Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/31/2019

President Trump said in an interview that he supports an alliance between the Brexit Party and the “Conservatives” in December’s elections in the UK. Mr. Trump said that a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn would be a disaster for the country.

In other news, Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi announced his resignation after a month of violent protests in which more than 200 people have been killed.

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

Thanks to JD, Reader from Chicago, RR, 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. I 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 Swedish Woman Speaks the Simple Truth

The following video shows a woman-in-the-street interview in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. The original video (here) was close-captioned in English, and Vlad and I just converted it to regular subtitles, so I don’t know who to credit for the translation:

Video transcript:

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B-Day, 31st October 2019?

Today, at long last, is Brexit Day — or such was the vehement promise of Prime Minister Boris “BoJo” Johnson. Our English correspondent Seneca III sends his remarks on the topic.

B-Day, 31st October 2019?

by Seneca III

It is roughly 13 hours to go before Boris Johnson’s original deadline for departure. Looking at today’s possibilities from a Machiavellian/Sun Tzu perspective, the crazy thought running through my head is that this could be a perfect moment for a surprise attack. There will now be a general election on 12th December, and by engineering this Johnson has contained the enemy on a battlefield and to a battle at a distant, clearly defined starting time and date of his choosing. The whole of the opposition is now totally focused on electioneering at the expense of all other matters.

The House of Commons sits beginning at 9:30am today for some mundane routine business, and the Lords assemble to ratify the Election Bill at 11:00am. Thus, all appears to be the calm before the storm and probably neither House will be well-attended. If Johnson and Dominic Cummings, his senior adviser, do actually have a plan and a legislative trick/tool to push No-Deal through before anything can be done to stop them, then timing is crucial and depends on the Lords’ swift ratification of the Election Bill before Johnson and Cummings strike with a preemptive coup de grâce.

This, if it eventuates, would explain a lot of the reasons why Johnson has gone through the motions of presenting a patently unacceptable ‘Deal’ (a modified May’s Withdrawal Agreement) to the House, has meekly complied with every corrupt ruling that has been imposed on him, the strange way he responded to the Extension imposed on us, and has patiently accepted a lot of stick from his own supporters.

It is a weird situation all round, but in these times nothing, absolutely nothing, no matter how way-out, is now out of the question.

Irrespective, whatever happens today and in the immediate future, the abiding reality is that any introduction of external controls on a stable system of socio-political governance that has traditionally been maintained by internal balances inevitably leads to chaos.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/30/2019

Swiss police conducted anti-terror raids across various parts of Switzerland yesterday. The operations netted the arrest of eleven suspected mujahideen.

In other news, the Pentagon has released an aerial video of the raid on the Islamic State compound in Syria in which Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed.

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

Thanks to JD, 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. I 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 Truth Shall Get You Jailed

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s book about her encounter with Austrian “justice”, The Truth Is No Defense, will be published next month by the New English Review Press.

The Truth Shall Get You Jailed

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

In the past week, two eerily similar polls — one in Germany (available in German only) and one in the United States — made it into the public sphere. Both concerned the pillar of freedom, free speech, and both sadly portend the end of what countless brave souls on both sides of the Atlantic who died on so many battlefields valiantly fought for.

November 2019 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ostensibly ushered in the end of the Communist iron grip on Eastern Europe. Following the end of World War II, Communism had brutally separated the free West from the subjugated East, and nowhere was this partition more glaringly obvious than in individual liberty or lack thereof. Thirty years have now passed since that glorious November day. I watched the tearing down of the wall by East Berliners desperately seeking freedom — the freedom to speak, think, move, exist — live on television, having visited East Berlin only a year before. I was ecstatic for the people of East Germany, hoping they would be able to savor their hard-fought freedom as I have done over and over.

The widespread disillusionment that has set in over the past decades pains me. Just a few days ago, the Post-Communists won the parliamentary elections of the state of Thuringia in what was once East Germany, and I am quite certain post-election analyses will show that the block of Post-Communist voters consists of mostly young people who have no recollection or experience of the evil of Communism.

And so it comes as no surprise when a well-known German opinion research institute publishes a poll indicating that “nearly two-thirds of [those polled] are convinced that nowadays one must be very careful regarding the topics about which one can speak freely because there many unwritten laws indicating which opinions are permissible and which opinions are not permissible.” In addition, 58% of those polled no longer feel safe speaking freely in public, with only 17% agreeing that they can voice their opinion freely on the Internet. More than 40% sense that political correctness is overemphasized, while 35% have decided for themselves to voice their opinions only in a private setting.

The German poll is complemented by a — frankly, frightening in its ramifications — US poll: a whopping 51% of Millennials call for fines and even jail time for “hate speech.” In a survey conducted by the Campaign for Free Speech, more than 60% call for restrictions on speech in some way. While the Campaign’s director finds the results “frankly extraordinary,” they are hardly surprising. Speech restrictions coupled with hefty fines and, in some instances, even jail time have become the norm in Europe, with my case being one of countless others. Moreover, the results of both polls are what free speech activists on both sides of the Atlantic have been warning about for at least the past decade: at international forums such as the United Nations and the (perhaps lesser-known) Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, these very speech restrictions have been not only concocted, but also weaponized and successfully applied. In one case in point, at an official OSCE forum in Vienna in 2015, which I attended, we were told that speaking the truth may constitute “hate speech”, because “sometimes truth is difficult.” Secretary General Antonio Guterres of the United Nations calls for stepping up international efforts to suppress “hate speech.”

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/29/2019

For the fifth straight day, demonstrators took to the streets of Iraq to protest government corruption. In the Shi’ite city of Karbala, security police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 18 of them.

In other news, the House of Commons voted to support Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s call for a general election, which will be held on December 12.

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

Thanks to FL, JD, 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. I 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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Muslima Rages Against Michael Stürzenberger in Offenbach

The doughty German anti-Islam activist Michael Stürzenberger, who is often prosecuted but never daunted, appeared in the city center of Offenbach a few days ago to give one of his informative presentations on Islam. A young Muslima was so enraged by his actions that she threw a tantrum while the video cameras were running.

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

MissPiggy has also translated the text that accompanied the video at Politically Incorrect:

On Friday October 25th, as part of their Germany tour, the citizens’ movement Pax Europa (BPE) were in Offenbach. BPE members hung up 160 posters at 80 locations and distributed thousands of flyers to interest citizens in the event. The planned mosque construction by Millî Görüş in the already strongly “enriched” city means it has great need for information.

The establishment parties are happy about the €4.5 million project with a minaret for 600 Muslims. It is estimated that 14,000 Muslims live in Hessen’s fifth-largest city, and to date there are already ten mosques. Friday’s rally at the Aliceplatz between 12 noon and 7pm included a very exciting discussion with the citizens (See video). According to the Frankfurter Rundschau, the magistrate of the city reacted to the posters on Tuesday with a statement in which it wished to have “no imported debates on the subject for parties to catch votes”. If a mosque was a topic, then it would be discussed by those affected. Well, this magistrate is obviously badly informed. The BPE is not a “party trying to catch votes”, but rather a citizens’ movement that has been enlightening people about Islam for over 15 years. And this magistrate should be grateful when the discussion is enriched with extensive facts about the threat of political Islam. The BPE provided citizens with information that has been withheld from them by the mainstream media and the old parties.

OP Online also reported about the poster campaign and the BPE rally, tendentiously as expected, and called it a “controversial right-wing populist campaign”:

“Offenbach is not a good place for hate demonstrations by right-wing or right-wing populist movements: in 2017, an appearance by the AfD politician Alexander Gauland at the Stadthof in front of just forty sympathizers was drowned by the whistling concert of the counter-demonstrators.

“Also the action of the right-wing populist ‘citizen movement Pax Europa’ (BPE) planned for Friday (October 25, 2019) is already encountering resistance. The fact that the BPE is advertising its event throughout the city with the right-wing populist and Islam opponent Michael Stürzenberger, who has been watched by the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution and convicted of incitement of the people, has caused controversy.”

Video transcript:

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Bad Craziness in Badalona

Badalona is a culturally enriched suburb of Barcelona. In recent years the fights between drug-trafficking gangs in Badalona have become grotesquely violent and deadly. It’s worth noting that these are enricher vs. enricher battles, apparently involving rival Pakistani clans.

Note: photos in the media of the incident described below are gory and/or pixelated, and thus not useful or appropriate for posting here. Readers who are interested in seeing what the mayhem looked liked are invited to follow the link.

Many thanks to FouseSquawk for translating this article from El Pais:

One dead and two gravely injured in a gang fight in Badalona

Various witnesses described a fight with chains, knives and baseball bats

Barcelona
October 28, 2019

The young man, Jean Pierre (19), was clearing up the last tables of the bar where he worked yesterday, in front of the Gorg Metro stop in Badalona, when he saw “a mountain of people coming up from the beach.” He was certain that there were some 30-40, located in the middle of a type of small walkway, they began with insults and “ended up hitting each other with machetes and clubs”. He and his friend closed the doors of the bar because of what could have occurred. One youth died and there two more were gravely wounded in the gang fight that took place Sunday at 10pm, according to what the Catalan police reported. The Urban Guard has detained nine persons, all of Pakistani origin.

The mayor of the municipality, the Socialist Alex Pastor, explained that two clans fighting for territorial control of the drug traffic were there expressly to confront each other. “One of the groups arrived from Barcelona, from the neighborhood of Ciutat Vella”, he indicated in an interview on TV3. On RAC1 the Counselor for the Interior, Miguel Buch, also referred to a settling of accounts over a drug conflict. Fights with knives and clubs have occurred repeatedly in the center of Barcelona in recent years for control of the area. The police have attributed the battles between the clans to attempts to dominate the sale of merchandise and drugs in the center of the city. “They always resolve their conflicts with a lot of violence,” note police sources.

Irene (34) is still shaken. Jean Pierre, a waiter at the bar she is in charge of, called her in the night where she is now seated, telling her what was happening. Upon parking her car, she saw a young guy saying, “I’m dying, I’m dying,” and ran to ask for help from the police. “He raised his red shirt squirting blood from his head to his legs,” she explained. When she arrived at the bar, just a few meters further on, another young man hidden behind a pillar repeated the same: “They told me not to approach, but how was I not going to approach if he was yelling that he was going to die?” He had at least six stab wounds, according to the account by Jean Pierre, who also saw him. “His skin was opened like meat,” describes Irene, who took his pulse, hoping that the ambulance would arrive.

The battle did not last more than ten minutes, say a group of neighbors, who commented in a group about what happened. “They caught one on a corner and beat him without stopping,” they explain among themselves. “It was hard to see,” they say of the fight, which they became aware of from the screams that they heard from their balconies. They had no doubt that the fight had ended very badly. They called the police, but nobody dared to go down into the street. They had never seen anything similar before.

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Brad Johnson on the Bagging of Baghdadi

[The above graphic doesn’t really have anything to do with this post. I just thought it was a hoot, and felt compelled to post it.]

Well, it seems that this time Schrödinger’s Caliph is really most sincerely dead. In the following interview, the retired CIA station chief Brad Johnson discusses the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from an intelligence perspective.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for conducting the interview and uploading the video:

Hat tip for the graphic: MissPiggy.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/28/2019

Populist parties scored a decisive electoral victory in the central Italian province of Umbria, gaining solid a majority of the vote. The Lega (Matteo Salvini’s party) rose from 14% to 36.9%, while Fratelli d’Italia (Giorgia Meloni’s party) increased from 6.2% to 10.4%.

In other news, thousands of protesters gathered outside Trump Tower in Chicago during President Trump’s visit to the city.

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

Thanks to Insubria, JD, 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. I 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 AfD Triumphs in Thuringia

As reported here last night, yesterday’s elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia devastated the CDU (Angela Merkel’s party) and the SPD (the Social Democrats). Although it only received 23% of the vote — compared with 30% for Die Linke — the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) was the big winner in Thuringia, since it more than doubled its result from the previous election.

The two videos below concern the AfD and events in Thuringia. Many thanks to MissPiggy for the translations, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling.

The first video shows an excerpt from the AfD’s victory celebration last night in Thuringia. The two speakers are Björn Höcke, a leader of the AfD in Thuringia and a member of the state parliament, and Alexander Gauland, the co-leader of the AfD at the federal level and a member of the Bundestag:

The second video shows the reaction of Alice Weidel — the other co-leader of the AfD — when an infiltrator of an AfD event publicly mimes the slitting of her throat:

MissPiggy has also translated this article from the Badische Neueste Nachrichten:

AfD Doubles Results

The Left wins Thuringia election: No government in sight October 27th, 2019

Erfurt — Historic victory for Bodo Ramelow in Thuringia, but great uncertainty remains about the future government: The Prime Minister and his Left Party [Die Linke] have become the strongest force in a federal state for the first time in the state elections on Sunday.

But the current red-red-green coalition lost its majority. The CDU, which had always received the most votes since 1990, plunged to its worst result on Sunday. It was in third place behind the AfD, which more than doubled its result. The search for a coalition is likely to be extremely difficult. The parties may have to break new ground.

According to projections by ARD and ZDF, the Left increased to 31 percent (2014: 28.2 percent) and achieved the best result ever in a state election. The CDU with top candidate Mike Mohring dropped to 21.8 percent (2014: 33.5) — a drop of more than 11 percentage points. The AfD, which is lead in Thuringia by Björn Höcke, the spokesman for the right-wing group know as Die Flügel, jumped from 10.6 to 23.5 percent. The SPD continued to plummet: to a new low of 8.2 percent (12.4). The Greens were at 5.1 percent (5.7). The FDP reached 5.0 percent (2.5). and was concerned about qualifying entry into parliament.

Ramelow, so far the only Prime Minister in Germany for the Left party, spoke in the evening of a complicated task with regard to the formation of the government. At the same time he stressed: “I see myself clearly confirmed. Given the approval rating that my party has received, the government mandate is clear with my party. And I will also accept this mandate.”

The Red-Red-Green coalition clearly missed the required majority of 46 seats in the Landtag according to the projections. In purely mathematical terms, three coalition options were possible: red-red-green and the FDP would together achieve a narrow majority of 47 seats. The Left and CDU (50 seats) as well as the Left and AfD (51 seats) would also have a mathematical majority. All constellations, however, are politically difficult and were partly excluded before the election.

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Fathers of Daughters

This week’s edition of Dymphna’s Greatest Hits was originally posted on Fathers’ Day in 2005.

Fathers of Daughters

by Dymphna
June 19, 2005

Father’s Day is a pale feast compared to what we do in May for mothers. That’s understandable since mothering roles have changed less than fathering has in the last generation. The daddy template is broken, or if not broken, certainly skewed and bent by stress. As the job has become more thankless and more easily taken from them, fewer daddies are to be found at their posts.

The easiest piece to see of this sad situation is the animus that the previous generation’s feminists have for men. Their anti-male bias has taken its toll on men, but it has not served women well either. Feminist politics are those of resentment and victimization. The younger generation of women coming along behind them are not eager to trap themselves in this ghetto where men are vilified and condescended to.

The most damaging thing the feminist movement did to women was to push fathers to the periphery. “I’d-rather-do-it-myself” was a mantra whose end result was not stronger, happier children. Long-term studies of the children of divorce do not paint a pretty picture.

In contrast to this philosophy, I offer two anecdotal pieces of evidence of the importance of fathers for girls. We know they’re crucial for boys if they are to grow up able to strive and to maintain themselves in the world as productive adults, able — as Freud said — to work, to love, and to play. Without Dad, some of that will wither. What about the girls, then?

Here are two stories that show what a woman can only accomplish with the help of her father. These are fathers who had to buck the culture to give their daughters what they needed. They are brave and courageous and anonymous men who deserve our attention on Father’s Day.

The first story appeared this week in the print edition of The Wall Street Journal. Neo-neocon reports the serendipitous appearance at her front door of a copy of the Journal which contained an article entitled “Married at 11, a Teen in Niger Returns to School,” with Roger Thurow’s byline. Neo-neocon relates the sad story she read of the young Muslim girls of the Southern Sahara who face several horrific problems directly related to gender.

The first is genital mutilation. The second is premature marriage at wholly inappropriate ages to men much older than they. These early marriages result in pregnancy in little bodies that are not yet ready to bear babies to term. When the babies are ready to be born they cannot easily leave a womb which has no room to let them pass. The result is protracted labor in which long days of pressure on the walls of the uterus cause it to tear a hole between the uterus and vagina. The result is a fistula. The result is urinary incontinence and social ostracism for smelling so bad.

The girl under discussion here was sold by her father into marriage in exchange for a camel. Mr. Thurow gives us her story:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/27/2019

The Washington Post reported on the death of Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with a headline describing him as the “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State”. There’s no word on how the venerable WaPo reconciled that description with its earlier coverage depicting ISIS as purveyors of a distorted and “extremist” interpretation of Islam.

In other news, demonstrators in Hong Kong hurled Molotov cocktails after police used water cannons and fired tear gas and rubber bullets at them to disperse the protesters.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Diana West, Reader from Chicago, RR, 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. I 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 Hollowing-Out of the Political Spectrum in Thuringia

An election was held today for the state parliament in Thuringia, which was once part of the DDR, a.k.a. East Germany. The two videos below concern today’s political events in Thuringia. Many thanks to MissPiggy for the translations, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling.

The first video shows a breakdown of the projected vote in a TV news report. In Thuringia, as in almost the entire West, the political spectrum is being hollowed out: votes for the “center” are disappearing, leaving the stage to the hardcore left and the “far right”.

Angela Merkel’s CDU is what passes for the “center-right” in Germany. It lost massively in the Thuringian election, so much so that if it were to ally with the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) — which it would never agree to — it could not form a government in the state. The AfD received more votes than the CDU, but no other party (with the possible exception of the FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei, Free Democratic Party, which got 5.5% of the vote) would ever ally with it.

You’ll notice that the Left is still the big winner in Thuringia. The Left (the party, that is, Die Linke, the sanitized successor to the ruling communist party in the DDR) got the largest share of the vote, 30%. Its traditional allies, the SPD and the Greens, got 8% and 5.5% respectively. All this enthusiasm for socialism is coming from East Germany, which is reputed to be allergic to such things after its lengthy bout of Communism. But Thuringian voters gave more than 40% of their votes to the commies and their allies, and less than 25% to the AfD.

The left parties don’t have enough seats to form a coalition government. However, if the CDU were to join them — which is what this video is speculating about — they could do it:

The second video shows an alcohol-fueled diatribe by Mike Mohring, a CDU politician in Thuringia and one of its candidates. Mr. Mohring is as nasty and vitriolic as only a self-righteous leftist can get when fighting “Nazis”. But remember, this guy is actually “center-right”:

Video transcript #1:

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