Category Archives: Politics

“Immer wieder Angriffe auf Rabbiner”

Deutsche Welle: Erneut Angriff auf Rabbiner in Deutschland. “Schon wieder wird in Deutschland ein Rabbiner auf der Straße beleidigt und bespuckt. Die Europäische Rabbinerkonferenz sieht “das religiöse Miteinander in Deutschland” und die Religionsfreiheit bedroht.”

“Teichtal hofft auf eine Reaktion der gesamten Gesellschaft. “Alle Menschen in Deutschland sollten die Zivilcourage haben, aufzustehen und zu sagen: Das wollen und werden wir nicht akzeptieren! Wir werden keine Akzeptanz für Inakzeptanz haben und keine Toleranz für Intoleranz.””

“Geistige Brandstifter”

Deutsche Welle: Wie gefährlich ist die Identitäre Bewegung? “Der Verfassungsschutz ist zum Schluss gekommen: Die Identitäre Bewegung ist rechtsextrem. Was wollen die Aktivisten, die sich gern als modern und moderat verkaufen, wirklich?”

“Aus dem Ethnopluralismus erwächst die Forderung nach “Remigration”: Migranten und Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund sollen in ihre “Herkunftsländer” zurückgeschickt werden. Speit meint: “Hier sind sie wirklich knallhart. Sie sagen eindeutig: wer nicht deutscher Abstammung ist, hat in Deutschland nichts zu suchen.” Wer zwar einen deutschen Pass hat, aber Wurzeln in der Türkei, der muss also zurück in die Heimat der Vorfahren? “Nicht zwangsläufig”, sagt IB-Chef Fiß im Gespräch mit der DW. Wieder bemüht er sich, zu betonen, dass seine Bewegung nichts gegen Menschen mit ausländischen Wurzeln habe.

Diese Uneindeutigkeit sei eine “diskursive Taktik der IB”, sagt der Journalist Speit. “Sie wissen, was sie wann und wo sagen oder nicht sagen sollten, um moderat zu erscheinen.” Ansonsten könne man leicht erkennen, welch radikale Positionen sie in Wirklichkeit vertreten würden. “Sie halten sich zum Beispiel massiv zurück bei der Frage, wie Remigration organisiert werden soll. Sollen da wieder Züge fahren?””

“Though 72 hours is the longest a minor can be legally confined in such a facility, some had been there almost a month”

The Atlantic: What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse. “Dolly Lucio Sevier evaluated dozens of sick children at a facility in South Texas. She found evidence of infection, malnutrition, and psychological trauma.”

“But when Sevier asked the 38 children she examined that day about sanitation, they all said they weren’t allowed to wash their hands or brush their teeth. This was “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease,“ she later wrote in a medical declaration about the visit, the document that the lawyers filed in federal court and also shared with me. (Asked for comment on this story, a Customs and Border Protection official wrote in an email that the agency aims to “provide the best care possible to those in our custody, especially children.“ The agency’s “short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations,“ the official added, “and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis.“ )

As agents brought in the children she requested, Sevier said, the smell of sweat and soiled clothing filled the room. They had not been allowed to bathe or change since crossing the Rio Grande and turning themselves over to officials. Sevier found that about two-thirds of the kids she examined had symptoms of respiratory infection. The guards wore surgical masks, but the detainees breathed the air unfiltered. As the children filed in, Sevier said she found evidence of sleep deprivation, dehydration, and malnutrition too.”

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“Trump is not simply a serial liar; he is attempting to murder the very idea of truth”

The Atlantic: Trump’s Sinister Assault on Truth. “The president appears committed to destroying the very idea of facts.” By Peter Wehner, contributing editor at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC.

“Trump is not simply a serial liar; he is attempting to murder the very idea of truth, which is even worse. “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda,“ according to the Russian dissident and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. “It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.“
[…]
Destroy the foundation of factual truth, and lies will be normalized. This is what the Czech dissident (and later president) Václav Havel described in the late 1970s when he wrote about his fellow citizens making their own inner peace with a regime built on hypocrisy and falsehoods. They were “living within the lie.“ In such a situation life becomes farcical, demoralizing, a theater of the absurd. It is soul-destroying.

The United States is still quite a long way from the situation Havel found himself in. But to keep it that way—to keep civic vandalism from spreading—we all have a role to play, including calling out lies, including the lies of Trump, in every way we can.

The most obvious thing Americans can do is to vote for men and women who prize integrity and are, in the main, truth-tellers. It doesn’t seem too much to ask that we not vote for those who are chronically dishonest and corrupt. Americans can also end their financial support for parties that are aiding and abetting compulsive liars.“

(Emphasis mine.)

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