rightwingwatch.org
Pat Robertson falsely claims that Margaret Sanger targeted black people for genocide and inspired Nazism

Just when you think you’ve seen it all with the vile hatred coming out of Belgium there is this:

(JTA) — A float satirizing local politicians dressed as Nazis holding canisters of Zyklon B poison will be part of a carnival parade in the Belgian city of Aalst.

The float, which also features a railway wagon and a political leader dressed as Hitler, was featured on the Facebook page of a group called FTP. The people on the wagon, who are to be dressed as SS officers, are meant to portray Flemish nationalists deporting French speakers from Flanders, the Flemish VTM network reported.

The procession is scheduled to take place on Sunday.

Belgium is a federal entity made up of three regions populated by two ethnic groups, the Flemish and Waloons, who speak French. Over the past two decades, some Flemish political parties have called for secession.

The spectacle is meant as a protest against the perceived anti-Waloon policies of some nationalist Flemish politicians.

“This is our deportation wagon and we are going to deport anything French,” Jaques Jaquemin, one of the organizers, told VTM.

The float seeks to satirize leaders of the Flemish nationalist N-VA party, its leader Bart de Wever and Aalst Mayor Christoph D’Haese.

Doorbraak, a Flemish weekly, quotes Eli Ringer, honorary chairman of the Antwerp-based Forum of Jewish Organizations, as calling the float “disgusting.”

This was scheduled for last Sunday. I can’t find any updates reported on this story in English since then.

Update:

I found a story about the parade from Sunday in a Dutch paper. Translated:

A Nazi tank in a carnival of the province? Impossible

The last weekend, the popular Aalst carnival hit the headlines. A group led a tank called “chariot of the deportation of French” with Bart De Wever made up as Nazi officer and Elio Di Rupo in the role of a deportee wearing a t-shirt rainbow sky.

The mayor of Aalst, Christoph D’Haese and alderman Flemish Affairs Karim Overmeire (N-VA, former Vlaams Belang) were also caricatured by Nazi officers. Unsurprisingly, this representation is about. But such a tank is it possible in our carnival parades? We posed the question to several organizers. They all agree: “It is inconceivable.”

Recognized since 2010 as Intangible Heritage by UNESCO and cultural, the Aalst carnival is sometimes described by its critics as a party disguised vulgar. This year was no exception to the rule with the presence of a tank “SS-VA” where Bart De Wever was represented Nazi officer … An extreme caricature does not really shocked by Flanders but against different Carnival organizers in the province.

Here is a pic from parade:

All organizers of the province are unanimous in condemning this chariot “bad taste”.

A sane person might argue that the president and his family require special protection because they face threats the rest of us don’t. But the NRA and many of its most fervent supporters don’t see it that way. As far as they’re concerned, all of us are just as threatened as the person in the Oval Office. The fact that you’re an ordinary person and not the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth doesn’t mean you haven’t already been targeted by an al Qaeda death squad or a murderous drug gang, so you’d better be prepared, not just with a gun but with an entire arsenal of military-style weaponry.

But the real threat in the fantasy world some gun owners have spun inside their heads isn’t terrorists. You know the people I’m talking about: the “doomsday preppers,” the angry tea partiers talking about “watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants,” the folks who can’t talk about guns for 30 seconds without bringing up Hitler (who, for what it’s worth, didn’t actually disarm the German people, as so many gun advocates believe). What’s important isn’t just that these folks are paranoid, it’s who they’re paranoid about: the United States government.

Take, for one vivid example, James Yeager, the CEO of a Tennessee company called Tactical Response. In response to the prospect of stricter gun laws, he posted a YouTube video saying, “If that happens, it’s gonna spark a civil war, and I’ll be glad to fire the first shot. … I’m not letting my country be ruled by a dictator. I’m not letting anybody take my guns. If it goes one inch further, I’m gonna start killing people.”

More: NRA’s Paranoid Fantasy Flouts Democracy

The right wing media noise machine sowed paranoid fears for thirty years, and there are three generations of severely paranoid rubes to harvest for cash as a result. This is so ludicrous and hateful a plea that it’s nearly unbelievable, but these far right hatemongers wouldn’t continue to do this if it weren’t working at some level.

“Someday,” the fundraising pitch concludes, “your children will thank you for saving their future from Obama’s Soviet-Style Socialist State.”

Let’s get this straight: Unless we arm our children and deport a gun-control-friendly British CNN host, the president of the United States, who is practically the same as Hitler, is going to create some kind of United Soviet Socialist States of America by abolishing guns rights?

That’s a lot to untangle.

First, a word about our sponsors. TeaParty.org, also known as the 1776 Tea Party, is an especially belligerent faction of the Tea Party movement whose founder, Dale Robertson, once showed up at a Houston rally carrying a sign that read, “Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar [sic].” Its CEO, Steve Eichler, used to be executive director of the Minuteman Project, a nativist extremist group whose splashiest event was a month-long vigilante gathering on the Arizona border in April 2005.

TeaParty.org boasts that it is “the ONLY tea party praised by Dr. Michael Savage,” a radio talk show host who was fired from MSNBC in 2003 after describing an unidentified caller to his show as a “sodomite” who should “get AIDS and die.” Its website proudly features original content by Jerome Corsi, an influential conspiracy theorist best known for proposing, at various times, that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen; that the president’s true father is the late labor activist Frank Marshall Davis; and that Obama is gay and married to a Pakistani man. Really.

The site also includes content from WorldNetDaily, an extreme-right online publication that plugs all manner of conpiracist nonsense (the imminent end of the world, the cause of homosexuality is soybean consumption — you get the idea), and from Alex Jones, an antigoverment conspiracy monger whose response to recent calls for gun control has been so unhinged that even Glenn Beck - Glenn Beck! - described him as a “crazy person.”

Now that we’ve taken care of explaining who is behind these wild claims about “Schindler’s America,” it’s time to get to the what of the matter - as in, what the heck are these guys talking about?

“Remember, Hitler and his Nazi regime disarmed the people,” Friday’s E-mail blast warns. “The comparison between Hitler and Obama is striking.”

More: TeaParty.org Drops the (Other) H-Bomb

Yesterday I plunged into the depths of the Twitter hashtag #TGDN to bring you the Best of Godwin: insane posts comparing President Obama to Hitler. If #TGDN was used to determine who should be allowed to own a gun, well, none of these people should be allowed to get near a supersoaker, much less anything that has bullets in it.

Going to #TGDN looking for Godwins is like descending into a huge sewer looking for the smelliest and biggest turd. It means there are a whole bunch of other turds floating around but they just don’t have enough chunks in them. The Godwins are coiled together with other looney shit, including Birther, Troofer, Debt, Spending, Abortion=worse than gun murder, MOAR GUNZ, Benghazi, Stalin, Lenin, Louis XIV, Washington/Jefferson fake quotes, Guns/Hammers fake statistics and other random bugfuckery.

First Godwin of 1/18/2013:

Conservative ‏@ChristiChat
TIME MAGAZINE “MAN OF THE YEAR”…which year? Which man? WHY? @ScottSaxman1 #TGDN pic.twitter.com/POgldvDm
7:20 AM 18 Jan 13

@ChristiChat spamblocked @ViciousBabushka for calling a fake Jefferson quote, because, you know, you can always tell a KOMUNIST by facts n shit.

Of course, attempts to equate gun control with fascism are bogus. But the “Hitler took the guns” argument has long had a prominent and fairly effective role in America’s gun control debate despite its obvious reductionism.

Its origins can be traced back to at least the early 1980s, when opponents of a Chicago proposal to ban handguns invoked it in the largely Jewish suburb of Skokie by “reminding village residents that the Nazis disarmed the Jews as a preliminary to sending them to the gas chambers,” the Chicago Tribune reported. In 1989, a new pro-gun group called Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership began arguing that the 1968 federal gun control bill once favored by the NRA’s old guard “was lifted, almost in its entirety, from Nazi legislation.” (That false claim is still being repeated.)

In 1994, JPFO founder Aaron Zelman implored the NRA’s board to seize on the alleged Nazi connection:

Some of you may even have figured out that unless the NRA changes its strategy, the law abiding firearm owner in America will go the way of the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe: extermination…The choice is yours; you can turn your back on a failed strategy—one of compromise with evil-doers—and attack the concept of “gun control” by exposing the Nazi roots of “gun-control” in America. Or, you can persist in a failed strategy, and accept your own extinction.

Whether or not the NRA was influenced by his advice, that same year its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, published Guns, Crime, and Freedom, in which he claimed, “In Germany, firearm registration helped lead to the holocaust,” leaving citizens “defenseless against tyranny and the wanton slaughter of a whole segment of its population.” The following year, President George H.W. Bush famously resigned from the NRA after LaPierre attacked federal law enforcement officials as “jack-booted government thugs” who wore “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.” More recently, Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer who has represented the NRA, argued (PDF) that “If the Nazi experience teaches anything, it teaches that totalitarian governments will attempt to disarm their subjects so as to extinguish any ability to resist crimes against humanity.”

More: Was Hitler Really a Fan of Gun Control?

Philosophy’s Shameful Love for the Swastika

Crude and vicious anti-Semitism; narrow, bigoted nationalism; and total indifference to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people - these are not attitudes we expect from philosophers. On the contrary, these academic thinkers are supposed to have sophisticated ethical outlooks. They aim to be supremely rational, and to believe only what they can show to be true.

So it comes as a surprise to be reminded of the story told in Hitler’s Philosophers. This forthcoming book by Yvonne Sherratt, to be published by Yale, looks at the way some academics in Germany reacted to the coming of Adolf Hitler. And what an intensely depressing story it is. Most of them, including Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest names in 20th-century philosophy, did not merely reconcile themselves to Hitler. They enthusiastically espoused Nazi ideology, and came up with all sorts of elaborate reasons to justify the purging of Jews, the persecution of dissidents, and the conquest and oppression of other nations. They went out of their way to flaunt their loyalty to the Nazi cause. Heidegger used to lecture in military uniform, in a hall that he arranged to be decked out with swastikas and other Nazi flags. He got rid of Jewish academics with relish, even betraying his own teacher, Edmund Husserl, who had kindly arranged Heidegger’s professorship for him.

The way academic philosophers embraced Nazism is shocking. You might try to excuse it on the basis that they were bullied into it by the Gestapo and the SS. But they were not. As Sherratt points out, when Hitler became chancellor in 1933, his plan to purge universities of Jews “required the wholesale collaboration of a mass of academics”. No doubt it could and would eventually have been achieved by force - but, in the event, Hitler did not need to use force. The academics, particularly the philosophers, cleared out their Jewish colleagues voluntarily.

More

‘Kneeling Hitler’ Placed In… JPost - Jewish World - Jewish News

Another “artwork” by an attention freak.

WARSAW - If you look through the bars of the locked gate at 14 Prozna Street in Poland’s capital, a place that was the center of the Jewish ghetto 70 years ago, you may spot a small statue of a figure kneeling in prayer. That figure is Adolf Hitler.

“Amen,” a new exhibition by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, which includes the praying Hitler, has caused outrage among the Jewish community in Poland as well as among Jewish and Catholic organizations worldwide that regard the exhibit as extremely offensive.

Cattelan, 52, an Italian-born sculptor living in New York, is known for his controversial work. One of the most famous is “La Nona Ora” (“The Ninth Hour”) depicting Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite.

Last month, Cattelan opened a show at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw.

Most of the exhibits are displayed inside the museum, which is elsewhere in Warsaw. Only the praying Hitler has been placed in the middle of the former Jewish ghetto.

The Center for Contemporary Art has a description of Cattelan’s exhibition on its website: “In a Warsaw ravaged by the cataclysmic 20th century, Maurizio Cattelan’s works take on a particular dimension; they become an artistic commentary on the Catholic credo. What, in fact, does love thy enemy mean? What does forgive those who trespass against us mean? Evoking the traumas of history, they deal with memory and forgetfulness, good and evil.”

Cattelan’s decision to put the Hitler figure in the former Jewish ghetto has angered many in Poland, Jews and Christians alike. The organizers of the international film festival Human Docs being held in Poland and dedicated to human rights, have decided to hold a debate on the question “What’s Hitler up to in Poland? The moral impact of provocation in art.”

Historians and artists have tried to explain Cattelan’s decision to place the figure in one of the most sensitive places for Jews in Poland and to resolve the question of whether it is a legitimate art exhibit or an offensive provocation. Some said the kneeling figure appears to be vulnerable and ambiguous. On one hand, the hero is an icon of evil; on the other, the view of Hitler kneeling may evoke sympathy in the viewer. Viewing this object, they say, provokes mixed feelings.

A few days after the Hitler figure was placed in the yard of 14 Prozna Street, someone covered its face and hands in an attempt to obscure its identity, perhaps fearing the reaction it would produce.

Another sign of the strong emotions the figure has raised is that, despite there being no public access to the exhibit, the museum’s management has mounted 24-hour security around it.

thesun.co.uk

RACIST mass murderer Anders Breivik has fallen for an alleged female Nazi killer and sent her a letter praising her role in a string of assassinations.
Breivik wrote to accused far-right extremist Beate Zschaepe in Germany to congratulate her terror cell which killed nine immigrant businessmen and a policewoman in a decade-long reign of terror.
Breivik, who slaughtered nearly 80 young people in Norway last year, said she should use her upcoming trial on murder and other charges ‘to spread right-wing propaganda!’
He also called her a ‘courageous heroine of national resistance’ and addressed the letter to ‘Dear Sister Beate’.
‘Reveal your political motives to the population,’ said Breivik.
Details of the correspondence are revealed in this week’s edition of Der Spiegel magazine which went on sale on today in Germany.
Zschaepe was an alleged member of the National Socialist Underground, a death squad which idolised Hitler and wanted to up a “Fourth Reich” in Germany.
The cell was hunted for many years after being suspected of the string of racially-motivated attacks.

Read more: thesun.co.uk