On September the 29th, the KRO Brandpunt programme in my country paid attention to the international contacts of my fellow countryman Mr Wilders, the leader of the PVV party. Usually described as a 'rightwing populist' party, the PVV now holds 15 of the 150 seats in Dutch parliament. A recent poll indicates a rise to 27 seats (source: Nieuwsuur Ipsos Synovate). In the broadcast, journalist Fons de Poel repeatedly wonders: 'How fresh are the new friends of Geert Wilders in Europe?'
Mr De Poel especially focuses on Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the FPÖ party in Austria. Mr Wilders had called him 'a very impressive man' on Twitter, after the two had met. Mr De Poel doubts whether Mr Wilders knows everything about this 'new friend' he should know and he gives the following example. In 2012, Mr Strache published the following cartoon on his Facebook page.
The cartoon shows three people at a dining table.
At the left, a man in morning coat is seated. He is fat and sweaty, he has a hooked nose, and his three cuff links have the shape of little Stars of David. Above the man, who is feasting on a variety of dishes, stand the words 'The banks'.
In the centre of the cartoon, a friendly man is obligingly pouring wine in the fat banker's glass. He is called 'The government'.
And at the right side of the table sits a skinny fellow, neither a plate of food nor a glass of wine in front of him, and he is looking at the scene with a dreary face. He is called 'The people'.
So arguably the message is: 'Look, the governments are burdening and empoverishing the people by high taxes and cutting public services, only to shove the money to Jewish bankers, with their extravagant salaries and bonuses, after they made a mess of the world's finances.'
Mr De Poel lets three people comment on this cartoon.
Paul Lendvai, a history professor who is said to be a Jew: 'That was of course an unforgivable lapse, doing something like that'.
Karl Öllinger, a politician of Austria's Green Party: 'The entire Austrian population has interpreted this as an anti-Semitic sign, no doubt about it whatsoever.'
Ewald Stadler, a former fellow party member of Mr Strache: 'Not only could this cartoon also have been published in Der Stürmer in the 1930s, it would above all have led, in any other European country, to Mr Strache having had to draw the political consequences from this and to resign.' [Der Stürmer was a hate-inciting Nazi rag - RS]
The Dutch viewers are told more things by Mr De Poel, things suggesting that Mr Strache might be a neo-Nazi posing as a democrat. The KRO Brandpunt journalist says that 'the least you can conclude, is that there is an unpleasant smell hanging around Mr Wilders's new political friend in Austria.' Later on, the corridors of the Binnenhof - Holland's Westminster - come in view. There, the reporter asks Mr Wilders why he thinks of Heinz-Christian Strache as an impressive man. Mr Wilders doesn't answer him and continues his walk to the Parliament's plenary hall.
Mr Strache himself is shown to respond to the criticism by saying: 'It are usually my competitors who are engaged in creating this false image. I find they should stop building this false image, and they should realize that we [of the FPÖ] are sincere honest democrats.'
So far my limited representation of this broadcast. It's limited, because it is the cartoon and the reporting about it I want to focus on. I hope you will bear with me, because the matters that now follow are as complicated as sensitive.
Firstly, this. In political communication there are always two things at play: content and style. What are they telling me? How are they saying it to me? And what are they not telling me?
Let's apply this to the current opinion climate in The Netherlands and to the report on the cartoon. Fact no. 1 about the opinion climate: the Dutch people are never informed, neither by the wellknown political parties nor by television and the newspapers, that Torahism's holy Tenach (= the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament) is the foundation of a genocidal annex suppressive annex exploitative doctrine.
Fact no. 2 about this opinion climate: the media in The Netherlands inform the Dutch amply about the Second World War in general and about the Holocaust in particular. The combination of the two has resulted in the rise to prominence of this idea in the Dutch mind: there is nothing wrong or evil about Jewry, the Jews were the innocent victims of the Nazis, who murdered six million of them in the Holocaust.
Because this message is sent with a high frequency, this unbalanced view is vividly present in the foreheads of the Dutch.
In this opinion climate, Mr De Poel shows an anti-Semitic cartoon, and he shows commenters who immediately link the cartoon to the Third Reich's propaganda. And it's true, in the media of the National Socialist dictatorship, the Jews were vilified by the most hateful and sordid cartoons, posters, slogans, books, films, etc. Furthermore, the term 'Weltfinanzjudentum' (world finances' Jewry) played a prominent part in the Nazi vocabulary.
So the first reaction of the average Dutch TV viewer will logically be one of immediate disgust: 'Wait a minute, this Strache character is a Nazi; Wilders is befriending Nazis!' This reaction is understandably triggered by the repulsion of the style of the cartoon, but regretfully, viewers will therefore also immediately fence off their minds from the content of the cartoon. It's a chain reaction: 'This is a Nazi-like cartoon > the Nazis were the mass murderers of the Jews > Ears can close now, mind can go blank now > I am on the good side of history and I will stay there.'
What Mr De Poel didn't tell his viewers - perhaps because he doesn't know - is that 1) in Torahism, texts like the following serve to indoctrinate Jewish toddlers as from the age of five. In Deuteronomy 15:6, prolonged banking - borrowing and lending ever larger amounts of money - is explained as the method by which the Jews can and will rule over many other nations. In Deuteronomy 6:10 and further, the Jews are reminded to thank Torahism's god for giving them great and good foreign cities in their possession, cities other nations toiled and sweated for building them. In Isaiah 60:10-12 it says that the wealth of the other nations will flow to the Jews, and that those nations who don't want to serve the Jews, will face utter ruin.
Once you know that, think back of 2) what happened in 2008, at least, what I've come to understand about it. In the decades preceding that year of the great financial crisis, US banks had profited from successive presidents softening and undoing the regulations and restrictions that were imposed on the banks by the Roosevelt administration after the 1929 crisis. This deregulating made it possible for the banks to go out and seduce hundreds of thousands American low-income families into the illusion they could become home-owners. People lost touch with common sense, and a moral responsibility towards society didn't matter to the bankers involved. The prospect of bonuses however did, and the risks were thought to be checked by insurance tricks the complexity of which would baffle a rocket scientist.
In 2008, this quicksand foundation under America's finances got to a point that the New York bank of Lehman Brothers, once described as 'masters of the universe', went bust, and since all these huge banks are interconnected, mutual distrust and fear of bankruptcy among the bankers led to a standstill of the daily run-of-the-mill lending and borrowing all over the world.
What did we see then? Western governments desperately tried to kickstart financial traffic again, by giving and lending these banks zillions of dollars, pounds and euros. By doing so, the governments heavily increased the taxpayers' burdens, which were quite over the top already.
In the same period, bankers pocketed fat bonuses nonetheless, 3), a shameless behaviour that got a lot of media attention (some bankers did not, feeling embarrassed over the shame befallen to their trade). Subsequently, we got to see angry politicians. President Obama was angry over the bonuses, and I can recall that in my country minister of finances Wouter Bos (PvdA) was also angry over the bonuses - like those bankers gave a damn (!)
The system remained intact, that's what matters. Of course those bankers understand why politicians play angry on TV. It's what will diminish the anger of the millions of people in their living-rooms. People will then say: 'Well, at least these politicians share my anger.' Yet I repeat, the system remained intact, and that's what mattered to both the major banks and to the established political parties, and that's why 4) in 2012 America the Wall Street banks again paid huge amounts of money to the presidential campaigns of both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Now, the Western peoples are chosing their governments on the basis of the idea that the government is in charge of things, that the government has the decisive power in the country, to make things happen for the common good. And surely, it should be like that. But what we got to see in the banking crisis was, 5), not banks doing what the governments wanted them to do. No, we saw governments doing what the banks wanted them to do. Those are the same governments that never inform their nations about Torahism, 6), but that always hasten to denounce 'anti-Semitism' whenever an incident involving Jews occurs.
The media never inform us about Torahism either, but always pull a serious face when they tell us 'anti-Semitism' (real or alleged) is on the rise in this or that country. Those are the same media who in 2008, 2009, resignedly told the general public that 7) the troubled banks were 'too big to fail'. So the media spread the idea that the governments simply had to help the banks. In other words, when those banks make huge profits, the profits flow to the pockets of the bankers only. Yet when the banks make huge losses, it are the taxpayers who are forced by their own government to foot the bill.
Add 1), 2), 3), 4), 5), 6) and 7) together and you'll realize the likelihood is there is indeed an international banking system, dominated by Jews, that is far more powerful than is good for the nations. It's not something you can prove, but it is a realistic assumption. This assumption is far more realistic than the belief that such a financial superpower is merely an 'anti-Semitic conspiracy theory' of paranoiacs, neo-Nazis and Muslims.
In fact, the belief it's a fantasy is quite naive, honestly. One is however easily forgiven for sharing that belief, because the probability that the world's finances are dominated by Jewish bankers, is constantly being trashed as an 'anti-Semitic conspiracy theory', by television and newspapers.
Things go pretty far, the last ten years. In the autumn of 2004, US Congress passed a law that forbids Americans to publicly say that 'the Jews are in control of the banks and the media'. Whether it's true or not, apparently doesn't interest America's lawmakers, so long as Americans keep quiet about it.... "America, the land of the free".... the issues at hand are rather huge actually, when you think about it....
....so for changing politics for the better, I think the following is necessary:
1) The nations have to become aware of Torahism;
2) In their relations with the Jews, the nations have to seek what we Dutch call 'de gulden middenweg' ('the golden mean') between their national interests on the one hand (pushing back and containing Torahism), and the interests of their Jewish minorities on the other hand;
3) The Jewish sensitivities, rooted in the Holocaust trauma, are always to be understood and respected;
4) The nations might find it useful to form a Christian Patriotic alliance, and
5) The best traditions of parliamentary democracy can and have to be relied upon:
Discussing ideas instead of personal attacks. Taking your loss as a good sport and waiting for better times, instead of radicalizing or embittering. A subdued businesslike style of communication instead of hateful insults and pejorative cartoons. Disciplining your supporters and respect for law and order instead of manipulating and inciting people to provoke riots and create chaos. Respecting other people's democratic rights. In-depth internet discussions instead of shallow and manipulative TV reports. Demanding tough and swift punishments of neo-Nazi vandals and other perpetrators of political violence. In short, trying to meet Christian standards instead of sinking to the level of the loathesome.
It's easy to write these things down in the quietness of the street where I live, but I know that realizing fundamental changes will be extremely hard and time-consuming. However, extremely hard and time-consuming are not the same as impossible.
I have to say, since I believe the tide will once turn, I worry at the prospect of religious and political violence. I think of the foreigners in Germany, predominantly Turks, who were murdered by the 'NSU' neo-Nazis. I think of UK soldier Lee Rigby, who wrongly believed to have returned to a safe home country. I think of the murder of Greek musician Pavlos Fissas, for which a Golden Dawn supporter was arrested. And I think of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, who aspired to become a leading politician in my own country. Politically, Mr Blair and I don't live in the same galaxy, but I've always felt appreciation for Downing Street's condemnation of this crime. Mr Blair was prime minister back then, in 2002, and the No 10 statement had the line: 'No matter what feelings politicians may arouse, the ballot box is the place to express them' (source: BBC World).
Let's return to the cartoon, finally. Is it anti-Semitic? Well, its style definitely is, and it's therefore an objectionable cartoon. Yet its content most probably reflects the reality of the banking system of today's world, and criticizing that, or criticizing and resisting the whole of Torahism for that matter, is not anti-Semitic. Absolutely not - regardless of the relentless publicitary efforts of the current order to make you believe it is.
I'll bring this article to Mr De Poel's attention.
If he sends a reaction, I'll publish it.
Next time I will go into another aspect of this KRO Brandpunt report.
Richard Schoot, 10th October 2013
I haven't received a reaction from the journalist. (9th November 2013)
Britain, The Netherlands, Europe are in very big trouble, in my view. Our countries
urgently need new political parties, Christian Patriotic parties, and it is very important to know what Torahism is. Please read
my main text at www.ibcpp.org.uk
If you come to agree with my views, please always remember that
the only way out is a peaceful and patient way. Not a single foreigner or Jew
can be held responsible for the country's present situation. Avoid
confrontations that can easily turn overheated. Don't react to provocations. Please
don't view the avoiding as cowardice. It isn't. Be strong, be calm and calm down others
if their anger may cause them to do foolish things.
Long live the Jews, down with Torahism.