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November 30, 2016
November 29, 2016
Religious Tensions: US Turned Its Back on Anne Frank, Will Trump Do the Same with Muslim Refugees? - by Robert Fisk
I’ve just visited the hiding place of some troublesome refugees who
should make Donald Trump very angry. It’s not the first time I’ve called
at the little house on the old canal, but you only have to glance at
the family’s papers to see how they fall under Trump’s anti-immigrant
rhetoric. They fled a dangerous country full of extremists – a nation
which threatened its own neighbours – and they sought their first new
home for “economic reasons”.
Worse still, they even tried to enter the United States. They were turned away – on the grounds that even if they had good reason to flee their persecutors, they didn’t have good enough reason to choose America as their place of refuge.
No, they’re not Syrians or Turkmens or Yazidis or Afghans, although the younger daughter of the family was reading a book about “Palestine” and was very much a member of a persecuted race. She was, of course, Anne Frank, the German Jewish girl who with her family fled the Nazis in 1933 and was given sanctuary in Holland – until Germany invaded the Low Countries in 1940 and she found herself under the rule of her own vicious country all over again. By 1941, her father Otto – realizing that the Nazis had in store for Jews in Holland the very same fate that was already being perpetrated against the Jews of Germany – sought visas to the United States. And the door was slammed in their face.
Yup, I do wonder what the Trump administration would have done.
Anne Frank’s diary was the first book my mother wanted me to read “on my own” (without having it read to me) and this wonderful narrative of childhood-growing-into-adulthood, of fear and love and joy and fury – especially at the other refugees crowded into the family hiding-place behind Otto’s office on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam – has stayed with me all my life. With other people too. It has been translated into 70 languages. It’s even been translated into Arabic. Officials at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam tell me, sadly, that – despite its awful relevance – they sell only about one copy a month in the Arabic language.
No matter. So powerful, so tragic and so relevant is Anne’s story to us today – and that of her mother Edith and her elder sister Margot and the others squeezed into the secret annex in Prinsegracht – one of them a boy called Peter van Pels with whom Anne is slowly falling in love – that queues stand round the block in the cold Amsterdam rain to take their turn to walk up the stairs behind the false bookcase to see where these frightened Jewish men, women and children lived until, two years after they first hid here, the Gestapo arrived. You can still see – it’s so genuine, it allows of no clichés – the newspaper photographs of 1930s film stars (Ray Milland, Diana Durbin, Ginger Rogers) and of a very young Princess Elizabeth of England (plus sister Margaret and corgis) and of the Dutch royal family in exile whose nationality Anne wished to adopt after the war and whose pictures she glued to the wall of her room.
The Dutch nation would certainly have been more loyal to her than the Americans. Otto sought help for US visas from friends who were relatives of those who owned Macey’s department store. He had two brothers-in-law in the States. He wrote of the plight of his wife and two daughters. The State Department was not interested. Otto even pleaded for Cuban visas. He got one – on 1st December 1941 – but it was cancelled a week later when Germany declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbour. Thus did Japan as well as Hitler and the Americans join hands to doom the refugees on the Prinsengracht Canal. Roosevelt’s US – and Democratic – administration did a “Trump” on the Frank family.
To add to the travails of refugeedom, Nazi Germany had already deprived German Jews of their own citizenship – so the Franks, originally – and legally – in exile in Holland, also became stateless under their own country’s occupiers. Stateless? Economic migrants? Illegal migrants in Holland now that their German passports were invalid? What earthly chance did they have?
Each time I read Anne Frank’s diary – and reader, if you haven’t read it, make up for lost time, as they say, and do so – I find something new which I missed on my previous journey through her pages. She wanted to be a writer. She wanted to turn her diary into a novel called The Secret Annex. And she wrote, on May 11th 1944, “my greatest wish is to become a journalist one day.” You can’t beat that.
I find that one day she is about to read a book called Palestine at the Crossroads. Although she does not say so, it was published in 1937 by a Jewish writer called Ladislas Farago – an author I read many years later when he wrote a best-selling biography of General Patton – which is a rather plodding pro-Zionist book, put together after Farago visited, rather indifferently, the old British Mandate. I’ve read bits of it. I doubt if it would have persuaded Anne to help found the state of Israel, had she lived long enough to do so, for she was wedded to European culture and wanted to live among the Dutch and return to school with their children. She waited with childish excitement for her liberation, recording in her diary the joy of learning about the Allied landings at D-Day, writing movingly of the plight of the crew of an RAF bomber which she sees – through the secret office skylight – shot down over Amsterdam.
But then – and her story sometimes seems to have the inevitability of Greek tragedy about it – her family was betrayed and three members of the Dutch Nazi Party and an Austrian (and therefore Reich) SS officer came storming up the staircase behind the false bookshelves on 4 August 1944. And that was the end of all of them. Except for Otto. He was eventually freed from Auschwitz by the Soviet army and travelled slowly back to Amsterdam to find that his family were dead. Edith died in Auschwitz, Margot and Anne at Bergen-Belsen, both of typhus. Anne, now 15 years old, died last. An old school friend says she caught sight of Anne in her last days and threw food to her over the camp barbed wire.
Anne’s was one of tens of thousands of corpses piled into the mass graves of Belsen. Even if he can’t find the time to fly his private jet into Schipol airport and visit the little house on the old 17th-century Amsterdam canal, Donald Trump could at least read Anne Frank’s diary. It’s a short book. It’s by a child, and is therefore easy to read. It’s by a Jewish girl, who asks at one point why God has visited such terrors upon her people. Just as refugees today seek to know why God has forsaken them.
Four Dutch citizens helped Anne and her family and friends throughout their two years of solitude, at daily risk of their lives. They said later that it was a natural thing to do. Odd, that. Because today we are supposed to find it “unnatural” to help these people. I guess that’s Trump’s view. Yet in the streets around the Prinsengrach this week – after all the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have arrived in Europe, and just 72 years after the Gestapo came to Anne’s hiding place round the corner, I found small cafes whose Dutch owners had written on their front doors the words: “Refugees welcome”.
Read more: America Turned Its Back on Anne Frank, Will Trump Do the Same with Muslim Refugees?
Worse still, they even tried to enter the United States. They were turned away – on the grounds that even if they had good reason to flee their persecutors, they didn’t have good enough reason to choose America as their place of refuge.
No, they’re not Syrians or Turkmens or Yazidis or Afghans, although the younger daughter of the family was reading a book about “Palestine” and was very much a member of a persecuted race. She was, of course, Anne Frank, the German Jewish girl who with her family fled the Nazis in 1933 and was given sanctuary in Holland – until Germany invaded the Low Countries in 1940 and she found herself under the rule of her own vicious country all over again. By 1941, her father Otto – realizing that the Nazis had in store for Jews in Holland the very same fate that was already being perpetrated against the Jews of Germany – sought visas to the United States. And the door was slammed in their face.
Yup, I do wonder what the Trump administration would have done.
Anne Frank’s diary was the first book my mother wanted me to read “on my own” (without having it read to me) and this wonderful narrative of childhood-growing-into-adulthood, of fear and love and joy and fury – especially at the other refugees crowded into the family hiding-place behind Otto’s office on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam – has stayed with me all my life. With other people too. It has been translated into 70 languages. It’s even been translated into Arabic. Officials at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam tell me, sadly, that – despite its awful relevance – they sell only about one copy a month in the Arabic language.
No matter. So powerful, so tragic and so relevant is Anne’s story to us today – and that of her mother Edith and her elder sister Margot and the others squeezed into the secret annex in Prinsegracht – one of them a boy called Peter van Pels with whom Anne is slowly falling in love – that queues stand round the block in the cold Amsterdam rain to take their turn to walk up the stairs behind the false bookcase to see where these frightened Jewish men, women and children lived until, two years after they first hid here, the Gestapo arrived. You can still see – it’s so genuine, it allows of no clichés – the newspaper photographs of 1930s film stars (Ray Milland, Diana Durbin, Ginger Rogers) and of a very young Princess Elizabeth of England (plus sister Margaret and corgis) and of the Dutch royal family in exile whose nationality Anne wished to adopt after the war and whose pictures she glued to the wall of her room.
The Dutch nation would certainly have been more loyal to her than the Americans. Otto sought help for US visas from friends who were relatives of those who owned Macey’s department store. He had two brothers-in-law in the States. He wrote of the plight of his wife and two daughters. The State Department was not interested. Otto even pleaded for Cuban visas. He got one – on 1st December 1941 – but it was cancelled a week later when Germany declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbour. Thus did Japan as well as Hitler and the Americans join hands to doom the refugees on the Prinsengracht Canal. Roosevelt’s US – and Democratic – administration did a “Trump” on the Frank family.
To add to the travails of refugeedom, Nazi Germany had already deprived German Jews of their own citizenship – so the Franks, originally – and legally – in exile in Holland, also became stateless under their own country’s occupiers. Stateless? Economic migrants? Illegal migrants in Holland now that their German passports were invalid? What earthly chance did they have?
Each time I read Anne Frank’s diary – and reader, if you haven’t read it, make up for lost time, as they say, and do so – I find something new which I missed on my previous journey through her pages. She wanted to be a writer. She wanted to turn her diary into a novel called The Secret Annex. And she wrote, on May 11th 1944, “my greatest wish is to become a journalist one day.” You can’t beat that.
I find that one day she is about to read a book called Palestine at the Crossroads. Although she does not say so, it was published in 1937 by a Jewish writer called Ladislas Farago – an author I read many years later when he wrote a best-selling biography of General Patton – which is a rather plodding pro-Zionist book, put together after Farago visited, rather indifferently, the old British Mandate. I’ve read bits of it. I doubt if it would have persuaded Anne to help found the state of Israel, had she lived long enough to do so, for she was wedded to European culture and wanted to live among the Dutch and return to school with their children. She waited with childish excitement for her liberation, recording in her diary the joy of learning about the Allied landings at D-Day, writing movingly of the plight of the crew of an RAF bomber which she sees – through the secret office skylight – shot down over Amsterdam.
But then – and her story sometimes seems to have the inevitability of Greek tragedy about it – her family was betrayed and three members of the Dutch Nazi Party and an Austrian (and therefore Reich) SS officer came storming up the staircase behind the false bookshelves on 4 August 1944. And that was the end of all of them. Except for Otto. He was eventually freed from Auschwitz by the Soviet army and travelled slowly back to Amsterdam to find that his family were dead. Edith died in Auschwitz, Margot and Anne at Bergen-Belsen, both of typhus. Anne, now 15 years old, died last. An old school friend says she caught sight of Anne in her last days and threw food to her over the camp barbed wire.
Anne’s was one of tens of thousands of corpses piled into the mass graves of Belsen. Even if he can’t find the time to fly his private jet into Schipol airport and visit the little house on the old 17th-century Amsterdam canal, Donald Trump could at least read Anne Frank’s diary. It’s a short book. It’s by a child, and is therefore easy to read. It’s by a Jewish girl, who asks at one point why God has visited such terrors upon her people. Just as refugees today seek to know why God has forsaken them.
Four Dutch citizens helped Anne and her family and friends throughout their two years of solitude, at daily risk of their lives. They said later that it was a natural thing to do. Odd, that. Because today we are supposed to find it “unnatural” to help these people. I guess that’s Trump’s view. Yet in the streets around the Prinsengrach this week – after all the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have arrived in Europe, and just 72 years after the Gestapo came to Anne’s hiding place round the corner, I found small cafes whose Dutch owners had written on their front doors the words: “Refugees welcome”.
Read more: America Turned Its Back on Anne Frank, Will Trump Do the Same with Muslim Refugees?
November 28, 2016
Netherlands: Rise of the right: 'Anarchist' media in the Netherlands
Over the past 10 years in the Netherlands, the far-right Freedom Party has moved from the political wilderness to where it is today: leading in the polls with an election coming up next year.
The party's leader, Geert Wilders, has long argued that the Dutch mainstream media cover populist movements with a tone of mockery and cynicism.
"You could say that the traditionally left, progressive media, until this point, have only engaged with far-right movements by opposing them, by discarding them, by saying people are bad or stupid for holding such beliefs. This has only been counterproductive, because by repressing this sentiment, you end up radicalising the debate. Yet, for 15 years, politicians and the media have failed to offer an alternative that goes beyond merely denying those sentiments you don't agree with," says Rob Wijnberg, editor, De Correspondent.
Feeling the mainstream media no longer catered to their views, a part of the Dutch audience started looking elsewhere for their media coverage.
Alternative right-wing outlets, such as GeenStijl and PowNed, who call themselves "anarchist", have grown more popular and have now found a platform on Dutch state-funded TV channels, where their anti-Islam and anti-immigration rhetoric can reach larger audiences.
Read more: Rise of the right: 'Anarchist' media in the Netherlands - Al Jazeera English
The party's leader, Geert Wilders, has long argued that the Dutch mainstream media cover populist movements with a tone of mockery and cynicism.
"You could say that the traditionally left, progressive media, until this point, have only engaged with far-right movements by opposing them, by discarding them, by saying people are bad or stupid for holding such beliefs. This has only been counterproductive, because by repressing this sentiment, you end up radicalising the debate. Yet, for 15 years, politicians and the media have failed to offer an alternative that goes beyond merely denying those sentiments you don't agree with," says Rob Wijnberg, editor, De Correspondent.
Feeling the mainstream media no longer catered to their views, a part of the Dutch audience started looking elsewhere for their media coverage.
Alternative right-wing outlets, such as GeenStijl and PowNed, who call themselves "anarchist", have grown more popular and have now found a platform on Dutch state-funded TV channels, where their anti-Islam and anti-immigration rhetoric can reach larger audiences.
Read more: Rise of the right: 'Anarchist' media in the Netherlands - Al Jazeera English
November 27, 2016
RUSSIA: Vladimir Putin reveals what he enjoys about being President
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday during a conversation with the workers of the 'Avtodizel' plant in Russia's Yaroslavl Region that the benefits of his job do not differ much from the pluses of working at a plant.
"The most positive aspect of my job does not differ from your's — when it brings satisfaction and you achieve goals you set for yourself, when you're doing something important, necessary and good, it's beneficial for you and those for whom you work, that's the greatest satisfaction when you're satisfied with the results [of your work]", Putin said.
Speaking about the negative aspects of his work, the Russian leader said that there are a lot of negative emotions, but "nothing can be done." "… when something goes wrong or when somebody lets you down, when you face other unexpected circumstances, but this is the delight of our work as we are able to overcome these difficulties and achieve the desired result," the Russian president concluded.
Read noreL Vladimir Putin attends Seliger 2014 National Youth Forum
"The most positive aspect of my job does not differ from your's — when it brings satisfaction and you achieve goals you set for yourself, when you're doing something important, necessary and good, it's beneficial for you and those for whom you work, that's the greatest satisfaction when you're satisfied with the results [of your work]", Putin said.
Speaking about the negative aspects of his work, the Russian leader said that there are a lot of negative emotions, but "nothing can be done." "… when something goes wrong or when somebody lets you down, when you face other unexpected circumstances, but this is the delight of our work as we are able to overcome these difficulties and achieve the desired result," the Russian president concluded.
Read noreL Vladimir Putin attends Seliger 2014 National Youth Forum
November 25, 2016
Press Freedom Award: International Press Freedom Awards go to journalists from India, El Salvador, Turkey and Egypt
The Committee to Protect Journalists honored journalists from India, El
Salvador, Turkey and Egypt on Tuesday with its annual International
Press Freedom Awards for their commitment to a free press despite death
threats, imprisonment and exile.
CPJ executive director Joel Simon said threats against journalism are increasing around the world, including in the United States following the presidential election victory of Republican Donald Trump, who has branded mainstream media dishonest and who hasn't held a news conference since his election.
"It's a very intimidating, hostile environment,'' Simon said before the ceremony. "Now, we're not going to compare it to some of the things we're going to see tonight, but certainly the climate's changed and the notion that we're here living in this First Amendment paradise defending the rights of our more vulnerable colleagues around the world, that gap has closed considerably.''
Turkey's Can Dundar, chief editor of the daily Cumhuriyet, was another honoree. He was arrested on November 26, 2015, after publishing an article alleging the government intelligence service sought to send weapons to Syrian rebel groups.
He was charged with disclosing state secrets, espionage and aiding a terrorist group and was sentenced to five years in prison. He remains free, after spending 92 days in jail, while his appeal is considered. His wife however was not allowed to travel outside the country.
Read more: International Press Freedom Award goes to Malini Subramaniam
CPJ executive director Joel Simon said threats against journalism are increasing around the world, including in the United States following the presidential election victory of Republican Donald Trump, who has branded mainstream media dishonest and who hasn't held a news conference since his election.
"It's a very intimidating, hostile environment,'' Simon said before the ceremony. "Now, we're not going to compare it to some of the things we're going to see tonight, but certainly the climate's changed and the notion that we're here living in this First Amendment paradise defending the rights of our more vulnerable colleagues around the world, that gap has closed considerably.''
Turkey's Can Dundar, chief editor of the daily Cumhuriyet, was another honoree. He was arrested on November 26, 2015, after publishing an article alleging the government intelligence service sought to send weapons to Syrian rebel groups.
He was charged with disclosing state secrets, espionage and aiding a terrorist group and was sentenced to five years in prison. He remains free, after spending 92 days in jail, while his appeal is considered. His wife however was not allowed to travel outside the country.
Read more: International Press Freedom Award goes to Malini Subramaniam
November 24, 2016
EU Healthcare: Bad health: EU buries billions with 550,000 premature deaths due to chronic disease
A joint OECD/European Commission report says chronic diseases and
premature deaths cost the EU billions every year. It calls for better
prevention policies and improved health care. So what else is new?
Health reports seldom say anything new. There's the obligatory risk factors - smoking, alcohol and obesity - and an equally standard call for better prevention policies and improved healthcare systems. Let's face it: We could all live a bit more healthily.
Such is the mainline in "Health at a Glance: Europe 2016," a joint report launched Wednesday (23.11.2016) by the OECD and the European Commission in Brussels.
But what's striking about this report is the human cost of Europe's failing health.
The report estimates that about 550,065 people of working-age (25-64 years) in the European Union die prematurely from chronic diseases. It could be a heart attack, stroke, diabetes, or a form of cancer. And their dying early, says the report, costs the EU 115 billion euros annually.
Note EU-Digest: another issue not discussed in this report, which certainly must be seen as a part of the problem, is that in some countries, like the Netherlands, where insurance programs have been privatized and the insurance premium costs have continuously been on the rise for the consumer, people have not been going to the Dr. or hospital for preventive care, mainly because of personal economic reasons.
For the complete report Read more: Bad health: EU buries billions with 550,000 premature deaths due to chronic disease | Science | DW.COM | 23.11.2016
Health reports seldom say anything new. There's the obligatory risk factors - smoking, alcohol and obesity - and an equally standard call for better prevention policies and improved healthcare systems. Let's face it: We could all live a bit more healthily.
Such is the mainline in "Health at a Glance: Europe 2016," a joint report launched Wednesday (23.11.2016) by the OECD and the European Commission in Brussels.
But what's striking about this report is the human cost of Europe's failing health.
The report estimates that about 550,065 people of working-age (25-64 years) in the European Union die prematurely from chronic diseases. It could be a heart attack, stroke, diabetes, or a form of cancer. And their dying early, says the report, costs the EU 115 billion euros annually.
Note EU-Digest: another issue not discussed in this report, which certainly must be seen as a part of the problem, is that in some countries, like the Netherlands, where insurance programs have been privatized and the insurance premium costs have continuously been on the rise for the consumer, people have not been going to the Dr. or hospital for preventive care, mainly because of personal economic reasons.
For the complete report Read more: Bad health: EU buries billions with 550,000 premature deaths due to chronic disease | Science | DW.COM | 23.11.2016
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