Swabians In Berlin Soon To Be Wearing Yellow Mercedes Stars

Remember that Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Berlin back in the bad old days with all those signs and scribblings about “Don’t Buy from Jews!” and the like? Of course you don’t.

Schwaben

But many from Berlin’s enlightened anti-gentrification left do remember and have now come up with the breathtakingly brilliant idea of introducing this same simple asymmetrical tactic against the “hated” Berlin Swabian community by spraying “Don’t Buy from Swabians!” on the walls around town, too.

The evil Swabians are hated here, you see, because they work hard and are successful and make lots of money (and the cliché goes that they’re  tightwads, too, but that’s beside the point) and, through their very presence, therefore increase Berlin property values which is an awful thing to do because those of the enlightened left (like most other Germans) do not own property but prefer to pay rent instead and this pushes the rents up and laber, laber, laber (blah, blah, blah) been there done that.

There can be no losers in Germany in general and Berlin in particular, you see (it’s verboten or something). That’s why there are so many of them here, I guess.

Der anonyme Unmut regt sich gegen die Schwaben, weil sie angeblich die Besonderheiten des Stadtviertels veränderten und die Preise auf dem Wohnungsmarkt in die Höhe trieben. In Berlin leben schätzungsweise rund 300.000 Schwaben.

„Kauft nicht bei Schwab’n!“

Where’s The Enlightenment When You Need It?

This is German regulation madness at its best. Or, to be fair, Berliner Green Shirt regulation madness at its best.

Mendelssohn

The city district council of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (the Greens) is currently causing not just a little bewilderment by refusing to name the square in front of Berlin’s Jewish Museum after Moses Mendelssohn, the German Jewish Enlightenment philosopher. No, not because they’re anti-Semites (at least not openly). It’s because Mendelssohn was not a woman.

You see, the district parliament decided back in 2005 (Greens and SPD) that 50 percent of the district’s streets and squares had to be named after women. Until that goal is reached, no new streets or squares will be allowed to be named after men, except in exceptional cases. Which this one isn’t, I guess.

This is about as small-minded as you can get, of course, and it fits perfectly with mainstream Green ideology, I find, in that nothing the Greens ever do or say can ever be allowed to be labelled as being small-minded or petit bourgeois in any way. But of course practically everything they do, well, is.

Die kleingeistige Posse spielt vor der Tür des weltweit bekannten Jüdischen Museums. Die Hauptakteure hocken in der mit Abstand stärksten Fraktion des Bezirks: Es sind die Grünen. Sie schämen sich nicht, „das leider falsche Geschlecht“ Mendelssohns in einem Satz mit dem „Projekt Unisextoiletten“ abzuhandeln.

PS: Speaking of Berlin city government in action: Oh boy! The new tourist tax is here! The new tourist tax is here!

Well It’s Certainly Anti-Something

Whether the quotes below from Jakob Augstein (Der Spiegel) are anti-Semitic or not, you decide.

Jakob Augstein

One thing is for sure, though: If a German is not sure about which opinion is the “correct” one he is supposed to have, he takes a quick read through the Spiegel to find out.  These quotes represent mainstream thinking in Germany today.

“With backing from the US, where the president must secure the support of Jewish lobby groups, and in Germany, where coping with history, in the meantime, has a military component, the Netanyahu government keeps the world on a leash with an ever-swelling war chant.”

“Israel’s nuclear power is a danger to the already fragile peace of the world. This statement has triggered an outcry.Because it’s true. And because it was made by a German, Guenter Grass, author and Nobel Prize winner. That is the key point. One must, therefore, thank him for taking it upon himself to speak for us all.”

“Israel is threatened by Islamic fundalmentalists in its neighborhood. But the Jews also have their fundamentalists, the ultra-orthodox Hareidim. They are not a small splinter group. They make up 10% of the Israeli population. They are cut from the same cloth as their Islamic fundamentalist opponents. They follow the law of revenge.”

“The fire burns in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, in countries which are among the poorest on earth. But those who set the fires live elsewhere. Furious young people burn the American, and recently, the German flag. They, too, are victims, just like the dead at Benghazi and Sanaa. Whom does this all this violence benefit? Always the insane and unscrupulous. And this time it’s the U.S. Republicans and Israeli government.”

“Gaza is a place out of the end of times….1.7 million people live there on 360 sq. kilometers. Israel incubates its own opponents there.”

Germans Finally Manage To Bring Muslims And Jews Together

To protest against restrictions on circumcision, that is. They’ll be getting together in Berlin to holler and shout and raise hell this Sunday, for instance. Warms your heart, don’t it?

When it comes to “flagrant interference” in religion, Germans may indeed have a long and proven track record and all, but as expected, they have clearly bitten off more than they can chew this time with their latest perfectly pointless and completely unnecessary stab at this ancient Jewish and Muslim practice.

They’re backpeddling as fast as they can, of course, but it’s too little too late and now everybody has hurt feelings and, well, that’s what you get for fixing things that ain’t broken.

“Gut gemeint ist leider nicht unbedingt gut gemacht.”

Circumcision Decision Revision

Not that there was ever much doubt about it. That it would come to a big backpedaling Aktion, I mean.

The German government says Jewish and Muslim communities should be able to continue the practice of circumcision, after a regional court ruled it amounted to bodily harm.

That’s what can happen when you have that pressing need to fix things that aren’t broken.

“Circumcision carried out in a responsible manner must be possible without punishment.”

That Didn’t Take Long

“We urge the Jewish community in Germany and circumcisers to continue to perform circumcisions and not to wait for a change in the law.”

A German court’s ban on circumcising baby boys has provoked a rare show of unity between Jews, Muslims and Christians who see it as a threat to religious freedom, while doctors warn it could increase health risks by forcing the practice underground.

Die Positionen zur Beschneidung waren bei Anne Will unversöhnlich, am härtesten stritten ein Rabbiner und ein Strafrechtler.

Circumcision Decision Causing Division

And may need a revision.

Leaders of Germany’s Jewish and Muslim communities have criticized a court ruling they fear could make circumcision a punishable offense in the country.

Talk about having short vision.

German courts need more tight supervision.

There was no provision for all the derision now caused by that little incision.

“This is an unprecedented and dramatic intrusion on the right to self-determination of religious communities.”

But At Least He Didn’t Say Nazi

Sigmar Gabriel, the head of the German Social Democratic Party and possible candidate for Chancellor of Germany, finally decided to break with that long and rather tiring SPD tradition of calling dissenters Nazis and tried out something new and refreshingly different instead; labelling the state of Israel an “Apartheid-Regime” on his Facebook page.

And to give the whole thing a little more umpf, he decided to publish this while visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories. Now he gets to pretend to defend his comparison of Israel to a racist state live and in color, right there before those terrible racists themselves (the Israelis, not the Palestinians). I tell ya, you got to have instinct in this business. Go SPD!

“I was just in Hebron. That is a lawless territory there for Palestinians. This is an apartheid regime, for which there is no justification.”

Well We Can’t Excel At Everything

Like when it comes to anti-Semitism and bad old fashioned anti-Jewish thought crime.

Honestly, let’s put this latest study in perspective and maybe not paint the Germans as being the Hollywood Nazis they aren’t for once (but just this once).

Sure, 20 percent is a lot. But you know that you know you thought it was higher (or wanted it to be). And “the study — which draws on several different surveys and other research — puts Germans in the middle of the pack in Europe, showing more latent anti-Semitism in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Portugal, and less in Italy, Britain, the Netherlands and France.”

And what happens to that 20 percent once you subtract the extremist right/Islamic fringe and those who think like and/or support them? I’m all for subtracting them, by the way, but we don’t live in a perfect world. What can I say? It’s a never ending story.

Ob auf Fußballplätzen, im Netz oder in islamistischen und rechtsextremen Milieus – Judenfeindlichkeit ist in der deutschen Gesellschaft noch immer gegenwärtig.

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