Gretta in 1,000 words

Here's an excellent summary of Gretta Duisenberg's exploits.

(I'm still having routing problems which makes blogging difficult at the moment.)

Gretta's shady past

The furore over Gretta Duisenberg's idiotic remarks has died down a little but it's not yet slipped from people's radar. Nor should it. I received an email from someone who'd read my blog on Gretta's Nazi comparison, and then asked me in the ensuing email exchange whether Gretta is a classic pathological anti-Semite, or just very very stupid. That's a hard question to answer. But it did jog memories of an article I'd read in a Dutch newspaper some indeterminate time ago about Gretta's past. Through the marvels of Google I found Stop The Lie, a Dutch pro-Israel site which has been keeping track of such things. Even better, I found the link to the article I was looking for. It appeared in the daily newspaper De Telegraaf on June 6th, 2002 and carried the headline "Gretta Duisenberg had ties with left-wing activists."

That is a understating matters a little bit. I guess I'll just translate the relevant part of the article:

... Gretta Duisenberg had sympathized in the past with people in shady circles of left-wing activists. For instance Gretta Bedier de Nieuwenhuizen, as she was called at the time, had close ties with the Transnational Institute, based in Amsterdam. Member of the staff there was the Pakistani Eqbal Ahmad, who was suspected of terrorist activities. The TNI is a left-wing think-thank headed by Basker Vashee, an activist of the Rhodesian Marxist Liberation Front (ZAPU). Vashee counted Gretta amongst his best friends, as he stated more than once. His ZAPU fought a bloody war of independence in Africa against the regime of Ian Smith.

Before she married Duisenberg in August of 1987, Gretta was also a confidante of Philip Agee. This ex-CIA agent became public enemy #1 after he'd betrayed the identity of American secret agents in the Soviet Bloc. Some of them were them liquidated.

He lived in the TNI building on the Paulus Potterstraat in Amsterdam and was ultimately deported from this country. Before it came to that he asked Gretta to be a witness at his wedding with an American ballerina.

As a result of her colorful friends Mrs. Bedier de Praire came to the attention of the Secret Service when she had a relationship with Hans van Mierlo, who at the time was minister of Defense. Because he was responsible for all ongoing investigations of the military intelligence agencies in this country, the Americans were worried that information might leak to Agee and his buddies.

This goes slightly beyond being stupid. Somebody who's very very stupid might fall for Arafat's propaganda, or even the Soviets' propaganda. There were plenty of well-meaning idiots who were in the same boat, and who somehow always ended up supporting the side of unspeakable evil.

But Gretta takes it a step further. She's beyond the scope of the merely gullible. This woman has a history of consorting with the evil and depraved. As someone who frolicked with a traitor who was responsible for the murder of American agents in the Soviet Bloc, she has forsaken all moral right to speak out on behalf any oppressed. When people were being brutally oppressed by the evil of communism just a few hundred miles from where she lived, she was actively sympathized with the henchmen of tyrannical regimes. This is somebody who has no moral compass, no sense of right and wrong, not the slightest sliver of intellectual integrity. This woman is evil, pure and simple.

The Nazi comparison

The most prominent Dutch idiotarian at the moment is without doubt Gretta Duisenberg who last Sunday wasted no time in blaming the Palestianian terrorist attack on Israel. Not content with that particular expression of her moral bankruptcy, she's been very chummy with terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, protectively wrapping her arm around him:

Appearing with Arafat, the ECB president's wife said she thought Israel should "give back the occupied territories" and said the PA chairman "hates killing."

"I think there should be peace and the military situation of the Israeli government should stop because their actions are terrible. You can't have peace when you have all these killings around. There should be dialogue and negotiations," she said.

Of course, the last time there were negotiations and dialog, Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat just about everything he wanted, but Arafat declined. Instead, he breathed new life into the terrorist campaign against Israel and help nourish the psychotic death cult that has now poisened the minds of many Palestinians. There is no reason to assume that any negotiations or dialog would have a different result now. Arafat, the Palestinians and the Arab world are still clinging to their fantasy of destroying the state of Israel. I know I've been overusing the term, but Gretta Duisenberg truly is Arafat's useful idiot.

But Gretta's on a roll. Her idiocy just compounds itself day by day. The latest revolting comments she made are causing another stir. She said today that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian terrories is worse than the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (with the exception of the Holocaust). History clearly isn't her strongest point. The Dutch never tried to exterminate the Germans, they did not carry out terrorist attacks on Germans, they did set up the Dutch Liberation Organization whose aim it was the destroy the German nation. Israel was forced to fight wars in order ensure its very survival, because the Arab nations surrounding have been trying since 1948 to destroy Israel itself. The Nazi comparison is all the more despicable because it being directed at the Nazis' victims, and Gretta knows that full well. It's a calculated act of callousness. And her parenthetical qualification that excepts the Holocaust from this comparison is just a superficial attempt to pre-empt criticism. You cannot compare anybody to the Nazis-ex-Holocaust. Anti-semitism and the deliberate extermination of the Jews is the very defining feature of Nazism. Gretta's attempt to have it both ways is disingenous and despicable.

But of course, she was not done yet. She also said:

The cruelty of the Israelis knows no bounds. It's really no exception that they blow up the houses of Palestinians. The Nazis never went this far during the occupation of the Netherlands.

Yes, in their "boundless cruelty" the Israelis blow up the houses with the people inside them, right? Oh wait, they give them a chance to leave and not be physically harmed. When's the last time a Palestinian terrorist showed this much consideration for an Israeli life?

Onward through Gretta's phantom world of saintly Palestinians and villanous Je.., eh Israelis. Showing yet more historical illiteracy, she happily skips on to Jenin which was the base for many Palestinian terrorist attacks in which many dozens of Isrealis were murdered. She says:

This wall that Israel is building, is many times worse than the Berlin wall. It is terrible. It is much higher and goes over land that was taken from the Palestinians

Yes, it was taken from them in one of those wars in which the Palestinians and their friends tried to expunge Israel from the face of the earth, remember? And Ehud Barak was willing to give it back to the Palestinians (who never really owned it in the first place, as it was part of Jordan before the Six Day War). But the Palestinians prefer to strap on explosives and murder and maim as many Israelis as they can, reveling in their death cult. For good measure she also mentions that the situation is worse than it ever was for blacks in South Africa.

Historical illiteracy, a stupendous dose of gullibility, a never-ending supply of idiocy, utter callousness towards the Jews of Israel and complete moral bankruptcy; these are the ingredients that make up our highly sophisticated European intellectuals. Truly revolting.

Of course, since the protection of free speech is less strict in most European countries than in the US with its First Amendment, we have laws on the books which can impose various penalties on people who say things which are hateful. In response to Gretta's blather, several Jewish organizations are now saying they're going to sue Gretta Duisenberg under these laws. The head of the "Federative Jewish Netherlands" organization has said that he wants the courts to prohibit Duisenberg from "expressing hurtful or offensive sentiments about Jews or the Jewish people." Much as I sympathize with them, I strongly prefer the American absolutist approach to free speech. Shutting people up by means of court orders is dangerous and wrong. Therefore I support even the right of the utterly reprehensible Gretta Duisenberg to say these offensive and hurtful things.

UPDATE: LGF is on it too. Lots of good comments there.

Blame the victim!

Gretta Duisenberg, the wife of European Central Bank president Wim Duisenberg is a fine example of the sophisticated European elite. Dripping with anti-semitism, she made the news in late 2002 when she made a despicable joke about the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. She's currently visiting her beloved Palestinian terrorist scum. After a visit to East Jerusalem, she blamed Ariel Sharon for the violence, claiming he's "provoking the Palestinians" and that his government is guilty of committing terror attacks.

Apparently she's a bit confused about what a terror attack is, but her Palestinian scum buddies can be counted on her refresh her memory. Shortly after she made those comments, the Palestinian vermin committed another terrorist atrocity: the deliberate and targeted murder of civilians in the most gruesome way they can pull off. That's terrorism. Undaunted, Duisenberg wasted no time in sinking even further into depths of moral depravity to join her Palestinian chums in the deepest cesspit of revolting moral disingenuity. The bodies of the murdered Israelis weren't even cold yet, the wounded were fighting for their lives in hospitals and she was already blaming Sharon. Not the subhuman Palestinian scumbags who murdered and maimed, but in true Euroweenie fashion she firmly blamed the Jewish victims. According to Gretta, Sharon has to "stop all that aggression."

Utterly, utterly despicable. At times like these I can fully identify with Steven Den Beste's emotional response, except that it extends to the likes of Gretta Duisenberg who are actively supporting this evil.

Wilders, a Dutch member of parliament for the Liberal Party (VVD) who is in Israel at the moment called Gretta Duisenberg's remarks "one-sided" and "disgusting." Speaking from Tel Aviv he said that "someone who a couple of hours after 26 people were brutally murdered by Palestinian terrorists points to Israel as the aggressor, is being one-sided and disgusting." I am glad to hear that there still are some European politicians willing to take a stance against this.

European elite opinion

I knew I wanted to blog something else last night, but fortunately fellow Netherblogger Michiel Visser has taken care of it. It's yet another astonishing example of those highly cultured European elites' blatant anti-Semitism.

Andrew Sullivan is on it too.