Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/26/2016

In the German city of Duisburg a migrant burst into a church during a wedding ceremony, yelled “Allahu Akhbar”, tore down the decorations, and fondled a statue of the Virgin Mary. The sexton and a policeman intervened. After the man had calmed down, he was escorted by police to a hospital for psychiatric testing.

In other migration news, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said that Italy could not survive another year of immigration at current levels. Mr. Renzi threatened to veto the EU budget if Eastern European countries do not agree to take their share of the migrants.

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

Thanks to AF, Insubria, JD, MC, Nick, Reader from Chicago, 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.

Continue reading

German Parents Fined €300 for Refusing to Permit Their Son to Visit Mosque

Parents in the German town of Rendsburg were assessed a €300 fine for refusing permission for their 13-year-old son to participate in a school field trip to a mosque.

Apparently the “permission” that parents were asked to give was pro forma. It was not really optional. The visit was mandatory. The parents were fined. The boy will go to the mosque. Ve haf vays of making you visit the mosque…

Many thanks to Nash Montana for translating this brief item from oe24.at:

Student refuses mosque visit: €300 penalty

Parents are lodging an appeal. But still a €300 penalty is looming, and a forced visit to a mosque

According to the syllabus topic “The Orient — power factor, water and crude oil”, a school class in the German town of Rendsburg was scheduled to visit a mosque. But one 13-year-old student did not want to make the visit, as the online portal mmnews.de reports. The parents sought a dialogue with the school after the announcement of the field trip destination. Since they aren’t members of any denomination or faith community, they were of the opinion that no one can be forced to step inside a religious facility. “Why should we send our child to people who generally despise and condemn unbelievers?” the parents asked the school.

€300 penalty and forced visit

German Constitutional law would agree, but the responsible parties at the school see it different. The school’s headmistress filed a complaint with the police and the county school inspector issued a penalty charge notice against the mother as well as the father of the student. Reason: The child did not attend the “information event” at the mosque.

Now the parents look like “dangerous felons”, they say. There was a hearing. The penalty charge notice never considered any exculpatory circumstances. Therefore the parents “didn’t in a satisfying manner see to their child’s school attendance”. Now a €300 penalty charge looms, and a forced visit to the mosque. The parents have filed an appeal. Therefore this case will be heard in district court soon.

An Armed Heist to Finance the Syrian Jihad

Two culture-enrichers in Bavaria robbed a businessman who also happened to be the employer of one of them, and the authorities suspect that the money was intended to be used to finance the jihad being waged by U.S.-backed moderate terrorists in Syria.

Many thanks to Silentium Voces for translating this article from Bayern Depesche:

Suspicion of financing terrorists: Syrian refugees hold up their own boss

Redwitz — A week ago in the town of Redwitz, Bavaria two masked Syrian asylum seekers committed an armed robbery. The 22- and 23-year-old men used pepper spray to attack and overwhelm the owner of a tiling company in his apartment on the company premises, They then tied him up and broke into his safe, stealing several thousand euros and jewelry.

The suspects were arrested by the police on Tuesday morning and are under investigation after an appropriate request from the prosecutor’s office in Coburg. The stolen goods and a mask found in their apartments in Lichtenfels and Redwitz and are offered as evidence.

A woman driving the car with one of the asylum-seekers in at the time of the arrest was also arrested. She probably drove him to the scene of the crime and is suspected of assisting in the robbery.

Investigations revealed that the 23-year-old Syrian is a tiler who works for the tiling company in question and had thus attacked, tied up and robbed his own employer. According to media reports, the 67-year-old company owner had taken on the refugee in the summer to help him to integrate into German society. The craftsman is quoted as saying: “He repeatedly came to my shop and begged for work. Again and again.”

The prosecutor’s office in Bamberg now seriously suspects that at least the older asylum seeker had raided the company in support of so-called rebels in the fight against the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Continue reading

Bush on the Primrose Path

Obama’s ruination of MENA had method after all. And here we thought it was just mendacious madness. Now it turns out that after eight limp-wristed years he has succeeded in dragging home a goodbye gift for the whole world. Just what everyone needs: the soft music of a ticking-bomb crazy state.

BHO makes Bush’s iconic picture, holding hands with the Saudi prince as they walk through the bluebonnets, look positively benign:

Since Obama entered office nearly eight years ago, Iran’s record in advancing its aims has been of uninterrupted success.

Iran used the US withdrawal from Iraq as a means to exert its full control over the Iraqi government. It has used Obama’s strategic vertigo in Syria as a means to exert full control over the Assad regime and undertake the demographic transformation of Syria from a Sunni majority state to a Shiite plurality state.

In both cases, rather than oppose Iran’s power grabs, the Obama administration has welcomed them. As far as Obama is concerned, Iran is a partner, not an adversary. Since like the US, Iran opposes al Qaeda and ISIS, Obama argues that the US has nothing to fear from the fact that Iranian-controlled Shiite militias are running the US-trained Iraqi military. So too, he has made clear, that the US is content to stand by as the mullahs become the face of Syria.

In Yemen, the US position has been more ambivalent. In late 2014, Houthi rebel forces took over the capital city of Sana’a. In March 2015, the Saudis led a Sunni campaign to overthrow the Houthi government. In a bid to secure Saudi support for the nuclear agreement it was negotiating with the Iranians, the Obama administration agreed to support the Saudi campaign. To this end, the US military has provided intelligence, command and control guidance and armaments to the Saudis.

Iran’s decision to openly assault US targets then amounts to a gamble on Tehran’s part that in the twilight of the Obama administration, the time is ripe to move in for the kill in Yemen. The Iranians are betting that at this point, with just three months to go in the White House, Obama will abandon the Saudis, and so transfer control over Arab oil to Iran. For with the Straits of Hormuz on the one hand, and the Bab al Mandab on the other, Iran will exercise effective control over all maritime oil flows from the Arab world. [my emphasis – D]

It’s not a bad bet for the Iranians, given Obama’s consistent strategy in the Middle East.

Obama has never discussed that strategy. Indeed, he has deliberately concealed it. But to understand the game he has been playing all along, the only thing you need to do listen to his foreign policy soulmate.

According to a New York Times profile published in May, Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes is the president’s alter ego. The two men’s minds have “melded.”

Rhodes’s first foreign policy position came in the course of his work for former congressman Lee Hamilton.

In 2006, then president George W. Bush appointed former secretary of state James Baker and Hamilton to lead the Iraq Study Group. Bush tasked the ISG with offering a new strategy for winning the war in Iraq. The ISG released its report in late 2006.

The ISG’s report contained two basic recommendations. First, it called for the administration to abandon Iraq to the Iranians. The ISG argued that due to Iran’s opposition to al Qaeda, the Iranians would fight al Qaeda for the US.

Continue reading

Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/25/2016

A Kenyan immigrant named Getachew Fekede entered his former workplace in Roanoke, Virginia and started shooting. He killed one person and wounded three others before killing himself. Mr. Fekede had been fired by his former employer in March. The late perpetrator had come to the United States as part of the refugee resettlement program; however, based on his name, he was not a Muslim.

In other news, large fires could be seen in the “Jungle” migrant shantytown near Calais as French police began demolishing the camp.

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

Thanks to Dean, Diana West, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Reader from Chicago, Upananda Brahmachari, 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.

Continue reading

There Is No God But Allah in Bavaria

The Christian religion has been cleansed from most public institutions in Germany, including the schools. But that doesn’t mean there’s no religion in schools — it’s just not the Christian religion.

Many thanks to JLH for translating this article from Unser Tirol:

Students Must Recite “Allahu Akbar”

In an elementary school in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Bavaria), an outraged father went public, because his daughter had to learn a sura from the Koran by heart.

Elementary students in the fourth-year class in Garmisch-Partenkirchen are said to have been “forced” by teachers to memorize and recite the Islamic confession of faith.

This was discovered by an angry father whose daughter had told her parents about it. The students were supposed to read the sura aloud, alternating line-for-line between German and Arabic in an ecumenical religious service.

Politicians Protest

Since this instructional content has been vigorously discussed in public, the school and responsible teaching staff have been in the crossfire of numerous critics of such teaching methods.

Representatives of diverse political parties have already announced their willingness to proceed with all available means against those responsible.

Principal Gisela Ehrl did not wish to confirm the incident to unsertirol24, and offered no further information over the phone. According to her, the school will give its position in writing during the coming week.

Photo: This is the sura students must memorize

Antifas Allow No Mourning When Culture-Enrichers Murder German Kids

Last week a 16-year-old native German was stabbed and killed in Hamburg by one of those “southerners”, who has yet to be apprehended. The news of the murder did not make it into the national media in Germany — after all, it was just one white boy who was killed, and he doesn’t merit the same attention as all those brown people massacred by the Russians and the Assad regime in Aleppo, or all the Palestinians slaughtered by the Zionist Entity, or all the blacks murdered by white police officers in the USA.

If you’re a German, and you try to mourn for a fellow German who was murdered by a “southern-looking” person, you are racist xenophobe, and thereby become a valid target for the “anti-fascists” of the Left. The local Hamburg Antifas felt quite justified in their attempt to suppress any public expression of grief by their fellow citizens for the murdered boy.

Many thanks to Nash Montana for translating this article from Philosophia Perennis:

Antifas attack attendees of candlelight vigil for murdered 16-year-old

Barely acknowledged by the big media, a brutal crime occurred in Hamburg a few days ago: A 16-year-old was ambushed from behind while he was walking along the Alster with his 15-year-old girlfriend. He was stabbed multiple times [and killed], and the girlfriend was pushed into the Alster.

Many people were shocked, despite the persistent silence from the media about the incident. To express their mourning, within a short time they organized a candlelight vigil. They lit candles, put down flowers and grieved mostly in silence.

In the meantime it’s almost redundant to mention that not one politician of any of the big parties even showed up to commemorate or express solidarity.

Only the Hamburg AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) had planned to lay down a wreath. But because that became public knowledge, a gang of left-populists, radicals and extremists decided to interrupt the memorial ceremony. The Hamburg Antifa (Anti-Fascist Action) publicly announced their action. The people attending the ceremony found themselves surrounded by Antifas, and the ceremony could only continue after the police provided protection.

Continue reading

The Two Aleppos

The image of the Aleppo that Westerners are used to seeing consists of mounds of rubble with dead children amidst the debris. Yet there’s another Aleppo — the part that is still controlled by the Syrian government — that looks quite different. Some of the shots in the following video from Swiss TV may surprise you if you get all your news from CNN or the BBC.

Many thanks to Nash Montana for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Below is the article accompanying the video, also translated by Nash Montana:

Swiss TV shocks its viewers with current images from Aleppo

Western media shows us the same pictures over and over: destroyed houses, peaceful terrorists and an evil regime. But reality looks very different. Everywhere where the government has control the people are living peacefully and normally. And wherever the from the West supported terrorists are rampaging, the people flee and there is terror and destruction. Such is the reality in Aleppo of today. The city is divided into two parts.

In East Aleppo the Western-supported Al Qaeda terrorists are in control. Only about 5,000 to 10,000 civilians still live there. The rest of the population fled two years ago from the terrorists. Those remaining civilians in the East part of the city are prevented from fleeing by the terrorists.

West Aleppo, on the other hand, is controlled by the Syrian government. More than 1.5 million civilians live there — Muslims, Christians, Kurds and other minorities. In the Government-ruled areas normal life is continuing, or would if only the Western-supported terrorists in East Aleppo didn’t exist. They shoot rockets and grenades daily at the 1.5 million people of West Aleppo. Again and again, children die that are attacked on their way to and from school by terrorists.

The people are demanding from Assad that he finally clamp down more severely against the terrorists of East Aleppo. But terrorists still to this day receive new weapons and ammunition from Western states; the West is trying to prevent the Assad Government from stopping the terrorists.

Most of the Syrian refugees aren’t in Turkey, Germany or Austria — they fled to the Assad-controlled areas within Syria. Almost eight million refugees are at this time being taken care of by the Assad government in safe zones. But the West wants to put sanctions on these safe zones. It becomes more and more difficult for these refugees. Apparently Merkel & Co. want the people flee not to Assad, but to Germany. Why?

Video transcript:

Continue reading

The Great Game, Updated for 2016

The Obama administration’s rapprochement with Iran was obviously driven by commercial interests. Western companies, including many American ones, stood to profit handsomely when the sanctions were lifted. Given the longstanding Russian involvement in Iran, it’s no surprise to find that Russia has planted strategically-placed agents of influence in Western governments and corporations to advance its own Iran-related interests.

According to a report published today by the Center for Security Policy, a prominent foreign policy advisor to Hillary Rodham Clinton may be one of those agents of influence. Below is the press release from CSP:

Clinton’s Shadow Diplomat: Thomas Pickering and Russia’s Pipeline Sales to Iran…

“Clinton’s Shadow Diplomat” is a hard-hitting investigative report [pdf] from the Center for Security Policy, exposing the ties of former Ambassador Thomas Pickering to a Putin-linked Russian company that sold oil and gas pipelines to Iran and Syria when Pickering was on its Board of Directors. The report reveals Pickering’s overlapping roles: as Clinton’s Foreign Affairs Policy Advisor, as an Advisory Board member for two Iranian advocacy groups, as a paid Director for a Russian firm selling pipeline to Iran and Syria, as a paid consultant to Iranian aircraft contractor Boeing, and as a Senate committee hearing witness, all with a common goal of ending economic sanctions on Iran and reversing U.S. Iran policies.

As meticulously documented in “Clinton’s Shadow Diplomat,” Pickering was a paid Director for the Russian-owned company Trubnaya Metallurgicheskaya Kompaniya (TMK) from June 30, 2009 to June 26, 2012. TMK is majority-owned by Russian billionaire oligarch Dmitry Pumpyansky, a close Putin ally.

The investigation discovered extensive proof of TMK’s business dealings in Iran and Syria while Pickering was on the Board, including a financial offering disclosure, catalogs, marketing materials, websites, press releases, legal documents, reports from the steel industry press and Iranian customer websites. Sales of oil and gas pipelines to Iran were specifically prohibited under U.S. laws and executive orders.

According to TMK’s records, Pickering attended 143 of the 145 TMK Board meetings. Pickering is estimated to have been paid over half a million dollars for his service to TMK, based on TMK’s compensation rules.

“Clinton’s Shadow Diplomat” documents TMK’s relationships with three Iranian customers, all listed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as “Specially Designated Nationals” during the years Pickering served on the Board: the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), Petropars, and Pars Oil and Gas Company.

Continue reading

Say it Through the Refugee

Many thanks to Nash Montana for translating the latest essay by Anabel Schunke from Roland Tichy’s website:

Say it through the refugee

by Anabel Schunke

The migration crisis has unmasked the hypocritical double standard about human dignity in these parts. And it reveals it daily anew. As a text by a Syrian about the homeless in Berlin shows.

“Berlin forgets the homeless”, says the title in Tagesspiegel. At first glance, it’s a headline that recurs and reaches across the full spectrum of politics in the local media. Every year towards fall/winter: the question about the placement and housing of Germany’s homeless. Each year the answer turns out to be as shameful as in previous years. Just like in other countries we look away when it comes to the weakest within our population. Nothing pretty, but also nothing new.

Nevertheless, this text is remarkable. First because the actually rather left-leaning Tagesspiegel has put itself into the politically incorrect minefield of comparing the domestic population with refugees. And on the other hand because the author of the text is a refugee himself. And maybe it is exactly that factor that will close the politically incorrect gap that the comparison had caused in the first place. Because refugees are allowed to say things that we aren’t allowed to say. Just like earlier generations of Muslim immigrants, who in the meantime at times are also called Nazis. The politically incorrect elevates itself through the politically correct use of the refugee as a mouthpiece. An act of genius, in fact, although a deeply dishonest plot.

The good leftist racism

And here as well the good leftist racism shows itself, exactly as described by Gideon Boes: “bad racists, good racists, and Islam.” Meaning: Refugees are not subject to the same impeccable moral expectations of political correctness as are the domestic population and their writers. When the Turkish neighbor forbids his wife to go outside, this is merely a cultural peculiarity, but woe to the chauvinist that “genders” incorrectly at the university. Similarly with our refugee author: while the comparison of asylum seekers with parts of the domestic population may be yucky, and even worse “right-wing populist”, when it is the refugee himself who calls attention to the unfair state of affairs, then that’s totally OK. Finally the Gutmensch editor doesn’t have to wash his brain out with soap anymore after reading approving articles on ‘Tichy’s Einblick’ or ‘Achse des Guten’. Instead he can now say it directly through the refugee.

For a long time we have only been allowed to bloviate in the abstract, theoretical sense about something like dignity, while the Syrian author of the Tagesspiegel article shows us how practically every day dignity is violated in our society:

“In Syria we had no homeless; we had poor people. But in any case they didn’t sleep on the street. They had family or they were beggars who sometimes had more money than you yourself. To see homeless people is entirely new for us here.”

It is he who, through the good racism of a society that is beyond all measures stunted, and that has become paralyzed through political correctness, becomes the child from Hans-Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Who says that which all others secretly think, but he’s allowed to say it because we are ascribing to him those same childish-naïf attributes.

Meanwhile we Germans discuss dignity in theory by means of a fictitious example. Whether it is legitimate to shoot down an airplane carrying 164 people if the death of 70,000 people in a soccer stadium can thereby be prevented. Whether these fictitious people in their fictitious airplane containing fictitious terrorists through facing fictitious doom would lose their fictitious dignity if we fictitiously shot them down while exactly in that moment everywhere and repeatedly in this country many real people have their real dignity groped and infringed upon in a very real fashion.

Whose dignity?

Inevitably the question comes up about dignity itself. How we define it and who decides it; when it is regarded as infringed upon and when not. Because even our Constitution is not what God gave via a Moses-like middleman to us Germans. And the judges on the Supreme court aren’t God’s messengers. Hence the question about the substance of such a vague concept, and the risks as a consequence thereof, are entirely appropriate, while still not calling into question its basic existence.

Dignity is — as I have said already — a nebulous concept. The danger of its erosion is a constant. Who is doing the eroding is defined in this case through the current political climate: In recent decades in Germany it’s mostly been through the left-green media and minority groups of all kinds — Muslim support groups leading the way — which would all have each other’s backs.

What has resulted from this is a state that lets us discuss right and wrong into the finest ultimate detail — all the way to the remaining lifespan of fictitious airplane passengers and the cost of the lost dignity of these people when we take these last seconds, minutes from them — but all this completely hides the factual condition of our relationship with dignity.

Because of course the Syrian author is absolutely correct. Just like the German “Schmuddelkinder” [“The mucky pups”, the grubby kids, based on a song by Franz Josef Degenhardt, “Don’t Play With the Mucky Pups”, from 1965], who could be compared as well, and whose Schmuddelkind status is only constituted in so far as that they aren’t Syrian refugees. They are not new in this society, and they don’t belong to the sacrosanct Islamic culture to whom one — with sympathetic lordliness — concedes a few faux pas here and there.

Continue reading