For many years Sweden was far ahead of Finland in its embrace of the joys of cultural enrichment. The Swedes were actively importing massive numbers of Third World immigrants — especially Muslims — decades before the Finns began. However, in recent years Finland’s ruling class has decided to catch up with Sweden and other multicultural utopias in Europe. Nowadays the benefits of mass immigration are relentlessly touted to Finish citizens.

Those who resist are being demonized as — you guessed it — “racists”. Like Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada, Finland has passed laws against “incitement against a religious or ethnic group”. The Finnish oligarchs are now using these legal means to ensure that their citizens accept their multicultural fate — or else.

The Finnish blogger Vasarahammer posted the following guest-essay at Tundra Tabloids about the increasingly totalitarian tactics employed against one particularly “racist” town in the north of Finland.

Finnish government fights internet racism

The Norwegian blogger Fjordman has sometimes described Sweden as softly totalitarian politically correct tyranny, meaning that dissidents who step out of line are punished by social exclusion or, at worst, by losing their job. However, there is no direct persecution by the state like in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Dissidents are neither sentenced to forced labor nor committed to mental hospitals like they used to be in the Soviet Union.

The Swedish way of controlling dissent is subtle. It does not rely on the state to carry out the actual punishment, but the media and the government organizations perform the task without resorting to force. In some cases, though, the self-styled anti-fascists do intimidate the opponents of the state ideology, but the state is not directly involved in the attempt to force the representatives of dissident political organizations to cease their activities.

It can be argued that the Swedes have had decades to fine-tune their methods of marginalizing dissent and keeping matters related to immigration outside of mainstream political discussion. Finland, on the other hand, still tries to learn the methods of controlling dissent, since the Finnish multicultural project began as late as in the early 1990s, when the arrival of Somalis from the Soviet Union spelled the end of the strict Finnish immigration policy of earlier decades.

Since then the Finnish authorities have tried to combat racism in different ways that are very familiar to everyone living in a politically correct society. The crude propaganda highlighting the positive aspects of multiculturalism is matched with demonization of racists, meaning those who do not embrace the multicultural project with adequate enthusiasm.

The Finnish way also relies more heavily on courts and law enforcement as a tool to suppress racist thought. This can be seen clearly in the case of Lieksa below, as well as in the several court cases in which internet bloggers have been convicted of incitement to ethnic hatred.

Lieksa — the “racist” city

The town of Lieksa located near the eastern border of Finland is famed for its natural beauty and the landscapes of Lake Pielinen. However, recently the town hit the headlines in Finnish media with allegations of racism.

Lieksa is a fairly typical town in the remote parts of Finland. The population is aging and the young people are moving out to the big cities in the southern part of the country to escape the high unemployment.

Lieksa has also had a high availability of empty municipally-owned flats. The political leaders of the town decided that by giving the flats to the asylum seekers from the nearby Kontiolahti asylum-seeker reception center they would solve the problem of empty flats. So two hundred asylum-seekers, mainly from Somalia and Iraq, were given municipal flats and got to stay in Lieksa mostly living on social security benefits.

Some local politicians openly questioned the long-term financial viability of the plan. They saw that asylum seekers would become a permanent drain on the municipal economy. It was then that the campaign against Lieksa was started. The main regional newspaper Karjalainen published several articles highlighting the racism in Lieksa and how it spoils the reputation of the town. The paper was backed by the chief of North Karelian police Kai Markkula who stated:

“What distinguishes Lieksa from Joensuu is the fact that negative attitudes towards immigrants are a lot stronger and visible in all social groups.”

Joensuu is the main city in the North Karelian region and had problems with skinhead violence in the 1990s. Those events were said to have spoiled the reputation of Joensuu, since they received a lot of media coverage at the time. In his statement Markkula implies that the local politicians in Lieksa are also responsible for the negative attitudes, not only the local youths. It must also be noted that the local politicians who have criticized the reception of asylum seekers are not members of the Finns party but Social Democrats and Center Party members.

By comparing the current situation in Lieksa to the events in Joensuu the chief of police is trying to stop the complaints about asylum seekers and make people of Lieksa accept the new multicultural reality.

This did not happen. Instead, some local young people from Lieksa launched a racist Facebook group, which did, in fact, contain some fairly unpleasant postings, most of which have been removed by now. The group attracted the attention of national media and the North Karelian police were forced to act. The police arrested nine people suspected of incitement of ethnic hatred, two of them with gross incitement of ethnic hatred, a new crime recently introduced to the Finnish law that carries the maximum penalty of four years imprisonment.

The police said that those arrested were between 15 and 51 years of age. One of the suspects was a 15-year-old girl. It must be noted that the suspects were taken into police custody solely because of the posts in the Facebook group. The suspects were not accused of actual violence or planning of specific violent acts.

Internet racism targeted

The North Karelian police were supported by the Chief police officer of Finland Mikko Paatero who congratulated them for the job well done. It is not yet clear whether the perpetrators of the Facebook crime will be prosecuted and on what grounds. However, the police did their best to intimidate the racists of Lieksa.

The Finnish Foreign Ministry recently published a report about the implementation of the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination. In that report, the following was stated:

“Criticism of immigration and hate speech on the internet have increased that is fought against by monitoring of the internet. An essential part of the work to intensify the monitoring of the internet is also to educate the public to inform actively on crimes they observe on the internet through a system of hint via internet.”

Following the Norwegian example, Finnish police have launched a website that allows people to report racist content in the internet. Using that site anyone can turn in any website that the informer thinks is against the law. It is also possible to report anonymously.

According to the Finnish police, there have been 1028 tips on racism in 2010, out of which 22 led to measures. What is interesting in the statement above is the fact that the police are actively fighting against criticism of immigration as such. It is not just those who plan to carry out violent acts that are targeted by the police but also people expressing their opinion about immigration.

Meanwhile the crude propaganda advertising the benefits of immigration from countries like Somalia goes on. Newspaper Karjalainen published an op-ed, in which the paper expressed concern about able pairs of hands. According to Karjalainen, Finland needs immigration:

“The most attention to the job opportunities available for immigrants should be paid in Lieksa, in which the population is aging faster than average and the need for able pairs of hands is high.”

In the article Karjalainen is promoting the official lie saying that immigrants from Somalia and Iraq will rescue Finnish society from the impending labor shortage. This lie is repeated over and over again, even thought the fact remains that roughly ten per cent of Somalis work for a living and few have skills most needed in contemporary Western society.

Recently Finnish anti-racists have tried to borrow expertise from Sweden. Far-left anti-racist Lisa Bjurwald’s recent book about the European far right was published in Finnish recently. Bjurwald has allegedly monitored Finnish politics after the electoral success of the True Finns party. According to Bjurwald, the Sweden Democrats would not be stupid enough to express openly racist and homophobic statements like some representatives of the True Finns party have done.

There is an element of shame in supporting the Sweden Democrats openly. In addition, the support may turn out to be physically dangerous. However, such an element does not exist for the True Finns party. The conformism and the need to maintain a politically correct facade are part of Swedish society, but not so much in Finland. That is why Bjurwald’s flawed analysis, which is not based on actual understanding of Finnish politics but moral narcissism, will not benefit the Finnish anti-racists. That is why, they will have to rely on the law enforcement to do their bidding in the future as well.

People have been inquiring about the success of Fjordman’s recent fund-raising effort, and he sends this FAQ to answer some of their questions about the Fjordman Relocation Fund.

A message to all readers and donors to the relocation fund

1.	Yes, I have a bank account and I put all the donations there. Obviously I don’t want to publish my bank account number on the Internet.
2.	Yes, I do get the money you donate to me via Vlad Tepes’ PayPal account. Just be sure to mark it “for Fjordman” so Vlad will know to set it aside for me.
3.	Yes, People have been most generous. I am grateful for that.
4.	Yes, I have been acknowledging your gifts. Due to the turmoil in my life, it will take time to get through all of them but all donors with a working email address will receive a response from me.
5.	The primary goal of this fund drive was to find a safer place to live, thus the title for my fundraiser. Due to my donors’ generosity, I was able to cover the expenses associated with moving out of my old flat in Oslo. From there, I went to a safe location elsewhere.
6.	Another expense has been legal costs. I never thought I’d receive enough funding to begin to pay for those. I hope people don’t mind that some of their gifts were allocated for this. Yes, I will have to deal with most of the legal costs later, but all of you have given me a good start.
7.	Yes, I have been investigated and finally let go by the police. Technically I am only a “witness”, though what I was supposed to have witnessed is still a mystery. However this “witness” status entitled me to having my apartment ransacked and my computer equipment and personal belongings confiscated by the police. Ironically, had I actually been charged with something, I would’ve had the right to legal counsel. But since they simply “investigated” me without ever giving me a reason, I now have to pay all the legal expenses myself.
8.	The reason for legal representation was the police investigation. Had my lawyer not been present, the police dealings with me might have been worse. Even my lawyer was taken aback at how I was treated in his presence.
9.	The latest police information is that I have been “checked out” from the Breivik case. As I tried to tell them in the beginning, the police didn’t find anything to tie me to Breivik because there was nothing to find in the first place. I even got my socks back, after 100 days in captivity.

— Fjordman

The incident on the Afghan-Pakistani border yesterday in which NATO forces killed at least 24 Pakistani troops has caused civil unrest in Pakistan. Mobs took to the streets and burned President Obama in effigy, as well as American flags. Sources in NATO say that its troops were acting in self-defense, that the Pakistanis opened fire first.

In other news, Moody’s has raised an eyebrow at Austria’s bonds, causing the Austrian government to take action to save its AAA bond rating. The issue is Austria’s questionable loans to its Eastern neighbors. Much of its investments in Eastern European debt consists of “toxic” assets, so Austria is pulling back its lending to Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and other countries in the former Soviet Bloc. Economists in the affected countries fear a credit crunch as a result.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Gaia, Insubria, Nick, Tartan Marine, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Bob Dylan channels his astral self into a musically-inclined group of Palestinian activists.

The latest from Latma:

Hat tip: Steen.

This is the fourth of an eight-part history of the Transatlantic Counterjihad. Links to the first three parts are at the bottom of this post. The section on Counterjihad participation at OSCE “Human Dimension” meetings had to be split into two posts, and this is the second of those posts.

A debt of gratitude is owed to the Counterjihad Collective for its efforts in this project.

A Brief History of the Transatlantic Counterjihad
by the Counterjihad Collective

III. The Transatlantic Counterjihad at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (continued)

Speaking in plenary sessions:

Session I:

From Commitments to Implementation: Freedom of Religion or Belief in the OSCE Area

At the beginning of the main session, speakers representing several NGOs made reference to a recent murder in Dresden, Germany, in which a woman of Egyptian descent had been stabbed by a Russian immigrant. They voiced the opinion that OSCE participant countries should be much more assertive in countering any form of racism or anti-Islamic activities. The representative of COJEP (originally rooted in Millî Görüs) reiterated the call for governments to stop racism and anti-Islamic activities everywhere.

More on-topic, several speakers commented on the increase in vandalism against Jewish and Christian buildings, in particular the destruction of some 150 Christian buildings in Kosovo.

Benjamin Bull of the Alliance Defence Fund raised several issues for Christian organisations:

The misapplication of hate speech laws to stifle any religious expression.

The misapplication of anti-discrimination laws to force religious organisations to hire staff with beliefs and viewpoints contrary to that of the organisation.

Revoking tax benefits on basis of the above, or banning Christian organisations from university campuses, thus severely hampering the activities of these organisations.

ICLA fought for — and won — the opportunity to make this comment:

Referring to several speakers, ICLA agrees that the increasing frequency of vandalism against Christian and Jewish interests is a problem. Examples of these incidents are frequent, from relatively benign harassment over desecration to the extensive destruction of cultural heritage in Kosovo, as the Serbian speaker noted. This is a severe problem in upholding genuine freedom of religion. ICLA recommends that OSCE participating states act to protect citizens against such acts of intimidation.

On the other hand, ICLA firmly believes that religions do not need or deserve protection against free speech and criticism.

On a supplementary note: In spite of this being off-topic for this conference, speakers have made reference to the recent brutal murder in Dresden. We have full confidence in the German legal system to handle this criminal act, and emphasize that such events, not matter now evil, should not be used as a pretext for assaulting freedom of expression or implementing draconian legislation.

After the session, the official representative of Denmark approached us, thanking for the fine statement. It is notable, however, that the government representatives paid to be there are not making clear statements defending our civil liberties. Such problems are key reasons that good NGOs need to participate at OSCE, or bad OSCE recommendations may eventually lead to bad national law.

Using printed material

At the conference, the Karl Martell Network representative brought 100 copies of Sam Solomon’s A Proposed Charter for Muslim Understanding. The Charter is a concise proposal for ironing out material differences between the Islamic and the Christian worlds. It was picked up by many, including representatives of the Holy See.

During the break Turkish representatives approached us, lamenting that the Charter text implied that there is some kind of connection between Islam and terrorism, a linkage they found absolutely reprehensible. While terrorism certainly is reprehensible as such, the fact that thousands of terrorists use Islam as a justification for their deeds does need to be addressed, and it should be no problem for moderate Muslims to unconditionally condemn terrorism, be it in the name of Islam or otherwise. The representatives apparently did not find our points of view convincing, so in the next plenary session they talked extensively against the ‘Islamophobic’ Charter and the inappropriateness of talking of any link between Islam and terrorism. Predictably, many more picked up the Charter to see for themselves, and by the end of the day, the stock of printed Charters was almost depleted.

Submitting papers

At the same conference, ICLA submitted a paper about the dangers of Islamic enclaves in the West, where Sharia law is being quietly introduced, the rights of women suppressed, and freedom of belief and expression undermined. This caused COJEP to immediately issue a press release condemning the ‘Islamophobic’ nature of the document. The document is available in the OSCE archive.

At the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, Warsaw, 28 September 2009 – 9 October 2009, several more papers were submitted by the Counterjihad activists. For working session 12-13, Freedom of expression, free media and information, a paper entitled “Freedom of Expression: New challenges, new responses” was submitted. It took up issues of intimidation, misuse of “hate speech” legislation and in particular “Libel tourism”. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, the main opponent of “Libel tourism”, was very helpful addressing this issue at OSCE. The recommendation that libel laws in Britain (specifically England and Wales) be reformed was included in the summary document from the conference, available in an OSCE document.

Freedom House has had libel tourism on the agenda for several years, and it was brought up at a side event “Freedom on the Internet”. That led to a heated debate with an English lawyer who did not like the pressure to change their libel laws, in spite of the abuse the laws were open to.

The consolidated pressure, however, led the British government to introduce the needed reforms less than half a year later. See the report from The Guardian.

The moves against libel tourism were applauded by the OSCE media freedom representative.

Doing something really controversial:

Speaking out against religiously sanctioned domestic violence

These participations and contributions may rattle a few nerves among those not committed to free speech and civil liberties as known in the West, but the OSCE also presents opportunities to bring seriously controversial material on the table. At the conference Gender Equality, 5-6 November 2009 (Warsaw), religiously sanctioned violence against women was taken up in the plenary session. By quoting scripture (Quran 4:34) used as justification to beat disobedient wives, the Counterjihad representative caused the room to enter pin-drop silence. The exact intervention was:

Thank you for a very powerful presentation. You mentioned the strain of migration in your report. Here in Europe we also face a huge influx of migrants, including many of the Muslim faith.

One issue that has been left out until now, it seems to me, is violence against women that is backed by principles of the Muslim faith. I do not have to tell you about the honor killings in Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, among other countries; as well as forced marriages, in addition to the Koranic verse 4:34, which says — and I quote:

You have rights over your wives and they have rights over you. You have the right that they should not defile your bed and that they should not behave with open unseemliness. If they do, God allows you to put them in separate rooms and to beat them but not with severity. If they refrain from these things, they have the right to their food and clothing with kindness. Lay injunctions on women kindly, for they are prisoners with you having no control of their own persons. (Guillaume’s translation, p. 651) (Ibn Ishaq)

Why are not discussing this issue here and at other occasions in a depth that does justice to this problem?

I therefore recommend that ODIHR urgently start a working group on violence against women in Islam in order to find out how to best approach this in the context of the OSCE human dimension.

Predictably, this caused a series of reactions, in particular from people and organisations who thought this should not be debated at all. COJEP pointed out that this came from the same people who demanded that Islam distances itself from terrorism, and called the intervention “hate speech”. This accusation was strongly countered by the country representative of Austria, who said:

I object to a certain debate culture which is employed more and more often by a certain group of participants. Disagreement with someone else’s opinion is immediately denounced as hate speech. The accusation of hate speech is a serious one. We have been dealing intensively with this phenomenon in these human dimension meetings for many years. We take part in these human dimension meetings precisely because we need to find solutions to the current grave problems. The localization and identification of the problems and their implications are an important prerequisite to finding a solution.

Now if a certain negative social behaviour — and here I am alluding to this meeting’s topic — such as FGM and forced marriages, is manifested only in very specific religious and ethnic migrant groups, it must be possible to identify this group. This is not stereotyping, but a fact, and definitely not hate speech.

To conclude, educating female milk farmers in [the Austrian state of] Styria on the dangers of FGM will not be helpful.

See the full report from the conference.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

After the bulk of this report was composed, representatives of ICLA and BPE attended another series of OSCE “Human Dimension” meetings in late October and early November of 2011. These were particularly important events to attend, since the official title of these sessions was the “Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Prevention of Racism, Xenophobia and Hate Crimes Through Educational Awareness Raising Initiatives”. Needless to say, standing against “Islamophobia” was the sine qua non of this meeting, which was heavily attended by proxies for the OIC.

Extensive reports on the sessions may be found in the following articles:

• ESW: Liveblogging In Vienna
• Steering Public Discourse
• Fallacies That Deserve Correction
• Towards a “Responsible” Freedom of Speech in Europe
• Islamophobia, Islamic Slander, and the OSCE
• The OSCE Fights Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna
• When Good Intentions Go Bad
• ESW: The ACT! For America Interview at OSCE
• OSCE: The murky waters of political correctness

Below is a comprehensive list of reports from earlier OSCE conferences:

• europenews.dk/en/node/25169
• europenews.dk/en/node/26733
• gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/07/report-on-osce-roundtable.html
• gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/10/icla-meets-osce-round-2.html
• gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/11/hate-speech-accusations-at-osce-meeting.html
• gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/11/osce-islam-and-violence-against-women.html
• missioneuropakmartell.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/report-on-the-osce-supplementary-human-rights-dimension-meeting-november-2009
• www.jihadwatch.org/2009/10/osce–what-is-a-message-crime.html
• www.jihadwatch.org/2009/10/the-organization-for-security-and-cooperation-in-europe-osce-and-the-counterjihad.html
• www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/at-the-osce-straight-talk-about-womens-rights-in-islam.html
• www.libertiesalliance.org/2009/07/20/international-civil-liberties-alliance-at-the-organization-for-security-and-co-operation-in-europe-osce
• www.libertiesalliance.org/2009/11/07/pax-europa-at-osce-meeting-in-vienna-november-2009-gender-equality-and-the-threat-from-religious-law/
• www.libertiesalliance.org/conferences/vienna-osce-supplementary-human-dimension-meeting-9-10-july-2009
• www.libertiesalliance.org/conferences/vienna-osce-supplementary-human-dimension-meeting-on-gender-equality-5-6-november-2009/
• www.libertiesalliance.org/conferences/warsaw-osce-human-dimension-implementation-meeting-soffitel-victoria-28-september-2009-9-october-2009
• www.osce.org/odihr/39431

List of papers submitted to the OSCE:

• www.osce.org/odihr/38041
• www.osce.org/odihr/38042
• www.osce.org/odihr/38043
• www.osce.org/odihr/38941
• www.osce.org/odihr/39431
• www.osce.org/odihr/39489

Next: Part IV, The Rosetta Stone Projects

Previously:

2011		Nov		24		Part I, Introduction
				25		Part II, Conferences
				26		Part III(a), The Transatlantic Counterjihad at the OSCE

“Is there a right-radical program? Those who are pursuing one today are the extreme Left.”

The following article from Die Welt is a left-wing perspective on a historical fact that has been swept under the rug: the remnants of National Socialist ideology were kept alive by Communists and Socialists in postwar Europe.

Many thanks to JLH for the translation.

The Brown Legacy of Socialism
by Freya Klier

November 22, 2011

Already at the time of the Turnaround [the political turning of East Germany after the Fall of the Wall], Freya Klier was on a death-list of the East German Neo-Nazis. She describes its roots in the German Democratic Republic [GDR] and explains why it is nonetheless necessary to seek dialogue about it.

In 1993, the West German chair of the Republicans, Franz Schönhuber, padded the then thin Western personnel with cadres from the East. He found especially worthy of sponsorship a professor who had for many years been a member of the SED [Socialist Unity Party of Germany], and head of the discipline of sociology in the section for Scientific Communism at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig. He became Saxon state head of the right-radical Republicans. In June, 1993, there was a party meeting in Augsburg and, during it, an “act of national reconciliation.”

In this connection, the party head enthuses about the GDR. At one point, he opines: “The GDR was much more German than the Federal Republic. Here, there was a sense of family, and not this dog-eat-dog society.” At another point, he praises the “orderly lock-step” in the GDR; yet again, its “total freedom from foreigners.” Schönhuber shared this perspective with a number of citizens of the deceased GDR and many socialist comrades.

Schönhuber had still not realized at all what these comrades were capable of: an anti-Semitism that had been nurtured for 40 years, as well as a vice-like hold on the extremely small minority of foreigners who were allowed to stay temporarily in the isolated GDR. After the flight of millions of GDR citizens, there was such a permanent shortage of workforce that the socialist leadership at the end of the 1970s decided reluctantly to admit contingents of Vietnamese and Mozambicans — for three years at a time, then they were exchanged for the next group.

“Fitchis” and Mozis” were housed in isolated housing developments. They were not allowed in the official guest restaurants. They could not leave the city without permission, performed menial labor in businesses and were not even allowed to learn German. Most importantly, their wives were under abortion compulsion — a fact which still makes right-radicals happy. Is there a right-radical program? Those who are pursuing one today are the extreme Left. And shortly after the fall of the Wall, they put the blame for the meanness they practiced on the West.

Right-radicalism now forged ahead unimpeded. In 1990, in the General Jewish Weekly Newspaper, I published my essay on anti-Semitism and xenophobia, which I had written deep in the GDR era. That got me place #8 on the death-list of the GDR Neo-Nazis, as an escapee confessed to me years later. I had written about what was going on in our elaborate German ward-heeler system when the “FRG” [West Germany] was still not present there.

I wrote about the Vietnamese women and my old Jewish friend, Johanna, who now saw sitting before her as SED party secretary the very Nazi who had raped her and thrown her into the Elbe. I wrote of our little anti-racist play which I had rehearsed in 1986 with two Berlin young people who had come out of a German-Sudanese student liaison. The young people grew up as “niggers” and “coals” and finally had to be put into a special army unit, and that is how they survived the NVA [National People’s Army] in good health. We were also rehearsing this theatrical piece at a time when the Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier [official East German term for the Berlin Wall] was still protecting us from the Western Nazis. I vividly remember the fascist horde which fell upon the neighboring church in October, 1987 with “Sieg Heil” and “Jews out of German churches” and stabbed at the fleeing punkers with broken bottles. A year before that, I had collected signatures to stop the bulldozing of the Jewish cemetery of Berlin-Weissensee.

“We are looking at a ruin,” I wrote in 1990, “and must take stock of a society that is unreliable. In 1990, a climate of open violence reigns in the cities of the deteriorating GDR .” Shortly before that, I had to run away from an empty city train station because a rabble in combat boots and bomber jackets had worked out from my dark hair that I was a “Jewish c—t.” I did not feel safe until I reached West Berlin territory. I would never have expected to be protected by an East Berlin policeman.

The policy of the ruling socialists was the fertilizer for resentments against everything that deviated from the norm. The homeless never darkened the gray cityscape of the GDR. Anyone who was not inclined to work found himself behind bars as antisocial, where he was forced to work for slave wages. There were no ramps for the handicapped. Integration schools were an alien concept.

Directly after the fall of the Wall, I saw the responsible socialist comrades begin to push the whole thing off on the “West,” the “Federal Republic,” “capitalism.” Their propaganda machine rotated so massively over the years that today a sentence like the one about “youth torn from their roots after the fall of the Wall” is just as much pan-German as the one about the wonderful kindergartens of the GDR. What is once learned stays learned. Simultaneously, comrades of the SED mutated to the PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism] and then to the sweet-as-honey party, Die Linke [The Left].

How many decades do deeply internalized patterns of behavior maintain and reproduce? GDR citizens were made uncomfortable by any deviation from the norm: garish hair color in Punks, “Negroes,” “Fitchis,” the physically handicapped, even someone wearing an unusual hat. In 1993, I was at a meeting of citizens in Berlin-Köpenick where residents of a settlement of individual houses were told that an intake residence for Bosnian war refugees would soon appear in their area.

At that time, ex-GDR types were not yet acquainted with Political Correctness, so the city councilman’s announcement was met by the hatred of 300 Köpenickers. Everyone shouted wildly and chaotically, then one loud voice asserted itself: Things were already bad enough for people in the new states of the Federal Republic. They refused to even let these “swine” in (the refugees). Two years later in Brandenburg, half of a town gathered to support a youngster in burning down a renovated asylum seeker’s home. Comment of a resident: “Better ahead of time than if the people were already inside.” How long does something like this last?

Today, many ex-GDR citizens still think like that. But they are not stupid enough to say it out loud. They have withdrawn to their private circles, where they reach the young people at the supper table. Many children have grown up in the East after the Turnaround with the sentence: “Foreigners are taking our jobs.” And with these behavior patterns, not just foreigners are meant. Also, when a “retard gets smacked” or a homeless person is kicked around, there is no cry of protest echoing through the row houses between Frankfurt an der Oder and Magdeburg, Rostock and Gera, The Big Change is already 10 years in the past and still almost 20% of the localities vote NPD [National Democratic Party of Germany].

Since the 1990s, I have been discussing dictatorship, democracy, tolerance and xenophobia in East German schools. One of these meetings, in a trade school in Neuruppin, led to the often heard statement: “We are infiltrated by foreigners here!” When I asked the circa 60 Neuruppin vocational students to show by hand who in this circle was not born in Germany, not one arm went up. Perhaps none of the young people I met had taken part in racist attacks. But the question arises, where does this problem in perception come from — who prepared the ground for this irrational feeling of being infiltrated by foreigners?

A few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the building of the Wall, “Junge Welt” [Youth World] served up a breathtaking title page. There were the vacant faces of a GDR combat group, vintage 1961: Weapons held before their chests, the comrades were blocking the Brandenburg Gate. This was followed by thanks for 28 years of the Wall! “Junge Welt” is the favorite newspaper of the Die Linke party and its youth. I do not recall even one of the readers protesting this mockery of the victims of the Wall or canceling their subscription,

This party should finally stop dissembling and admit that it contributed greatly to preparing the ground for rightist radicalism in the East. Human lives are important to its members only if they are politically useful. And that connects to an old GDR tradition: It was Junge Welt in 1987 that seized on the Nazi attack on the Zionskirche [Zion Church — Protestant denomination] when it boiled over in the West. It would be terrible to omit the fact that even under GDR conditions there were always people for whom tolerance and civil courage were not mere phrases. In the East, too, citizens courageously stood in front of asylum seeker domiciles, crouching before fist-sized stones, when nothing was to be seen of the local keepers of the peace.

These people exist; but they are too few to confront small minds and brutality with enlightenment and broad resistance. Almost alone, pastors, social workers and small citizen initiatives battle clandestine malice and a spiraling silence. Their small number reflects another cause for the unfortunate jumble in the East — the decades-long bleeding away of credible and desperately needed people in authority. The fact that almost our entire critical intelligence is found in the three million intimidated GDR citizens has dire consequences to this very day. Generations have been degraded here. And understandably, the competent members of the younger generation are fleeing the remaining, dull atmosphere.

Some of those 68ers* who did not belong to the glorifiers of the socialist dictatorship could render a service. To credibly pass on natural basic values like respect for the lives of others even in pathetic broken-down towns, we need the time-period witness of the democratically-minded among those who fled, who can get along well with young people in youth clubs and schools. I know that something will come of that. Last year in Greifswald, I worked with rightist radical young people — with the hard kind who had already spent time in prison. We will never reach all of them, but there is a great reservoir there.

The 68ers who are ensconced in many institutions should think about what international projects they could involve the “dimwits” in — yes, them too. We like to criticize the 68ers. But not because they left the collaboration and collaborative silence of their parents during the Nazi era off the agenda. This generation deserves respect for that, and the East should also profit from it. For we had no 1968 — even more, the war guilt was categorically shoved off on the West, where all Nazis had allegedly fled, as every schoolchild learned, year after year. Now GDR history is also being obfuscated. The East is diseased by a past left unreviewed for the second time.

*Varied, but parallel leftist activist groups who hit the streets in 1968 in West Germany and elsewhere. Cf. the various anti-Vietnam War groups in the U.S.

The following essay by Paul Weston has also been published at the British Freedom website.

The Totalitarian EU Tightens Its Grip
by Paul Weston

The increasingly dictatorial behaviour of the unelected EU Commissioners rather proves the point made by Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who way back in 2006 stated that the political structure of the European Union was similar to that of the Supreme Soviet and the Politburo, and that the similarity was intentional.

The liberal-left are woefully ignorant of history, yet with their various humanities degrees they should know something of human nature, but even this appears to be beyond their intellectual grasp. The mental make-up of all dictators seeks one thing and one thing only — control over all others. Lenin once remarked that Communism was not actually about equality for the worker, but was rather about control. Total control.

Have we not seen this in the last few weeks? Frau Merkel and Monsieur Sarkozy are both on record stating their intention to wrest further EU control from the European electorate in the wake of the Eurozone economic catastrophe (inflicted by EU economic policy) and they are now doing this in spades.

Greek ex-Prime Minister Papandreou rather foolishly suggested the Greek people might like to influence their economic future in a democratic manner, only to be immediately toppled by the EU powers and replaced by Lucas Papademos, a man of impeccable Socialist economic credentials, who went from Governor of the Bank of Greece to Vice President of the European Central Bank (ECB) to Prime Minister of Greece. In other words an EU placeman in a previously democratic country.

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi was not brought down by his lurid sexual shenanigans or his alleged lifelong corruption, but because he dared to question the validity of the euro. Enter the incensed EU Politburo, and exit the aged yet curiously wrinkle-free lecherous Lothario, to be replaced by unelected former EU Commissioner Mario Monti and a cabinet of bankers and academics, not one of whom represents a single Italian political party. Is this democracy in action? No, it is totalitarianism, pure and simple.

This should come as no surprise to those who understand the dictatorial machinations of the EU. Countries such as Ireland and Denmark were allowed referendums, but when they refused to accept the EU’s vision of a Utopian Socialist future, they were alternately threatened and bribed until they eventually complied with the wishes of the unelected EU Commissioners.

We saw the same disregard for democracy in Britain in 2004 after the North East firmly rejected setting up a Regional Assembly, much to the fury of the Labour government, whose response was simply to carry on regardless of the will of the people. In 2007 Gordon Brown established nine regional government offices complete with regional ministers, as per the EU geographical division of England.

Britain has been shamefully treated by its own politicians. The Labour manifesto of 2005 stated the electorate would be allowed to vote on the Lisbon Treaty, but they lied. David Cameron, ever clever with words, managed to sound like he intended to offer a referendum, but of course he has not. So here we are, run effectively by unelected Socialists in Brussels, via a puppet government of supposed “Conservatives” in Westminster.

In the last week alone we discovered that the EU wishes to import millions more North African Muslim migrants into Europe and Britain through Mobility Partnerships, the aim of which is to make EU action “more migrant-centred, with the aim of empowering migrants and strengthening their human rights in countries of origin, transit and destination.”

William Hague, Foreign Secretary and EU poodle, heard the call and penned an article for the Daily Telegraph outlining the importance of Turkish accession into the EU, no matter what Amnesty International might have to say about Turkey’s attitude to Human Rights. What a curious situation: even as the Arab Spring descends into Koranic Winter, our impossibly stupid politicians press for their own countries to be overrun by people unable to function in liberal democracies.

Why does the EU wish to import these racially and culturally foreign people? The answer is very simple: divide and rule, break down the community and smash the nation state. The Russians did this after they annexed the Baltic States during WWII, when huge numbers of Russians were exported to the conquered territories in an attempt to dilute and “de-nationalise” the native populations, thereby easing Soviet control.

The other reason for swamping racially and culturally cohesive countries with massed foreign people who have no intention of adopting British values is equally simple. Our rulers tell us they bring “diversity” but that is a lie. Local police chiefs talk of “nerve jangling” friction in multicultural areas which leads to ever-greater government control to keep the lid on the simmering factions. The more divisiveness, or multiculturalism, the more power to the Socialist elites — just as was planned.

Control is what it is all about. Over the last few days we learned that the EU wants the financial City of London to fall further under EU governance, with additional pressure being applied on Britain to join the calamitous Euro. Another EU diktat currently going through legislation proposes all new businesses must provide a surety of twenty-five thousand Euros. Why? Because it is far easier to control a thousand companies of a reasonable size than ten thousand smaller ones, no matter the economic destruction this will cause.

Meanwhile Frau Merkel and the EU Commissioners are making plans to ensure Britain is prevented from allowing a referendum, which under current EU law would be triggered as a direct result of the constitutional changes necessary in the proposal of a new, powerful and unelected EU quango, whose remit is the political annexation of failing Eurozone member-states.

And let us not forget the extraordinary physical power the EU already has over us. Europol, the EU’s sinister state police service, can travel across borders under diplomatic immunity. The EU even has its own paramilitary unit, the European Gendarmerie Force (EGF) which is rumoured to be operating alongside Greek riot police. Then there is the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) which can be issued anywhere in Europe, requesting the arrest and extradition of a British subject — a matter in which British courts are overruled should they wish to intervene.

The EAW was introduced in 2003 to target serious crime and terrorism, but many of the thousands of European and British people extradited to date were arrested for “crimes” of laughable triviality. The future however may not be so trivial. Under the EU’s laws on racism and xenophobia it is quite possible we could see an EAW issued simply because the accused person publicly expressed his dislike of Islamic immigration, thereby exposing himself as both a “racist” and a “xenophobe”.

All of the above should be taken very seriously. And, if we had a decent mainstream media, I have no doubt it would, but the Socialists in the media are in broad agreement with the Socialists in Brussels, so the dictators get a free pass. Can you imagine the BBC still supporting the European Union if Brussels had been taken over by the political right? Of course not — they would denounce the EU as a totalitarian disgrace — and they would be correct.

The EU has passed 120,000 pieces of legislation, out of which only some 10% have been enacted. The remainder are waiting to be used in the future. The framework has already been built for total and utter control of previously democratic European countries; we now simply await their enforcement. When might this be? No one knows for sure, but it seems a good long-term bet to suggest we will be subjected to an incremental tightening of their control over us. Whether it remains a soft ideology remains to be seen, but there is no reason at all to think the violent Socialist history of the last century is now behind us.

We are watching a genuine dictatorship in the making. These people have no regard for democracy, and their Socialist ideology is simply a softer version of the Communist ideology that murdered over 100 million people over the last century, whilst simultaneously destroying the economies and societies of the nations it infected. The most powerful man in Europe is Commission President Barroso, an ex-Maoist with no apparent regrets, and even now his apparatchiks talk of the new powers appropriated on the back of the economic disaster as a “Great Leap Forward.” During the Chinese “leap”, of course, Chairman Mao murdered some 45 million of his own people.

This madness must be stopped. UKIP provides a platform to vote against the EU, but if you also care about the long-term threat of Islam, then there is only one civilised political party which acts on your behalf, and that party is British Freedom.

Previous posts by Paul Weston:

2007		Jan		22		The Week Britain Died
				26		Britain’s Dystopian School Children
		Feb		2		Questioning the Sanity of Liberals
		Mar		1		Multiculturalism — Merits and Debits
				31		Is European Civil War Inevitable by 2025?
		Jun		26		The Big Story That Isn’t
		Aug		10		An Open Letter to Fellow Europeans
				24		A Brussels Perspective
		Sep		12		Democratic Europe R.I.P.
		Nov		2		The Coming Third World War
				21		Cool War — Warm War — Hot War: Part 1
				29		Cool War — Warm War — Hot War: Part 2
2008		Mar		27		The Face of Moderate Islam in Britain
2009		Feb		9		Wilders in Wonderland
				13		Who is Lord Ahmed?
				25		Temporary Peace Trumps Freedom of Speech
		Jul		1		Muslims, Mosques and Mosquitoes
				2		Islam, the BBC, and Young Children
				8		Review of “A Bridge Too Far”
				17		Socialist Propaganda in British Education
		Oct		15		Multiculturalism Has Destroyed the British Police
2010		Mar		16		Ethnically Cleansing the English
		Oct		7		Banana Republic Britain
				30		“We Will Hold You to Account”
		Dec		5		The Metaphorical Front Line of Islam
				5		The West Needs to Wake Up
				7		Land for Peace — Or Land for a Terror State?
2011		May		20		Why Is This Not Treason?
		Jun		1		One Week in the Death of Britain
		Jul		11		The Multi-Layered Betrayal of Britain
				29		The BBC, Breivik, the EDL and Islam
		Aug		7		Down’s Syndrome Babies, Sarah Palin and the BBC
		Sep		5		Clone These Men!

The British government acknowledges that it is engaged in contingency planning for the possible collapse of the euro. The Foreign Office is planning for worst-case scenarios in which rioting breaks out in Eurozone cities.

Meanwhile, the yield on Italian bonds has once again climbed above 7%, and the Indian rupee has fallen to a record low against the dollar.

In other news, the PVV says that Greenpeace is damaging the Netherlands’ reputation, and should be expelled from the country.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Gaia, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, JP, Kitman, RE, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

We’ve all heard of the fictional “moderate” Muslim. Now it’s time to meet a double fiction: the “moderate Islamist”.

The BBC news reporter in this clip falls all over himself in his eagerness to reassure viewers about the results of Friday’s election in Morocco. The party that got the most seats in the election may be “Islamist”, but really, it’s not all that bad. No need to worry. Everyone can go back to sleep.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

By the way — did you notice the woman in this report who had to show an unveiled photo ID in order to be able to vote? I always thought such practices were examples of racism.

The moderately extremist party in question is the Justice and Development Party (PJD). According to Wikipedia, “It should be noted that the Moroccan PJD is less liberal and modern than the Turkish AKP.” The AKP is, of course, the party of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been Islamizing Turkey since 2001. Mr. Erdoğan famously said, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”

And the PJD is “less liberal” than the AKP. Yet the BBC says we have nothing to worry about, so how can we help but be reassured?

The Beeb wants us to know that the “moderate Islamist” party is really just about fighting bribery and corruption, and is not “extremist”. However, the PJD’s secretary-general, Saad Eddin Al Othmani, said in an interview [pdf] that “many of our efforts, such as combating bribery and corruption, are based in sharia.”

Another report tells us that

PJD’s agenda in parliament has occasionally taken it into pure sharia territory — calling for prohibition against alcohol consumption and distribution, and challenging media that it views as defacing Islamic principles.

So I’m going to hold off being reassured until I get some information that’s actually reassuring.

Details of Friday’s election results were reported by AGI:

Morocco: Pro-Islamic Party Gets a Quarter of Seats

(AGI) Rabat — The Moroccan Islamic moderate party PJD (Party of Justice and Development) is ahead in the counting of votes for the legislative elections that were held on Friday. The data were announced by the Interior Minister Taib Cherqaoui in a press conference around midday. After completing the counting in 288 out of a total of 305 polling stations for the local circumscriptions (that is without the single list valid for the other 90 seats), PJD has already 80 (28.5%) deputies, followed by Istiqlal (centre-left, 45 seats) and by the National Union of Independents, its major rivals. The Party for Authenticity and Modernity got 33 seats, the Socialist Union (USFP) 29, the Popular Movement (MP) 22, the Constitutional Union 15 and the Party for Progress and Socialism (PPS) 11. Other smaller parties got a total of ten seats. The polling stations counted up to now are 73% of the total and final results will not be anounced before tomorrow, Cherqaoui added. According to the Moroccan constitution, passed by a referendum on July 1st, King Mohammed VI will call to rule the country the party winning the elections. The trend is in favour of PJD.

A horrific crime was committed last weekend in the vicinity of Gullestrup, a suburb of Herning in central Jutland. Kitman compiled the following report on the case, based on translated excerpts from Danish media articles and the blog Uriasposten.

Warning: The post below describes brutal violence against a small child. Readers who are sensitive to such descriptions should not read past the jump.

Earlier this week a rape case made headlines in the Danish press: “After Rape, a Lynch Atmosphere — Now There is War in Gullestrup”. But this is no ordinary rape case: the victim is a ten-year old indigenous Danish girl, and the suspected perpetrator is a 16-year-old boy of Somali background.

Ekstra Bladet talked with a friend of the father of the victim, who informed the paper that they would meet up, some 25 men armed with knives and baseball bats, and then go from door to door until they found the perpetrator. This however, was not the father’s intention.

Today further details of the case emerged in the local newspaper:

16-year-old charged for very brutal rape of 10-year-old

The rape committed against a 10-year-old girl from Gullestrup last Saturday, was much crueler than the public was told. That was revealed today at the initial questioning in Herning, as the accused rapist from Gullestrup appeared before the judge at 1:37pm

The accused, who pleaded not guilty, is facing three charges.

Besides ordinary rape, he is also charged with anal rape and forced oral sex. And in addition, he is charged with attempting to rape another 9-year-old, who luckily escaped from the scene of the crime and alerted her parents.

According to Ekstra Bladet’s paper edition, the accused recently returned from a so-called “educational tour of Somali culture and Islam” which allegedly changed his personality. “He and his little brother stumbled upon some [Somali] militants. They were brainwashed, and he became very quiet and thoughtful.”

He was only able to return without a passport “because he received help from his schoolmates and a former teacher in Gullestrup”.

The suspect fits the description, and the police claim to have secured “forensic evidence which definitively places the suspect at the scene of the crime.”

For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.

This BBC television report describes the Salafist insurgency currently underway in the Russian republic of Dagestan, in the Caucasus. The old form of Islam, which had managed to coexist with Tsarist and Communist Russia, is being supplanted by the fundamentalist variety imported from Saudi Arabia.

The BBC does a reasonable job of explaining current events in Dagestan. However, you’ll notice a persistent subtext in the narration: poverty and unemployment are somehow the root of the problem. Like most progressives, the BBC reporter strains to assign an economic cause, rather than an ideological one, to the radical Islamic incursion.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

This is the third of an eight-part history of the Transatlantic Counterjihad. Links to the first two parts are at the bottom of this post.

The section on Counterjihad participation at OSCE “Human Dimension” meetings has been split into two posts.

The OSCE provides a rare opportunity for anti-sharia activists to be heard in a respected public forum. At several OSCE events over the past two years, Henrik Ræder Clausen has represented the International Civil Liberties Alliance, and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has represented Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa.

A Brief History of the Transatlantic Counterjihad
by the Counterjihad Collective

III. The Transatlantic Counterjihad at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)

One of the most important venues for Counterjihad NGOs to present their material has been at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

The Transatlantic Counterjihad movement has represented several NGOs at OSCE roundtables and conferences. At these events it is possible to raise issues of importance, counter misuse of human right laws and conventions, submit papers to the official OSCE archives and forge alliances with other NGOs as well as representatives from the participating states.

General notes on making use of OSCE events

Participating in plenaries, round tables and side events

Presence at the conferences is of paramount importance. As a NGO representative, one not only gets to follow the discussions and talk to various representatives, there is also plenty of opportunity to get floor time, including at the large plenaries. Here one may raise issues of importance (must be on topic for the given conference, of course), comment on the importance of issues raised by others, and deflect unjust criticism against oneself or others. Conferences take place on a regular basis in Vienna, Austria and Warsaw, Poland. There is no participation fee for NGO representatives.

NGO Round table discussions

Alliances work particularly well in the open-ended round table discussions. If an issue or a point of view is raised by one representative, then supported by others, it will have a much greater impact than if merely mentioned, then forgotten. The official summaries of these meetings will also reflect what issues were highest on the agenda, and since the conclusions reflect a rough consensus of the round table, it is very feasible to prevent dangerous ideas from reaching the summaries.

Plenary sessions

The most important — and the largest — events at OSCE conferences are the plenary sessions. There will usually be roughly a hundred representatives of participating countries and NGOs, all competing for floor time and the right to comment. NGO representatives participate with country representatives on almost equal footing, the main difference being that state representatives have a Right of Response against criticism, which NGO representatives do not.

When preparing to speak at a plenary session, one must pick an issue on which to speak, then prepare a concise statement on it. The next step is to be early at the conference hall, get on the list of speakers, and find a seat with access to a microphone. There is a time limit of three or even two minutes per speaker, and violating that limit is generally frowned upon. Being concise is crucial, and quite useful as well. Three sharp points delivered in 90 seconds can make a much clearer impact than ten points pushed into three or four minutes of speaking time. A prepared, written statement can be handed over for the translators to use, that the statement gets translated into various non-English languages. English remains the main language of OSCE events, and since all presentations are translated to English or from English to other languages. Foreign language skills are not required to work effectively at OSCE events.

Apart from what one brings to the table, following the debate and making comments is equally useful. Not all participating states are equally ripe democracies, and some representatives may deliver unfair criticism (in particular of states) that deserve to be countered. As long as one has the audacity to get onto the speakers’ list, one can comment on any issue taken up in the plenary.

A peculiar effect is that the European Union and associated countries usually seek to speak in unified statements delivered by the current EU chairmanship. That is supposed to increase the impact made, but in practice that single statement tends to be quite toothless and drowned out by the myriad of other voices present, while also erasing the natural diversity of the European countries. For good or ill, this gives even more scope for NGOs to speak their opinions — an opportunity to be used, or important things will remain unsaid.

Side events

Side events are smaller meetings where NGOs and others present issues of concern needing more time than plenary sessions permit. Any NGO can register to host such events as long as rooms are available at the conference venues, and such events are listed in the official OSCE agendas for the conferences. Attendance is usually fairly moderate, though announcing the serving of refreshments is often used to attract a larger audience. The side events are run entirely by the NGOs themselves, and can for example be video-recorded and presented to the outside world later.

Submitting papers

Another major activity at OSCE consists of submitting papers to the official OSCE archives. There are guidelines to follow, both in style and in size, and it is recommended to keep papers to three pages, though more is accepted. In these papers it is possible to elaborate on issues presented briefly in the plenary sessions, add details, quotes and sources, and after the conference the papers will be available on the OSCE website for interested parties to access.

Presenting printed material

Usually tables or stands are provided where NGOs can place written material, to be taken home by interested participants for further study. These can be flyers or more extensive reports in the form of books. The practical circumstances vary, but if printed material exists, the OSCE events are good opportunities to get it into hands of relevant readers.

Transatlantic Counterjihad contributions at OSCE

The Transatlantic Counterjihad activists took up work at OSCE in 2009, participating in several conferences, submitting papers and taking the floor as often as possible. They gained valuable experience and spoke on crucial issues, at times causing remarkable responses. While the direct benefit is difficult to quantify, it was their opinion that going was very well worth the time and effort, and they will continue working through OSCE as much as is practically possible.

Hofburg, Vienna, 9-10 July 2009:

Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Freedom of Religion or Belief

This particular conference is held infrequently, the previous one being back in 2003. The official summary of the conference outlines how the main events proceeded, attempts to enumerate the ideas and concepts presented in the sessions and some comments about how broad the support was. The summary, as well as a detailed agenda, is available at the OSCE web site: www.osce.org/odihr/41823

An NGO roundtable meeting was held as a precursor to the conference itself. The meeting was chaired by Roy Jenkins and featured 136 NGO representatives. Among other topics discussed was freedom of expression versus freedom of belief, and some representatives argued that some regulations were needed to protect religion from free expression and criticism, also in light of the famous Muhammad cartoons and the unrest they had triggered. ICLA took the floor and said:

In reference to the distinguished speaker suggesting a balancing of freedom of expression and respect for religion, let me make this clarification: I am Danish and know the caricatures very well. The ICLA categorically rejects that there should be any need to create a ‘balance’ between religion and freedom of expression. Healthy religions should not need any protection against free speech and criticism, and should have no problem tolerating caricature or criticism.

As for the proposed recommendation that public schools should be mandated to teach ‘Tolerance’, this is an idea that properly belongs to states like the Soviet Union. Not only would such mandatory teaching of children be exploited for manipulative purposes, it would also lead to the actual problems being glossed over instead of confronted honestly and genuinely resolved. ICLA does not consider this workable in any way.

This point of view was supported by several other NGO representatives, and the idea of granting religions protection under the law did not make it into the final document of NGO recommendations.

Next: Part III(b), The Transatlantic Counterjihad at OSCE (continued)

Previously:

2011		Nov		24		Part I, Introduction
				25		Part II, Conferences

A high school teacher and homosexual rights activist is attempting to intimidate SUN TV and extort money from the network over its airing of a commercial opposing explicit gay-sex education for very young children. In the video below Brian Lilley takes exception to this blatant mau-mauing, and expresses his defiance of the mandatory “sensitivity training” demanded by the complainant, who also wants money from the network.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

The text of this segment, taken from Brian Lilley’s blog, is below the jump:

Trying to silence freedom of speech

There are people that do not like us, do not like Sun News, do not like me, do not like Byline.

This isn’t shocking, we are not everyone’s cup of tea, nor do we try to be.

We had Margie Gillis, the hand dancer, and her friends try to shut us down a little while ago.

Gillis asked for us to be put off the air until we could prove that we supported and broadcast Canadian values, of course that would mean her version of Canadian values which might included bowing before her and the million dollars plus she’s sucked from the pockets of taxpayers over the years.

Gillis complained to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council and encouraged others to do the same — some 4,000 people did complain.

The Broadcast Standards council is not a government body but it is close. It is made up of Canada’s private broadcasters and it issues rulings on codes of conduct, it hears complaints and issues rulings.

If you ignore a ruling or refuse to comply you can have your licence pulled because membership in the council is often a requirement of the licence.

Remember the Dire Straits ruling?

One woman in Newfoundland complained that the song, a song that had been played on Canadian radio for 25 years, used the word faggot. The council didn’t look at the context of the song, they didn’t look at the meaning, they just ruled that it used the word faggot and was therefore homophobic and was essentially banned on commercial radio in Canada.

They reversed themselves after a public outcry, a good dose of public ridicule and after looking at the context of the song.

Well now a lone man in Toronto has started a campaign not to shut us down but in a way to shut us up.

Michael Erickson, a high school teacher in Toronto and a candidate for the New Democrats in the last federal election has petitioned the board of directors of our parent company Quebecor, the Canadian Broadcaster Standards Council and the Advertising Standards Council over our decision to air an ad that he doesn’t like.

The ad, from the Institute for Canadian Values, is against the introduction of the McGuinty government’s graphic sex-ed curriculum.

Here’s the ad.

Erickson’s complaint and his online petition, claim that “This ad promotes intolerance against people who might stand out from traditional male or female gender roles.”

I’d disagree with that and I have several times. The ad highlights what was in McGuinty’s proposed curriculum and what has been found in existing guides for teachers at the elementary school level.

Is teaching about transgendered issues, gender identity and gender fluidity in grade three a good idea?

I don’t think so.

Neither do the people behind the ad.

But rather than fight back using his own words, asking to come on the show, buying his own ad to counter the ad that has already played he wants to go a different route.

Here is what he is demanding from Quebecor.

“AN INTERNAL INVESTIGATION to determine how this ad was approved for distribution and at what rate; we also recommend you assess the level of conflict of interest involved in this particular case. We assume that you will take the appropriate disciplinary action with the employee(s) involved.”Wow — he wants to control our internal systems that would touch on ad sales, human resources and more. He also wants to control what ads we show on our network. His letter goes on.

“A ONE YEAR MORATORIUM on publishing or circulating ads by The Canadian Christian College and its subsidiary organizations, specifically (but not limited to) the Institute for Canadian Values.”A bit of an over-reach don’t you think, telling us we cannot run any ads by this group?

The ad he’s complaining about was approved by the regulator put in place to approve ads on private stations in Canada. It’s called Telecaster. But he doesn’t like the ad so he wants to shut us up. Oh, and he wants money as well.

“PROFITS FROM THE AD TO BE GIVEN to a registered non-profit in Canada or Ontario that promotes or provides services that improve the equality, safety, awareness and/or human dignity of trans, transsexual, transgendered, two-spirited or intersex people.”Okay, so he wants to control our internal systems including human resources, ad sales and he wants the money from the ad to go to a group he approves of, one that promotes his issues.

But as they say on those late night ads, wait, there’s more!

“TWO HOURS OF FREE AD TIME for a registered non-profit in Canada or Ontario that promotes or provides services that improve the equality, safety, awareness and/or human dignity of trans, transsexual, transgendered, two-spirited or intersex people.”So he wants money, free ads, control of our human resources and a ban on a potential client buying any ads from us for any reason or on any issue. This is starting to sound like a threat, it’s starting to sound like Michael Erickson, the NDP candidate and high school teacher wants to run this company.

But he’s not done yet. Michael Erickson also want to control our minds, our thoughts, our feelings. He wants to control what we say. One of his other demands.

“SENSITIVITY TRAINING for every employee in Quebecor and its subsidiaries who earn over $90,000 a year. The sensitivity training should be no less than 3 hours and should build awareness and sensitivity of trans, transsexual, transgender, two-spirited and intersex identities and experiences with the goal of building a long term capacity for equality and respect of diversity in your corporation.”Erickson has other demands including a public statement from the company on trans issues and an audit of our portrayal of trans people to make sure it is to his liking.

Don’t do these things and he will take us to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, the group that can yank our licence, and try to get them to force us to do it.

He will also demand action from the Advertising Standards Council even though this ad has already been cleared by the body set up to screen TV ads.

This is an attempt at lawfare, an attempt to harras us into accepting his point of view and not allow any others.

This is an attempt to shred the Charter of Rights and Freedom which does not grant but guarantees free speech.

For daring to exercise our own free speech and allowing others to do the same, this man wants to take control of many aspects of this television station.

All of this comes at the same time as a boycott has been launched by gay activists in Toronto targeting the advertisers of the Toronto Sun. The reason, a print version of this very same ad.

These folks are asking people to call, bully and harass the companies that do business with the Sun until we bow and scrap before them and their point of view. The boycott appears to have the backing of the paper Xtra.

Rather sad if you ask me but that’s the way things are.

Is this what Canada stands for now?

Writing about the Shafia honour killings trial recently the blogger Closet Conservative used the phrase “From never again to never offend.”

That’s an apt description of this situation as well.

Is that what we want to become in Canada, a country that doesn’t allow anyone to offend?

Diefenbaker said, “I am Canadian, free to speak without fear.”

I say we embrace Diefenbaker’s way, not the way of Michael Erickson and his ilk.

And that’s the Byline.

Hat tip: Blazing Cat Fur.

The Russian navy is approaching the gas-drilling area near Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean. The Russians and the Israelis plan to engage in joint military exercises in the region. Russia says it has interests in the area, and its military moves show that it intends to protect them.

In other news, a 13-pound baby boy was born in Berlin, setting a record for Germany’s heaviest naturally-born baby. His mother named him “Jihad”.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

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