Almere-Digest

April 10, 2015

Netherlands - Armenia: Dutch parliament overrules “Armenian genocide” motion

The motion proposing to recognize 1915 events in Tukey as “Armenian genocide” was overruled by Dutch parliament with 78 pros against 63 cons today Friday 10th of April.

The Dutch Parliament also refused to approve a resolution prescribing to adopt in government’s official language “Armenian genocide” instead of “Armenian genocide issue” which has been used for many years.

The parliament also overruled another motion requiring to send King Willem Alexander, Prime Minister Mark Rutte or at least one of the Dutch Government ministers to Armenia to attend the so-called "commemoration genocide ceremony" which will be held on April 24. Instead the motion calling both Turkish and Armenian nations to develop mutual understanding and expressing the wish that any commemoration ceremonies would contribute to respect and acceptance between the two communities was overwhelmingly approved.

The DENK movement – a political organization established by Turkish people living in Netherlands – and being represented in the Dutch parliament with two deputies, stated that they have voted against the resolutions and they will continue to spend all of their efforts to block such future motions.

“Dutch parliament is not the right place to make a judgements about some unfortunate occurrances which happened some 100 years ago,” DENK deputy Tunahan Kuzu underscored.

Note EU-Digest: Good move by Dutch Parliament - before the Armenian Diaspora seriously can start accusing anyone about Genocide they should allow their own Government archives to be opened to international research teams to study historical documents on the issue, like the Turks have done. Present actions by the Armenian Diaspora on this issue are now seen by many political observers around the world more as a fund raising issue than anything else.

EU-Digest

Vatican - gay community: "Pope Frances speaks out of two sides of his mouth" - Vatican refuses gay French ambassador′s nomination

Italian gay activists have slammed the Vatican after it reportedly refused to accept France’s nomination for new ambassador Laurent Stefanini on the grounds of his alleged homosexuality.

French President Francois Hollande recommended 55-year-old Stefanini for the post in January, but the Holy See has so far failed to recognize his credentials French and Italian media reported on Friday.

"Clearly, even at the Vatican they do not practice what they preach," Flavio Romani, chairman of the Arcigay association said Friday in a statement, where he blamed "top prelates" of contradicting one of Pope Francis' most famous statements.

In 2013, the pontiff said that "if a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge?

The debate comes as tensions rise between the Holy See and France's Socialist government after gay marriage was legalized in 2013, much to the outrage of the Catholic Church and traditionalists.

Vatican officials have refused to comment on the allegation.

The Netherlands - Soccer: Nazi chants at Dutch soccer game expose an ugly blot on ‘the beautiful game’ and on the Netherlands - by Michael E. Miller

It was a beautiful day for soccer in the Dutch town of Utrecht. Spring sunshine filled the stadium as the local team, FC Utrecht, kicked off against perennial powerhouse Ajax Amsterdam.

As the beautiful game slowly played out on the field, however, things in the stands quickly got ugly.

“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” sang a section of the home supporters towards the fans visiting from Amsterdam, a city historic in part for its Jewish community. “My father was in the commandos, my mother was in the SS, together they burned Jews, because Jews burn the best!”

The anti-Semitism was caught on video and quickly circulated among Dutch media. FC Utrecht issued an apology as Jewish organizations demanded action by soccer authorities.

The shocking chants weren’t an isolated incident, however. Instead, they were the latest in a string of anti-Semitic episodes that threaten to mar European soccer.

Discrimination isn’t new to European football, or soccer. The sport has long struggled with racism, a problem which resurfaced recently when Chelsea fans pushed a black man off the Paris metro, chanting: “We’re racist, we’re racist, and that’s the way we like it.”

Note EU-Digest This incident is not only an ugly blot on Dutch soccer fans, but also on Holland as a nation, and the rest of the world in general. Maybe, "We the People" should be reminded from time to time, that no one is better than another in this world of ours - we are also all equal when it comes to the bad things we do in life - it is only a question of our own perception, as to how we divine what is good, bad or worse. If you have the time, or want to take the time, please listen to the Easter Sermon of Tullian Tchividjian - http://www.crpc.org/mediaPlayer/#sermonvideo/688 - a Pastor in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which reminds us, pretty clearly, of this human flaw, know to some of us as hypocrisy.

Read more: Nazi chants at Dutch soccer game expose an ugly blot on ‘the beautiful game’ - The Washington Post

April 9, 2015

France: Marine Le Pen, Leader of France’s National Front Party, Splits With Her Father, Its Founder - by Suzanne Daley

Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s far-right National Front, has openly split with her father and the founder of her party, calling his recent comments, including those on German gas chambers, “political suicide” and an attempt to harm her.

In recent years, Ms. Le Pen, trying to clean up the image of her party as racist and anti-Semitic, has kept her distance from her father, Jean-Marie

Le Pen, 86, and his more extreme statements, even as he continued as the party’s honorary chairman.

But Mr. Le Pen made headlines over the last week, after he once again claimed that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of history; praised the France’s collaborationist wartime leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain; and questioned whether France’s Spanish-born prime minister, Manuel Valls, was really loyal to France.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen seems to have descended into a strategy somewhere between scorched earth and political suicide,” she said. “His status as honorary president does not give him the right to hijack the National Front with vulgar provocations seemingly designed to damage me but which unfortunately hit the whole movement.”

She added that, with great sadness, she was calling a meeting of the party’s executive bureau with her father present “to find the best way of protecting the interests of the movement,” a statement that some experts took to mean that Mr. Le Pen may be expelled from the party altogether

Ms. Le Pen’s deputy and the party’s chief spokesman, Florian Philippot, soon said in a Twitter message, “The split with Jean-Marie Le Pen is now irrevocable and definitive.”

The Netherlands: French forces rescue Dutch hostage held in Mali since 2011

French forces have freed a Dutch man held hostage in Mali since 2011 by al Qaeda’s north African arm, the French defence ministry said. It said Sjaak Rijke, who was kidnapped in Timbuktu in November 2011, was freed on Monday during a special operation and had been transferred “safe and sound” to a temporary base in Tessalit, north-east Mali.

French forces had also killed two militants and captured two others during fighting that took place during the early morning operation, said Lieutenant Colonel Michel Sabatier, a spokesman for Barkhane, the French counter-insurgency operation in the region.

Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said Rijke was in good condition considering the circumstances and receiving medical treatment under Dutch supervision.

“The liberation of Mr Rijke underscores France’s staunch determination to fight armed terrorist groups in the Sahel region as part of the Barkhane operation,” the French ministry said in a statement.

In November Rijke’s captors, the al Qaeda-affiliated AQIM group, issued a video of him along with French national Serge Lazarevic.

Read more: Africa - French forces rescue Dutch hostage held in Mali since 2011 - France 24

USA: Poison on your dinner table?: Strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, grapes, nuts and vine crops could be contaminated with methyl bromide

They look good, but are they poisoned with methyl bromide

The pesticide that sickened a Delaware family in the Virgin Islands is banned for indoor fumigation but U.S. growers will still legally use more than 375 metric tons of the chemical on fields this year through special waivers, federal regulators said.

Methyl bromide is blamed in the accidental poisonings of a mom, dad and their two teen sons at a Caribbean resort. The boys remained critically ill Monday at a Philadelphia hospital. Criminal investigators are examining how and why the bug killer got sprayed in a room beneath the family's rented villa two days before they arrived in mid-March.

U.S. law forbids exterminators from using methyl bromide but the Environmental Protection Agency grants a "critical use exemption" to certain farmers — primarily strawberry growers — letting them inject the chemical directly into their soil, the EPA said.

And some organic advocates are worried about the pesticide perhaps reaching grocery-store fruit.

"You have nurseries producing strawberry transplants — the nurseries are the main users of methyl bromide in the U.S. today. The plants in the fields are all started in nurseries.

That ground at the nursery is all fumigated," said Jonathan Winslow, field services manager at Farm Fuel, Inc., a farmer-started, organic distribution and research company on the central California coast.

"So that strawberry transplant can get pulled out of the ground at the nursery and moved to an organic field and be produced under an 'organic' certification," Winslow said. "The use of methyl bromide has diminished, yes. But I am concerned about it. That's why I work for an organic company."

The pesticide is so nasty that, in 1987, the United States and 26 other nations signed a treaty called the Montreal Protocol, vowing to phase out methyl bromide mainly because it depletes the ozone layer. Today, nearly 200 countries have signed that agreement.

But the use of the neurotoxin goes on in farming.

"In the United States, strawberries and tomatoes are the crops which use the most methyl bromide," the EPA says on its website. "Other crops which use this pesticide as a soil fumigant include peppers, grapes, and nut and vine crops."

Spain: The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics - by Giles Tremlett

At the start of the 2008 academic year, Pablo Iglesias, a 29-year-old lecturer with a pierced eyebrow and a ponytail greeted his students at the political sciences faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid by inviting them to stand on their chairs. The idea was to re-enact a scene from the film Dead Poets Society. Iglesias’s message was simple. His students were there to study power, and the powerful can be challenged. This stunt was typical of him. Politics, Iglesias thought, was not just something to be studied.

It was something you either did, or let others do to you. As a professor, he was smart, hyperactive and – as a founder of a university organisation called Counter-Power – quick to back student protest. He did not fit the classic profile of a doctrinaire intellectual from Spain’s communist-led left. But he was clear about what was to blame for the world’s ills: the unfettered, globalised capitalism that, in the wake of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, had installed itself as the developed world’s dominant ideology.

Iglesias and the students, ex-students and faculty academics worked hard to spread their ideas. They produced political television shows and collaborated with their Latin American heroes – left-leaning populist leaders such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador or Evo Morales of Bolivia. But when they launched their own political party on 17 January 2014 and gave it the name Podemos (“We Can”), many dismissed it.

With no money, no structure and few concrete policies, it looked like just one of several angry, anti-austerity parties destined to fade away within months.

A year later, on 31 January 2015, Iglesias strode across a stage in Madrid’s emblematic central square, the Puerta del Sol. It was filled with 150,000 people, squeezed in so tightly that it was impossible to move.

He addressed the crowd with the impassioned rhetoric for which opponents have branded him a dangerous leftwing populist. He railed against the monsters of “financial totalitarianism” who had humiliated them all.

He told Podemos’s followers to dream and, like that noble madman Don Quixote, “take their dreams seriously”. Spain was in the grip of historic, convulsive change. The serried crowd were heirs to the common folk who – armed with knives, flowerpots and stones – had rebelled against Napoleonic troops in nearby streets two centuries earlier. “We can dream, we can win!” he shouted.

Polls suggest that he is right. Since 1982, Spain has been governed by only two parties. Yet El País newspaper now places Podemos at 22%, ahead of both the ruling conservative Partido Popular (PP) and its leftwing opposition Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE).

If Podemos can grow further, Iglesias could become prime minister after elections that are expected in November. This would be an almost unheard-of achievement for such a young party.

Many in the Puerta del Sol longed to see that day. “Yes we can! Yes we can!” they chanted. Other onlookers shivered, recalling Iglesias’s praise for Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez and fearing an eruption of Latin American-style populism in a country gripped by debt, austerity and unemployment.

But without Podemos, supporters feared, Spain faced the prospect of becoming like Greece, with its disintegrating welfare state, crumbling middle class and rampant inequality.

Read more: The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics | Giles Tremlett | World news | The Guardian