Gates of Vienna News Feed 9/30/2013

As I write this, the federal government is a few minutes away from its much-ballyhooed shutdown. The Senate refused to accept a funding bill sent by the House that included a delay in financing ObamaCare. The Senate sent it back to the House, and that’s where the impasse stands.

In other news, the IHP halal poultry abattoir has become the first company in Britain to be certified and monitored by the Sharia halal board.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Jerry Gordon, JP, Mary Abdelmassih, Steen, Vlad Tepes, 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.

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.

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A Call to Eliminate Controversial Undefined Terms

Below is the intervention read by Stephen Coughlin, representing Center for Security Policy at the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, Session 1 “Tolerance and Non-Discrimination”, Warsaw, September 24, 2013.

His intervention was part of the week’s push by ICLA and its allied NGOs to make OSCE and ODIHR aware that their policies and programs are increasingly based on terms which are not adequately defined. In those cases where words are defined, those definitions have not been not established through a consensus of all represented political opinions.

Many thanks to Henrik Ræder Clausen for recording this video, and to Vlad Tepes for uploading it:

The prepared text of Maj. Coughlin’s intervention is available here.

For links to previous articles about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, see the OSCE Archives.

Did We Lose the Cold War?

If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post.

Did We Lose the Cold War?
by Fjordman

Diana West’s latest title, Diana West’s book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, challenges conventional wisdom about the Second World War and the Cold War. It has caused quite a stir in certain circles.


Old Town, Warsaw

As it happens, I started reading it while visiting Warsaw, Poland for the first time. This is fitting in many ways. Historian Timothy Snyder in his excellent work Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin demonstrates how East-Central Europe was crushed between the totalitarian regimes of two infamous dictators, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. One of their victims was Poland. Roughly 85% of Warsaw was destroyed during the Second World War. Its pretty Old Town is actually fairly new; it was reconstructed after WW2.

Today, the city is riddled with monuments and memorials to those who struggled and were wiped out during those fateful years, both from the Jewish minority population and the Slavic Christian majority population. One of the monuments of Warsaw’s Old Town is dedicated to the victims of the Katyn massacre, mass execution of 22,000 Polish officers in the spring of 1940. This evil deed was originally blamed on the Nazis, but it was in fact carried out by the Soviet secret police. Evidence of this surfaced rather early.


Katyn massacre memorial at Old Town, Warsaw

Yet this fact was deliberately buried by the Roosevelt Administration in order not to offend their new Soviet “allies,” after Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union. This shameful policy continued for years even after the war ended, when it should have been clear to all sensible people that Stalin and the Communists could never really be anybody’s “allies.” Diana West argues that by actively covering up such atrocities, the Western world in some ways became complicit in Soviet crimes.

Towering over the city center of Warsaw even today is the Palace of Culture and Science. It was a “gift” from Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in 1952. How nice of Uncle Joe, especially since he and Hitler had secretly carved up Poland and several other countries between them in the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. The International Socialists of the Soviet Union were every bit as much expansionist totalitarian predators as were the National Socialists in Germany. Diana West reminds us that this isn’t always emphasized today, and asks: Why is this so?

A timely question.


Stalin’s gift: The Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw

It wasn’t the first time the Communists attempted to expand into Central Europe via Poland, either. As Adam Zamoyski details in his book Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe, already after the First World War, the Bolsheviks under the direction of Vladimir Lenin tried to use military force to invade Poland and export the world revolution to Germany. This early attempt was successfully beaten back by Polish resistance. But the Soviets returned with a vengeance a generation later, under the leadership of Lenin’s ruthless apprentice Stalin. This time they succeeded in establishing Communist dominion over the eastern half of Europe as far as Berlin.

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Team Warsaw

ICLA logo (new)

The Human Dimension Implementation Meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) convened in Warsaw last week. A team of liberty-loving people from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, the UK, and the USA was in attendance. They represented the International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA), Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE-Austria and -Germany), ACT! for America, ACT! for Canada, the Center for Security Policy, the Stresemann Foundation, and Women for Freedom.

A group photo of the core team is below:

Back row:

  • Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff (Austria), Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE-Germany)
  • Polish representative, International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA)
  • UK representative, International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA)
  • Alain Wagner (France) , International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA)
  • Pierre Renversez (Belgium), NONALI
  • Henrik Ræder Clausen (Denmark), International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA)
  • Chris Knowles (UK), International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA)
  • Felix Strüning (Germany), Stresemann Foundation — A Lobby for Freedom

Front row:

  • Ned May (USA), International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA)
  • Stephen Coughlin (USA), Center for Security Policy
  • Valerie Price (Canada), ACT! for Canada
  • Marie-Luise Hoffmann-Polzoni (Germany), Women for Freedom
  • Liz Schmidt (Germany), Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE-Austria)
  • Dave Petteys (USA), ACT! for America 5280 Coalition

The team worked with tireless dedication all week. Everybody who participated has my deepest thanks.

For links to previous articles about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, see the OSCE Archives.

What About Jihad?

Below is the intervention read by Dave Petteys, representing ACT for America 5280 Coalition at the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, Session 1 “Preventing Aggressive Nationalism, Racism and Chauvinism”, Warsaw, September 23, 2013.

Many thanks to Henrik Ræder Clausen for recording this video, and to Vlad Tepes for subtitling and uploading this video:

The prepared text of Mr. Petteys’ remarks is below (pdf here):

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 9/29/2013

350 Syrian migrants were picked up in the Mediterranean by a Romanian Frontex ship. They are being brought to Sicily. Meanwhile, more than 500 refugees, most of them Syrian, landed on Lampedusa in two different boats.

In other news, a bank in Azerbaijan has launched Europe’s first sharia-compliant Islamic credit card.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Jerry Gordon, JP, Kitman, KP, Mary Abdelmassih, Steen, Vlad Tepes, 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.

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.

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Get That Nasty Thing Out of Here!

A few days ago German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party (the Christian Democrats, CDU) won the German elections. During the celebrations afterwards, a fellow party member handed Ms. Merkel a German flag.

You don’t have to speak any German to understand the clear message in this video about what the chancellor thinks of her flag, her country, and German patriotism:

Hat tip: Politically Incorrect.

It’s Worse Than a Conspiracy: It’s Consensus

Most readers will be familiar with Vladimir Bukovsky, the respected writer and former Soviet dissident. In collaboration with Pavel Stroilov, he has written a review of Diana West’s book American Betrayal for Breitbart.

As listed at the foot of the review, here are the bios of the authors:

Vladimir Bukovsky is one of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement. He spent twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals during his fight for freedom. In 2007, he was nominated for president of Russia by the democratic opposition in moral protest of Putin’s powers. His many works include To Build a Castle and Judgement in Moscow.

Pavel Stroilov is a Russian exile in London and the editor and translator of Alexander Litvinenko’s book, Allegations. He is co-author with Bukovsky of EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration, and the author of Behind the Desert Storm: A Secret Archive Stolen From the Kremlin that Sheds New Light on the Arab Revolutions in the Middle East.

So Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov have paid their dues as victims of communist oppression, Mr. Bukovsky through his time in the gulag. In their Breitbart piece the two men have done more than write a favorable review of the book: they have deconstructed the malicious ad hominem attacks on its author, and offered plausible explanations for the reprehensible behavior of people who otherwise seem sane and rational.

David Horowitz has already responded at FPM, saying: “Now, in the pages of Breitbart, even Vladimir Bukovsky, the great Soviet dissident, whose work we have previously admired in these pages, and will continue to admire, has joined [Diana West’s] wolf-pack.”

Well… I thought it was a “kook army”, but now it seems to be a “wolf-pack”, with Vladimir Bukovsky baring his fangs at the front of the ravening horde.

This is very strange, considering that Front Page Magazine has sung the praises of Mr. Bukovsky so many times in the past. Ten or twelve years ago, Jamie Glazov, Mr. Horowitz’ assistant, was particularly generous in his admiration of the courageous Soviet dissident.

But not any more. That was then, and this is now: I’m told that Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov first submitted their review to FPM, but Mr. Glazov turned it down. The authors’ opinions presumably failed to accord with the current party line laid down by the politburo editorial staff at FPM.

Below are excerpts from their review, “Why Academics Hate Diana West”:

Groundbreaking books about the history of communism, such as Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Viktor Suvorov’s Ice-Breaker, are never written by “professional” historians. Indeed, historians typically meet those books with remarkable hostility.

Yet, non-academic history books certainly have their advantages. For one thing, they are readable. More often than not, they are better researched too. Above all, they are intellectually honest, free from the unspoken taboos of the academic world and from allegiances to theories and to colleagues that tie the hands of many an academic.

Where a professional historian pursues an academic career, the amateur seeks after the truth. Ignorant of taboos, the amateur can follow the trail of evidence to wherever it leads and discovers things which, according to the academic conventional wisdom, are best left untouched and unsaid.

That is what Diana West does in American Betrayal:The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. By her own admission, she started that book with no intention of writing much about the Cold War. She started not as a historian, but a simple mortal puzzled and disturbed by the obvious question: how on earth could this great civilization of ours have degraded into such a hypocritical nonsense as political correctness? Having written her previous book about the death of the civilization of grown-ups, now Mrs. West, in her own words, attempts a post mortem — only to discover unmistakable signs of a murder.

She digs deeper, “tracing references and footnotes backward along a well-mapped historical route that has simply fallen into disuse”, as she puts it — and discovers the true history of the 20th century, the history of communist crimes against humanity, to which so many in the Western Establishment were accomplices and collaborators; and then a massive cover-up of those crimes, which infested our entire public life with a culture of hypocrisy and double standards.

[…]

In the face of those proven facts, most of them now recognized even by academics, Mrs. West asks some bold but legitimate questions. Did all these people (the glorious FDR administration) really conduct the Second World War in the interests of Western democracies, or was it in the interests of Comrade Stalin? Having declared that war to defend the freedom of Poland, the Western democracies ended it by surrendering Poland and a dozen other nations to a totalitarian empire worse than Hitler’s. Was that really a victory? Above all, was that outcome inevitable, or did it, to a greater or lesser extent, result from the work of the Soviet agents of influence in the positions of power in the West?

[…]

Mrs. West has proven her point without access to secret archives on the basis of published sources alone. She would have found this much more difficult if she tried to continue her narrative much beyond the Second World War. Scandalously, most secret archives of that period remain classified to this day, and very few historians ever complain about that. It required some extraordinary efforts on our part to smuggle some of those archives out of Russia and make them available to the Western public. Of course, our efforts were attacked furiously by the very same academics who now attack American Betrayal, using exactly the same expressions It is their job to suppress any truth about the Cold War. However, despite all their efforts, we now know that the so-called Cold War was never particularly cold on the Soviet side and never much of a war on the Western side:

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Torpedoing “Islamophobia”

For the International Civil Liberties Alliance, the theme for this week’s OSCE in Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw was “Bad Definitions”. As readers have undoubtedly noticed, the most prominent bad definition is the word “Islamophobia”. There are plenty of other words than can be targeted as ill-defined, and those have been discussed here in earlier posts, and in the ICLA paper “The Problematic Definition of ‘Islamophobia’”. However, to make matters simpler, the ICLA team concentrated this week on “Islamophobia”.

On Tuesday night the ODIHR Tolerance and Non-Discrimination Department convened a side event, “Educational initiatives and approaches for addressing anti-Semitism and intolerance against Muslims”. This sounded like a worthwhile opportunity, and a large contingent of people from ICLA, Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa, the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the Stresemann Foundation, and other anti-Shariah NGOs decided to look in on it.

It was a good thing we did. It turned out that the side event was convened to highlight “Guidelines for Educators on Countering Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims: Addressing Islamophobia through Education”, which was published jointly [pdf] by OSCE/ODIHR, the Council of Europe, and UNESCO in 2011. This document — which contains 49 instances of the word “Islamophobia” — was discussed in the ICLA paper, and was part of the focus of our research.

The first forty minutes or so featured presentation by the panelists, including some of the authors of the “Guidelines”. One of them was a British gentleman named Robin Richardson, who is associated with the Runnymede Trust. Among other things, Mr. Richardson told the audience: “We all know that nations are not capable of solving the world’s problems.” Only global institutions were capable of doing so.

His assertion was the last straw. Since the panelists had repeatedly mentioned “Islamophobia” — ICLA’s topic for the week — I decided to speak up. After comments by one other member of the audience, I had my say, and a lengthy discussion ensued, capped by devastating remarks made by Major Stephen Coughlin of CSP.

Below are relevant excerpts from the audio of the occasion. Many thanks to Henrik Ræder Clausen for making the recording, to CSP for the transcript, and to Vlad Tepes for editing the audio to produce this video:

The full audio of the final 48 minutes is available here, and a complete transcript of that audio is at the bottom of this post.

Transcript of the excerpts:

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A Call for Banning the Word “Islamophobia”

Below is the intervention read by Ned May, representing the International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA) at the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, Session 6 “Freedom of Religion or Belief”, Warsaw, September 26, 2013.

ICLA logo (new)

As other delegates have noted, the use of ill-defined terms can be an impediment to progress. In the worst of cases, such terms may even be exploited to effectively undermine human rights.

For example, the definition of “Islamophobia” presented at the OSCE conference in Tirana, Albania on May 22nd 2013 fails to meet reasonable standards of logic, coherence, and objectivity.

The definition fails solely due to the inclusion of the word “unfounded”. As a result, well-founded fear, mistrust, or hatred of Islam does not constitute Islamophobia. Millions of non-Muslims have very real reasons to fear Islam and Muslim violence, and cannot reasonably be described as “Islamophobes”.

Furthermore, any investigation into the basis for the fear of Islam is denounced as “Islamophobia”. Thus the definition of “Islamophobia” is circular, a violation of logic.

ICLA recommends that ODIHR immediately abandon any use of the term “Islamophobia”, remove it from existing official publications, and omit it from all future publications.

More information will be available at the ICLA side event this afternoon.

For links to previous articles about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, see the OSCE Archives.

A Passage to Warsaw

I returned from Warsaw late last night, after being up for 26 hours or so after two flights with a five-hour layover in between. So I’m running on approximately 2.47 cylinders at the moment.

I plugged in the new monitor this morning and fired it up, and it works just fine. I’m now re-attached to my Auxiliary Brain, and no longer an independent organism. Everything is back to normal.

I have a lot of interesting things to report. The past week’s events in Warsaw were momentous in many ways, even groundbreaking. We have a lot of interventions to post, and hours of good video. The OSCE news will probably go on for weeks.

Having so many Counterjihad people gathered in one place, we took the opportunity to hold Counterjihad Warsaw meetings on two of the evenings we were there, at times when we were not required to attend other events. Those will be reported separately.

But I also have a lot of email to catch up on. So bear with me.

Also: I’d like to thank all the people who wanted me in Warsaw, and chipped in to help me get there. You all know who you are; I couldn’t have done it without you.

Interviews from the OSCE Battle Space

Radical Islam

The Baron is heading home from Warsaw. A very long trip from Poland to Schloss Boddisey, about 18 hours counting layovers.

I’m having some computer problems that the tech people were unable to solve but they did reduce the problem enough to allow me to tell you about the radio interviews the Center for Security Policy did with some of the participants at the meeting in Warsaw.

Radio Interviews at OSCE

If you click on the link, you’ll see the buttons for the radio interviews:

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff • Liz Schmidt • Ned May • Stephen Coughlin

Hope you enjoy listening to them all. They worked hard – to me the most excruciating kind of labor: sitting in chairs listening to bureaucratic bumpf paid for by George Soros.

They made a difference

The Baron likes to say that the most we can do is move things at the margins. With all the preparation he did ahead of time, making sure that he and his colleagues could turn the globalist Soros’ words right back against them, that happened: a victory at the margins of keeping speech free for us all.

I hope you take the time to listen, especially to Steve Coughlin. He really is a leading light in this pushback.