Dutch Court rules against arrest of US President: 'American Pol Pot' is welcome?

CORRUPT DUTCH JUDGE SAYS BUSH VISIT IS OK: NO ARREST ?

by Henk Ruyssenaars

Amsterdam - May 4th - 2005 - The FPF earlier published an item on the need to arrest Bush while visiting Holland coming week-end - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/ao5tc - And now the verdict has come and is as negative as expected.

International law and conventions are trampled underneath: the Netherlands through this judgement again confirms to be committing war crimes too, and supporting it by welcoming murderous perpetrators like Bush and Rice.

To better understand this, it's good to know that the former president of the 'Hooggerechtshof'' (High Court) in The Netherlands yesterday published a book, based on some decades of experience, concerning the corruption among crooked and politicized dutch judges. The basic theme is that you've got to be lucky to
find a judge who's not partial. According to the book - which hardly anybody speaks about - the whole judicial system in the Netherlands has to be redone. That's correct and the verdict below confirms this.

Bush is no 'opportunity' for any form of law?

Dutch judiciary uses 'the principle of opportunity', meaning that something is only done when an officer or judge decides to do something about it, if it's 'opportune'. In normal countries the 'legality principle' is used: one is legally obliged to act upon information concerning any form of illegality.

That's why in the Netherlands justice looks OK but is far from reality: there's one set of laws for the average people and the elite' doesn't care: they are the judges.

Concerning corruption one is sorry to say that the Netherlands already for decades is forced down the slope of criminal greed by it's neocon managers, and is totally comparable with extremely corrupt states like the United States and Israel, which form some kind of 'evil trinity' with Holland. [http://tinyurl.com/asaam]

Because opinion in a country mostly for 95% is formed by the media, the compliant journalists are guilty too, that it's possible to invite an 'American Pol Pot' and applaud, instead of arresting the war criminal as all conventions the Netherlands has signed say we should. The media hardly even report the demonstrations going on: they are guilty by association.

And this is the result of Dutch shameless opportunism:


Court rules against arrest of US President

AMSTERDAM — A Dutch judge has ruled that US President George W. Bush can visit the Netherlands as planned this weekend and should not be arrested.

The ruling in a court in The Hague on Wednesday comes after a group of Dutch nationals lodged legal action against the State in the lead-up to Bush's visit.

The activists demanded that Bush be arrested or a court order issued to block his entry to the Netherlands due to "numerous, flagrant breaches of the Geneva
Convention".

However, the judge rejected the request on the grounds that such a refusal was a political matter and therefore not something the court could rule on.

Granting the request would also have had "far reaching consequences for relations between the Netherlands and the US," the judge said.

The request was lodged by several peace organisations and city parties, namely Haagse Stadspartij, The Hague's town party, the Stichting Haags Vredesplatform, Peace Platform Foundation the Hague, the Vereniging van Anti-Fascistische Oud-Verzetsstrijders Nederland, Union of anti fascism vets, the Vereniging van Juristen voor Vrede, and the Union of Lawyers for peace.

Several individuals living in The Hague were also involved.

The activists claim that Bush is responsible for countless civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture of prisoners and the fact the US has refused to recognize the International Criminal Court in The Hague. [Uniqe in US history: the day after GW Bush became president he revoked Clinton's signature! - HR]

Bush will fly into the southern Dutch city of Maastricht on Saturday night and stay at the nearby Château St Gerlach in Houthem.

On Sunday, he will attend a ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial at Margraten near Maastricht.

During his visit, Bush will meet with Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and Queen Beatrix before departing again later on Sunday.

[End item - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/aey4j - Expatica News + ANP 2005]

Bush in Limburg/NL site - some information in English:
Url.: http://www.bushinlimburg.tk/

WHY ARE WE WELCOMING THIS TORTURER - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/98d2g

Liberty underground - Url.: http://luvsite.org/navigate.htm

Mainstream on Bush - http://tinyurl.com/9jq6k

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The British Labour Party isn't an option

FPF-fwd: agreeing with it,

If you vote for Blair's Labour Party this Thursday, you really don't deserve to have a life yourself.
You are voting for one of the nastiest, most violent, right-winged regimes in memory. You walk
over the corpses of at least 100,000 mostly innocent people and turn a deaf ear to the cries of
countless Iraqi children, blown-up by BRITISH cluster bombs! You also turn away from the tens of
thousands of children left to starve. You are affirming Blair's triumph and even though it has been
proved that he is a liar on such an epic scale, you are inviting even more lies
about terrorist scares,so that totalitarian laws can be enacted.
I hope you can live with your conscience -
(GJ-UK)


BRITAIN'S ABSURD ELECTION - PILGER

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=5692


"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." Mayer Amschel Rothschild

"There comes a time when every man feels the urge to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats." -- H.L. Mencken

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These are Blair's last days  - Iraq is our greatest foreign policy calamity in modern history and the reckoning has only just begun - George Galloway - 05/03/05 "The Guardian" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cvz6d


Thinkpiece

*Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli musician and writer, and a proponent of a secular and democratic one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the two peoples live in one state as citizens with equal rights and responsibilities.
He wrote the story below.

The British Labour Party isn't an option

By Gilad Atzmon*


Gilad Atzmon considers the significance of Tony Blair's almost certain victory in the coming British general election. He compares Britain to other morally degenerate democracies, such as Israel and the US, and says that, in the case of Britain, the question will not just be one of the ruling Labour Party's moral bankruptcy, but "the entire British society ... will lose its innocence, forever".


In two days time the British people are going to elect a war criminal to be their prime minister for another five years. Not only is Blair a war criminal who initiated an illegal war, but, judging from the British media, the picture is crystal clear: the man is a compulsive liar who has surrounded himself with morally degenerate advisers and obedient servants. Even his attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, the man who was supposed to uphold law within government, isn't exactly squeaky clean when put under scrutiny.

But, surely, this is not a great novelty. Blair and his junta didn't invent a thing. Politicians are known to be pretty horrible people and, if this is not enough, ordinary people do tend to put their fate into the hands of nasty politicians. Seemingly, there must be something appealing about mass murderers. Stalin and Hitler were loved by their people for more than a while. But then, democracy was supposed to change it all; we were supposed to become morally-guided, peace-loving creatures. Somehow, it didn't happen. Not only did it not happen, but we are now killing in the name of democracy.

Thinking of Britain in terms of a morally degenerate democracy, we might as well draw a lesson from the cases of America and Israel, no doubt the two leading morally degenerate democracies. The current Israeli prime minister is a war criminal. And yet, it didn't stop the Israeli people from electing him twice. Needless to say, Sharon, has never laid down his weapons: day by day he is engaged in killing Palestinian civilians and ethnically cleansing those who manage to survive. But he continues to enjoy the support of the majority of the Israeli people. He is far more popular than any recent Israeli prime minister.

It is no surprise that America is no different to Israel. In the last American election Bush's success was more than just marginal. This time he won the popular vote. The majority of the American people believe that the warmonger cowboy is the right man for the job. They must be happy with the American expansionist policy in the Middle East.

Thus, we can deduce that it isn't only the British people who crown a war criminal. People love to be led by warmongers. But then, we should stop for a second and ask ourselves: is Britain as bad as Israel or America? Surely, we want to think that Britain is far better.

In fact, it is the other way around: Britain is far worse. While in America and Israel it is the "right wing", the so called "lower classes" and the "uneducated" who are electing war criminals, in Britain it is the "centre left" who are doing the Job. In Britain, it is the "enlightened", "well-educated" and well-informed broadsheet readers who are doing this. In Britain, it is those who read, day after day, about the prime minister's lack of integrity. It is those people who read daily about the growing numbers of Iraqi civilian victims. True, they all admit in public that Blair is a dreadful choice but, nevertheless, they will vote Labour. Furthermore, while in Israel and America the shift towards the right is usually blamed on the direct assault on the American and Israeli people, the British people are yet to become victims of any direct terror. The British people will elect Blair in spite of his crimes, in spite of the horror for which this man is responsible. This support for Labour cannot be morally justified.

Labour voters have developed a unique form of self-righteous blindness. They would say, yes we vote Labour in spite of Blair, we vote for health and education. As if the state of the National Health Service or schools is something to boast about. They would say, we vote for the economy, referring to Blair's prosperous economy, a miraculous success maintained by masses of abused illegal immigrants who are working and living in inhuman conditions.

And yet I am not blaming the British voter or the Labour supporter. It isn't their fault. In fact, the British do not have much of a choice. They have to choose between the one who initiated the murder of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the one who supported this illegal war in the first place. They have to choose between Blair, the compulsive liar, and Howard, the tactical liar, a man who declares a populist war against immigrants while praising the British people for letting his Jewish grandmother escape the Nazis.

Labour is a dead concept. But I am not suggesting that left-wing philosophy is over. The idea of equality is as alive as ever; it is just those people who were supposed to transform that idea into practice that are the problem. It is them who fooled us completely. It is the Labour Party that should have replaced Blair long before this doomed election. It is the Labour Party, once a major left-wing European institution, that has become a morally bankrupt power-seeking association. True, a few Labour MPs did rebel at the time of the Iraq war; some even abandoned their comfortable seats. But those who were not brave enough to stand up to Blair are the real bad people in this saga. Together with Blair, they have betrayed the very notion of humanism. As members of the ruling party, they have betrayed the British people.

Clearly, it is the Labour Party that should have spat out Blair ages ago. It should have done it not only in order to protect world peace, but also to help Labour regain its moral ground. But now it is too late. In two days time, when Blair is re-elected, the question won't just be that of Labour's moral bankruptcy. In two days time, it will be the entire British society that will lose its innocence, forever.

*Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli musician and writer, and a proponent of a secular and democratic one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the two peoples live in one state as citizens with equal rights and responsibilities.


Dyke condemns Blair's government :
Another Blair government would be a danger to democracy, former BBC director general Greg Dyke has said at a Lib Dem campaign news conference.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4504975.stm
http://snipurl.com/en5s

Rep. calls for deeper inquiry into secret Iraq attack plan:
"Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States was too busy with wall-to-wall coverage of a "runaway bride" to cover a bombshell report out of the British newspapers," Conyers writes.
http://rawstory.com/aexternal/conyers_iraq_letter_502
In case you missed it:
'Failure is not an option, but it doesn't mean they will avoid it':
The Prime Minister knew the US President was determined to complete what one senior British official had already described as the unfinished business from his father's war against Saddam Hussein.
http://snipurl.com/en5u

Video: ITV: Ask Tony Blair:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8732.htm
http://snipurl.com/en5t

George Galloway: These are Blair's last days :
Iraq is our greatest foreign policy calamity in modern history and the reckoning has only just begun
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8736.htm
http://snipurl.com/en5v

The British Attorney General's Legal Advice, Government Spin And The Iraq War
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8734.htm
http://snipurl.com/en5w

Papers reveal commitment to war :
Secret documents indicate Blair support for military action a year before invasion took place
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8728.htm
http://snipurl.com/en5r


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FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this blog is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, and even to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. [http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html].

Yesterday and Today: Nazis and the Righteous Right

FPF-fwd. (in full agreement) - This is one of the most sensible articles received, and the
conclusion ought to be only one possible: if you do not agree, you're one of them...

Donna Glee Williams is the Director of the Holocaust
Education Program at the North Carolina Center.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8735.htm

Yesterday and Today: Nazis and the Righteous Right 

by Donna Glee Williams 

05/03/05 - - History is tapping us on the shoulder and pointing. The sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz followed so closely by the popification of an ex-member of the Hitler Youth combine to force our attention back to the Nazi catastrophe. We study World War II and the Holocaust and ask ourselves “How could it happen?

How could civilized people let it come to this?

How could they consent to let their flag become the registered trademark for collective evil and let their country walk into history with the blood of millions on its conscience?” We shake our heads and turn away from the questions because our historical gaze is dazzled by the enormity of what happened in the 1940’s. “Never again!” we say with tears in our eyes. 

But if we truly want some calamity to happen Never Again, we won’t just study that calamity. We’ll study what went before. We’ll study its precursors. What allowed, invited, or caused it to happen? Who were catastrophe’s midwives? If we learn to recognize them, there is hope that we can turn them away when they again show up, smiley-faced, at our door. Before World War II and the Holocaust, there was Germany of the 1920’s and ‘30’s. That’s where we need to focus our cross-generational telescopes. 

If we take a look at pre-WWII Germany, we notice it has some things in common with the United States now. Start with the concept of exceptionality. Nazi ideology grew out of Germans’ belief that their country was uniquely privileged because it was uniquely valuable. This made them an exception to rules and norms. The average “Proud to Be an American” bumper-sticker-buyer believes the same thing. (I’m still waiting for some churchgoing patriot to notice that being born American is a gift of grace and to begin marketing “Humble to be an American” decals.)

A belief in your country’s exceptionality takes you way out beyond the warm self-appreciation of patriotism; in naming your heritage “exceptional,” you cut your ties to the family of nations and set yourself above the rules. Our belief in our own exceptionality erodes the walls that hold back human greed, fear of otherness, and violence. Exceptionality makes the unthinkable possible, even reasonable. 

Before the Nazi rise to power, German society bloomed with cultural, artistic, and social openness, as did the United States in the last third of the twentieth century. The dominant culture enriched itself by cross-pollinating with other groups. Creativity, innovation, and freedom held sway in art, music, drama, and dance. In lifestyle choices, openness and experimentation were possible. 

A part of this bubbling cultural ferment was caused by physics. We think of physics as an esoteric branch of science that is of interest only to the The Few, The Proud, The Geeks whose quirky neuroanatomy makes them able to emote in equations. But where physics goes, culture follows. The big metaphors in all areas are based on the physics of our time. And both Nazi Germany and the American Whatever-the-Hell-You-Call-What-We-Are-Becoming were preceded by advances in physics that announced reality to be much different from what we’d always assumed it to be.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s physics of relativity and uncertainty—largely centered in German universities—proclaimed that some of our most fundamental understandings about the universe were Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. As quantum mechanics and the new cosmology developed in the later part of the twentieth century—largely centered in U.S. universities—their outrageous paradoxical observations once again taught the lesson that common sense isn’t always right. Things aren’t always—or ever—the way they seem. 

In physics as in lifestyle and the arts, Germany and the United States both saw a great questioning of old values, limits, and presuppositions of all kinds—followed by an iron backswing of the pendulum rushing to shut down all the openness, answer all the questions, replace uncertainty with certainty, and relativism with absolutes. Does our anxiety in the face of uncertainty and relativity drive us to cook up fake certainties, like which language is better, who is going to Hell, who must live, and who should die? Did Germany, and will the United States, overcompensate for being uncertain like Napoleon did for being short? 

Another family resemblance between Germany of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s and the Righteous Right of today is the feeling that somebody done us wrong. For Germany, the sense of being aggrieved was related to the famously vindictive Treaty of Versailles that settled the overt hostilities of World War I but left Germans with smoldering bitterness against what they saw as injustice and injury. The core resentment that energizes the swing toward right-wing “Christian” totalitarianism is the confusing, painful panic at seeing The Way and The Truth become one of many ways and many truths. As one pulpiteer expressed it, “having our culture become a subculture” is felt as a wound, an assault.

On September 11th, the cultural assault on our inner landscape then manifested as a physical attack on our outer landscape, echoing the unsolved burning of the Reichstag building in 1933. Then, as now, terrorism coupled with an effective propaganda machine helped those in power to bring the country together while separating it from its civil rights. Once we feel ourselves to be under attack, are there any limits to what we will permit in the name of “self-defense?” 

The backlash against openness and uncertainty, together with perceived national victimization, led Germany to begin to pick off voices of dissent in its own house. Some of these were political. Some were religious. German Christian churches were systematically nazified. The governing boards of seminaries were taken over seat by seat. Seminary faculties were pruned of opposition, guaranteeing that the pulpits of Germany would spout preaching that supported the Nazi agenda. The prophetic voice of the church was silenced. The systematic right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, board by board, professor by professor, pulpit by pulpit, is so eerily similar that it could be an echo of the same shout. 

And then there were the Jews. For historical reasons, the Nazi party had, ready to hand, a tiny subgroup of people that they could call “evil” and have that name stick. Once the “evil” was identified, people projected onto the Jews every disowned trait they hated in themselves. Enormous energy was mobilized to oppress, exile, and destroy the theoretically contagious corruption of Jewishness. The righteousness of the cause was “proved” by the visceral disgust the oppressors felt towards the oppressed. Hatred kept the dominant group bonded, energized, focused, and easy to manipulate. Today, similar rhetoric is mobilizing hatred for another tiny minority, homosexuals, who are similarly represented as undermining the entire fabric of American life and values. In the same way, appeals to disgust as a moral arbiter “prove” the validity of the argument. Incidents of violence against gays remind us of the spotty street violence against Jews that came before the systematic, state-sponsored violence of the Holocaust. 

They say that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat trite sayings. But when history lands a big one-two punch like “Happy Birthday, Auschwitz Survivors, Now Guess Who’s Pope?” the teacher gets our attention. And what we notice are a lot of parallels between the Nazi rise to power 80 years ago and the “Christian” right-wing rise to power today. Do we keep our wide-eyed mystification—“How could they have done those things?”—or do we do what Germans failed to do, what we revile them for not doing: Do we recognize the road we’re on, wrestle the steering wheel away from the mad bus-driver, and stop the bus before we get to the last stop, the town of Ultimate Consequences, Pop. 11 Million? 

Donna Glee Williams is the Director of the Holocaust Education Program at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching and a free-lance writer. In 2005, NC Governor Mike Easley appointed her to the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. She is also a registered nurse. She can be reached at williadg@nccat.org 

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