MORE 'FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY'

Israel urges Germany to ban NPD

NSNS Friday, 4 February 2005

BERLIN—Prompted by demands from the state of Israel, the German foreign ministry has called for the banning of the patriotic, populist National Democratic Party.

The demand came in the wake of German president Horst Köhler's recent trip of "repentance and atonement" to the Jewish state, in which he begged "forgiveness" and pledged to fight "anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism."

A leader of the Social Democrats in the Bundestag, Gernot Erler, joined in the call for a ban on the NPD.

"Germany will have an image problem if the impression that it can't get rid of these right extremists gains a foothold abroad," he told the Berliner Zeitung.

The vice-president of the German-Israeli Parliamentarian Group in the Bundestag, Reinhold Robbe (SPD), echoed Erler's sentiments and said that the Israeli demand was "indeed encouraging."

BAN OF PARTY STILL POSSIBLE

The president of German high constitutional court, Hans-Juergen Papier, has meanwhile declared that a ban of the NPD is possible, despite the failure of an earlier attempt to outlaw it.

Future attempts could still succeed, he said. "The suspension of proceedings to ban [he party] then, does not represent a preordained decision on future efforts to ban [it]," Papier told the newspaper, Bild am Sonntag.

Earlier, in a visit to the Auschwitz theme park in Poland, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder singled out his country for special blame for alleged war crimes and "The Holocaust"®—this, despite the ethnic cleansing, mass murder and vastly more hideous and actual crimes committed by the wartime Allies, whose representatives sat piously in attendance at the event. He said it was the duty of Germans today to "confront the neo-Nazis" who now dispute such blood libels.

"The enemies of democracy and tolerance should never be tolerated in a well-fortified democracy," the chancellor asserted in unabashed Orwellian newspeak. "Never again should the anti-Semites succeed in suppressing and harming our Jewish citizens and bringing shame on our nation—nor should it ever happen, even outside our country."

LAWMAKERS WALK OUT ON THE LIE

The NPD has long been a thorn in the side of the German puppet government. On January 28 it caused outrage among the champions of "freedom and democracy" when 12 of its deputies in the Saxony state parliament walked out before a moment of silence in honor of so-called Holocaust and the Soviet capture of the Auschwitz internment facility in 1945.

NPD deputies compared the Jewish trademark non-event with the targeting of German civilians by the Allies in a very real "bombing holocaust" during World War II—including the ghastly fire-bombing of Dresden 60 years ago.

The NPD garnered national and world attention after winning 9.2 percent of the vote in Saxony last year. Its stand against immigration and the government's cavalier slashing of basic social programs for struggling and needy working families won it widespread support.