracy making common cause with head-loppers.
I do not ask, how he died, for medical opinion tells us it was a heart attack. I do ask why he had to die as he did, weary and stressed after months of unconscionable official harassment. Bill Leak, cartoonist extraordinaire is lost to us. No more of that sardonic wit. Gone forever the sharpshooting sniper whose targets were the pompous and the self-righteous and the lies they tell each other and will use any means at their disposal to make the rest of us bow before them too.

And if we don’t, if we refuse to genuflect before their lies? They’ll persecute us and make us pay, in Bill’s case with his life.

The Inquisition hated to spill blood, it preferred that heretics be racked and broken then quietly expire. Bill’s heart exploded, that is what the death certificate says. Yet still he died as countless heretics have died — those who dared to think differently, who dared to speak their heretic thoughts aloud. They died lest they contaminate others with their heresies. What did they accuse you of, Bill, what was your crime? Of telling the truth as you saw it? Of ruffling feathers by whipping idiots into lathers of froth and turmoil?

My hands are trembling as I write. My eyes are full of tears. My heart is heavy with foreboding. When an artist, a writer, a poet, a satirist is persecuted, the country that lets it happen slides toward totalitarianism. No, that’s wrong. A country that funds a spiteful bureaucracy to punish those of whose words it disapproves is already there. It’s just a question of degree. To tolerate that is worse than simply being stripped of the freedom millions died to win and defend. Rather, it is to throw away freedom and liberty like so much worthless rubbish. Today they pick off a cartoonist and a laughing, joyful mob dips its hankies in the blood for souvenirs. Tomorrow? It could be any door — your door, my door, any door — on which the enforcer’s fist bangs in the darkness.

I state it plainly, people, in the USSR, where I lived and grew up. Like Bill Leak, I was hauled in front of the unsmiling, self-righteous, angry, shouting komsomoltsy of the Young Communist League for my desire to emigrate to the West. My wife and I, two thought-criminals together. We were denounced as Western spies and Zionist traitors, criminals who deserved to be shot. We did not know at the time if we would have to find someone prepared to care for our four-year old daughter if we were taken away. In the USSR that was the fate of those who declined to submit to their tormentors. I saw people being accused in front of many of anti-Communist thoughts or deeds or words. I knew people, like Bill, who were taken to hospital with heart attacks. Their friends stayed silent or publicly turned against them. I saw all this and worse.

I lived it and survived it. I escaped it. Or so I thought.

November 10, 1938, 16-year-old Gertrude Rothschild was recruited by her rabbi to hurriedly enter the ruins of their synagogue in Konstanz am Bodensee to help gather up and bury the burned remains of their Torah scrolls, all that remained after the infamous night of violence, Kristallnacht. The story remained etched in Gertrude’s memory. She later survived the Gurs concentration camp, in Vichy, France.

Gertrude understood why people burned synagogues. Decades later, she embedded the memories of Kristallnacht in the minds of her children and grandchildren, one of whom is a co-author of this piece. We all knew from an early age that when a synagogue was attacked, the core of our Jewishness was defiled and threatened.

Post-World War II Germans understand this fact and have acted accordingly when such anti-Semitism reared its ugly head. That is, until the court in Wuppertal. We don’t have the courage to tell Gertrude, now in her nineties, that those blacked-robe judges (and the regional court that later confirmed the ruling), decided that three Muslims who set fire to a German synagogue were making a political protest against Israel’s actions in the Gaza War, and therefore could not be convicted of anti-Semitism.

If German history isn’t sufficient a guide, a definition of anti-Semitism has been adopted by 31 European nations, and should guide German jurisprudence in erasing this travesty. But the stain and pain remain.

As Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz put it, “The idea that attacking a synagogue can be justified as an anti-Israel political protest, rather than anti-Jewish hate act, is as absurd as saying that Kristallnacht was merely a protest against poor service by Jewish store owners.” Or, we might add, claiming that torching a mosque is a protest against ISIS. Or dismissing the desecration of the Cologne Cathedral as a consequence of long-simmering discontent over the medieval Crusades.

The German courts’ decisions will further fuel the anti-Semitism engulfing Europe. Jews are specifically warned not to wear kippot or other Jewish symbols in many European capitals. Holocaust survivors in Malmo, Sweden — where, ironically, they settled after escaping the Nazis — are fearful of walking to synagogue on the Sabbath because the anti-Israel political establishment won’t protect them or their rabbi from anti-Semitic threats. Armed guards are stationed in front of synagogues throughout the Continent — yet, according the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, Jews do not feel safe inside their own houses of worship.

The Dutch Labor Party used to dominate Maastricht. The ancient city gave its name to the Maastricht Treaty that created the European Union. In this election, the Labor Party fell from a quarter of the vote to a twentieth.

Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, which advocates withdrawing from the EU, is now the largest party in the birthplace of the European Union.

And the growing strength of the Freedom Party can be felt not only on the banks of the Maas River, but across the waterways of the Netherlands. A new wind of change has blown off the North Sea and ruffled feathers in Belgisch Park.

In The Hague, where Carnegie’s Peace Palace hosts the World Court while the humbler Noordeinde Palace houses King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima, the internationalist institutions colliding with the nationalist ones, the United Nations rubbing up against the Dutch parliament and Supreme Court, the Freedom Party has become the second largest party despite the 15% Muslim population.

In Rotterdam, where Muslim rioters shouted, “Allahu Akbar” and anti-Semitic slurs and where Hamas front groups are organizing a conference, the Freedom Party is now the second largest political party. In that ancient city on the Rotte that had the first Muslim mayor of a major European city, Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb of the Labor Party who was being groomed for Prime Minister, estimates are that Labor fell from 32 percent to just 6 percent. That is strikingly similar to what took place in Maastricht.

But nearly half of Rotterdam is made up of immigrants. Muslims make up 13% of the population. But turnout hit 72% and after the Muslim riots, the Freedom Party only narrowly trails the ruling VVD.

The Freedom Party has become the largest party in Venlo while the Labor Party has all but vanished.

And that is the real story of the Dutch election.

The truly final results will only be known next week. But the current numbers show that the Freedom Party has become the second largest political party in Parliament having gained five seats while the Labor Party has disastrously lost 29 seats.

The Greek people have just about reached the limits of their strength. The economic situation is tragic. Illegal immigration is out of control, criminality increases day by day. The political system is steeped in corruption and the media have stopped being the communication channel between citizens and the political system. The Greek media are functioning as the praetorian guard of the euro; they favor the massive admission of Muslim populations into Greece and they fiercely attack every voice that disagrees with them.

Bishop Ambrossios is urging people to revolt. He characterizes the illegal Muslim immigrants entering the country as conquerors. He also says that Christianity is under attack in Greece, while Islam is being daily reinforced. He says that Greek Orthodox churches are being desecrated, robbed and burned by Muslim immigrants while the state just sits by and looks on.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras does not fully control his political party; his biggest problem is his cabinet.

When a political system is corrupt, when the media only put out propaganda and not information, when oligarchs control public life, when the political system seems repeatedly directed against the interests of its own people, when a political system ignores the constitution and the will of the majority but draws its legitimacy once every four years through elections, then, although it may be called “democratic”, it is a democracy of junk. It is not the people’s democracy anymore; instead, it belongs to the elites.

If Greeks do not take back their homeland, wrote journalist Makis Andronopoulos on January 3, 2017, the guns may well have the last word. Andronopoulos wrote that he came to this conclusion after polls showed the detachment of the political system from the Greek people and their tragic way of life.

The director of the newspaper Kathimerini, Alexis Papahelas, wrote on January 29, 2017 that the people are exhausted, that democracy still does not have solution to the problems of citizens and that the situation in Greece reminded him of 2012, when the old political system was wiped out.

Bishop Ambrossios is urging people to revolt. He characterizes the illegal Muslim immigrants entering the country, as conquerors. He also says that Christianity is under attack in Greece while Islam is being daily reinforced. He says that Greek Orthodox churches are being desecrated, robbed and burned by Muslim immigrants while the state just sits by and looks.

Members of the governing coalition say that Germany wants to bring down the Greek government and bring the New Democracy party to power. The leader of New Democracy, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is the most obedient and tenacious follower of the German policy in Greece.

The Left’s route to promoting their radical agenda around the world is engineering the enactment of a United Nations treaty that contains their distorted “women’s rights” policies that can then be used to impose their alien feminist views on third world nations. I know this from my experience of more than 20 years at the UN –– including working as an NGO delegate advising official delegates plus being an official U.S. delegate appointed by President George W. Bush to two sessions, The Children’s Summit (2002) and the Commission on the Status of Women (2003). I’ve learned that whatever the theme of the session and whether it’s an official or NGO meeting. And this week, March 13 – March 24, the UN is holding its 61st annual Commission on the Status of Women.

A 2013 article that cited the 10 top accomplishments of the UN lists “promoting women’s rights” as the UN’s #1 accomplishment over the years. That achievement demonstrates the indirect and outsized influence of radical feminist NGOs in the United States and in other Member States. They gained significant, even decisive, power in 2010 with the establishment of a body incorporating all related UN agencies under one billion-dollar entity –– UN Women: United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. This powerful consolidation of women’s agencies within the UN (often referred to as a “global policy-making body”) gave radical women unprecedented global influence. UN Women is now among the most powerful of the various entities of the UN in working to impose radical policies and practices related to women’s rights and gender identity. It is nothing short of the 21st Century’s most glaring example of arrogant western colonialism: cultural imperialism and domination at its worst.

The establishment of UN Women was the result of significant groundwork to implement a long-term strategy. Ambassador Arvonne Fraser, former ambassador to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), explained the strategy very simply: “[W]hen you put something in law you change culture.” UN treaties, of course, are not law, but “customary law” has become a direct implication of the treaties and economic benefits that are given or withheld by the UN according to a specific nation’s adherence to the treaties. Thus, a series of women’s meetings were planned to provide a foundation for cultural change, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

The UN’s “International Women’s Year” in 1975 was followed by “The United Nations Decade for Women” from 1976 to 1985 ,including a World Plan of Action and a dramatic increase in non-governmental leaders (NGO), with the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). All of this happened following the drafting in 1972 of the controversial Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This proposed treaty is promoted by its proponents as a “women’s rights treaty” (focusing on the “women’s rights” agenda rather than the human rights of women).

THE HAGUE, Netherlands—The Dutch political establishment held on to power Wednesday, despite losing votes to anti-immigrant nationalists and other upstart parties, according to preliminary results published after the country’s most closely watched election in recent times.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy won the most seats, putting Mr. Rutte in a strong position to form a new ruling coalition.

Mr. Rutte achieved his goal of finishing ahead of anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders , whose Party for Freedom wants to halt Muslim immigration and leave the European Union. The key to Mr. Rutte’s win was offering his own, gentler version of anti-immigrant populism during the campaign.

Preliminary results based on counting 94% of votes put the premier’s center-right party on track to win 33 seats, an 8-seat drop compared with 2012 elections but still ahead of Mr. Wilders’s group, which came second with 20 seats, followed closely by the conservative Christian Democratic Appeal and the centrist D66, both with 19 seats. Turnout was at 77.6%.

The Dutch contest has drawn unusually high global attention as a bellwether for Europe’s string of major elections this year, including in France, Germany and potentially Italy. Across the continent, mainstream political parties are facing challenges from populist and antiestablishment forces, many of them opposed to immigration and the EU.

While results in one country are unlikely to influence another’s voters, similar themes are echoing around the region including migration, security, and alienation from traditional governing parties.

Although Mr. Rutte’s party lost ground compared with 2012, its losses are smaller than expected as his party performed better than opinion polls indicated. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is an overstatement to call Hochschild a “Schindler”……Schindler worked under the noses of the Nazis putting his life at risk every single hour. Hochschild was never at risk, but his efforts were noble. I was born in Bolivia where my parents went after my father finished medical school. He was an acolyte of Jabotinsky who told him at a Zionist meeting in Geneva to get out of Europe. My father joined the Bolivian army and fought in the Chaco War where he became the surgeon general. For his military stint he was rewarded with full Bolivian citizenship and government access. He participated in Hochschild’s efforts and was instrumental in persuading the Bolivian government into opening its borders to Jews. To their eternal credit the Bolivians were kind, welcoming, and gave the Jews a haven. rsk

Old files have revealed the story of a businessman hailed as the “Bolivian Schindler” for helping thousands of Jews flee to the South American country to escape the Nazis.

Piles of documents had stood stacked for decades in the headquarters of a mining company formerly run by German Jewish entrepreneur Mauricio Hochschild.

In his time Hochschild was vilified as a ruthless tycoon, but when researchers started sorting through the paperwork decades later, they began to unravel the tale of how he helped Jews flee from persecution in the 1930s.

“He saved many souls from the Holocaust by bringing them to Bolivia and creating jobs for them,” Carola Campos, head of the Bolivian Mining Corporation’s information unit, told AFP.

Along with fellow magnates Victor Aramayo and Simon Patino, Hochschild had his mining company nationalized in 1952 by the Bolivian government. It accused them of plundering the nation by mining its tin reserves for their own profit.

But the documents revealed what else Hochschild had been up to.

They include work contracts drawn up for Jews from Europe by the mining firm in the 1930s, says the head of the corporation’s archives, Edgar Ramirez.

There is a letter from a kindergarten housing Jewish children in La Paz asking for Hochschild’s help to expand the facility “in view of the number of children who are here and others who want to come.”

One letter was from French authorities, asking him to receive a thousand Jewish orphans.

There are letters sent at the time by the British embassy to Hochschild with blacklists of companies linked to the Axis powers, whom he was forbidden to do business with.

Of the many Jews who fled from repression under Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany, thousands came to Bolivia.

For many it was a stepping stone on to the United States, Brazil, Argentina or Israel.