Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
"He is loud, persistent, he pinches cheeks and puts his arms around shoulders and stands just a little bit too close when he speaks, he uses lushly vulgar expressions and is utterly shameless in his bids for popularity.''
"Faced with negative approval ratings," echoes a wire report,
". . . he has started promoting such causes as breast cancer research
and efforts to locate money in Swiss banks that belonged to Holocaust victims."
A poll, however, showed that 62 percent of respondents felt D'Amato is ``too
closely tied to special interests.''
"Special interest?"
Everywhere around the globe, this entity called "special interests",
safe for so long from any criticism, is under siege in ways that make descriptive
euphemisms obsolete.
Take a quick look:
· A few days ago Nigel Rodley, a British lawyer who serves as U.N.
special rapporteur on torture, likened Israel to South Africa under apartheid
and accused the Jewish state of institutionalizing the use of torture in
interrogating Palestinian detainees.
In a 50-page report, Rodley said Israel had assured him last November that
its law forbade all forms of torture or maltreatment. Yet, he noted, sleep
deprivation, hooding, violent shaking were often used in combination in
what he assumed to be Israeli methods ``sanctioned under the approved but
secret interrogation practices'' defined by the 1987 Landau Commission.
Used together, he concluded, the techniques amounted to inhumane treatment.
"Israel," he said at a news briefing, ". . . is actually
institutionalizing it, juridicising it. . . they have been invoking . .
. the doctrine of necessity to justify the use of these techniques."
· In Cairo, one of the PLO leaders, Farouk Kaddoumi, heading the
political foreign affairs department, appealed to the international community
". . . to impose a political and economic blockade on Israel, and if
possible that Israel's membership (of the United Nations) be frozen, as
South Africa's was in the past, for its racist practices.''
On March 25, almost 1,000 Egyptian students stormed out of Cairo University
and marched outside campus to protest Israeli policies in the Middle East.
Two days before, thousands of students at Ain Shams University and others
also demonstrated in the Azhar Islamic university and Helwan University.
* Here is an excerpt describing France, according to a Washington Foreign
Services report:
"(M)ore than 35,000 people moved through the streets here today to protest the weekend presence of France's burgeoning far-right National Front party.
Squads of French security police backed by riot vehicles kept the largely peaceful marchers from getting any closer than seven blocks from the convention hall where 2,200 delegates of the National Front assembled to prepare for legislative elections next spring."
And in a late-breaking bulletin:
"Riot police and hundreds of demonstrators fought a running battle in central Strasbourg overnight after clashes broke out at the end of a mass protest . . . Police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse hundreds of stone-throwing and masked demonstrators who took over after the bulk of the 50,000 people who took part in the protest had dispersed. It took police until 4 a.m. Sunday to restore order."
Shades of the ARA? Frrom a reader inside France, who sent this overnight:
"I'm always amazed to see how no one except here seems to realize that we are very near a civil war . . . The people demonstrating outside the Palace are so excited that you don't know what's going to happen. And if you could only hear the radio! . . . France is upside down, everything is going astray, but there is only ONE problem, the unique problem, i.e. to fight the National Front; and all politicians have stopped doing anything else but fight Le Pen."
· Associate director of research for the Anti-Defamation League,
Gail Gans, reports that many US militia members have gone underground.
"They now hold small, unadvertised meetings in private homes and no
longer publicly identify themselves as militias,'' she said, adding that
many "extremists" have been publicly active in setting up "common-law''
courts that seek to replace the existing legal system with vigilante justice.
These courts, which, according to Gans, number more than 125 and are active
in 35 states, issue scores of phony legal documents and liens against property,
often the property of elected officials, in what extremism experts call
a campaign of "paper terrorism.''
Similarly, "Klanwatch," a program operated by the immensely wealthy,
leftist Southern Poverty Law Centre, an outfit detested by mainstream America,
reported that at least 858 "extremist" groups operated in the
United States last year, up 6 percent since 1995, and that they included
380 armed militias.
A "Klanwatch" spokesman, Richard Baudouin said "extremists"
appeared to be improving their intelligence- gathering networks on public
and private targets.
· Australia's rising political star, Pauline Hanson, who created
an international storm last year with her attacks on Asian immigration and
Aboriginal welfare, is forming her own party. The party, as yet unlaunched,
would be called ``Pauline Hanson's One Nation.''
In her maiden speech in parliament last September, Hanson warned that Australia
was ". . . in danger of being swamped by Asians.''
Opinion polls showed that a majority of voters backed her anti-immigration
views, referring to Prime Minister John Howard's ". . . struggle to
control the race debate she sparked."
· In Germany, where the post-war record of unemployment stands at
4.7 million, the conservative CSU has already proposed restrictions on work
permits. CSU leader Finance Minister Theo Waigel stated that it was "grotesque''
that so many foreigners were working in Germany, while so many Germans were
out of work.
Another politician, Zeitlmann, the CSU's domestic policy spokesman in parliament,
was described as ". . . poking his head above the parapet" by
saying that the government should sit down with Jewish community leaders
and agree on a limit on the immigrants.
"The humanitarian intake for Jews can't go on for ever. It will have
to be brought to an end again,'' he said.
To which the leader of Germany's Jewish community, Ignatz Bubis, replied
in an interview with Southwest German Radio: "I certainly won't hold
any talks like those. I won't speak to any government about how many Jews
I think should live in Germany.''
Proposals sitting in the legislative hopper stipulate that aspiring settlers
of German origins be able to speak German. Furthermore, the country has
already started what has been described as "forcible repatriation"
last October of over 300,000 Bosnian refugees who it had hoped would leave
of their own accord but didn't.
· No place seems safe enough, it seems, for "political correctness"
any more - not even for Gottfried Wagner, the great-grandson of the 19th
century German composer Richard Wagner, a fellow who has elevated groveling
to unanticipated heights and given fawning a new definition.
Denouncing his own family for their "unrepentant anti-Semitism'', he
has been subjected to death threats in Germany, blacklisted by Swiss- based
right-wingers, and his music seminars in U.S. universities have been disrupted
by a heckling audience denouncing him as a "traitor.'' Even on a recent
visit to Israel, his hosts asked him to speak from behind a bullet-proof
screen ". . . in case of extremist attacks", he told Reuters.
· In Russia, not even the mummified Lenin is safe!
Olga Ulyanova, a daughter of Lenin's younger brother Dmitry Ulyanov, warned
that moving Lenin's body could have ". . . unpredictable consequences
for Russia. . . . His removal can lead to consequences which no-one can
predict or even imagine.''
Yeltsin had suggested a few weeks ago that a referendum could be held to
ask the people if they want Lenin's body, resting in the mausoleum since
1924, to remain there ". . . or to be reburied in an ordinary grave
according to Christian traditions."
Nationalists had pushed for that and had pointed out that Lenin, who was
baptized into the Orthodox church, should be properly buried rather than
lying in state like a pagan.
What is the New World Order coming to this sunny Easter Day - what with
Political Correctness going out of fashion like yesterday's bell-bottomed
trousers?
Ingrid
"If Chinaman is racist, it follows that Englishman is, too."
(Doug Collins)