Threatening a Fascist: A Threat to Democracy? The Danish Saga Continues..

Thursday, February 18, 2010

In today’s Politiken we are told that several people have been arrested for threats against “Dansk Folkepartis formand, Pia Kjærsgaard“, that is the ring leader of the fascistic, ultra right-wing, Islamophobic and generally xenophobic and racist, socalled Danish People’s Party. The first article tells no more than that, but soon others were to follow.

It is now declared that the five people arrested are supposed to have a Somalian background and that threatening a hate speaker is a threat to democracy. “If you threaten an elected politician you threaten all the people who voted for them”, says an appeaser of the Conservative Party, while the Prime Minister, also in dire need of some popularity, calls the threats “totally unacceptable“.  (EDIT: It has now been stated that one of the Somalians is a “self-taught imam” another is a director of a bank, allegedly with connections to al-Hikmah, that in turn relates to a school in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, called Ibnu Baz Islamic Center, and that “some of the school’s youth are suspected of having joined Hisbul Islam og al-Shabaab“).

Although colonos are not in favour of threatening people, we are also not in any possible way surprised: When you threaten an entire religion and way of life, then you threaten – or at least insult – all of those people who identify with that religion and way of life. How difficult can it be to understand that? Moreover, the vice-president of the party’s youth organisation, a local council member, has just been excluded for violent threats against named Danish individuals who are said to collaborate with legal muslim activities, such as the building of a mosque. In this case, the party does not deem it relevant to report the threat to the police – “they leave such doing to others“?!?

Read the rest of this entry »


Rafael Correa: With God On Our Side

Thursday, November 1, 2007

In the same week as Rafael Correa announced that Ecuador would eradicate illiteracy by 2009 he also used anti-consumerist rhetoric to denounce a pagan celebration, which the Christian church, unlike most other pagan days, have not yet managed to appropriate; but, of course, the capitalist have seized the day.

What is Correa saying, then? Well, firstly he is saying that in two years there will be no one who cannot read and write in Ecuador – so perhaps he is going to nuke the last bit of the Amazon – or deprive those who live there of their citizenship (not that they ever asked for it in the first place, but still..)?

Once more he is speaking as if the people who live in the Ecuadorean rain forest just don’t count…..

Read the rest of this entry »


Ecuadorian Political Theatre presents: Candidates for the Constituent Assembly

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Ecuador Rising – Hatarinchej features a collection of the right-wing candidates for the constituent assembly in Ecuador, which, by the way, is not going to rewrite the constitution, but engage in a political debacle that costs hundreds of millions of dollars and which is a struggle for particular definitions or limitations or interpretations (and so on) of the new constitution written by a group of carefully selected lawyers.

The colonos blog has said a bit about the trouble of the Ecuadorian, parliamentary (and the upper echelons of civil society) Left, the neo-socialist or neo-liberal left – which ever way you want to define the current political climate in quite a few Latin American nation states (you can here read a contribution by Rafael Correa to establish what that phenomenon is). This is a comment on the Ecuadorian right, which is even worse – as viciously rich and powerful as your next war criminal:

As you will understand the list of candidates is enormous, but that is the strategy of the right, of avoiding the discovery of the past commonalities that unite them with the traditional and oligarchical parties, of which they were part. It is useful to identify the true candidates of the people, the workers, the farmers, the students, the small retailers, the migrants, etc. They have the space, the candidates who offer to fight for the nationalisation of petroleum and the mines; those that want to eliminate the labor ‘casualisation’; who yearn to recover monetary, legal and territorial sovereignty, that the Right stripped from us with bad governments; those that dream of a worthy and sovereign motherland await your support. It is necessary to bury the parties of the Right, those named ID, PRE, PRIAN, UDC, PSC and, of course, the PSP, of ex-president Lucio Gutiérrez.”

and the list follows:

Read the rest of this entry »


“…talking about the one who got away”

Friday, April 6, 2007

In a “funny” article in today’s Guardian about the 15 British sailors first captured and then released by the Iranian authorities Polly Toynbee notes that the Daily Mail – what we can call a guardian of “good ole conservative, christian family values” – shares its outlook on “life” with the Iranian president – in other words, as has been glaringly obvious for a thousand years: X-tianity or Islam or whatever distorted reality in question – extremism is alive and well, pretty much indistinguishable, breeds like a cancer and threatens the freedom of everyone:

Still, amid all the high tension, here was a revelatory moment: the Daily Mail believes pretty much the same as President Ahmadinejad. The fundamentalist Iranian opined: “How can you justify seeing a mother away from her home, her children? Why don’t they respect family values in the west? Why was the difficult task of searching the seas given to a mother thousands of miles from home? Why is there no respect for motherhood, for the love of her child?” The fundamentalist Mail printed those words in bold letters in a special box. Paul Dacre couldn’t have put it better himself. Bewailing the west’s lost family values, his paper finds ways to warn against the moral danger of mothers working every day of the week.”

This kind of “news” could hardly come at a “better time” – Easter – a time where extremist Christians around the world in particular are whipping and crucifying themselves (recall the mad Opus Dei monk in the “da Vinci Code”) to be forgiven for their sins?!!!?

Whatever happened to atheism?


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.