european news

EU states raise no objection to US missile plan at NATO forum - 19.04.2007 - 17:36
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US plans to build a shield against intercontinental missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic received tacit approval from the 26 NATO member countries at a meeting on Thursday, despite opposition to the plan inside the EU and from Russia.

http://euobserver.com/9/23899/?rk=1

EUROPE'S RIVERS RUNNING LOW:

GERMANY

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Polish witchhunt

By Ignacio Ramonet

Le Monde English edition

The Poles call it the law of lustration, a term meaning ritual purification; the word has strong connotations of repentance and penitence in Poland, where history and Catholicism are so closely intertwined.Under the law, which was passed last October and entered into force on 15 March this year, 700,000 Poles are required to confess any collaboration with the communists between 1945 and 1989. All senior civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and journalists born before 1972 must now confess their past sins by 15 May.They must all fill in a form and answer the question: “Did you secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former communist security services?” The forms must be handed to their immediate superiors, who will forward them to the Institute of National Memory in Warsaw, which will check its records and issue a certificate of political purity. Journalists employed in any public service will be dismissed automatically if they collaborated. Anyone who refuses to answer the question or who is proved to have lied may be banned from their profession for 10 years.

This mad law, which is causing uproar in the European Union, makes the McCarthyites of the United States in the 1950s look like amateurs at the practise of anti-communism. It is the main feature of a witchhunt launched by the authorities after the conservative president, Lech Kaczynski, and his twin brother, prime minister Jaroskaw Kaczynski, came to power in Poland in October 2005.Many Poles consider the law to be unconstitutional because it requires citizens to prove that they did not do something. It may be quashed by the Constitutional Court, which will deliver its verdict in May.

The ruling rightwing, Catholic and nationalist coalition (the Kaczynski brothers’ Law and Justice party, the agrarian Self Defence party and the League of Polish Families) is pursuing a disturbing policy of tough enforcement of moral values. Roman Giertych, deputy prime minister, minister of education and leader of the League, has just tabled a homophobic bill, causing more international uproar and protests from human rights organisations. Under the bill, which could be presented within a month, any person disclosing their homosexuality “or any other sexual deviation” in a university or scholastic establishment would be liable to a fine, dismissal or a term of imprisonment. The minister’s father, the League MEP Maciej Giertych, caused protests in February when he published an antisemitic pamphlet, paid for by the European parliament and issued under its logo, containing such statements as “the Jews create their own ghettos” and “antisemitism is not racism”.

These anti-communist purges and attempts to reimpose an authoritarian moral order in Poland — and also to some extent in Ukraine, Lithuania and other countries formerly in the eastern bloc — conceal a worrying nostalgia for the period before the second world war, when racism was blatant. Some of those caught up in the current wave of revisionism go as far as extolling collaboration with the Third Reich against the Soviet Union.The idea, so popular with the media, that Putin’s Russia is merely a covert extension of the old USSR inspires the spirit that prompted Warsaw to agree to instal on Polish territory the anti-missile shield designed by the Pentagon to protect the United States. It did that without deigning to consult its partners in the EU and Nato. Which goes to show that paranoia in politics can lead not only to spiritual atrophy but also to a special form of treachery.

http://mondediplo.com/2007/04/01poland

Researcher: Israel Responsible for at least 97.8 Percent of Serious Human Rights Abuses in Conflict
April  Friday 13  2007 (20h33) :

An independent Swedish researcher released an extensive analysis of the Middle Eastern conflict since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. According to Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, the vast majority of grave violations of human rights falls under the responsibility of the Jewish state. In the third edition of his study, ’Apartheid: Ancient, Past, and Present’, Löwstedt concludes that no less than 97.8 percent of gross human rights violations so far committed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews, and 2.2 percent, at the most, are Palestinian crimes.

Israel was accused of apartheid by John Dugard, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Special Envoy to the Occupied Palestinian Territories in February this year. In a report to the Council, Dugard recommended bringing the charge of apartheid, a crime against humanity under international law, against Israel to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Previously, two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and the former South African Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, had also raised accusations of apartheid against Israel. According to all four and many others, Israel is implementing the same system of oppression that Whites used against the indigenous black majority in South Africa until 1994. And just like Blacks committed a number of violent crimes against Whites and occasionally incited people to violence against South African Whites in the liberation struggle there, Palestinians have carried out similar crimes against Israeli Jews.

However, the overwhelming majority of violent crimes as well as cases of incitement to violence are responsibilities of the privileged ethnicities in both countries, according to Löwstedt. Moreover, he points out seven kinds of systematic, racist crimes which he says are the sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews and the South African Whites and of similar ethnic elites in other apartheid societies. These crimes include ethnically discriminatory repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education, and language policies and practices.Löwstedt has worked in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as in South Africa as an academic and for the UN. He currently teaches at Webster University in Vienna, Austria.

Read the study: Apartheid – Ancient, Past, and Present: Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, Vienna: Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie und kritische Anthropologie, 2007, 3 rd edition, http://www.dada.at/gems/gesellschaft/Apartheid.pdf

South African (Jewish) Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils says Iran's nuclear program 'wise'

Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:40:13 +0100

Yaakov Lappin, YNet, 04.17.07 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3389123,00.html

[When SA zionists try to blackball Kasrils they will find themselves in trouble in terms of SA national politics - RB]

South African Minister of Intelligence Services, Ronnie Kasrils, has "praised Iran's wise stand regarding its nuclear program," according a report by the Islamic Republic News Agency. Kasrils, who is Jewish, was in Iran last week as part of an official state visit. Efforts by Ynetnews to reach Kasrils for comment were unsuccessful. The South African government has released an official statement, saying that Kasrils "has had a fruitful meeting with Mr Ali Larijani; Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. The meeting was held in the spirit of advancing the existing good relations of friendship, co-operation and understanding between the governments and peoples of the two countries. The two Ministers expressed their satisfaction with their meeting which like the rest of Minister Kasrils' visit to Iran has been a positive one," the statement added. Members of South Africa's Jewish community reacted with alarm to news of Kasril's visit. Beth Goldman, of the South African Zionist Federation, told Ynetnews that Kasrils has alienated the Jewish community after a long-running campaign aimed at demonizing Israel. "Kasril's attitude towards Israel has made him an enemy of the Jewish community. He started off comparing actions by the IDF in Palestinian areas with actions by the Nazis," she said. "This is extremely alarming. We are very concerned that the South African government has not come out and condemned Iran for the statements of its president, threatening to destroy Israel. We as Jews are very alarmed," Goldman added. Goldman said that so far, efforts by members of the community to contact the South African government have produced few results. "We don't do very much public protesting, due to concerns for the security of the community. We have a very large, hostile Muslim community in South Africa," she said. Michael Bagaim, Chairman of the South African Board of Deputies, told Ynetnews: "The South African Jewish community strongly supports the international call for the condemnation of Iran building up nuclear capability. We believe that this international call is correct and that support by the Minister of Intelligence for Iran's rogue development is both wrong and out of place. We don't believe that it is in line with the South African government's policy statements. In light of Iran's call for the destruction of Israel, it is extremely insensitive of Minister Kasrils to support the development of Iran's nuclear capability," he added.

Bashing the Jewish community

Michael Kransdorff, author of a leading South African Jewish blog, 'Its almost supernatural,' told Ynetnews, "Kasrils is a non-practicing Jew but a rabid anti-Zionist. It is probably a story in itself. In 2001, at the start of the intifada, he formed an organization called 'not in my name'. It was for people of Jewish descent who opposed Israel's actions. They launched a declaration of conscience hoping to get the mainstream community to condemn Israel. It failed dismally," he added. "The Jewish community responded by shunning him and denouncing him publicly. But given his political status, he was able to bash the community and Israel in the newspapers and on TV and Radio. He uses the sort of anti-Zionist rhetoric you would find in say, Syria," Kransdorff said, adding: "His views have become more and more extreme. Last year after the Lebanon war peaked he wrote in one of South Africa's most intellectual weeklies that Israelis are behaving like Nazis. I am extremely concerned about Mr Kasril's comments in particular and South Africa's foreign policy in general. Anti-Zionism is very common here. While most South African Jews continue to be fierce supports of Israel, the have switched off to this sort of rhetoric," Kransdorff said. He added: 'Minister Kasrils often writes about how his 'Jewish' conscience obligates him to speak out against Israel. But where is his 'Jewish' conscience when it comes to the Islamic Republic of Iran? How could any self respecting Jew, no matter what his position on Israel, call for the strengthening of ties with a nation that is today at the forefront of Holocaust denial?"

Absent from UN vote to condemn Shoah denial

Last month, the leader of the opposition in the South African parliament blasted the government after South Africa failed to vote in favor of a UN motion condemning Holocaust denial. Tony Leon, head of the Democratic Alliance, wrote in a statement: "A further indictment on South Africa's human rights record is its extraordinary decision to be absent when a resolution was adopted by the UN General Assembly in January this year condemning Holocaust denialism. "The resolution was co-sponsored by more than 100 countries but South Africa chose to be among 22 countries who were not in the Assembly when the resolution was passed. In so doing, South Africa stood shoulder to shoulder with some of the worst abusers of human rights in the world, including Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan and Zimbabwe. The government cannot profess a commitment to upholding and protecting human rights when, on the international stage, we go out of our way to temporise with tyranny," Leon added.

From: Rowan Berkeley <rowan.berkeley@googlemail.com>

Tanzania: Forced Water Privatisation
The legal arbitration soon to open in Holland and in which British investor Biwater is demanding $25 million from Tanzania......................
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/40744
2007-04-11

Tanzania Gender Networking Programme has issued a strong statement condemning profit hungry companies that came to Africa to reap profits from our natural resources such as water.

, a country said to be one of the poorest in the world is of great public interest to any Tanzanian, like our well-wishers all over the globe. This case is not only an international investment dispute but also a human rights issue. The outcomes of the case will have great implications on the lives of common Tanzanians. Tax payers’ money is definitely going into an area of no positive impact to poverty reduction let alone equity and justice in the country.

The Tanzania Gender Networking Programme(TGNP) condemns companies, such as Bi-water Gauff that have sought to reap maximum profits from natural resources, in countries that lack strong economies like Tanzania. We demand that the Biwater Gauff versus United Republic of Tanzania case currently being heard at the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) beginning Monday 16th April 2007, be open to the watchful eyes and cameras of the world so that the mayhem of plunder by profit hungry companies of the ‘global village’ can partly be revealed for all to see.

This is what forced privatization can do. We wish to re-affirm our unhappiness and anger over privatization of public services as one of the key conditionalities enforced by International Financial Institutions led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB).Ironically, the ICSID is part and parcel of the World Bank system.

As gender and human rights activists, we are appalled by the trends. Aid and loans continue to come to Tanzania with difficult strings attached, most of which have working at the detriment of Tanzania. The City Water Consortium contract of 2003 is just one case in mind. We are confident that Tanzanians will continue to oppose such colonial type of contracts in future. But this case must end now and without harm to the economy and welfare of the people of Tanzania.

TGNP is part of an amicus submission that was presented to the ICSID together with six other human rights organizations in Tanzania, Switzerland and Canada last month. Although we are confident that there is no legitimate case against the people of Tanzania, dubious undertakings are likely to affect the conduct of the case. Bi-water is known for international maneuvers across the world and the likelihood is that the case may turn thorny to Tanzania. According to a report, Challenging Investment Rule, just released in the United Kingdom, nearly 70 percent of ICSID cases are ruled or settled in favor of the investor with a compensation award against the country where the investment failed. The report notes that in seven out of 109 cases filed with ICSID, the investor’s revenues exceeded the gross domestic product of the country they were suing. This case may add to the number of such cases.

Water privatization has failed to get water to those who desperately need it. The ongoing arbitration will definitely not deliver water to the women and poor men of Tanzania. Tanzanians don’t owe, why pay?

Released,

Usu Mallya
Executive Director
Wednesday, 11th April 2007

ISSN 1753-6839   © 2007 Fahamu [TheBlackList] Tanzania Forced Water Privatisation

18,000 German thought-crime prosecutions in 12 months

Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 10:07:26 +0100 From: Rowan Berkeley <rowan.berkeley@googlemail.com>

A Radical's Diary

David Irving, April 7, 2007
http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2007/070407.html

The German Government has quietly admitted that over the last twelve months it prosecuted over 18,000 Germans for offences of "right-wing extremism," of which only a few hundred involved actual violence: i.e. they prosecuted over seventeen thousand thought-crimes -- people unwitting displaying the old swastika emblem, or even worse, National Socialist ideas, and perhaps even "denying the H."

As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently pointed out in a courageous editorial, most of these new criminal records have been sprung on ordinary citizens blissfully unaware of the criminality of their actions and thoughts, because the tame German media are too cowardly to report any of these cases --  even the major trials like those involving the revisionists Ernst Zündel and Germar Rudolf.

These absurd laws themselves are protected by fresh layers of other, even more absurd, laws making it impossible even for court-appointed attorneys to provide an adequate and conscientious defence to those accused under the thought-crime laws. Any German or Austrian lawyer who does, can be -- and frequently is --  himself ordered arrested by the judge, for having associated himself with these criminal thoughts and deeds. Zündel's court-appointed defence attorney Sylvia Stolz made herself unpopular with the prosecutor for "hampering the prosecution," and is now to be prosecuted for so hampering. Go figure, as the Americans say.

More than once my chosen Austrian lawyer, Dr Herbert Schaller, arrived in the Vienna prison with fresh horror tales from Zündel's Mannheim courtroom -- the judge Meinertzhagen had warned him that if he asked certain questions of the court, or made certain defence motions, he too would be arrested.

I remember that in January 1993, when I was tried in Munich under Germany's laws for the suppression of free speech, one of my three lawyers turned up apologetically on the morning of the hearing apologizing that he could not continue to act for me, as the Munich Bar Association had threatened him with dismissal -- i.e. the end of his career -- if he did. He showed me their actual letter. I was fined thirty thousand deutschmarks, around twenty thousand dollars, for uttering a single sentence which the Polish authorities now belatedly admit was true.

I noticed when I was in Viennese prison that the jailhouse, built to hold eight hundred malfeasors, currently held 1,400 inmates, a quarter of them Blacks. It was a tight fit but it was possible, provided we did not all breathe at the same time.

This morning I have received a letter from Frau K., an elderly Viennese lady in her nineties. Exercising what is the constitutional right of every citizen in most other countries, on September 27 of last year she had written a personal letter to the President of Austria, one Herbert Fischer -- a small, straw-haired gentleman of even smaller character and endowed with all the intellect and bearing of Lady Chatterley's gardener -- to protest against my arrest, trial, and imprisonment. "What D. I. said was right," she wrote in one passage of this incriminating letter.

She received no presidential reply? Right. -- She heard no more? Wrong.

On March 8 the Austrian criminal authorities sent her a letter fining her the sum of 200 euros under penalty of jail for having written these seditious words to their august president. No trial, no hearing, no defence -- no lawyer would have dared to defend her anyway.

This is the new Europe, coming soon to a jailhouse near us. I for one shall do my damndest to prevent it.

EU aims to criminalise Holocaust denial

By Tobias Buck in Brussels

Published: April 17 2007 19:56 | Last updated: April 17 2007 19:56

Laws that make denying or trivialising the Holocaust a criminal offence punishable by jail sentences will be introduced across the European Union, according to a proposal expecting to win backing from ministers Thursday.

Offenders will face up to three years in jail under the proposed legislation, which will also apply to inciting violence against ethnic, religious or national groups.

Diplomats in Brussels voiced confidence on Tuesday that the controversial plan, which has been the subject of heated debate for six years, will be endorsed by member states. However, the Baltic countries and Poland are still holding out for an inclusion of “Stalinist crimes” alongside the Holocaust in the text – a move that is being resisted by the majority of other EU countries.

The latest draft, seen by the Financial Times, will make it mandatory for all Union member states to punish public incitement “to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin”.

They will also have to criminalise “publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes” when such statements incite hatred or violence against minorities.

Diplomats stressed the provision had been carefully worded to include only denial of the Holocaust – the Nazi mass murder of Jews during the second world war – and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

They also stressed that the wording was designed to avoid criminalising comical plays or films about the Holocaust such as the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni’s prize-winning Life is Beautiful . The text expressly upholds countries’ constitutional traditions relating to the freedom of expression.

Holocaust denial is already a criminal offence in several European countries, including Germany and Austria. It is not a specific crime in Britain, though UK officials said it could already be tackled under existing legislation.

In an attempt to assuage Turkish fears, several EU diplomats said the provisions would not penalise the denial of mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman troops in the aftermath of the 1915 collapse of the Ottoman empire. Turkey strongly rejects claims that this episode amounted to genocide.

The proposal draws what is likely to be a controversial distinction between inciting violence against racial or ethnic groups and against religious groups. Attacks against Muslims, Jews or other faiths will only be penalised if they go on to incite violence against ethnic or racial groups, the draft text states.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

UPDATE:
The deal agreed by justice ministers on Thursday (19 April) "proves that the EU now has moral responsibility and not only on the economy" EU home affairs commissioner Franco Frattini said.

"There is no safe haven for racist violence, anti-Semitism or people inciting to xenophobic hatred," he added, underlining the text agreed by ministers is "a right balance between fully respecting freedom of speech and punishing any criminal actions, not ideas."

Under the new law, offenders will face up to three years in jail for "public incitement to violence or hatred, directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin."The same rules will apply to people "publicly condoning, denying, or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes," but only those recognised under statutes of the International Criminal Court.

According to German justice minister Brigitte Zypries, speaking on behalf of Berlin's six-month EU presidency, the EU-wide sentencing framework is "an important political signal...especially to the young generation."However, the wording has been carefully chosen to make it acceptable to the UK, Ireland and the Scandinavian countries, who were particularly worried about the scope of freedom of speech. http://euobserver.com/9/23902/?rk=1

The bad German
By Natascha Freundel, Ha'aretz

For some people, just hearing his name can almost bring on a heart attack. For others, though, he seems to have magnetic powers. Women's eyes focus on him with marvel during his public readings. In the streets of Berlin, it's not unusual to see dreamy girls enter a cafe simply because they have spotted him through the window.

Maxim Biller - novelist, short-story writer and newspaper columnist - is one of Germany's best writers. He loves to think of himself as a younger, German version of Woody Allen, with a good dose of Mephistophelian meanness. He is sharp, provocative, witty, rude and romantic. Fans of his cool, playful irony buy the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung just to read his regular column, "Moral Stories," which deals, according to his own summary, "with Jews, Germans, Hitler and sex." More sensitive readers may prefer his simple, slightly melancholic prose about childhood memories and love, as in his 2004 novel "Bernsteintage" ("Days in Amber"). Partisans of trashy guitar music are more likely to like the shamelessly amateur singer-songwriter Maxim Biller. The 2004 CD "Maxim Biller Tapes" may have received the worst of reviews, but was nevertheless illegally copied and passed along as much as a Samizdat book in Soviet times.

And since 2003, Biller has also had the distinction of being the author of a novel whose distribution is prohibited by law. The case of "Esra" - the title of the book, in which an ex-girlfriend of Biller's, as well as her mother, found themselves exposed, and claimed to be victimized by its publication - is currently in the hands of the German Constitutional Court, which is being asked to rule on the limits of the freedom of expression.

Now Biller, born in 1960 in Prague to a Russian Jewish family that in 1970 emigrated to Germany, two years after Soviets tanks brought the Prague Spring to a violent end, has announced his plan to move to Israel.

"I have always been such a good German, but by the end of this German summer I decided to leave Germany. I will go where buses explode and Katyushas rain down. And I will still be better off." With these words Maxim Biller concluded his contribution to a jubilee, one-off revival edition of the German lifestyle magazine Tempo, last December.

From 1986 to 1996, Tempo served as a mouthpiece for German pop writers with a subversive, ego-driven and pro-capitalistic revolutionary spirit, and it was here that Biller directed his outstanding polemical talent, in a regular column he called "A Hundred Lines of Hatred" ("Hundert Zeilen Hass"). In his latest lines of "hatred," Biller gave a disillusioned summary of a Germany of the so-called soccer-patriotism, as it amazed the whole world last summer. He is very uneasy about the new "relaxed German": "This, in short, is someone, who no longer feels embarrassed by the idea of Hitler as grandfather." This was Biller, the spoilsport (Spielverderber).

The massive presence of black-red-and-gold flags all over the country during the World Cup last June did not cheer Biller up. The following month, he was not inclined to join Germany's discussion of the Second Lebanon War, at least not in the terms by which it was presented on the cover of Der Spiegel: "Can Israel Survive Like This?" In August, he found Germany disturbed not by the fact that Gunter Grass had served in the Waffen-SS, but only by the fact that it took him so long to admit it. In September, he read complimentary obituaries in all the main German papers of the conservative historian Joachim Fest, who had been the biographer and friend of Hitler's architect Albert Speer. Then the radical right-wing National Democrats once more proved their political acceptability, gaining seven percent of the vote in September in the regional elections of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

It was then that Biller wrote his column, with the result being something that a narcissist can only dream of: A whole nation, or even better, the intellectual class that sees itself as the nation's elite, was talking about that discontented speaker in their midst. And people are still gossiping about his whereabouts.

As if Putin had resigned

"It was just a column, but it became like a German Press Agency announcement. As if Putin had declared his resignation," Biller says today, with his typical modesty, and continues: "There is still no other country in the world that is so minimally anti-Semitic or racist as Germany, in reaction to Nazi times. But it has made a step toward nationalism that one would not expect from the Germans. A self-admiring nationalism. Suddenly people are saying they are proud to be Germans. One shouldn't be proud of anything, pride is a disgusting characteristic."

So, one wonders, were all the international visitors who came to Germany last summer really wrong in describing both a self-confident and open-minded place?

Biller: "They don't know what's really going on in Germany. In the past, when there were really just one and a half Nazis, CNN would show a Nazi rally in a way that made it look like Nazi hordes were marching in the streets of Berlin again. But now, Nazis can make it without difficulty into regional parliaments. And in the same country, you had this most ridiculous film, 'The Downfall,' running, showing just how human Hitler was.

"One day, Hitler will be a figure just like Napoleon in France. But his actions differed from those of Napoleon. After 1989, the Germans stopped being strangers to themselves. Overnight, criticism of Germany became embarrassing. Nobody realizes what an influence these things can have on a generation, the one that is forming just now. People live only in the today. But it is today that the tomorrow is made. And the German tomorrow, in my opinion, looks very, very right-wing and nationalistic."

Biller's sense of disaffection also derives from the reaction of his countrymen to the Lebanon war. "The German public clearly took the side of the Arab party in the war. Sheikh Nasrallah wasn't an issue, but the destruction of Lebanon was. And one could hear over and over: Soon, Israel will not exist anyway, and actually, that's not so bad.

"Moreover, we have this huge problem with Muslim Arabs. If we take just Berlin, [quarters with large Arab populations, like] Kreuzberg, Neukoelln, Wedding, are very anti-Semitic. This will become a problem for all Europe, but in particular for Germany."

So, maybe Biller endorses that most unusual proposal that recently made the rounds of Tel Aviv's intellectual circles? Namely, that Israel should warn Europe, that in the event it is targeted by Iran, it will will bomb European cities in response ...

"All I can say to this is that Israel has always known, and it's an old story for the Jews, that it cannot count on anybody's help. That's why once again they are in the situation in which only they can help themselves. But here's another question. The only thing I've always been aware of - and maybe it's unfair to some people - that Israelis still believe, is the idea 'We are the victims, who need to defend ourselves, and in so doing, we sometimes make mistakes and do stupid things.'

"But Israelis aren't the victims. They really have colonized this land. And they have to deal pragmatically with the consequences of this colonialization. The moment this fact is acknowledged, all the idealism will be gone, and only pragmatism will be left. And the days when Israel wandered around the Middle East like a hurt prima donna will be over.

"But - and this is important - it's lucky the Jews colonized Palestine. All the other nations of Europe got to conquer their piece of land, why should the Jews be the only ones not doing it? Yes, we did it, but we should stop acting as if we didn't."

Oz is full of hot air

Biller is certain that if in 1970 his parents had decided to go to Israel, he would have made himself just as many enemies there as he has in Germany today. In his world, good guys are extremely rare. And while other German writers of his generation may try to avoid the words "Hitler," "Auschwitz," "Nazi," "Holocaust," fearing that their heaviness will bury all the other words around them, Maxim Biller plays with these words the way a juggler plays with little balls, standing with a big grin on the other side of political correctness.

In Biller's 1998 novella "Harlem Holocaust," the Jewish-American writer Warszawski - fat, ugly, unsuccessful and a sex maniac - finds Germany to be a welcoming place for his obsessions. Biller's first novel, "The Daughter" (2000), tells the story of the Israeli Motti, who commits a war crime in Lebanon and after running away from his trauma to Germany, sees himself getting lost in a deeply cold society, as he begins to sexually abuse his daughter.

When asked about his favorite Israeli writers, Biller hesitates only a second before declaring Amos Oz full of hot air and boring, and David Grossman - except for his novel "See: Under Love" - "not deep enough for a German Jew" like himself. Biller prefers a novel like "It Happened in Gaza" by Amos Kollek, he likes Yaakov Shabtai's "Memories of Goldman," and he thinks Etgar Keret is "really, really great, because he is absolutely non-ideological. Keret blends humor and tragedy so closely, something that can be done only by a great writer, one who doesn't take sides, who doesn't believe he has to be a politician."

There are clear similarities between Keret's short stories and Biller's "Moral Stories." Both like to turn reality into a surreal scenario that aims at the inner truth of that reality. But Biller is careful to give every theme the literary form that best suits it, and when it comes to love, his third major theme, after Jews and Germans, the jeering and mean Maxim Biller can become very soft and deep. There is a wonderful scene in the forbidden novel "Esra," in which the author needs only an open window in a Munich apartment, a summer breeze blowing the curtain, children shouting from afar, and the two lovers - he Jewish-German, she Turkish - eating watermelon, to express a strong longing for a summer somewhere else, an oriental summer: "So there we were sitting and playing the south." The question of exposed privacy, though, that brought the novel before a court after Biller's ex-girlfriend and her mother sued the author, is already built into the story. "I don't want to show you my breasts and afterward read somewhere that I showed you my breasts," says Esra, the Turkish woman, to Adam, the Jewish-German writer. Maxim Biller loves to describe bodies and what can be done with them. It's not by chance that he once accused his German fellow writers of producing Schlappschwanzliteratur, "wanker literature" or "literature without balls."

"German literature, with very few exceptions, sounds like it was written by professors or clerks. I find the German used by German writers mostly very bloodless, bureaucratic, formal, not concrete, long-winded, stagnant. And it is simply not by chance that the only great German writer of the 20th century was a Jew from Prague, Franz Kafka."

Biller insists that "I am not saying this because I am also a Jew from Prague. Kafka wrote in a German that one can sing and speak as beautifully as French, Italian or Hebrew. What I call 'Emperor Wilhelm German' has to be avoided, like everything that comes from the bureaucrats and the military."

And what does he have to say about the banned novel, "Esra"? "I don't want to compare myself to Jean Genet - he had real problems - but Henry Miller also couldn't publish in the U.S. for a while, and James Joyce, and Nabokov with "Lolita." By the way, this happens very often when sexuality comes into play. That's when the bourgeoisie gets cold feet. I believe, in a single novel of mine there is more sex than in all the books of German post-war literature combined." Then he adds, "Well, this might be a slight exaggeration."

There is definitely a lot of sex in Biller's new book, "Liebe heite" ("Love Today"). The short stories portray heterosexual, cosmopolitan and often Jewish Germans, Czechs and Israelis, aged 35-45 and involved in short partnerships. The protagonists struggle with the unbearable lightness of their being, they are torn between places, possibilities, people. Again, Biller creates moments that contain everything and nothing. It's about stroking a woman's back on a balcony in snow-covered Berlin, it's about exploring the other's feet with your tongue, it's about breaking up via SMS and still, in one's mind, talking with your lover a month later. Cheating and lying and loving all appear in these laconic texts, there are no happy endings, nor does that old tradition known as marriage make an appearance.

"For all I know," says Maxim Biller, "nothing is as exciting as waiting for the love of your life. And mostly, when you think you've met her, it goes wrong, because you don't get her, or if you do, the relationship doesn't work, or you yourself don't want to be the love of his or her life. In the past, only bohemians wanted free love, but now everyone is into it. I know people who settled for a small love, and they found that they felt much worse than those who hold out for true love, and fail again and again. It's not funny at all to resign yourself to the fact that there is no such thing as true love, it's like being buried alive. If lovemaking didn't often lead to the birth of children, I would say that people should always hysterically run after true love."

Some of the places where his characters pursue true love in "Love Today" are Prague, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin and Tel Aviv, all places that appear in Biller's biography. He was 10 when he came with his sister and his parents to Hamburg. There he studied literature, before moving to Munich, his chosen town before he came to Berlin. Biller's sister, Elena Lappin, is a writer living in London; his mother, Rada Biller, was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and lived many years in Moscow. The urban space is very important in Biller's writing, like a home is to someone who has been on the road for a long time. Reading his stories, it becomes clear, that a part of Maxim Biller still lives in the cities of his past. Where does he really feel at home?

"I am giving up on this slowly. For a long time, it was Prague. But then I went there again, and worked for a couple of months, and that satisfied my longing.

"A burdened German poetic phrase for this is Sehnsuchtsort, 'place of longing.' And the place I long for most now is Tel Aviv. When I am there, I feel very much at home. When I was a child, we went every year to Israel, especially Tel Aviv. I love Tel Aviv. It's a place where I will be a lot in the future.

"But it's not easy to be a wandering Jew, it can get on your nerves. Once you've left, and even if it's only a single time, you will always miss what you haven't got. If someone were to invent a device that measures happiness, that could check the one who always misses the place where he is not and the one who stayed where he was born - I would have myself examined and would act accordingly, and stop wandering around."

So does Maxim Biller, to come back to that announcement of his, seriously see himself moving to Tel Aviv?

"I write in German," he answers, "and no writer can live for a long time where the language he writes in is not spoken. And where thoughts and information aren't circulating in that language."

But it is time for his books, which have been translated into six languages, to be circulating in Hebrew, Biller believes. He is very unhappy that up to now not a single line of his has been translated into Hebrew. "The only explanation I have is, that for Israelis, a Jew in Germany is still a highly unappetizing idea, all the more if he is an author and he writes about this. But, I think that maybe it doesn't make sense anymore to close your eyes to the fact that there is again Jewish life in Germany. It is, probably precisely because it is forbidden, especially interesting."


COMMENT:
(1)I hope I don't sound gloomier than the average Western with minimum critical skills. I am however culturally pessimistic. I do believe that if somebody has the power to hold a distorted mirror up in front of your nose for 60 years, you will end up believing that you actually are a gargoyle.What Mr. Maxim Biller and his zionist brethren do is exactly that. They attempt to ban and to turn into a taboo any spontaneous expression of a culture which differs from their own. The means at his disposal are formidable, since his views largely underpin the post-WWII status quo in Germany, with an added benefit of proving to the outside world that the Germans have been finally turned into an edulcorated, compliant and nondescript mass of apolitical hard-workers; like an army of PC zombies.People like Mr. Biller were accepted in the country as refugees, profited from the freedoms and opportunities the country had to offer, cultivated a victim-status as a highly effective political weapon, and still reserve the right humiliate the host country's culture and people from his media platform as a matter of course.Therein lies the rub. Unlike the millions of Turks, Portuguese, Arabs, and Italians who came to Germany and helped rebuilt it from the smouldering ashes, people like him never developed any attachment to the country other than as a profitable place they love to hate. Despite the unique privileges, grants, franchises, reparations and state-support given as a matter of course until today to Jews in Germany, his only feeling towards the Germans is sanctimonious contempt and the certainty that they somehow they owe him a living. His prescription for the Germans is very simple: hate yourself, and those whom I tell you to hate. If the Germans get bored with his hectoring, and stop paying attention, all he can do is say is that they are congenitally right-wing jew-baiters, and pack up to Israel. Well, good-riddance. I am sure Germans and the immigrant communities who peacefully live here can perfectly live with one less neo-con bastard daily soiling printed paper and the airwaves with hate.
(2)I totally agree with your critique of the Jews and that Biller, what an ungrateful bastard, so typical though. I was cheering for the Germans last summer in more ways then for just the world cup and if I was I'm sure many others were as well.
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