Monthly Archives: June 2019

Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/30/2019

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The journalist Andy Ngo was set upon by Antifa demonstrators in Portland and severely beaten. City police stood down during the incident and did nothing to prevent the beating. Mr. Ngo was hospitalized overnight with bleeding on the brain. Sen. Ted Cruz has called on federal law enforcement to initiate an investigation of the mayor of Portland for the failure of the police to act.

In other news, for the first time in history a sitting US president has entered the territory of North Korea. Donald Trump walked across the DMZ into North Korea and conducted talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un for almost an hour.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, 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.

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Are Twitter’s Shareholders the Arbiters of Free Speech in the Netherlands?

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That’s what Martin Bosma asks during what seems to be a parliamentary committee hearing (I’m not sure exactly what it was; our Dutch readers can tell us). The incident that prompted the discussion was the suspension of Geert Wilders from Twitter due to his tweet about immigration.

Mr. Bosma is a member of Mr. Wilders’ party, the Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV). However, what is surprising in this instance is that that Jan Middendorp, a representative of a rival party, the VVD, is in broad agreement with the PVV on the issue.

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


Video link

Video transcript:

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Immigration X-Box in the Balkans

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The Balkan Route for refugees has reopened.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who recommended the following article for translation, sends this prefatory note:

Thanks to Saint Greta and her apostles — the resurgent Greens party — this is a non-story in the Austrian media. Everyone is focused on climate change and its associated disasters, or lack thereof.

Does the youngest ex-chancellor care? Not much. He just wants to be re-elected in September, whether on a climate platform or anything else.

Many thanks to JLH for translating this piece from the Austrian media project Addendum.org:

The Balkans Are Becoming Porous Again

by Georg Gassauer and Benedikt Morak

New figures show that there was a 76% increase in new arrivals in the pivotal land of Bosnia in 2019. More and more people are beginning what is known to immigrants, politicians and authorities as the “game” — the gamble of (illegal) travel along this passage to the EU. We investigated on the spot.

Something is happening again in the Balkans. That is shown by the numbers from inside the Immigration Taskforce of the Austrian Interior Ministry.

By the end of May/beginning of June of 2019, there were an estimated 80,000 persons somewhere along the chaotic Balkan route, between the Bosporus and Spielfeld. At several stations along the way, authorities register clear increases in comparison to the previous year at the same time: up 155% between Greece and North Macedonia; up 76% in the pivotal country of Bosnia; up 31% in Croatia.

More Attacks on the Balkan Route

After Italy was able to reduce passage over the Mediterranean to zero, the passage through the Balkans, called by immigrants, politicians, authorities and the residents of the region the Game, became attractive again. The route ex-chancellor Kurz had once declared closed became porous again. Needed for the game — the word is a play on computer games where it is necessary to pass different levels in order to reach a goal or break a record — are time, luck and a smartphone. Between the Aegean and the Alps, participating immigrants pass through level after level. The goal is Austria, Germany or Sweden. Many make it through; some are stranded along the way; several are killed. Our reporters Georg Gassauer and Benedikt Morak investigated at the most important stations. Encountering participants, major players and minor players, they traveled especially in Bosnia, the pivotal point on the route.

Level 1: Greece

Among those who play the game is Amir (name changed) from Afghanistan. He traveled on a forged Austrian pass from Turkey to Greece, intended to fly from there to Germany, but at the airport had to return to Start. German customs, which checked air passengers from Greece, were alerted. So Amir stayed there: the alternative was the land route.

Why the strictness? March 20, 2016 marked a kind of new beginning of European immigration policy. Because of the pressure from the Austrian government at the time, the borders of four countries on the western Balkan route (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, North Macedonia) were closed simultaneously. Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s diplomacy was being implemented, and the era of close cooperation between EU countries and Turkey began. The official position was that a refugee and immigration crisis like 2015 shouldn’t happen again. And in fact, the number of arrivals from that time was not equaled.

Nevertheless, despite all measures taken, 116,537 arrivals from Turkey to Greece were counted between April 1, 2016 and May 31, 2019. Amir from Afghanistan was one of them. And now, in the summer of 2019, the pressure on the border “is getting stronger and stronger.” So says Gerald Tatzgern, of the section for organized immigration crime in the federal police. He warns that migrants stopped for now on the Balkan route “are slowly losing their patience and want to continue.”

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Two Laments

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Years ago I used to assign Saturday as either Ranting Day or Poetry Day, depending on my mood. Yesterday I was busy with other things, so this week Sunday will have to serve as Poetry Day.

The first of the two poems below was written by Dymphna. It is possibly her greatest poem. She wrote it in the mid-1990s, a few months after her mother died.

Some context is in order: Dymphna’s mother married a man from a wealthy Irish family when she was young. For reasons I won’t go into here, he abandoned his wife and their two children when the latter were still infants. Dymphna’s mother became destitute, and there was no welfare in Florida at that time, so she had to go off to work. For several years the children were placed with various foster families, where conditions ranged from awful to severely abusive.

The priest at Dymphna’s mother’s church eventually helped her place her son and daughter at separate orphanages, one for boys and one for girls, where they were to remain until they were ten or eleven — i.e. old enough to be latchkey kids.

Her poem describes the moment she and her brother were separated from their mother and from each other to be taken to the orphanages. At the time she wrote these verses, her brother had been estranged from his mother and sister for many years, and no one knew where he was. She assumed he was dead, probably of heart disease, since all her mother’s brothers had died that way when they were relatively young. But he wasn’t dead: her cousin was able to locate him, and Dymphna and her brother began an intermittent correspondence that continued until his death last year.

This, then, was her lament:

Lament for My Brother

It was so long ago
Those who stopped my tears
Then, who could not countenance
My guttural sorrow,
Are no doubt dead
Or disarmed by age and distance.

It was so long ago.
Yet my tears are the solvent
Melting the time between here
And then. I am five again.
The little brother being forced
From my arms is four.
We are crying, in the moment before
We learn it is not allowed.

It was so long ago.
Yet the wrench of grief
Tightens my throat now
Brings me to my knees here.
The void where my little brother
Was is hollowed out still;
I cannot fill it.

It was so long ago.
Yet the loss is as current
As the moment here before us.
The gods to whom all moments are one
Who do not understand
My linear “long ago”
Cannot hear my plea
To protect him.

It was so long ago.
He’s no doubt dead by now.
The men in my family die young
Whether they stay or flee.
The women in my family don’t teach
Them how to use their hearts.
The men succumb when
Flight is no longer possible
And they are overtaken
By feeling.

It was so long ago.

The second poem was written in the early 17th century by the great metaphysical poet John Donne. Fifty years ago I had to study the metaphysical poets intensively for A-level English Literature. I don’t know how they do it nowadays, but in those days a student was expected to quote at length from the assigned poetry at the exam, working entirely from memory. Thus, in preparation for the exam I memorized reams of Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Vaughn, Crashaw, etc.

I memorized three of the five stanzas of the following poem, and they’re still here in my head, intact after half a century. However, we were also required to present them in the original 17th-century spelling, and unfortunately that aspect of the task has largely evaporated (although I do remember that “festival” was spelled “festivall”).

In this poem Donne is mourning the death of his wife, for whom he grieved deeply. The conceit is that he is writing it at midnight on St. Lucy’s Day, the shortest day of the year. Dymphna’s case is the opposite: she, too, died at about midnight, but her death was almost exactly at Midsummer’s.

A technical note: the “Goat” to which the lesser (i.e. weaker) sun has run is the constellation Capricorn, in which the winter solstice falls.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/29/2019

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Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini says that Carola Rackete, the captain of the Sea-Watch 3, attempted to sink a police launch. Ms. Rackete has been arrested and is now in Italian custody. Mr. Salvini has ordered the deployment of additional patrol vessels to block attempted incursions by migrant ferries.

In other news, the governor of Montana, Steve Bullock (D), vetoed a bill that would have guaranteed free speech on college campuses.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Insubria, JD, Reader from Chicago, SS, 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.

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The Curious Case of the Murder of Walter Lübcke

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Earlier this month we reported on the strange death of Walter Lübcke, a local CDU politician in the German city of Kassel. It seemed likely that the murder was a political assassination, but it wasn’t clear who might have been responsible for it, or why it happened.

The German establishment, never one to let a crisis go to waste, has used the killing of Walter Lübcke as an opportunity to target the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany). The two videos below present various aspects of the case as they have appeared in the media in recent days.

Many thanks to MissPiggy for the translations, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling. First, a basic account of the murder:


Video link

The second video features remarks by Gottfried Curio, a member of the Bundestag for the AfD, about the investigation of the Lübcke murder:


Video link

Video transcript #1:

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Shaky Angie: Climate Change Made Her Do It!

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Many years ago Richard Thompson wrote a song called “Shaky Nancy”*. I reckon we need an updated version now called “Shaky Angie” in honor of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who on two separate occasions recently was visibly trembling over her entire body. During the attack she suffered in Ukraine, the tremors were fairly extreme, based on the video.

According to Annalena Baerbock, the co-chair of the Green Party in Germany, Mrs. Merkel’s condition was induced by climate change. The chancelloress is evidently only the latest victim of the Climate Change Shakes.

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


Video link

Video transcript:

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The Goal Has Been Reached

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Taken together, the PayPal donations, snail-mail gifts, and donations to the GoFundMe page have now reached and exceeded the costs of Dymphna’s funeral expenses. You needn’t donate to the GoFundMe any longer; everything has been taken care of. As I mentioned earlier, any additional amounts that are specifically earmarked for the funeral will be donated to a reputable local charity that helps victims of sexual assault, including children.

Any words I might choose to express my gratitude are inadequate. The response over the past ten days has been staggering. I now have an idea of how many people truly appreciated Dymphna’s work.

My current situation: I’m trying to forestall the depression and isolation that so frequently afflict a man after the sudden death of his wife. My tendency at the moment is to wander aimlessly around this empty house, bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball in a shoebox. I’m fighting that by the time-honored method of going back to work.

Sitting down in this chair and starting to post again is the rough equivalent of the widower showing up at the office on the Monday morning following the funeral. Work is what he needs to keep himself on an even keel. He has a glazed look in his eyes, and his productivity is not up to his usual standards, but his boss (if he has a good one) is patient and understanding.

I don’t have any boss except for you, our readers, and I know you’re being patient. I suppose Vlad comes close to being my boss, although we’re actually more like unpaid business partners. In any case, he’s being patient with me, too.

I see that another subtitle file (translated from the French) has just come in. It needs editing and formatting, so I’d best stop my meandering and buckle down to work.

Thank you all once again. I’m sending out responses to everyone, both by email and snail-mail, but it will take a while, because there are so many of them.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/28/2019

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The Libyan coast guard rescued nearly 400 migrants off the coast of Libya over a period of four days this past week. Meanwhile, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Portugal have reportedly agreed to take some of the migrants on board the migrant-ferry vessel Sea-Watch 3, to which Italian authorities have denied entry.

In other migration news, the Catholic bishop of El Paso personally escorted seven migrants across the border from Mexico into Texas.

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

Thanks to Insubria, JD, KP, Reader from Chicago, Srdja Trifkovic, SS, 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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Matteo Salvini: “This Ship is a Pirate Ship”

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The Dutch-flagged migrant-ferry vessel Sea-Watch 3 is owned by the NGO Sea-Watch, which has its headquarters in Berlin. The organization’s funding sources are unclear — it has actually held fundraisers to pay for its reconnaissance aircraft, but this is obviously not the only means by which it pays its operating expenses.

Last month the Sea-Watch 3 was impounded by the Italian government after one of its uninvited appearances at an Italian port bearing a load of “refugees”. Then, on June 1, it was released from custody. And now it’s back again, testing the mettle of Italian authorities, and in particular that of Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, by defying the ban on migrant-ferry vessels and pushing on through to attempt a landing in Lampedusa.

The following video shows Mr. Salvini’s response to this latest incursion by the migrant ferry. Many thanks to FouseSquawk for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Video link

Below are excerpts from two articles about the Sea-Watch 3. First, from Yahoo News:

Rescue Ship With 42 Migrants Defies Italy Order to Stay Out

MILAN (AP) — A private sea rescue ship carrying 42 migrants it took aboard off Libya two weeks ago entered Italian waters Wednesday despite an explicit ban from Italy’s interior minister, who has threatened to seize the ship operated by a German aid organization and to arrest its captain.

Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said the captain of the Sea-Watch 3 broke the law both by disobeying direct orders not to cross into Italy’s territorial waters and by flouting measures that bar the migrant rescue ships of nonprofit groups from entering Italian jurisdiction.

“The right to defend our borders is sacred,” Salvini said.

And from ANSA:

Italy: Sea Watch Ignores Stop Order, Salvini Blasts ‘Hostile Act’

Migrant rescue ship in front of Lampedusa

(ANSA) – Palermo, June 26 – The Sea-Watch 3 migrant-rescue ship on Wednesday defied an order from a tax police motor launch to stop and pressed on until it came close to the port of Lampedusa.

Carabinieri police were lined up on the quay.

Captain Carola Rackete, who has said she will land the 42 migrants on board despite a docking ban, risks a 50,000 euro fine and the impounding of the vessel.

She could also be probed for favouring illegal immigration.

The migrants have been at sea since they were rescued two weeks ago as Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini refused permission to dock in Italy. Salvini said Wednesday that the ship had committed a hostile act and he called on the Netherlands to take in the migrants on board. The search-and-rescue ship flies the Dutch flag, although it is run by a German NGO. “The Dutch government cannot pretend nothing has happened,” said League leader Salvini, who has spearheaded the government’s tough stance of refusing access to NGO-run search-and-rescue ships to Italy’s ports. “A ship flying the flag of the Netherlands has ignored the bans (on entry) and the orders to stop and it is heading to Lampedusa. “It’s a provocation and a hostile act. I had written to my Dutch counterpart and I’m happy that the Italian embassy in The Hague is taking a formal step with the government of the Netherlands. “Italy deserves respect. We expect the Netherlands to take in to immigrants on board”.

Video transcript:

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The Burkini Wars

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Several years ago France passed a law against wearing the hijab in public. This was a rearguard action by what remains of French culture in a society that has already been heavily Islamized, and is at least 15% Muslim. Needless to say, the Muslim population of France considers the new law an outrage, and is taking active steps to thwart it.

The two videos below discuss recent actions staged by Muslim women who wear their burkinis to the swimming pool in defiance of the law. Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translations, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling.

The first video talks about the fact that these acts are provocations — elements of the “soft jihad” that weaponize aspects of kuffar culture, in this case the strong taboo against “discrimination” — to demoralize and weaken civil society among non-Muslims:


Video link

The second video features a former (or lapsed) Muslim who explains in no uncertain terms what all these burkini capers mean in terms of the 1400-year-old war waged by Islam against the infidels. No one is a fiercer defender of women’s rights than a woman who has managed to escape the stranglehold of sharia.

Ava Lon sends this background on the speaker:

Zohra Bitan was born in 1964, a daughter of Algerian immigrants. She is married to a “Breton Jew”, as she likes to introduce herself, and is a former Socialist Party activist and member of LICRA. She was also the spokesman for Manuel Valls during the Socialist Party primary of 2011. She is now a popular blogger for the French Huffington Post.


Video link

Video transcript #1:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/27/2019

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The culture-enricher who beaned Rasmus Paludan with a rock will be deported from Denmark after he serves his sentence. Mr. Paludan has often been featured in this space as an unrepentant “Islamophobe”.

In other news, according to recent reports the Swedish security police agency Säpo is now secretly deporting foreign “extremists”.

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

Thanks to Andy Bostom, C. Cantoni, EO, Insubria, KP, Reader from Chicago, SS, 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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Geert Wilders, Holocaust Denier

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Geert Wilders declined to attend the most recent court session in the latest “hate speech” trial against him — he had better things to do with his time. In his absence, various fruits ’n’ nuts testified on behalf of the prosecution.

The PVV sends this translated report about the latest shenanigans.

Absent Wilders is linked to Holocaust at the ‘fewer Moroccans’ trial

Geert Wilders refused to listen to the “nonsense” of the “victims” of his fewer-Moroccan statements. He stayed away from his trial. And so missed allegations that Wilders “wants to set in motion a Holocaust.”

When the Court of Justice sits down in the courtroom at Schiphol in the morning, the seat of the PVV leader appears empty. The judges have to settle with a tweet from Wilders. “I’m just going to work in the Lower House today.” Because Wilders has no desire to hear ‘the nonsense’of ‘so-called injured parties’.

Who are mainly ‘decent citizens’, rooted Turkish and Moroccan Dutchmen, who were ‘deeply hurt’ by Wilders, watching television in March 2014, their lawyers say.

But the trial has also brought forward declarations with more remarkable motives. Jeroen de Kreek gets the opportunity to speak. He argues that Wilders actually used the word Moroccans ‘euphemistically’. Wilders’ words were, he says, directed against Jews. “It is terrorism-related deception. His great heroes are Jew-haters.” They were ‘behind the Second World War and the Holocaust’. In fact, De Kreek argues, Wilders’ statements could ‘trigger a next Holocaust’.

De Kreek says that he is also a victim because of his Jewish origin. After all, Wilders’ statements are equivalent to ‘Juden raus’, he argues.

The court hears it all unmoved, but the lawyers for the others who claim to be affected sighs. ‘We don’t want to be in the same corner with him,’ one will later say in the corridor.

Jews

After all, De Kreek is no stranger, not even in the Wilders trial. A former lawyer himself, he was already convicted of insulting Jews. He previously denied the Holocaust himself, via his websites, and was even considered completely of unsound mind by the court in Amsterdam after he had threatened Minister Jeanine Hennis at the time. His statements could ‘best be ignored’ because of his narcissistic personality disorder and chronic psychoses.

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The Greens Will Build the PRC in Germany

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On two recent occasions German Chancellor Angela Merkel has displayed severe and obvious whole-body tremors — what you might call the Rattlesnake Shake.

The first video below shows video excerpts from both those shaky occasions, particularly the most recent one. The second video uses the first incident as a jumping-off point to speculate about the possible ascendancy of the Greens — who got the largest share of the vote in the recent European Parliamentary elections — after the all-but-inevitable ouster of Mrs. Merkel and her replacement by a palatable CDU cardboard cutout such as AKK. This clip uses excerpts from an interview with Robert Habeck of the Green Party in which he explicitly declares his goal to be the establishment of a People’s Republic of Germany along the lines of the one in China.

Many thanks to MissPiggy for the translations, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling.

Video #1: The Shakes


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Video #2: The Greens


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Video transcript #1:

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