Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/31/2012

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/31/2012Olli Rehn, the economics czar of the European Commission, has warned that the euro may disintegrate if the current hemorrhaging in Greece and Spain can’t be stanched. There have been massive withdrawals of euros from Spanish banks, with more than €68 billion leaving the country last month. The interest rate on Spanish bonds has risen dramatically.

In other news, artists, entertainers, and other non-fundamentalists in Tunisia staged a sit-in today in front of the Constituent Assembly building in Tunis. The demonstrators were protesting Salafist attacks on secular people, including one on a female journalist, who was beaten by a Salafi for not covering her arms in public.

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

Thanks to Diana West, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Insubria, Jerry Gordon, JP, 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.

The BBC Uses the “M” Word — But CNN Doesn’t

These two videos uploaded by Vlad Tepes illustrate how two major media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic dance around the issue of Islamic violence and misogyny.

The first is a CNN report about the plight of women in Afghanistan. Throughout the entire report, Christiane Amanpour never once mentions Islam or shariah when discussing what happened to these female victims of Islam. It’s simply “domestic abuse”.

As Vlad says, this isn’t reporting, it’s apologetics.

Warning: The footage of a hideously scarred young woman in this clip may be disturbing to sensitive viewers:



The second video breaks new ground for the BBC: it actually refers to the rapist of the Sikh girl in Luton as a Muslim. The fact that the victim was a Sikh seems to have given the Beeb permission to forego “Asian” and call a spade a spade.

Also notice the reporter in Luton refer to honor violence as a “crime, so to speak”:

A Witness Stands Down

The defense team in the trial of Anders Behring Breivik has built a carefully constructed a political show trial with the full co-operation of the Norwegian system of “justice”. Yet over the past few days the architecture of this judicial farce has been crumbling at an astonishing rate.

Numerous “expert” witnesses have either refused to testify or have been excused by the court. The most recent to extend his polite regrets is Fjordman.

Here’s the report from Document.no, as translated by ST:

Fjordman pulls out
by Hans Rustad

The list of witnesses shrinks: the latest to decline is Peder Nøstvold Jensen, alias Fjordman.

After some back and forth, there was talk that Jensen would testify via Skype. He has been abroad for some time, far away from Norway.

Now Fjordman has said that after the recent increasing complications he has decided to refuse to testify in any form.

Also: Mullah Krekar and Hanne Nabintu Herland no longer have to give testimony.

In related news, Fjordman sends this note about his recent correspondence with a leftist newspaper — is there any other kind? — in Norway:

I was contacted by email on May 29 by the journalist Tore Letvik from the Norwegian daily Dagsavisen. He noted that Gates of Vienna was doing a donation drive, and asked whether this indicated that this ideology has so few followers that it cannot even fund a blog.

I replied that his own newspaper receives something like forty million kroner every single year in government press subsidies just to stay afloat. Perhaps he and his colleagues shouldn’t talk too loudly about “sustainable ideologies”.

I reiterated my call for an end to all press subsidies, as well as the withdrawal of the license for NRK.

Needless to say, to date the newspaper has not published my response.

Concerning Dagsavisen: Gates of Vienna readers may remember that this newspaper has very close ties to the ruling Labor Party. Tore Letvik also wrote the notorious article in December 2011 claiming that I promote “the same” policies as the SS and Heinrich Himmler, the prime architect of the Holocaust.

He obviously hates my guts, and GoV as well.

Spaghetti Bolognese: A Casus Belli?

Cultural Enrichment News


The following account of events in Italy since the recent earthquake was originally published (in German) at SOS-Österreich. Many thanks to Hermes for the translation:

Italy: Muslim revolt over “Spaghetti Bolognese”

ROME (Novopress) — Violence, Islam, contagious diseases… a concentrate of all problems of the multicultural society has emerged in a few days in the refugee camps of Emilia-Romagna (in the region of Bologna) after a horrendous earthquake ravaged northeastern Italy. The preferential treatment of immigrant victims added to the sharpening of the situation.

In spite of all their goodwill, the Italian volunteers were simply rolled over by events. Last Thursday the Vodafone company wanted to distribute free telephone cards in the San Felice Sul Panaro camp in the province of Modena. There a scuffle took place among North African immigrants, during which one of them pulled out his knife and stabbed one of his fellow countrymen.

On Saturday a big revolt broke out in the same camp as an Italian voluntary worker served a Muslim girl a dish of spaghetti Bolognese. Those in charge of maintaining the civil order in the camp explained that everything had simply been a mistake: “The worker gave her the wrong meal by mistake.” But the Muslim girl began to cry, summoned all of her family members, and accused the managers of the camp of having purposefully insulted Islam. The help of the plain-clothes security personnel was needed to restore peace.

“We sincerely did not expect to meet such problems when we applied for the job in the camp of Emilia”, some voluntary workers from Trentino explained.

In two occasions, the disinfecting of a tent inhabited by North Africans was necessary because they suffered from an infection of skin mange. After having been disinfected twice by a special team from Venice, the tents finally had to be destroyed and thrown away by the San Felice team, because neither the Venetians nor the Tridentines were ready to accept more responsibilities regarding the issue. The scabrous Maghrebians were taken to a hospital.

According to a local newspaper: “The behavior of the north Africans puts the nerves of the other victims under great pressure,” but mainly of the native victims, who have lost everything. “We had been evacuated from our homes to this place here next to the camp,” a young couple complains. “We are from San Felice, but we receive no meals, because those are reserved for the inhabitants of the camp. One should also deal with the emergency situation we are in.”

However, they were very happy to be served spaghetti Bolognese.

Earthquake in Italy: preferential treatment of immigrant victims in the emergency camps

BOLOGNA (Novopress) — After the big earthquake ravaged northeast Italy, many Italians complained that the emergency shelters were full of North Africans and Eastern Europeans, and that “Italians were discriminated against here.”

The Italian newspaper Il Giornale describes the emergency situation:

“The lists of access to the camps were monopolized by immigrants from Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt and Eastern Europe. Many women were veiled. Preferential access to tents was given to women and children, virtually all of them immigrants.”

The situation in Sant’Agostino in Finale Emilia is roughly the same, where the tent camps are almost completely occupied by immigrants.

Italians must look to other means to provide themselves with food and to try to repair their homes. Some of them have no other choice but to sleep in cars or in the open air.

A situation of “positive” discrimination in favor of immigrants which underscores the imperative necessity of intervention of the “Salamander” patriotic civil protection organization.



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

“Diversity” Top Down or diversity Bottom up?


The sheep pen
Spring Fundraiser 2012, Day Three


Despite the wear and tear, I love our Fundraiser weeks. It’s a bit like a holiday, or Old Home Week. For one thing, donors often send an accompanying email message in addition to their note at the bottom of the Pay Pal form. Also, it forces me to do a post every other day, even on the days I’m sure I “can’t”. I’ll admit that if the every-other-day schedule went on for an extended time, you’d be reading some wacky essays here.

This fundraising business has its own learning curve, at least the way we do it. The Baron, as usual, does the heavy lifting while I write half the posts and all the acknowledgements. It works!

Sticking to our chosen subject can be a problem some days, as can remembering the point of all this: to raise money for the coming quarter so that we can keep Gates of Vienna open. So far so good: even though it does seem magical at times.

Tip jarFor this particular bleg I’m hoping to hear from some of our lurking Anonymouses who stepped out of the silence to make their point that the demographics fabricated by those Lefties in Norway regarding our audience were just that: convenient fictions. The personal prosperity many of you described gave me great hope for this particular bleg.

To those of you who wrote to put the lie to the ugly prevarication coming out of Norway, I ask that you step up again, this time with financial help. If your anonymity is a concern, send cash. Several of our donors have done just that for years and their money has never gone astray — they let us know when they mail it and we let them know as soon as it arrives in our post office box. And before the unfriendlies fire off an obvious salvo, let me save them some time: yes indeed, we do indeed pay taxes on our donations.

Norway — just to pick any old totalitarian democracy — is a good example of faux “diversity”. Diversity by government decree would be funny if it weren’t so crippling to the people who are forced to live within that framework.

Fjordman catches flack from the government-supported jornolists when he does fund-raising to take care of his own expenses. Those hacks are oblivious to the deep irony that their jobs are paid for out of the taxes gathered from Fjordman and others like him. These government workers are so deeply ignorant of life outside their sheep pen they can’t comprehend the reality for others, for people with real jobs, for people who are unemployed or underemployed or living with a disability. They “celebrate” diversity yet they move in the limited circles of their government-run environment which ensures they’ll never have to actually experience anything close to what they preach. Even if someone left the cage door open, do you think they’d leave? It’s a scary world out there with the grown-ups.

Norway isn’t diverse but its elites are dedicated to talking the talk. The pretentious airy-fairy grand consensus may end up with a few broken eggs, but hey: it’s a tasty omelet for those invited to the table. As for those cast into oblivion, shunned to death, well, too bad for them.

I believe in the principles of diversity, but not the ideology of this simplistic top-down pee cee “Diversity”. Genuine diversity is a bottom-up phenomenon; people have the freedom to sort themselves as they see fit. Here in America, the genuine article has been badly damaged by the ideologues and the opportunists who see the possibilities in grabbing a piece of the governmental Diversity Pie.

These snake oil salesmen — union leaders (not the rank-and-file), corrupt diploma mills, mass media hacks, the legislative lobbyists’ guild, ethically-challenged legislators and Pentagon pimps — it’s a veritable…umm, circus. No, make that a continuous kabuki performance. A stylized ritual where everyone in the audience knows what is going to happen next and is too out-numbered to mount an effective opposition.

There is hope to be had at the margins. The Tea Party is one example. Its activists will probably defeat the union leaders and the Democrat machine in Wisconsin in their attempt to remove a competent governor who has put his state on a more solid financial footing than it’s seen in a long time. Michelle Malkin has some of the details.

There have been gallons of mud slung in this ugly fight, and the left-leaning Washington Post predictably sings the Democrats’ tune in this one. Under the ‘reasonable’ tone is an ugly accusation, one that is far removed from reality. Given that the Democrat machine owns every major city in the U.S., and given that most of those cities are in ruins, WaPo stretches the truth mighty thin here. “Gaming the system”?? The Democrats wrote the book on that one.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Milwaukee paper has endorsed the governor and condemned the recall attempt.

The Tea Party functions well because it is decentralized. Agreed, it’s not perfect. But is sure is more diverse than either of the political parties. If we could ever get the Republican National Committee to do anything that smart — i.e. decentralize — we’d never have to live with another bloated, poverty-making government machine again. But hey — they’d lose the power perks that devolve to the also-rans…once you breathe in those “inside the Beltway fumes” there goes…diversity.

By the way, the Tea Party only exists because it was a genuine response to a spontaneous cri de coeur. People watched that video and stood up to respond as one: “Basta!” was the general sentiment. Our first local Tax Day Pushback was well-attended, even in the rain.

As de Tocqueville noted, America is a generous place. People are “naturally” generous here, whether it’s volunteering at the library, running the Emergency Squad, or putting time in at the Volunteer Fire Department. One of the best of the private groups is Habitat for Humanity. Their rules are firm and fair and the results of all that work make profound differences for individual families.

Gates of Vienna survives because of that very human impulse to support the good. Our European donors are an equal part of our diverse resources. Our volunteer essayists and translators and news-finders are part of this project that has grown far beyond the boundaries of a blog run by two people. All of our people know that their work counts, that their money is well-spent.

The Left wants to shove their statist version of Diversity down our throats. The more powerful ones are hell-bent on becoming the next Greece and failing their citizens. So far so good. The resistance continues to be robust and diversified. It is the privilege of all who make Gates of Vienna a viable, robust endeavor to know full well what they are doing for the future.

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Yesterday’s donations came in from:

Stateside: California, N. Carolina, New York, and Texas

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, British Virgin Islands, Denmark, Slovenia, and the UK

Let’s keep on keeping on.



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Islamic Slavery is Alive and Well in Bosnia

Further update, in response to various commenters:

Yes, you’re right; this story does seem a bit peculiar. If you read the full text as posted at Vlad (the last time I checked, the Pravda story was down again), the Muslim aspect of the case depends on the perps’ cousin being a Muslim. Hmm.

And let’s not forget the source — the Russians have a row to hoe with respect to Bosnia and Serbia. “There’s no izvestia in Pravda, and no pravda in Izvestia,” as they used to say in Soviet times (“There’s no news in The Truth and no truth in The News”).

But I’ll leave this stand as-is for the moment. Y’all can send me any significant further updates if they come in.



Update: The Pravda article has now mysteriously reappeared.



According to the following article, a Muslim husband and wife in Bosnia kept an underage German girl as a slave for years under bestial conditions.

The story was originally published in the English-language version of Pravda, but has since been pulled. One wonders why Pravda pulled it…

Fortunately, Vlad Tepes preserved a copy of it before it was pulled:

Muslim slavery in the center of Europe

Several days ago, the world was shocked with the news from Europe. A family couple from Bosnia and Herzegovina had been keeping a young German woman as their slave for eight years. The victim of family violence is now 19 years of age.

The Bosnian couple – Milenko Marinkovic, 52, and his wife Slavojka Marinkovic, 45, – were torturing and starving an underage girl, whose name was Karla. The girl would be raped by other men on a regular basis.

It was the couple’s neighbors, who called the police. One of them said that he saw Marinkovic harnessing the girl to a cart and whipping her, as if she was a horse. The couple made the German woman come into unnatural relations with dogs – just out of sadism, Austrian portal unzensuriert.at said. The victim was kept indoors. The woman was not allowed to communicate with other people at all. She had to eat the fodder that her masters would give to their pigs.

It still remains unknown why the authorities did not take any measures against the Bosnian couple to save the German child eight years ago. It was said that the Bosnians hid the girl in the basement, and the police did not find her. This time, the authorities decided to act only after a neighbor filed a written statement against his neighbors and presented a photo of the exhausted and bruised young woman.

They were hiding the girl in a forest. When she was found, she weighed only 40 kilos. She currently stays in an orphanage, although her physical and psychological condition leaves much to be desired. The rehabilitation process will take a lot of time, medics said.

Karla was taken to Bosnia eight years ago. Her mother, a German citizen, had been married to Milenko Marinkovic in spite of the fact that the man already had a wife from Bosnia -Slavojka. Karla’s mother had a work permit in Germany and Austria. She left her daughter to the Bosnian man, and kept silence about the violence in the family.

There’s more at Vlad, including screen caps of the now-missing article.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/30/2012

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/30/2012Christine Lagarde, the General Director of the IMF, caused a stir recently when she said that the Greeks should stop complaining and just pay their taxes. Now it has emerged that Ms. Lagarde earns almost €400k per annum and pays no taxes whatsoever. Her status as an employee for a trans-national institution exempts her from taxation.

Nice work if you can get it.

In other news, as part of his latest skirmish in the War on Obesity, Mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to ban large sugary drinks in New York City.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, DS, Fjordman, JD, JP, Steen, The Observer, 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.

Raceless Rape Exposes BBC Deceit

As reported in last night’s news feed, a large crowd of Sikhs gathered around the police station in Luton yesterday to protest the way the police handled a rape of a teenage Sikh girl by a Muslim man.

British Freedom chairman Paul Weston has some thoughts on this latest incident of culturally-enriched sexual predation in Britain. The essay below was published earlier today in a slightly different form at the British Freedom website.



Raceless Rape Exposes BBC Deceit
by Paul Weston.

It takes quite a bit of self inflicted torment and anguish within the traitor class at the BBC to make me feel sorry for them, but their take on a recent rape case in Luton has almost managed to achieve this. Almost… but not quite.

Paul WestonThe BBC can never honestly admit that what they routinely refer to as “Asian rape” is actually Muslim rape, leading more realistic observers to wonder how they would report a rape case when the perpetrator was an Asian Muslim and the victim an Asian Sikh/Hindu/Chinese/Thai etc etc.

Well, now we know the answer.

Luton police in talks over Sikh protest is the BBC headline, with the following excerpts taken from their article:

Police have said they are talking to community leaders following a protest by hundreds of Sikhs at a Luton police station……about 250 people gathered at Buxton Road on Tuesday over an allegation that a young Sikh woman had been sexually assaulted.

“Before the protest, senior officers had attended the Gurdwara in Dallow Road to meet Luton Sikh community leaders to explain the investigation into the report of an assault on Monday…after considerable negotiation with representatives from the group, who were invited into the police station to talk, the protesters left at 11pm.

A 19-year-old man charged with common assault in connection with the allegation is due in court later.

I can just picture the turmoil and consternation within the spinning brains of typical BBC propagandists here. One imagines that hours of high level conferences were held at BBC HQ; hours of inward looking incomprehension as reality overtook their desperately manufactured fantasy of Asian rape rather than Muslim rape; hours of the ever-deepening awareness that their entire liberal meme of multicultural lies and evasion was shortly to be exposed as just that.

“Honestly, how can these damned Muslims be so stupid?” drawled the Armani clad, classless, public school and Oxbridge educated Tarquin Toolightly, Chief Commissar of the BBC’s Diversity and Community Cohesion Unit. “How can they expect us to keep covering for them if they start raping Asians? Why can’t they just stick to raping white girls? This puts us in a very embarrassing situation. We can’t possibly headline the story with Asian man rapes Asian woman! We would end up looking like idiots!”

“This does put us in rather a quandary,” squeaked his assistant, Ms Glenda Ratchet, BSc (Hons) in Media Studies/White Female Oppression/Diversity and Treason. “It would be just too awful if we actually told the truth. After all, Islam is a religion of peace, virtue and female empowerment. How on earth are we going to spin our way out of this awful situation? I quite agree with you Tarquin, why couldn’t they just stick to raping white under-age girls from traumatic backgrounds? Their lack of community presence made our evasion and lies so much easier to manage!”

“And it gets worse,” said Tarquin. “It appears that the Sikh protest has been joined by the EDL. How can we portray Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll as ignorant racists if they are in amiable cahoots with the bloody Sikhs! This whole thing is turning into a nightmare! All our hard work and lies are unravelling! Bloody Muslims, why can’t they just stick to raping white girls!”

But Tarquin was not on 200 grand a year for his race-war and class-war ideology alone. He also possessed a brain of such cunning deviousness that he was able to come up with an absolutely stunning wheeze: “I know how to handle this, let’s just not mention Muslim OR Asian, then no-one will know who the rapist was! Although I suppose we will have to mention that this selfish victim was a Sikh, unless we can just spin her as a member of a nameless, raceless community!”

“Brilliant idea Tarquin!” rejoined the grim faced Ms Ratchet, “the white, racist Lumpenproletariat will never know the rapist was a Muslim if we don’t tell them he was! The gullible public still think we tell them the truth! They won’t even know he was an Asian! Let’s just call him a, you know, like, a man, YEAH! A man! A 19 year-old man of no race or religion! That’ll do it! Those racist whites are too stupid to work their way around that!”

And so the BBC sinks to ever greater depths of inhumanity and immorality, not to mention a total lack of journalistic competence or professionalism. No matter how they twist, turn, lie and evade, the game is up I’m afraid. They’ve been exposed for what they really are: Anti-white, anti-Sikh and pro-Muslim, no matter that Islam stands against pretty much every single liberal ethos the BBC tells us it stands for.

I have mentioned before that the BBC was/is complicit in the ongoing rape of British girls by Muslim men and now we see they are also prepared to allow Sikh girls be violated by nameless, religionless, raceless rapists in order to perpetuate the lie of “Luton in Harmony.” Hardly the BBC’s finest hour — again.



Paul Weston is Chairman of the British Freedom Party.

Previous posts:

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!
    Nov   27   The Totalitarian EU Tightens Its Grip
    Dec   6   One Rule for Them, One Rule for Us
        7   Muslim Misogyny, Feminist Indifference
        13   Interview with Paul Weston
2012   Jan   10   Racism and Media Double Standards in Britain
        13   How To Destroy A Country — Part 1
        14   How To Destroy A Country — Part 2
        15   How To Destroy A Country — Part 3
    Feb   20   “We Ran Out of Other People’s Money”
    Mar   1   NER Interview with Paul Weston
        1   Unite Against Freedom!
        2   Form Letter to MPs Who Endorse Unite Against Fascism
        2   Transforming Britain Into Lebanon
        12   Paul Weston: The CAN Interview
        13   Representing the Ideology and Law of Sharia
        15   Does Moderate Islam Really Exist?
        28   Muslim Paedophiles, Feminists and Future Civil War
        30   George Galloway, Islam and Britain’s Future
    Apr   12   Paul Weston at the British Freedom Party Meeting
        23   On Being English
    May   2   Celebrating Multicultural Madness
        12   Muslim Rape, Liberal/Left Complicity
        28   Saudi Arabia Buys Oxford

Freeing the Culturally-Enriched Captives

At the moment Norway is experiencing a series of labor strikes. Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer sends two articles, one of them translated, about the strikes and their consequences.

The translator includes this note:

These strikes take place on a fairly regular basis. While they are going on the entire country pretty much comes to a standstill, and most of the time the consequences of these industrial actions make the average citizen want to pull his hair out.

The translated article deals with the immigration detention centre at Trandum, where some of the staff are walking out on Wednesday ‘forcing’ the management to release some of the ‘clients’.

First, some excerpts from The Local about the strike by public sector workers (is there a private sector in Norway?):

Norway public sector workers were called out on strike on Thursday after salary negotiations broke down, affecting schools, day care centres and prisons.

Thursday’s strike action is the first in three decades by public sector workers in the country.

Up to 30,000 of Norway’s 600,000 state and municipal employees were taking part in the strike, according to a tally by the NTB news agency. That number was expected to increase unless the different unions can reach wage settlements with central and local governments.

[…]

The different unions however had demanded that their members receive the same increase as in the private sector, which they said was nearly 4.3 percent.

“The government cuts us off with worse wage development than for employees in the private sector. That is unreasonable,” Arne Johannessen, chief negotiator for the Unio union representing teachers and day care workers, said in a statement.

Some 8,500 of Unio’s members were taking part in the strike, affecting schools and day care facilities across the country, except for in Oslo, where negotiations continued.

[…]

Police, customs authorities and prisons were also affected, forcing for instance all prisoners at one prison to be transferred to other facilities, NTB reported.

The second (translated) article is an account of the effects of the strike on the asylum center at Trandum:

Must release detainees currently being held at Trandum as a result of industrial strike action

128 police officers from the Immigration unit of the Norwegian police (PU) have been chosen to take part in an industrial strike action on Wednesday morning. Of the 128 police officers, 42 are currently assigned to the immigration detention centre at Trandum, which means that an undisclosed number of foreign nationals being held at the centre will have to be released.

“We need to have a minimum police presence at Trandum in order to guarantee the well-being, health and safety of the staff. When we take the step of instructing our members at the detention centre to go on strike, it is going to have an impact on the safety of those who remain, and thus we need to reduce the overall number of detainees. And this invariably means that some of the detainees will have to be released,” Geir Petter Pettersen, local leader of the police union of the Immigration Unit, tells Politiforum [police union magazine].

It is not yet known how many detainees are going to be set free. Among those being held at Trandum are individuals who don’t have any identification documents and those who are awaiting deportation.

Mr. Pettersen emphasizes that the detainees do not pose any danger to society.

In addition to the release of an unspecified number of detainees from the centre at Trandum, foreign nationals awaiting deportation will not be transported out of the country until the strike has been called off.

A Diversity of Finches


Finches
Spring Fundraiser 2012, Day Two


We’re now into the second day of our quarterly effort to raise operating funds. As mentioned yesterday, the topic for this bleg is Diversity. Dymphna kicked it off last night by looking at demographic diversity, both among our readers and among our donors.

What other diversities are worth looking at?

Well… There is a diversity of birds outside my window here in the upper room of the North Tower at Schloss Bodissey.

I don’t mean right now, of course. It’s the middle of the night, and the weather is so stormy that not even the whippoorwills are willing to brave the sturm und drang out there. But during the middle of the day I can sit here and watch the phoebes flit back and forth outside the screen as they tend to their nest at the top of the drainpipe. Every now and then they fuss loudly at the squirrels that run up and down the nearby oak tree.

Besides the phoebes, we have at least two pairs of crows, innumerable sparrows, lots of wrens, a few cardinals, some bluebirds, a nuthatch, the odd pileated woodpecker or red-headed woodpecker, very rarely a goldfinch, a half a dozen rowdy chickadees, a mockingbird, and an occasional brown thrasher at the edge of the woods. During the winter we have juncos, with robins filling in for them during the summer. Once a year, when the fruit ripens, our juneberry tree is full of feasting cedar waxwings — the only time we ever see those reclusive oddballs.

When the cat is out on the lawn, the birds tend to retreat. But the rest of the time our yard is a chittering, squawking aviary. This is the sort of diversity that appeals to me.

It’s not the kind of “diversity” we’re supposed to celebrate, however, even though the “natural” aspect of the idyllic view from my window would probably earn it the seal of ideological approval from the PC PTB. No, a diversity of finches is not enough.

How about a diversity of national currencies? Would that help?

Not really — and especially not in Europe. Some diversities diverge too much from ideological orthodoxy.

Tip jarNo, we all know what “diversity” really means: it means an array of differently-colored faces, a lot of competent-looking women mixed evenly with sensitive, caring men, and some cheerful folks in wheelchairs. It requires the inclusion of people with deviant sexual proclivities — nothing blatant or anything, just a few visual cues to tell the TV audience he’s one of them.

Maybe a guy in overalls and a woman in a hostess’ uniform as a nod to those hard-workin’ yokels out there in flyover country.

But no diversity of opinion. All those celebratory inclusive rainbow-dwellers think exactly correct thoughts. They know what to recycle, and when. They recognize that the nation-state is a throwback to our violent past, and must be eliminated. They understand the need to build sustainable birdbaths.

And they know how to treat those reprehensible wretches whose thinking deviates from orthodoxy. Time to whip out the prescription pad and order up a diverse selection of psychotropic medications!

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *


As regular readers know, despite the fact we’re monocultural whitebread folks, we tolerate a diverse range of opinion here at Gates of Vienna. We stick to our mission statement, but there is a lot of room outside of that for argument to range freely.

We’ve featured excerpts from various socialist writers who also happen to resist Islamization. We once published a guest post submitted by an anarchist. We include Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists (lots of those pesky atheists). Libertarians versus neocons, birthers versus truthers, lumpers versus splitters — let ’em duke it out!

We’re a tolerant bunch, really. Heck, I even tolerate the fact that Dymphna was raised a Catholic.

So I’m ready to celebrate a lot of geographical diversity in Tuesday’s donors. These are the places represented by donations that came in yesterday, the 559th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople:

Stateside: California, Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Slovakia, Sweden, and the UK

Many thanks to all of you. This blog is a cooperative effort, and your generous (and diverse) support is deeply appreciated.



The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup on our sidebar, or the donate button. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/29/2012

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/29/2012A tribal council in eastern Afghanistan has condemned four women and two men to death for immoral behavior. Their crime was to dance together at a wedding, violating a law requiring segregation of the sexes. The council ruling says that their behavior constitutes “fornication”, and they may thus be killed at any time. The four women are in custody, but the men escaped and ran away.

In other news, hundreds of Sikhs have gathered in protest outside the police station in the English town of Luton. They are angry at the way police handled the rape and beating of a teenage Sikh girl by a Muslim man. The protestors have staged a sit-down outside the station, and the police say they are negotiating with them to try to resolve the situation. Members of the English Defence League are reportedly participating in the protest.

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

Thanks to A. Millar, CSP, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, JD, Jerry Gordon, JP, KGS, Mary Abdelmassih, Steen, The Observer, 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.

Watch Out Where You Point That Thing!

Cultural Enrichment News


The trouble in the Lavapiés quarter of Madrid began after a police officer asked to see the papers of an illegal street vendor from Senegal. A group of Africans took exception to this treatment of their comrade, and that’s when things went sideways…

Many thanks to our Spanish correspondent Hermes for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling of this eyewitness video:



Below is the accompanying ABC.es article, also translated by Hermes:

The local police open an investigation into the shots in Lavapiés

It will be a formal procedure, the results of which will not be made public

The local police have opened an internal investigation in order to throw light on the circumstances of what happened yesterday in the quarter of Lavapiés when one of the agents who carried out the detention of an illegal vendor shot twice into the air in order to disperse a group of Africans who were insulting the police after one of their mates was arrested.

According to the information given by a spokesperson for the local police, this kind of investigation is opened whenever an agent opens fire with his service weapon. It is an internal proceeding carried out by the police force of the town hall, the results of which are not made public.

The incident was being heavily commented on today in the neighborhood as well as on the Internet, where the news and the video of the two policemen arresting the suspect, and the clash between them and the immigrants, were published yesterday by ABC reached a wide audience.

In the police station

Regarding the detainee, a man from Senegal, the local police stated that he had already been handed over to the national police, which is responsible for the keeping detainees in custody, and if so determined, to bring them to court. According to the police version, the man was caught by surprise by plain-clothes officers when he was illegally selling goods near the Rastro [street market]. When the agents asked him for his papers, he tried to flee.

According to judicial sources, the majority of these kinds of detentions end with the detainee being released from the police station itself. The illegal vendors are usually not prosecuted, but a report is issued by which they are later called to court. The issue would be more problematic for the detainee if he has no valid papers. In this case, he could be imprisoned in a migrants’ internment center.



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

Integration Camps in Vienna

Forget concentration camps — they’re so 20th century! The latest craze in Vienna is for “integration camps”, which help prepare Austrian citizens for the future by requiring them to adapt to the various cultures of their country’s immigrant population.

The tone of this program is playful, but the organizers’ underlying purpose is deadly serious. Many thanks to Hermes for translating this article from Krone.at:

Daring artistic activity

‘Integration camps’ for Austrians in the middle of Vienna

A spectacular project will take place in Vienna in the next days. A group of artists will put up “integration camps” in the city as part of the Festwoche [Festival Week]. Only for Austrians, of course. According to the promoters, in these places people will be able to heal their phobia about minorities. The FPÖ is in outraged.

This satirical action goes under the name “Austrians, do integrate!”. It was created by the Viennese artists’ group “God’s Entertainment”. “We turn the debate about integration interculturally upside-down”, the creators of this initiative say. “After all the dominant culture, the courses on integration, and the language courses which our fellow immigrant citizens have to comply with, now we call on the natives to do the same thing. We invite them to at last be part of the big, complete and perfect Austria.”

To begin with, an evaluation of the need to adapt is to take place in the camps, and at the same time each participant will also be evaluated to determine which kind of integration program he needs. “Pack A” covers the “low requirement”. In this case, the course lasts just a few hours. “Pack B” lasts at least a full day and (according to description) for a complete beginner on integration there’s the “Pack C”, which lasts 2-3 days.

Headscarf training, forced marriage, halal slaughter

Foreigners of various origins are supposed to be in the camp to instruct. “We have Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, colored Africans, Turks, Kurds, Gypsies and Germans”, the organizers say. At the beginning, one deals in a playful way with problem-solving strategies. “If required, there will be offered also headscarf, forced marriage and home slaughter training”, the operators explained with a wink.

The first integration camp will be open from Wednesday through Saturday at the gates of the Urban Loritz Square. The second will be open from June 7 through 9 at the corner of Mariahilfe Street and Museum Square. The final one will run from June 14 through 16 in Meidlinger Square. Those wishing to take part will be received from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. in the camps. “From 18:00 p.m. we’ll offer just a general guidance for Austrians with no special needs”, the organizers say.

The FPÖ is outraged: “A monstrosity”

The FPÖ is, as expected, not taking any pleasure from this satirical project: “This is a monstrosity among monstrosities,” the speaker for cultural politics Heidemarie Unterreiner claims. She does not understand the reason why such monkey business is also financed from the generous funds dedicated to the Festival Week. “In marked contrast to this there are the festivals in Salzburg, which preserve a cultural concept to appeal to the audience, and which year after year delight guests from all over the world,” the FPÖ member says.

Her Adversaries Have Become the Master

Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, fell to the Ottoman invaders 559 years ago today, on May 29 1453. With its fall the Roman Empire came to an end.

Many thanks to Anestos Canelides for this tribute to the brave defenders of Constantinople.

Byzantium: The Fall of Constantinople, 1453

In memory of the loss of Constantinople to the Christian world
May 29th 1453

by Anestos Canelides

Prologue: Constantinople! O Constantinople!

“How lonely is the city that was full of people! How like a widow is she, who was great among the nations! The Princess among Provinces has become a slave!” — Lamentations 1:1

The battle raged within the gates, on the high towers; the trenches swam deep in blood.[1]

A lone refugee, who had taken flight on a Venetian galleon wept at the unfortunate sight of Constantinople, shrouded in flames. A reflection in her teardrop captured the black smoke rising like the dark hand of death over the city’s blood-drenched streets.

These Hellenized Romans were forced to flee from their ancient capital just as during the Trojan War the innocents of the house of Priam had fled the proud city built by Neptune.

Smoke arose from the ruined ground while the city’s inhabitants fled in different directions [1] from the pursuing Turkish hoard.

Her teardrop, in slow motion, gently struck the salty waters of the Marmara Sea causing tiny ripples to form in the still water, moving towards the four corners of the Earth. Like the ripples the refugees of the vanquished city fled with winged feet to foreign lands. In those last hours of the siege, the valorous right arm of the Emperor Constantine Palaeologus XI held his sword high in defiance of the Turks, who were swarming through the city’s broken walls.

His very soul crushed within, and feeling abandoned, Constantine XI uttered his final words: “Is there no Christian who will take my head?”[2] Shortly afterwards, like brave Achilles who died by the thrust of a poison tipped arrow, Emperor Constantine was cut down by the edge of a Turkish sword. An enemy soldier struck him in the face and wounded him, but in turn, like a lion, Constantine struck back. Another mortal blow struck him down bringing a dramatic end to the life of the last Roman Emperor.

“Her adversaries have become the master, Her enemies prosper… Her children have gone into captivity before the enemy.”
— Lamentations 1:5



Notes:

1.   The Aeneid of Virgil, translation by Rolf Humphries, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 1951, pp 44, 81,332, 335.
2.   Sprantzes, George, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, translated by Marios Philippides, The University of Massachusetts at Amherst 1980.

Previous posts by Anestos Canelides:

2010   May   29   The Last Empire
    Jun   18   The Muslim Devastation of India
    Aug   20   Are They Lying to Us?
    Sep   28   Devshirme: A Muslim Scourge on Christians
    Oct   6   AIFD: Friends of America and Freedom
    Dec   3   A 19th-Century Jihad on American Shipping
2011   May   29   Borders, Language and Culture
    Oct   18   The Jihad Against Dogs
        31   Slavery and Jihad
    Nov   15   Abuse of Power
    Dec   10   Islam is not a Pacifist Religion
        28   Those Evil Crusades
2012   Mar   25   Why Do We Tolerate Their Intolerance?
    Apr   6   History is the Fairest Instructor
        21   Jihad: The Law of War
    May   27   The Arab Siege of Constantinople