Falling over a reminiscence: meet the bad boy

The year is 1966. "California Dreamin" by the Mamas and the Papas was the Billboard number one song of the year.

After basic training and border duty, I had been drafted into the Nahal Mutznach (Airborne Nahal) battalion of the Paratroopers. Every six weeks I had leave.

We received so little leave because there always had to be a minimum of paratrooper companies on alert during the Shabbat.

My base was up north and my home, a kibbutz, was down south in the Negev.

I had no money, so I hitchhiked. This was not difficult but it took a lot of time. I usually arrived at the kibbutz late afternoon on a Friday and left late afternoon on Saturday.

I did not have a room. It was a waste giving me a room if I only turned up for one night every six weeks. I used to kip in an empty room.

If I could not find one, I put up a stretcher bed at a friend’s place.

I was often very tired, but sometimes my tiredness did not get the better of my hormones. 

On one of my leaves I met a young Belgian Jewish girl, Ariella.

I cannot exactly remember why she was there. She may have just been visiting.

We started to talk earnestly and I ended up at her hut.

She had to start work early in the morning. When someone came to wake her, I hid behind a bookcase.

I got up a bit before lunchtime, took a shower and started walking down to the communal dining room. I was going to have lunch with my best friend, Zvi, who would then be finishing work.

The first people I saw on my walk were two women of my age. One was a schoolteacher for young children and the other was a member of my group (garin). They were always together.

They smiled at me, said hello and started giggling. That did not bother me as they were the giggling types.

I passed other people who greeted me with broad smiles. This kind of effusive welcome was a bit unusual.

Then I saw Noach and Peel from a distance. Noach was one of the Romanian Holocaust survivors who had founded the kibbutz. Peel, which is Hebrew for elephant, was his Israeli sidekick. They worked in the garage.

On a kibbutz the garage is the man cave. It is where the men go to gossip.

I had got to know them well when I was serving on a nearby border post, Kerem Shalom.

As there was not much to do on the post I could sometimes come and work on my kibbutz. My visits were too irregular for work with the sheep (I was a shepherd), so I started work in the garage.

I did not have to do much. They had a big armchair where I used to take a nap.

All they wanted from me was gossip.

My border post was mixed, men and women. They wanted to be kept up to date on all the lurid details of what was happening there; who was doing what with whom.

When they waved to me on my walk to the communal dining room, I waved back. Then they gave me the thumbs up sign. Now I knew something was going on.

For the rest of the walk I kept my head down and stared at the ground.

At the back of the building with the dining room there was a soda tap. I went there first to drink some soda.

I felt a thump on my back.

It was Zvi. He congratulated me on my new relationship. It was all over the kibbutz. Ariella was wallowing in the attention she was getting.

Nothing much happens on a kibbutz and this sort of thing was news.

I explained to him that it was only a one-night stand and I had no intention of starting a relationship with the girl. I would tell her that.

And that is where my memory fails me. I suppose I must have spoken to her about it. However, I cannot remember anything about the conversation.

Anyway, I do remember that I left that afternoon to go back to my base.

When I came home on my next leave she was not there. Nobody mentioned her name and I never saw her again.

I presume she got over me, the others did.

Jews are good for something

In 1948, the Israelis and Jordanians fought for Jerusalem.

The Israelis secured West Jerusalem. The Jordanians won East Jerusalem with the old city and its religious sites.

The old city has a Jewish Quarter where Jews had lived since Ottoman times. It is also home to the holy sites of Judaism, including the western wall of the destroyed Jewish temple. 

The Jordanian authorities did not allow any Jew to stay or pray in the old city. They did not bother with the upkeep of the Jewish holy sites. 

In 1967, Israel captured the old city from the Jordanians. Jews returned to the Jewish Quarter and Jews from around the world came to pray at the western wall.

There was an agreement reached with the Jordanians that gave sovereignty of the Muslim holy places to Jordan.

In December 2016, the United Nations Security Council adopted a "no Jews in Jerusalem" resolution.

The resolution decrees that any Jew living in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is a flagrant violation of international law and that all the sites that Jews consider to be holy belong to a new state called Palestine.

The Security Council vote was a logical follow-up of resolutions adopted by UNESCO two months earlier. 

In October, 2016 UNESCO adopted Palestinian formulated resolutions that deleted any mention of Jewish ties to Jerusalem.

The Palestinians rejoiced. The "world" agreed with them. Jerusalem must be Jew-free. There is only one question left.

How should they rename the Jewish Quarter?

My first thought was, the "May Quarter".
After all we now know that Theresa May helped formulate the Arab "Jews out of Jerusalem" resolution. And she did pressure other members of the Security Council to support it.

Was she trying to atone for the Balfour Declaration?
It was a really professional act of perfidy. Praising Israel and Jews with a broad smile and then kicking them out of their holiest religious sites.

She does have a lot going for her. Still, I do not think she will get the honour.
The Palestinians have become more and more religious. According to Pew, some 89% support Sharia punishments. I do not think they will rename it after a woman. 

That only leaves Barack Obama.
The Obama Quarter. It has a nice ring to it. If they were to decree that all the toilets there must be gender-neutral, he might agree to take part in the renaming ceremony.

The Palestinians can still use the old name for tourist purposes. Jerusalem tours of where the Jews used to live might be profitable.
European countries do that and it is quite a thriving business.
So you see, Jews are good for something.

Who needs antisemites?

Nina Siegal grew up in New York. She has been living in Amsterdam since 2006, where she works as an author and a frequent contributor to the New York Times.
She usually writes about art.

In an article for the Jewish Book Council in 2014 she reflected on being Jewish in Amsterdam. For her, that is reflections on dead Jews.
Not a word about the situation of live Jews. Of the growing antisemitism, mainly from Muslims.

On July 29, 2016 she wrote a glowing article for the New York Times about a new political party in the Netherlands, called DENK.
She referred to it as a party, "led by a multicultural group of candidates seeking to combat xenophobia and racism in the Netherlands."

In reality, DENK is led by two Erdogan-supporters.
On a popular Muslim site the party's leader was proudly referred to as, "the Dutch Erdogan".
As to be expected, they support the Muslim Brotherhood and Grey Wolves. They also deny the Armenian genocide and call all Kurdish organizations terrorists.
Ms. Siegal missed that.

She missed other things that are important for live Jews.
DENK hates Israel intensely. That is one of the attractions for its potential electorate.
It supports the "resistance", Hamas.
In its charter, Hamas calls for the murder of all the Jews in the world. It maintains that Jews are responsible for all evil since the French Revolution and killing Jews is the only way to rid the world of evil.

To summarize the above:
Ms. Siegal is in Amsterdam reflecting and lamenting the Holocaust of 6 million Jews.
Ms. Siegal writes a glowing article about a political party that supports Hamas, who calls for a Holocaust of 14 million Jews.

Jews can be their own worst enemies, who needs antisemites?

UPDATE.
This article was also posted to my blog on the Jerusalem Post.
Ms. Siegal complained that I had called her an antisemite. Which is incorrect.
The Jerusalem Post decided that a New York Times columnist is a non-public figure who could not be "personally attacked".
They removed my article.
They of course can do this. It is their newspaper.

I interpret their decision as saying columnists for major newspapers cannot be held accountable for what they choose to write. Even if it is a glowing article about an antisemitic organization that supports terrorists who call for the genocide of Jews.

DENK has been in the news.
To start with, the party split. Then there were the candidates they selected for the coming elections. All are virulent Israel-haters.

There are some variations in their candidates. Two examples.
One candidate is an ethnic Moroccan who started crowdfunding for another ethnic Moroccan who was convicted of kicking a Dutch linesman to death after a soccer match.
Another maintains that ISIS was created by the "cowardly dogs" Israel (and America). Furthermore that the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghadi, is a Zionist spy.

All that the readers of the New York Times know is that this wonderful new political party is "led by a multicultural group of candidates seeking to combat xenophobia and racism in the Netherlands."
They know this, courtesy of Nina Siegal.

Incompetence is Gender-Neutral

In 2009 Margot Wallström wrote an article for the Huffington Post with the title, "Women We Need: Towards a More Female-centred Foreign Policy." 

In her article she argued that (important) women (like her) should play a bigger role in conflict management, policy-making and peace-making processes. 

The major reasons for this upgrading of the "female perspective and experience" were that women are the most vulnerable group and "eighty percent of the world's refugees are women and children".
As a result, women (unlike men) realize that security is a "wider concept, including environmental and poverty-related challenges to the individual's integrity". 

Now fast-forward to 2015 and the surge of refugees entering Europe. Angela Merkel and Margot Wallström have taken over foreign policy in Europe. Their "female perspective and experience" reigns supreme.

What is the result? To start with, women and children are no longer 80% of the refugees. According to UN data, 69% are men, 18% are children and 13% are women. 
The percentage for children is relatively high because in 2015 there has been a surge in the number of "unaccompanied minors". 
In practice these are often young men without papers who say they are minors because they know it is harder to deport minors.

What else have Ms Merkel and Ms Wallström accomplished? Deep divisions between and within EU countries. Possible destruction of Schengen. The EU is on the verge of collapse.

A lot of this new policy will have to be reversed. According to EU vice-president Frans Timmermans, some 60% of the migrants will not be recognized as refugees.

Sweden has now stated that it expects to deport 80,000. The expulsions will "have to be done using specially chartered aircraft, given the large numbers, staggered over several years." 

What is Germany going to do? How is it going to deport 600,000 people (the 60% of Timmermans) and how long will that take? 

This foreign policy based on "female perspective and experience" is a complete and utter failure. Ms Merkel and Ms Wallström have proved that women can be just as incompetent as men.

Incompetence is gender-neutral. 

Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done

Two things bother me about the Wilders-trial.

They have nothing to do with whether he is innocent or guilty according to law. That is not my area of expertise.

I have problems with the way the trial was conducted. This transcends the discussion about “guilt” or “innocence”.

For me one of the most important principles of the rule of law is that justice must also be seen to be done.

This means that the mere appearance of bias during a trial must be avoided. Otherwise the impartiality of the judicial process will become contentious, which in turn diminishes the legitimacy of the rule of law.

That is my first problem. 

There was the appearance of bias during the trial and the defense will certainly use this in the appeals process as an argument for overturning the verdict.

The appearance of bias was in the person of one of the three judges, Elianne van Rens.

In a television programme this judge had publicly criticized Wilders’ ideas and the earlier trial that had acquitted him.

During the trial the defense called a professor of jurisprudence at Leiden University as a witness. He explained why he thought that Wilders was innocent of a crime.

Ms. van Rens interrupted him constantly with remarks (sneers?) like “that is just your interpretation”. She did not interrupt any witnesses for the prosecution.

Unnecessary comments, because it was obvious that it was his interpretation as a professor of jurisprudence.

The defense requested the substitution of the judge. This was refused.

My second problem is with the conclusion of the trial.

After the refusal to substitute one of the judges, Wilders began referring to the trial in the terminology of a kangaroo court. At the end of the trial, the judges wrote that Wilders’ terminology was “unworthy” of a politician.

The judges were there to interpret the law not to pass moral judgments on the “worthiness” of politicians.

This reinforces my amazement at the general arrogance of the judges.
As if they did not care about the sensitivity of trying an elected politician for his political statements.

As if they had never heard of the expression: “Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.”

It does not always happen to other people

Dr. Clemens Ladenburger is Assistant to the Director General of the Legal Service of the European Commission. He is one of the legal architects of the 2015 open borders policy.

He had a 19-year-old daughter, Maria Ladenburger, who studied medicine at Freiburg University, Germany.
Maria shared her father’s social conscience.
She was a member of an ecumenical Christian group, “Towards a new solidarity”, that actively supports refugees. She was also part of a group that collects money for refugees in Freiburg.

On October 19, 2016, Maria was brutally raped and drowned in the Dreisam River.

At the funeral her parents, true to the family’s social conscience, asked that mourners not bring flowers, but instead donate money to a church project in Bangladesh and to a student organization that agitates against the deportation of failed asylum seekers.

The police have now caught the murderer, who has confessed.
He was a 17-year-old Afghan refugee who had arrived in Germany in 2015 and was living with a Freiburg guest family.

In the majority of cases in Germany, an asylum seeker’s age is based on physical appearance and an interview. I presume they will now be allowed to carry out physical tests to ascertain his age.
They suspect he may also be responsible for another rape and murder.

Rapists are usually found through the use of DNA.
Not in Germany, as there are many restrictions on its use during an investigation. For example, the police are not allowed to ask for the DNA results for gender, skin colour or ethnicity. 
In practice, DNA can only be used at the end of an investigation to check if you have the right person.

The police found some partly dyed hair at the crime scene where she was murdered. Then they scanned the security videos to see if they could find anybody with the same partly dyed hair colours. That is how they found the suspect.
Their suspicions were confirmed by a DNA match.

When Dr. Landenburger and his colleagues were formulating the 2015 open borders policies, they knew there would be "incidents". There were going to be crimes committed, including rape and murder.
This, the would say, is the unfortunate price that must inevitably be paid for "helping millions of people".

What they did not presume, is that they would have to pay the price themselves. That one of their daughters would be the victim of rape and murder.

Rest in peace Maria Landenburger. You tried to do some good in this world.
May her memory be a blessing.

Gibberish and Balderdash

The public networks in the Netherlands are financed by tax revenue. People who work for these networks are not supposed to earn more than the Prime Minister, €179,000 per year.
The socialist network has a problem with the salary cap. It pays its presenter of a weekday talk programme a yearly salary of € 570,000.
The programme is very Bernie Sanders. There is no bleeding heart problem that it does not cover.

An 85 year old writer and ex-politician was on the programme.
First off, his new book was plugged by the € 570,000 a year socialist. Then he was given the opportunity to hold a speech. He spoke for seven minutes without notes.

He began the speech with a nostalgic review of his youth.
He mentioned that in the good old days all the houses had a piece of string hanging from their letter boxes. That way children and adults could open the front doors and walk in and out whenever they wanted to.
People trusted each other and their slogan was "make love not war" (He said that in Dutch English).

Then he fast forwarded to the present. The good times were behind us.Things had radically changed and not for the better.
What had gone wrong?
The fact that a hypocritical socialist network was paying a presenter € 570,000 to milk bleeding heart problems?
No, he did not mention that.

According to the octogenarian guru, there were two problems.
Firstly we were destroying the planet.
Secondly, there was no trust any more. The people did not trust the politicians and the politicians did not trust the people.

He had the solution.
Politicians had to be honest and work for the public good.
How could they prove their honesty and integrity to the people? By pursuing a radical environment policy to save the world.
That was the answer to all our problems.

The whole politically correct world of talking heads, columnists and analysts were unanimous in their praise.
This wise, old man had analyzed the problem correctly and shown us the way forward.

Gibberish and balderdash.
There is a problem with human interaction with the environment but this is not the cause of lack of mutual trust and lack of trust in politicians.
There is a whole list of developments that have contributed to the demise of the sense of community of bygone times.
However, the most relevant is the change in mutual human interactions: the transition from the monocultural society of his youth to the present day multicultural society. This has produced many frictions.

These transition frictions have been exacerbated by the Dutch disease: the denial of the elite that a politically inconvenient problem exists and the ensuing lack of policy to solve the problem.

There was only one columnist who had the audacity, honesty and courage to question this shallow speech of platitudes. She is not indigenous Dutch but a migrant from Romania. Perhaps that helped her make a better analysis.

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Hanging From Lampposts

Amsterdam has the largest documentary film festival in the world, the IDFA. It takes place in November. I am bound to the IDFA by family. So, I do go and see some documentaries.

I saw “Shalom Italia”, the story of three Jewish brothers who were the remaining members of a family that had hidden in a cave in Tuscany during the latter part of the Second World War. After the war the family emigrated to Israel.

In the documentary they return to Tuscany to search for the cave.

For the eldest brother the documentary is the first time he has talked about his war experiences. He had buried them in his subconscious for the 70 years he had been in Israel.

This was not unusual.
I lived in Israel in the 1960s. Everybody older than me who had come from Europe was a Holocaust survivor. Nobody ever talked about their war experience and I never thought to ask.

I knew all I needed to know about the Holocaust from the Jewish history lessons that were part of Hebrew classes. I went to these classes from the age of twelve.

There was one incident.

On my kibbutz I had moved from a wooden hut to a concrete room. There were four of them in a row. I was on the right. Zvi, Rahele and the Romanian parents of Yossele lived in the other rooms. We all had our own small terraces.

One night I was woken by the sound of a woman wailing and sobbing. I sat straight up in bed. I did not know what to do. It seemed to go on for a long time but, in hindsight, I think it lasted about 15 to 30 seconds

The next day I waited until someone mentioned the wailing to me. Nobody did. Having been brought up British, I did not mention it either.

A few days later it happened again. The wailing and sobbing were very disconcerting.

This time I wanted to know what was going on.
The next day I asked Zvi about it.

“Oh that,” he said, “that was Yossele’s mother. She sometimes goes through bad periods. You know, the Shoah. Then she has nightmares.

She dreams there are Jewish children hanging from the lampposts.

It does not happen often. You get used to it and turn over and go back to sleep.”

Zvi was right. Now I knew what it was, I did get used to it.
I did not mention it again. 

White Privilege

It is June 1964, I am eighteen.
Just taken my A levels. To the chagrin of everybody, I am leaving in four or five months to go and live for good on a kibbutz in the Negev desert.

I went with a few friends up west to the Flamingo, an R&B and jazz club in Wardour Street. It was in a basement underneath the Whiskey A Go Go, a more upscale club.

White people dressed to the nines went up to the Whiskey and slobs like me went down to the Flamingo.
The black people were always dressed smart, but they did not go to the Whiskey. The wrong music and only whites.
They came down to the Flamingo, that was a more integrated club. Though I sometimes had the feeling it was only black people and us.

We were at the club quite early. There was a supporting act from Newcastle. I had never heard of them before. The place was half empty when they performed.
Their name was The Animals.They had just released “House of the Rising Sun”. A week later it came into the charts at number 1.

I liked their performance because of Alan Price’s Vox Continental organ. I was an organ fan.
A friend of mine worked in a record shop. He used to import Jimmy Smith and other Blue Note records for me.
For the musical illiterate: Jimmy Smith was the greatest Hammond organ player ever.

The Animals performance was good and after them came an even better performance from Sonny Boy Williamson. However, I remember the evening for a less salutary reason.

You could dance there. Unfortunately there were few single white girls. I would not have dared to ask a black girl to dance. I do not think I had even met one at that time.

I saw this rather attractive white piece of skirt lounging against a wall, all on her own.
I swaggered over to her and said, ”Do you want to dance?”
She fluttered her eyelashes at me, smiled and replied in a posh voice, “I’m ever so sorry, but I don’t dance with white boys”.

I was used to anti-Semitism. That was the first time I had been put down because of the colour of my skin. 

Shout "Amsterdam"

Kristallnacht was a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and German civilians.
The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.

In 2015 a so-called platform against racism invited Hanin Zoabi to be the keynote speaker at an alternative Kristallnacht commemoration in Amsterdam. 
She held a virulently anti-Israel speech where Israel was equated with the Nazis.
This platform is headed by anti-Israel zealots (including some Jews). They are financed by a who's who of mainstream Dutch political and religious organizations.
Their strategy is/was to dejudaize and trivialize the Holocaust. 
According to them, it was an unfortunate coincidence that Jews were targeted. The Palestinians are the "Jews" of today and Israelis are the new Nazis. 
By separating Israel from the Holocaust, they hope to remove any sympathy people might have for Israel.

No, do not shout "Amsterdam" yet. There is more.

In 2015 the platform of Israel-haters held their desecration of the Kristallnacht commemoration at the monument for Jewish resistance. The descendants of the Jewish resistance wanted to protest this hijacking of their monument.
The police threatened to arrest these descendants of Holocaust survivors if they demonstrated as, according to the police, this would desecrate the "dignity" of the event.

No, do not shout "Amsterdam" yet. There is more.

In 2016 a Jewish group was clever and claimed the Jewish resistance monument.
So what did the haters do? They found a gullible synagogue and booked that for their Kristallnacht travesty.
When the synagogue realized who the group was, they tried to cancel the booking. 
They could not because they were afraid of being hit with a big claim for damages.

No, do not shout "Amsterdam" yet. There is more.

Remember, in 2016 a Jewish group had reserved the Jewish resistance monument for their commemoration of Kristallnacht. The descendants of Jewish resistance fighters were going to speak there.
The mayor of Amsterdam and the police forbade this commemoration on the grounds that it would disrupt the "public order".

Now is the time to shout "Amsterdam".

In the footsteps of Anne Frank

Early evening, cycling through the Maasstraat. This used to be a Jewish area.
Not recently, before the war.

I decided to buy some chips at Oase, a snack bar in a side street.
Before the war Oase was an ice cream parlour run by German-Jewish refugees. Anne Frank used to love the ice cream that was sold there. It is mentioned in her diary.
Yes, this is the neighbourhood where she lived before she went into hiding.

Last time I was there, Oase was a part of the Anne Frank Walking Tour of Amsterdam. 
For just $54.70 you can, “enrich your knowledge of Anne Frank’s early life on a private 1.5-hour walking tour of Amsterdam-Zuid.” 

The dead Jews of Amsterdam are revered. They are a good tourist attraction. It is the pesky live Jews who are the problem.
Nowadays, the Netherlands is a better place than in Anne Frank's time. Not all Jews are hated. Only the 90% plus of them who are not willing to bleat in unison with the prevailing hatred of Israeli Jews and Zionists.

Getting back to Oase. It was not there anymore. At this rate there will be nothing left over for the walking tour.

A bit further in the Maasstraat there was another snack bar. A football match between Egypt and Ghana was being streamed in Arabic onto a large flat-screen television. The commentator seemed to get hysterical every time an Egyptian had the ball.
The man working in the snack bar was watching the match intensely.

I bought my chips there and took them home.
They tasted like salted chewing gum. I am glad I did not try the ice cream.
Afterwards I worked out that he had overcharged me 50 cents.

The neighbourhood is not what it used to be.

Dutch Waffen-SS volunteers do not apologize

At least 75% of Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust. The highest percentage for western Europe.

Remarkably enough, the Germans were not very involved with the rounding up of the Dutch Jews and sending them to the transit camp Westerbork in the east of the Netherlands.

The civil service informed the Germans where the Jews lived and the Jewish Council drew up a list of names for transportation to the transit camp.
When enough Jews did not turn up voluntarily, Dutch police arrested Jews randomly in "razzias" to make up the numbers.

The resistance did not blow up the rail tracks to stop the transports. Some did want to, but this was nixed by the Dutch government in exile. They said the money the Germans paid for the transport of Jews was needed for the economy.

Eichmann was full of praise. He was very pleased the trains ran on time.

A few months after the end of the war, the Dutch Minister of Transport Steef van Schaik, praised the railway workers for their collaboration with the Germans.
He said they were doing their “duty”.

This Dutch “duty” is one of the main reasons why so many Jews perished.

In 2005, more than 60 years after the transports took place, the CEO of Dutch Railways apologized.

Nice of him.
There have been a stream of apologies from Dutch authorities, organisations and companies for their collaboration during the Holocaust - some 60 to 70 years after it happened.
However, not everybody has apologized.

The Nazis called the Dutch a “brother people” and a lot of emphasis was placed on getting them to cooperate with the German occupation.

They had more success in the Netherlands than in other occupied countries. Especially when it came to the SS.
"...approximately 25,000 Dutchmen volunteered to join the ranks of the German Waffen-SS. This number was not only relatively but also absolutely, the largest contingent of non-German volunteers from all of the Nazi occupied territories in Europe."
(NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Netherlands)

After the war it was claimed that the Dutch volunteers had not taken part in the Holocaust. They said all they did was fight on the front.

The Dutch authorities accepted this. Those who wanted to, were integrated into the Dutch army.

Later some diaries were found that had belonged to the Dutch SS volunteers. They were full of proud stories about how they killed Jews.

Here are two fragments from one diary (my translation):

“..we arrived at a village near Tarnopol.
There were a lot of Jews there. We took some of them and made them polish our car until it shined.

We shaved the Jews. We let one half of their beard remain and cut off the other half with a scissors. Some of the beards we burnt off with petrol.

Then we had some fun. We took a sword and a piece of wood and started beating them until they were screaming with pain.

Then we took them to the commander who led them to the river where prrt, prrt, they and the other Jews were shot with a machine gun.

The next morning we went to the river. It was full of half-dead and dead Jews.
What a wailing and it stank terribly.”

“I forgot to tell you how great it was to hang a chief rabbi from the tower of his synagogue and then torch the synagogue with the Jews inside.”

Nobody apologized for this.

I want you

I have always disliked Ari Shavit. That pompous, arrogant asshole who writes for Haaretz.

It is hard for me to suppress a hateful chuckle at his fall from grace for making passes at American Jewish women.

However, in Leadbelly's words I am, "laughing to keep from crying". This whole sordid episode also reminds me of a deep traumatic experience I had as a young man.

I had difficulty with the permissive sexual mores on my kibbutz. I believed in strict monogamy and sex only after marriage.
I would never ever make sexual overtures to a woman as I did not regard women as sex objects. I was a paragon of virtue, like those fine, upstanding young men in "The Little House on the Prairie".

There were three American Jewish women volunteers on my kibbutz.
They arrived with two suitcases of different sizes. The small one was for clothes. The big one was full of state of the art contraceptive devices.
They were sexual predators.

I was home on leave. There was some kind of festival in the communal dining room. The California one (the other two were from New York) casually swaggered over to me, whispered "I want you" and licked her lips.

I mean, can you imagine my shock. It would have sounded bad enough with a British accent, but that California drawl made it even more menacing.
I have never recovered from this verbal rape experience. It has been a trauma that has haunted me all my life.

Then I got to thinking. They say that parents who beat their children were often beaten by their own parents.

Could that be it? 
Was Shavit, like me, the victim of American Jewish predatory volunteers when he was an innocent young man? 
Is that why he, in later life, became a sexual "pervert" who makes passes at American Jewish women?

Cultural Appropriation

Amazon has stopped selling a ‘sexy burka’ party outfit. There were a lot of complaints. The usual screeching from the policor zealots: disgusting, racist, cultural appropriation.
This brought back a memory of one of our vacations in Eilat.

We had been upgraded to Herods Palace. On the first evening we went down to reception to ask for our free bath robes and slippers.
There was a Sephardic French couple with their teenage son and daughter checking in before us. They looked a bit tired. 

We saw them again the next morning at breakfast. The first to come in were the mother and son. They sat down a few tables from us.
After a good night's sleep in a Herods bed, the tiredness of the previous evening was gone and they were smiling vibrantly at each other and the other guests.
The mother was wearing a nice summer dress.

The son had long Lady Gaga-type fingernails that were painted bright red.
He was wearing a cotton "tallit katan", a poncho-like small prayer vest with four fringes. It is worn by religious Jews over or under their clothes.
However, the tallit katan was all he was wearing on the upper part of his body.

On the lower part of his body he was wearing tight short shorts. They were inclined upward at the sides to accentuate the length of his shaved legs.
For footwear he had chosen calf-high cowboy boots with elevated heels.

The father and daughter came in a few minutes later.
He had grown a full black beard overnight. Most of his head was covered by a large multi-coloured knitted kippah (skullcap).
For the rest, he was dressed in clothes usually associated with religious settlers. They looked dirty, but I think they were stained to create a dirty effect.

The girl was voluptuous.
There is an appropriate Dutch expression: “wood in front of the door”. She had enough wood there for a Siberian winter.
I was amazed that it did not tumble out, as her top was skintight with a deep décolleté.
She had an ample supply of wood behind the door as well. This was only partially covered by a skimpy miniskirt. Every time she moved, she flashed an eyeful of her opulent buttocks.

No, I was not foaming at the mouth. That was the froth from the excellent cappuccino that Herods serves.

We badges three

It was the early 1960s. We were 15 years old.
Albert, Glyn and I went to a youth CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) meeting in Herne Hill. In some rich girl’s house.
What a waste of time. Lots of vague hypothesizing.
There were some nauseating Trots (Trotskyists) there as well. They do go on and on. Terrible bores

This aimless chit chat was too soft for us grammar school solidarity-with-the-working-class kids from Brixton. We, who used to fight and heckle Mosley’s fascists when they started coming out onto our streets again, were looking for some real action.
So we decided to wear CND badges, the ones with the “peace” sign, to school. Does not sound much, but for us it was a courageous act of rebellion. Our school had strict clothing rules and badges were not allowed.

We three were the vanguard of a new movement, or so we thought. 
There were other CND supporters in our year. A plot was hatched. We decided that everybody would wear their badges to school on a badge-day of our choice. 
And as agreed, it came to pass.

However, unknown to us, our plans had been betrayed to the gym teacher who was a fascist and a racist.
On our badge-day he went from class to class telling our group of revolutionaries to either take off their badges or go down to the headmaster’s office and face the consequences.
Those of the miserable petite bourgeoisie with no honour complied with his command and removed their badges.

Only Albert, Glyn and I ended up in the headmaster's office. We badges three were Narodnik shepherds without a flock.
We were suspended and sent home.

We got into the national newspapers. The Daily Mail was on our side. Something about the new intellectual elite. I liked that.
My parents sent me to the doctor. Just to make sure there was nothing clinically wrong with me.

As we were now notorious, we were invited to visit youth CND headquarters. We went but I did not feel at home there, had the feeling I was in the wrong place. These la-di-da, wishy-washy armchair socialists were not part of my political world.

I remember one specific occurrence. A delegation of youth peace activists from Leningrad came in. They looked quite old to me. I noticed that they were all stocky, well-built men with close-cropped hair. In any other situation I would have said they were soldiers.

The vision of those "peace" activists stayed with me. After all, I reasoned, the Soviet Union would be very pleased if the UK renounced nuclear weapons. I came to the conclusion that CND was one of the pawns the Russians were using to weaken the West in the Cold War.
As I shared George Orwell's intense dislike of the Soviet Union, I threw out my badge. Away with you, "o viper vile".

The old CND was basically an elitist fringe group of misguided, naive dreamers who peacefully protested a lot. It has morphed into the Stop the War Coalition.
StW is different. It is hard-left, violent and bigoted. The stooge of any organisation or country that is anti-West. The Trots/Lenninists are no longer just a boring minority. They are running the show.

They want power and will use any means necessary to get it.

According to the Telegraph, they are taking over the Labour party.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/12/labour-alarm-at-stop-the-war-coalition-figures-growing-influence/

Halkidiki

Our peaceful, empty hotel has been invaded by hordes of small people. Their coaches are in the car park.
When we went for dinner, I asked the manager if they were new Russians. 
He said no, lowered his voice and hissed, Kosovo. Then he changed the subject. 
The Greeks do not seem to like them. 

They are wearing clothes that we gave to the Salvation Army 30 years ago.
They pile as much food as they can onto their plates. Just like Israelis. 
My wife, who is a better person than me, says they must be starving. They do not look underfed.
Quite the opposite. They are all chunky. They look like the bad guys in a Hollywood movie.
For the Kosovarians it may be the holiday of a lifetime. We are slumming.

I prefer to be one of the haves.

I almost forgot

It started with the exposure of the killing fields in Cambodia. After the Vietnamese invasion, the world saw the magnitude of the mass slaughter committed by the Khmer Rouge.

Then I looked around at my acquaintances, my peer group, my subsection of society. Most had marched in support of the Khmer Rouge. 

What was their reaction? Were they remorseful? Upset? Disillusioned? The answer was no, no and no. They were just not interested, it was yesterday’s news. 

That was when I left this political scene. There was no individual responsibility.

Demonstrations were exhilarating and exciting. You could bleat in unison with the other sheep. Fighting the good fight with thousands of other screeching yobs. 

That also made you horny and you had a good fuck afterwards. The best way to get inside a girl’s panties was to take her on a demonstration first. 

It was all a game for spoilt, bored children of the welfare state.

Then you start your adult life: a job and children. New bikes for your kids are more important than the imperialist, colonial machinations in darkest Africa.

Then one day you look around and find that you are now on the wrong side. You have become the target of the bleating sheep. The yobs are screeching at you.

Then you say to yourself, I almost forgot, I am a Jew.

And you are not just any Jew. You are the first generation after the Holocaust. 

Time to wake up from your political lethargy.

That “never again” starts with you.

Mr. Not Nice

I have nurtured my image of not being a nice person.

It is not that I throw stones at drowning people.

It is just that I am not socialized.

It is not that I think everybody else is stupid and that is why I do not converse with people.

It is just that when I talk to myself I am sure that I will have a good conversation.

Being a bad role model for decent people does have its advantages. Nobody bothers me with requests for money. They know it is a waste of time.

I never have to refuse an invitation as I never get any invitations.

I suppose it happens to most people. You are walking to the shops and a neighbor or acquaintance stops you and starts a conversation. Actually, you are in a hurry and the last thing you want is to talk to this person. 

However, you do not want to hurt his/her feelings. So you stand there smiling and making the right noises.

Never happens to me. People cross the road if they see me coming.

Every now and then my idyllic state of libertarian solitude is encroached upon. My family organizes an event. That means lots of people milling around my house, dirtying my floors and sanitary spaces.

They drink immense amounts of alcohol that I have paid for. It is not that I begrudge them the booze.

It is just that I would prefer to drink it all myself.

Even though nobody is coming for me, I still have to be sociable. So, I have been practicing.

Firstly, I have had to change my smile. It usually looks like a sneer or a leer.

A mirror comes in handy. 

The smile must not be too broad with an open mouth. Then it could be a laugh. It must be a bit wider closed mouth expression. The head should be slightly tilted as if you are listening. A few nods every now and then help as well.

Secondly, I have been watching talk programmes on tv. Great examples of smiling and talking for long periods of time without saying anything.

I am getting to be quite good at this empty interaction thing. I may now decide to enter politics.

The man and the girl

It was unusual for foreigners to study at Dutch universities in the 1970s. There was no official procedure. I sent a copy of my A levels to the University of Amsterdam and they accepted me. I received no grant or loan.

The UK was not in the Common Market so I had to go back to the Aliens police. I was allowed to keep my residence permit.

They rescinded my work permit. Their argument was, if you are studying you cannot work the minimum number of hours necessary for a work permit.  This meant I could not legally work any more.

I found work in the Red Light district, the area of window prostitution.

My first job was cleaning a sex museum, sex shops, live shows and small sex cinemas. My employer was mean, there was only one vacuum cleaner. I used to walk along the canals from sex this to sex that, dragging my Nilfisk behind me.
Every now and then I stopped for a chat with the day whores or the patrolling policemen. Amsterdam was a friendly place in the 1970s. 

I was a rising star in the sex business and quickly moved up from cleaner to projectionist/bouncer/ticket seller in sex cinemas.

You cannot keep a good man down and I was promoted to do the same kind of work in a private cinema outside the Red Light district.

That was the introduction. This blog is about a man and a girl I met at the private cinema. I do not remember their names, so I will call them the man and the girl.

He was late-thirties, married with a young child.

She was Eurasian, looked about eighteen but sounded younger. The girl was the man’s girl-friend, his trophy.

He used to do some evening shifts at the cinema. I saw them when he took over after my afternoon shift. They were always together. I did not like him and she was constantly giggling.

Then all of a sudden they did not come any more.

I read about it in the local newspaper. The girl had found somebody else and had moved in with him.

The man found out where they were living and went to their flat. When her new boyfriend opened the door, he shot him. Then the man kidnapped the girl. After a few days he let her go and gave himself up.

The local newspaper called it a “crime passionnel”. The new boyfriend did not die from his wounds.

The man received a sentence of 18 months. In practice this is 12 months.

A couple of years later I was doing some shopping in my local supermarket and there she was, the girl. She looked older and not very happy.

She smiled sadly at me and said that she was back with the man.
I found this surprising.

She explained that after he was sent to prison, she had fled to Germany. That did not work out and she came back to the Netherlands. She found a small town where she hoped she could hide.

He found her. He told her that if she did not come back to him he would kill her.

I asked why she did not go to the police. She said the police had told her they could not do anything because she had no real proof that would stand up in court. Anyway, she added, he was not scared of the police.

I suggested she kill him first. She did not appreciate the idea and said she did not want to go to prison.

I did not have any other ideas. It was not my problem. We said our goodbyes and went our different ways.

Piet Snot

It was a long time ago.

Gays could still walk hand in hand in all the neighbourhoods of the city. Treating women like second-class citizens was not considered a shining example of cultural diversity. Antisemitism had not yet reached the level it was before the Nazis made it unpopular. The left was still progressive.
It was the old Amsterdam

The winter was very cold. I did not cycle any more, I took the tram. It was early evening at the beginning of December. A few days before the Dutch "Sinterklaas" (Santa Claus) festival. That is the festival for giving each other presents.

I got off the tram a few stops before my house. There was a shop window that I wanted to see. A friend had told me about a new product they were advertising. It was called a cassette recorder.

While I was standing there looking into the shop window, a dishevelled old man came and stood next to me. He was wearing a thick old coat and a piece of frozen snot was hanging from the tip of his nose.
He turned towards me and said, “Sir, you do know that women are mean?”

“No,” I replied. “I do not think that meanness is dependent on gender.”
“You are wrong, “ he continued. “If you have a big argument with a man, you have a fight. When it is over the argument is finished. You go and drink a beer together.
Women are different. They never let go. They gang up on you. Constantly nagging and baiting you. It is happening to me. I can’t take in any more. I have run away from the old age home. They were making my life a misery”.

Then he started to sob quietly.
We stood there together. Him crying, me looking at the goodies in the shop window. 

After a few minutes I wished him good luck with his problem and left. I wanted to get home quickly to make dinner for my partner.
If the food was not on the table on time, she used to get upset. Then she would make my life a misery.

It was the Best of Times, it was the Worst of Times

In August 1926 Marks & Spencer started marketing their first bra. This month, August 2016, they are celebrating 90 years of glamorous lingerie advertising.

That brings back some childhood memories.

My parents had a clothes shop in the Elephant and Castle, a London district south of the Thames. 

It was a slum neighbourhood.

Many of the customers were poor Irish women. My parents gave them credit without interest. This meant that the women could buy clothes and pay in installments when their husbands were paid at the end of the week. No kids had to walk around without socks or pullovers.

The big problem was alcohol abuse. At the end of the week the women used to stand at the factory gates, waiting for their husbands. They wanted to catch them before they spent their wages getting drunk in the pub.
All the women were thankful when my parents gave them credit. Some were less than thankful when they had to pay. Then, many a time, my parents were called mean and grasping Jews or words to that effect.

We lived behind and on top of the shop.
Our house did not have much luxury. The toilet was outside in the garden and the kitchen was also the bathroom. The bath was under the kitchen table. There was no hot water.
They later knocked the whole neighbourhood down and replaced it with a new slum of ugly, high-rise council flats. 
Deacon Street, the street we lived in, does not exist any more.

When I was 6 my parents sent me to a Jewish boarding school in Hove. Before that, I spent a lot of my time playing alone in our parlour, that was behind the shop.

My mother used to bring women back into the parlour to try on clothes. As a young child I saw lots of bras and corsets. At the same time I saw my mother again.
The women in their underwear often gave me a cuddle and a kiss.

I have always appreciated lingerie.

What's in a name, what's in an ethnic identity?

My parents remembered the Laibovitch family from the Lithuanian community in the East End. They had moved, like my parents, to the Elephant & Castle. 

They changed their surname from Laibovitch to Lawson.

Their son Stuart and I went to the same secondary school: Strand grammar in Brixton. In the beginning I had little contact with him as he was in a parallel class. I remember him as quiet, nondescript, almost invisible. Most of the Jewish kids were like that.

Brixton was a tough neighbourhood. There was the usual anti-Semitism at the school. The word “Jew” was an insult. Being Jewish was seen as an impediment. Like being black or Asian or having something wrong with you physically. These were all reasons for bullying.

So, if you were almost invisible like Stuart, there was less chance you would be bullied.

I saw him more when we were in the 6^th form together. But even then there was not much contact. We had different interests. He was into maths and sciences, I was all history and literature.

There was also a difference with regard to politics. I was part of a trio of political agitators who were trying to “improve” the world.  We used to get into trouble with the school authorities. Stuart would never stick his neck out for something like politics.

When I was eighteen, I left England. I never saw Stuart after that.

Simon, an old friend of mine, remained in touch with him for the rest of his life. The sister of another friend, Vivian, had intermittent contact with him. 

Simon told me his story.

After university, Stuart started in actuary. He did not like it, so he switched to an academic career. He took his PhD and then became a lecturer at Warwick University.

He progressed up the university ladder and eventually was given the title of “reader”, which in the UK, “denotes an appointment for a senior academic with a distinguished international reputation in research or scholarship”.

He married Christine, who was a devout Christian. They had no children.

He died at the age of 59 from a heart attack. Simon and Vivian received an invitation for the burial service - in a church.
Simon was surprised. He knew Stuart as a secular Jew, an atheist. He had never talked about becoming a Christian.

Vivian was angry and did not go. But then, Vivian is different. She is the pesky in-your-face Jew. Proud of her heritage and an ardent Zionist as well.

Simon went. He said the service started with the singing of hymns and speeches. Then the microphone was passed around and many of Stuart’s friends and colleagues said a few words about him.

What struck Simon was the fact that nobody mentioned his early life. Nobody mentioned his ethnic background, that he was a Jew, the grandson of immigrants from Lithuania.

As a teenager, Stuart had started his attempt to become invisible as a Jew. He had succeeded so well that he was now being buried in a Christian graveyard.

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs

We all completely and categorically condemn (calls for) genocide without any ifs and buts. Do we not? No, we do not. Well at least not where I live.

It is now mainstream in the Netherlands to at least “understand” (calls for) the genocide of 6.4 million Israeli Jewish men, women and children. Two recent incidents have illustrated this.

The first was a letter from the Dutch Foreign Ministry.

A Palestinian crept into the bedroom of a 13 year old Israeli Jewish girl and stabbed her to death. Usually the whole world condemns the willful murder of a 13 year old girl. However, she was an Israeli Jew and that makes it different.

The Palestinian news agency referred to the murderer as a martyr of the resistance and called on others to kill random Israeli Jews.

The Netherlands had subsidized this news agency. So, a Jewish organization asked the Dutch Foreign Ministry to condemn the murder and the incitement.

In its reply, the Foreign Ministry did not only refuse to condemn the murder and incitement to genocide. It also referred to them as acts of resistance against the occupation.

I have the impression that the Dutch Foreign Ministry’s idea of peace in Israel/Palestine is the peace of a large Jewish cemetery.

The second incident was a recent television programme on the Dutch public network.

The Lebanese Belgian, Dyab Abou JahJah was invited to be the guest of an evening-long programme that was intended to be a podium for his ideas and beliefs.

The British press calls him a, “controversial fanatic who glorified the murder of British soldiers”. For Douglas Murray he is “a well-known thug on the Continent, particularly in Belgium and Holland”. He is banned from entering the UK.

For the mainstream Dutch media he is salonfähig. They refer to him as an “activist” and “publicist”.

Abou JaJah hates a lot of things, but his most intense hatred is reserved for “Zionists” and Israel. He is a cheerleader for those who would kill all “Zionists” and Israeli Jews.

Abou JahJah has little influence with Muslims. His father is Shia and his mother Christian. He wanted to fight for Hezbollah. The Muslims in Belgium and the Netherlands are Sunni. He is a marked man.

He may have little influence among Muslims, but he is the darling of the regressive left in Belgium and the Netherlands.

The basic definition of political Zionism is that Jews are a people and have a right to self-determination like all other peoples. According to Pew surveys some 90% of world Jewry, about 13 million people, agree with this.

Abou JahJah supports the mass murder of all “Zionists”.

How can the regressive left support this call for genocide?

I was given the answer forty-six years ago in Menorca. Before the arrival of Muslims in the Netherlands. I was drinking in a small bar in a fishing village with a Dutch revolutionary who later became a bookseller.
He looked at me earnestly with his Che Guevara stare and said in a tipsy voice:

 “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”.

The life and times of Ahmadinejad’s pet Jew

Moshe Aryeh Friedman was born in Brooklyn in 1972. He grew up in the ultra-orthodox  Satmar sect, a small radical right-wing Jewish sect that is virulently anti-Zionist.

He left the US and in 2005 eventually settled in Vienna. He called himself a rabbi, but no religious authority accepted his title. He had no congregation.

In Vienna, he aligned himself with the Freedom Party, an extreme right wing party with neo-Nazi overtones. As a result, he was expelled from the Board of the Vienna Jewish Community.

In 2006 he became famous.

He participated in Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. While at that conference, he also publicly called for the destruction of the State of Israel. There are photos of Friedman hugging and kissing Ahmadinejad.
The photos below of Friedman and Ahmadinejad together shocked orthodox Jews. They were taken on the Jewish Sabbath.

Friedman and his family lived in Iran for six months. The Iranian government paid him to stay there. He was called Ahmadinejad’s pet Jew.

Later in 2006, he met with Hamas official Atef Adwan in Stockholm. He announced his intention of building a coalition between Hamas and anti-Zionist Jews to bring about Israel's destruction.

Hamas maintains in its charter that it is the religious duty of Muslims to kill all of the Jews in the world.

Friedman’s friendship with Holocaust deniers, Ahmadinejad, fundamentalist Muslims and Hamas did not go down well with any Jews, religious or secular.

He became a pariah for all of the orthodox Jewish world.

In 2007, Friedman sued the Viennese Jewish community after three of his daughters were expelled from a private Jewish school. Friedman said it was because of his trip to Tehran; the school cited unpaid fees. He lost.

In 2009 Friedman was back in the news. This time for a different reason. He gave an interview to VIN, an American orthodox newspaper. The orthodox Jewish world had ostracized him. He wanted back in, so he gave a conciliatory interview.

He apologized for the Holocaust-denial conference. He was a changed man, he said.

Friedman still believed in reaching out to Muslim leaders, but now wanted to tell them different things: “Say that Jews must be protected. Represent Jewish feelings. Don’t go with anti-Zionism, but with a practical-pro Zionism, and not in the theological/biblical sense.”

His change of heart did not last long. Friedman could not  remain just an anonymous, poor Jew. He was a provocateur and soon back to his old tricks.

In 2011, Friedman settled in Antwerp. As a Belgian national, his wife was entitled to family and child benefits. The orthodox community did not want him. In the Flemish Jewish media he was referred to as the “mad rabbi”.

When no Haredi schools would admit his sons, Friedman tried to enroll them in schools for girls. That failed, too, so he sued. Then he sued an all-boys yeshiva in Antwerp for denying admission to his daughters.

He started a one-man war against the orthodox Jewish schools in Antwerp. He used the argument of gender discrimination to drag them through the courts. Gender separation is one of the tenets of all ultra-orthodox Judaism. The form of Judaism that he adheres to. He did win in the lower courts, but the higher courts overturned the verdict.

Friedman's ostracization by the Jewish world made him more sympathetic for anti-Semites and Israel-haters. Jew-haters flocked to his cause. He became the Jew-haters favourite Jew. He and his wife did not work. They had eight children. He lived off donations and state benefits.

His attacks on Belgium’s orthodox Jews intensified. The media could not believe their luck. A man who dressed as an orthodox Jew but trashed Jews. A Jew who agreed with the anti-Semites.

In 2013 he was in the news again. He called for a new investigation into a nine year old murder of an Antwerp orthodox Jew. He maintained that the man was murdered by a mafia type conspiracy of leading orthodox Jews. He had no proof so nothing came of his ranting. However, he achieved his goal. He had slandered Antwerp Jews and got his name in the newspapers again.

Begin August 2014 he gave an interview to a Belgian magazine. In the interview he maintained that Jewish schools in Antwerp indoctrinated youth to go and fight in Gaza. He claimed that since the new round of fighting in operation Protective Edge, 50 to 100 Jewish youth had left to fight in Gaza. He further ranted against Jewish "sharia schools". He compared the orthodox community to IS.

According to him, Israel and Israelis were worse than IS. He said that the “genocide” in Gaza was unique because it targeted children. It was a stream of hatred that was comparable to a blog on the Nazi Stormfront site

A few weeks later the “Forum of Jewish Organizations” in  Antwerp issued a statement about Friedman. They called Friedman a “pseudo-rabbi”. They wrote that he had never been seen in an Antwerp synagogue. That he had never visited a kosher shop. They accused him of pretending to be an orthodox Jew to promote his personal and political agenda.

Later in 2014 he was in the news again. He showed up in support of Jejou Bentinck who was standing trial for terrorism after fighting in Syria. Bentinck’s father said that as Friedman "supports Israel", his son could not be a terrorist if Friedman supported him..

After that it became relatively quiet around Friedman.
What is he doing nowadays?

Religious authorities throughout the Jewish world have proclaimed that he is not recognized as a Rabbi or Chief Rabbi. All Jewish communities have ostracized him.

So, he has reinvented himself away from Jews.

He is on Facebook. Actually he has two Facebook accounts. On one he is Moshe Aryeh Friedman. On the other he is Rabbi Moishe Arye Friedman.

As Moshe he can "like" the sites of female contestants in Belgian beauty contests (see the photo below).

Gone are the Satmar clothes, hair and beard. In their place, snappy clothes, a neat beard and expensive Borsalino Jewish fedora hats.
He is now a peace activist. A Jewish guru rabbi. Promoted himself to Chief Rabbi of something that he invented, the Forum for Jewish Dialogue Belgium. His "forum" is a front for donations.

He has been successful. On Facebook he has 5,000 friends. Mainly official figures in Europe, but still a lot of average people who may or may not know his history. He likes to travel. On Facebook he has photos of himself in expensive hotels.

He calls himself Chief Rabbi but is not recognized by any religious authority and has no congregation. He does not pray in any synagogue and visits no kosher shops. He is a cheerleader for those who kill Jews for being Jews in Israel.

He seems to be making a good living and enjoying his new life. 

Moshe Aryeh Friedman

Moishe Arye Friedman

Miss Liège 2018 candidate 11, Charlotte Wynen

Ahmadinejad and Friedman