More From Alder's Ledge

September 21, 2011

Hungary and the Neo-Nazis

Jobbik, the legal arm of Nazism in Hungary.
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Jobbik should had been banned much like the neo-Nazi organization just banned in Germany today. Instead Jobbik continues to flourish as it spreads its messege of hate across Hungary and abroad. Instead Jobbik remains free to enlist more and more "stormtroopers" into its Nazi army. Instead it continues to attack and harrass a portion of Hungary's population that the government refuses to protect.
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Spread the word about Jobbik and help fight the spread of fascist groups like these. In doing this you help make it more and more difficult for groups like Jobbik to gain power by working under the radar. And in doing this you help put pressure on Hungary to stop supporting Jobbik and its Nazi scum.
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September 20, 2011

"She's Buried Chest Deep"


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"Allah... has come up with such a fair rule, even the Devil couldn't be so cruel."
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Iran, the name alone makes me sick. A place where even Satan might not show his head for fear of Islamic retribution. A people taught to fear a religion, a faith, a tormented ideal. A country sealed off from hope.
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The rulers of this religious theocracy crush the fairer sex while exalting the depravity of the males beastly lust. A glimpse of hair, a centimeter of exposed flesh, a twinkle of the eye and a woman can be literally crushed. And yet the youth of Iran have showed the will to fight back.
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In the end of President Bush's rule the "green movement" began. Obama has refused to support it. His presidency has watched on as the symbol of this movement died... bleeding out in the street... staring into the camera as if to scream out for help.
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And yet we could not look away. For the first time the world was damned to watch. Damned to see how these religious zealots treat their women. To see how Neda died simply for being born the wrong sex... for stepping out of the role Islam has cast for its women.
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If you have seen her eyes you know her pain. If you have watched as life left her there, dieing before your eyes, than you must bear witness. Turning away is kin to being the bastard that fired the shot. Remaining silent is kin to being the monster that stole from her the life you live... free.
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Every year the Iran government issues the command to kill an unknown number of women. Many die without the world knowing their names. Many simply slip away into the darkness of Iran's Islamic law. Their faces are stolen from them with the pounding of stone. Their blood spilt by the fascist bullet. Their lives extinguished so that those remaining might never have to face the gallows.
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The goal of Iran is simple. To keep its women enslaved to the rule of Sharia law. A code Iran gave birth to. A law that was written through the militants' interpretation of radicalized Islam. A law that rapes, maims, and slaughters those who can not submit to it.
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Scream for these extinguished flames. Scream for Neda. Scream till your throat bleeds and your voice can bear it no more.
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September 15, 2011

Educational Discrimination Against Romani Children Part of Czech Unrest


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Czech Television station ČT24 has posted an article to its website reporting on the connection between the current unrest in Šluknov district and discrimination against Romani people in the schools. Such discrimination has been linked for decades in the Czech Republic to the provision of special education.
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The unrest in Šluknov region is rooted in the ongoing discrimination being practiced against Romani children at elementary schools there. For decades, the state has permitted intellectually healthy Romani children to be educated at schools for the intellectually disabled. After the practice was criticized, the state renamed the schools concerned, changing "special" ("zvláštní") schools into "practical" ("praktické") ones. Irremediable harm has been done to these children, because without a normal education, Romani people have no chance on the labor market. Among Romani residents of the residential hotel in Varnsdorf which police officers have been protecting from attack by non-Romani locals recently, only half of the local children currently attend mainstream schools.
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A full 27 % of Romani children without intellectual disabilities are still attending the renamed "special" schools throughout the country. "Special schools are intended for the intellectually disabled. Tell me: Is it possible for such a high percentage of any population to be intellectually disabled?" asks Iveta Němečková, a special needs educator.
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There are 400 ghettos total in the Czech Republic where an estimated 30 000 children live. Just like their parents when they were of pre-school age, many of these children have small vocabularies in Czech, may not yet know the words for colors or shapes (or may not distinguish colors), and may not yet grasp certain concepts. However, they are not intellectually backward, just socially deprived. They therefore have even more of a need for a normal education. "That's how they become familiar with the majority society, how they establish relationships with other children and start perceiving social norms and values in a natural way," said Klára Fischerová, a special needs educator working at the Lyčkovo náměstí Elementary School in Karlín.
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In 2007, the Czech Republic lost a case at the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, which found in favor of Romani citizens who complained they had been unjustifiably educated in special schools. The practice is continuing and has been criticized by the Czech School Inspectorate and the ombudsman.
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Segregated education has a sad tradition of devastating impacts among the Roma. Those living in the ghettos today are often graduates of the days when special education was developed in full in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s. "A disproportionate percentage of the Romani population were educated in special schools, as many as 70 % of Romani children at the height of the practice," Němečková pointed out.
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According to a World Bank study published last year, eight out of 10 Romani people currently of economically productive age have only ever completed an elementary education. If their children don't get a chance for a better education, they will end up on welfare. The situation is a vicious circle.
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"It's not true that information has not been available about this, but for some reason there has never been interest at the highest levels, such as the Czech Education Ministry, or even in regional government. If we don't address this now, it will catch up to us in time," said Ivan Gabal, a sociologist and author of several pieces of research into the unequal position of Romani children.
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The state already knows how to address the situation. One elementary school in Prague's Karlín neighborhood could serve as a model, where rich and successful people are neighbors with families living in existential deprivation and everyone sends their children to the same schools.
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"The children are satisfied, that's important. We are the clients of these children and their parents, so we want to guarantee education for all," school director Jan Korda said. The Romani population of the school is 10 %, or two or three pupils in each class. Class 6.B also includes a girl of Vietnamese origin and a hearing-disabled boy. They live on the same street and attend the same class.
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"We're all children and we should be friends, not be separated," said Anežka Novotná from class 6.B. Whether the situation will change in Šluknov district remains an open question.
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Romea.cz Article
http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_2813

Is Europe Dieing?


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Rise of Fascism in Russia.
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In 2009 it was predicted that over half the worlds known population of Neo-Nazis lived in Russia. To me this is almost to much to believe. After all, it was Adolf Hitler who had used a "scorched Earth" policy while invading the "Mother Land". So how is it that the World War Two stormtroopers are now reappearing in Russia?
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The idea goes that as the collapse of the Soviet Union came about the rise of immigration began. People from the Caucuses and other former colonies of the Soviets began to rush into the falling empire's homeland. These people simply were seeking a better life than what the Soviets had made for them in the old Soviet block puppet states.
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Now days the immigration to Russia is still climbing. With a booming economy, the old communist state is suddenly an attractive destination for the East and its impoverished countries. This has helped bring about the resentment that has fueled the "apocalyptic" view of the skinhead movement in Russia.
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Ideas that focus on the "birth rate" and the replacement of ethnic majorities have lent to the racist motivations that now have a footing in Europe. The Czech Republic has demonized its old communist rulers while leaning back toward Adolf's style of thinking. Romania too has lent itself to the racist ideologies of Hitler's Europe. Russia however... well Russian racist are reforming the agendas of Nazism to fit their nations unique needs.
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Random street fighting, vicious attacks on minorities, terrorist style executions, and racist backed boot camps. These are all the trademarks of Russian Nazism. This is how half of the Nazis in the world today behave.
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It is clear that the movement is still growing. The economy in Russia may be hitting rough patches yet the immigration to Russia is still continuing. And the Nazi movement in Russia is still sucking in the poor and weary in a dim society. All we have left is to see where the movement ends.
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Will Russia be the new Germany?
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Source Document
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Current TV: From Russia With Hate

September 9, 2011

Once The Roma Start Using Twitter...


Article by Romea.cz
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The electronic media - television in particular - have unfortunately played a large role in the hysteria created around the problems with coexistence between the "majority society" and the Romani community in the Šluknov foothills. The populism of various politicians has also played a big role.
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Various television stations have been and are reporting on the situation in Rumburk or Varnsdorf in a one-sided, populist manner - and sometimes directly in an apocalyptic style. Government politicians, under pressure from the unrelenting problems in their own coalition, have sensed the opportunity to flex their "muscles". It's not that there are not serious problems in the Šluknov foothills, but it cannot be a total coincidence that these problems have moved to the center of the country's attention at the very moment the governing coalition is introducing many anti-social measures through its reforms.
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The tactic of "divide and conquer", or inciting society against itself, is a tried-and-true political tool. In other countries where governments have gone down the path of unpopular measures, it has worked for them to incite the poor - or the lower middle class who are being rendered poor by the reforms - against those who are the very poorest, often those afflicted by total social exclusion.
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The rhetoric used in such cases is rather simple: During hard times, we must all make sacrifices, and unfortunately our world is being ruined by a layer of parasites and "moochers" who in addition are terrorizing our fellow citizens with their violence - citizens who may be poor, but who are honest, hard-working, and who pay their rent. Then, when the resentful "nation" takes to the streets demanding harsh measures and security, the television cameras movingly follow the socially "adaptable" dads, moms, teenagers and children as they take out their justified anger against the "inadaptables", demanding decisive measures. If the police weren't stopping them, the "adaptables" would be only too glad to beat those Roma up.
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We cannot make light of a certain justified degree of desperation currently being felt by locals in some towns over rising crime. However, a deeper analysis is missing from this flood of emotionally extreme television reports.
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For example, the information is not being delivered to the public that the Czech government, for more than 20 years since communism fell, has not managed to propose social policy or other measures to prevent the creation of the Romani ghettos into which politicians and town counselors are moving Romani people who once lived in town centers. These evictions are often a cynical display of corruption and gold-digging, with "the market" cutting its teeth on the potentially lucrative buildings in which the Romani tenants are residing.
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Various human rights organizations and think tanks have long warned that the Czech Republic is stirring up an enormous problem for itself by creating these ghettos, of which there are already several hundred, just as it is by segregating Romani children in the schools and adopting ineffective social policies. This is compounded by the fact that the freedom of "the market" to pick and choose who will be in the work force has never been considered an effective anti-discrimination policy for states to adopt in societies riddled with anti-minority prejudice.
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The people who have been evicted into the ghettos have nothing left to lose, because the ghetto is, for most of them, the "terminus". There are no (legal) jobs near the ghettos, and drugs, gambling and loan-shaking are the norm there. Children from an early age are learning how to survive in environments where they have never seen anyone hold a regular job.
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The superficial reporting by the media, and the populist outcries of politicians in response to the problems now arising in the vicinity of these ghettos, are food for racist stereotypes, according to which "only repression against them will work", because - "What's the point of discussing it?" - this problem is, so to speak, "genetic". When I recently published an opinion piece on how the invisible hand of the market is contributing to the creation of ghettos while the state passively ignores the problem, I received many responses to it in that vein.
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It's not surprising that various neo-Nazi fighting units who want to settle accounts with the "inadaptables" by using force - or at least squeeze some political capital out of it - have started feeding off of these desperate citizens' marches with lightning speed. Unfortunately, the government has come quite close to operating on the "skinhead" level itself. An otherwise indecisive Prime Minister, evidently inspired by the British government's recent response to unrest in British towns, has theatrically sent police reinforcements to maintain order in the Šluknov foothills.
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There is nothing wrong with modestly ensuring order where it is being repeatedly violated, but the publicized, forceful speeches about the police reinforcements remaining there as long as necessary - and that if necessary people from the Police Presidium will roll up their sleeves as well - are completely beside the point, because they are not addressing the essence of the problem. When the Prime Minister then says the new method for disbursing welfare payments will contribute to solving this problem because people will have to earn their welfare by performing public service, it is clear that even worse times lie ahead for us.
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In the final analysis, the actual failure of social policy must always compensated for by repression. Of course, more prisons, police officers, and special forces do not, in the end, cost as much as an active social policy - but they also don't solve the problem. They just push it under the surface. Moreover, if we "Řápkovize" the Romani problem through programs of harassment and repression, it is completely certain that it will lead to the radicalization of the people in the ghettos with nothing left to lose.
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Here it must be ironically added that the police and the "majority society" in general are in great luck that the Roma have not yet learned to use "Facebook" and "Twitter". When the Prime Minister made the sweeping gesture of deciding to deploy riot police in the battle with the "inadaptables" in a ghetto in just a single town, I could not help but rather mischievously imagine what the government would do if Romani activists suddenly used social networking sites to call for unrest in the hundreds of ghettos the Czech Republic has allowed to develop. I guess the Prime Minister's colleagues at the Office of the Government would have to help out in addition to the bureaucrats from the Police Presidium.
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The same applies to the Czech skinheads. The hard core of neo-Nazis is said to have hundreds of members and several thousand fellow-travelers. There are an estimated 300,000 - 500,000 Romani people in the country. What if they start organizing like the right-wing radicals? The catastrophic social policy of the Czech state has not yet managed to move all of the Roma into the ghettos, but the tens of thousands of people who have ended up there are just a bomb waiting to explode.
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Please Note That This Post Is Not The Original Content Of Alder's Ledge.
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Source.
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Romea.cz
http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_2793