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.

http://www.telegraaf.nl/premium/avond/27148588/__Heimwee_naar_het_brievenbustouwtje_lost_niets_op__.html?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=twitter

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.