I'm half crazy all for the love of you.
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This article in the Berliner Zeitung takes a feelgood event and — maybe in striving to be fair & balanced or, even more maybe, in an effort to avoid appearing to ignore the devil in our midst, lest they confirm the treachery the anti-Islam crowd crow about whatever the media do or don't do — highlights a controversy that turns it into a referendum on the radical associations of religious Muslims at home. If indeed it were only as fair & balanced in background detail as it is through its otherwise laudable microscope.
On its face — assuming one read the face from start to finish — it appears pretty fair & balanced. I would even give it high marks for the editor's inclusion of pertinent details one doesn't find in other articles, yet I cannot help but stroke it with a thick red marker for something I find missing, albeit on the obscured ground of the light kind of propaganda-by-default that results from the critical mass of a nation assuming one's own occupy higher ground. The extent to which one's own are not above reproach is considered, if taken into consideration at all, hardly relevant to the topic at hand.
The topic at hand is a band of imams & rabbis taking to the streets on tandem bicycles, pedaling together against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, so to spoke. But all is not well, for one-or-another of the participants "has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood", which is not okay if you're an imam not under the aegis of one-or-another of the host nation's spy agencies, if you'll excuse the digression.
It is the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution who says so in a report. For those unfamiliar with this office, it is not a grassroots-minded, independent watchdog, but rather a opaquely-funded, government spy agency. But who better to gather intelligence than an intelligence agency with absolutely no history of- or proclivity for bending the rules on behalf of their conflicts of interest, if you'll excuse the sarcasm.
The article is fair & balanced insofar as it gives the do-gooders the final word, those who remark that the imam in question is not who the spooks say, and others who are, anyway, more concerned about the downside of shutting people out of the conversation, which would drive them into the limbs of the rads, if you'll excuse the trans-lingual pun.
The mosque man's alleged connections aside, one should order one's own house. If the concerns are real and legit, then they're just doing their job in reporting on them. I have to wonder still what the official constitutional protectorate has to say about their host state's support of Saudi Arabia, not just because of the latter's alleged support for the same Muslim Brotherhood, but as it relates to the former couple's brutally collegial project that has created the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
Just as the strife between the Union side of the current government coalition threatens (at least as one reads in the media) to destroy European unity with its collateral damage, does no one find it strange that the same government should supply weapons to regimes that violate the same human rights as the party named in that particular intelligence report, said to model themselves after the historical regime, unreformed, while that current regime are with the support of their Western allies killing thousands and driving many more away from home, exacerbating the refugee crisis, which crisis is what this internecine political strife is all about? This connection is not even alluded to by any of the parties mentioned in the article or its editors, regardless of which of the ostensible two sides they come down on: for the iman ridin' the bike vs. against the imam ridin' the bike.
While we have learned from the media about the horrors in Yemen, it has not been as comprehensive and obsessively set to REPEAT as has been their reporting on the War between the CDU and CSU. Lemme ask you this: If the imam in question had procured for this so-called brotherhood just such weapons as Berlin has the Kings of Oil, would NATO missiles have destroyed his entire neighbourhood by now, or would they find a better solution?
Update: es geht weiter so. .. . ..mit Gänseblümchen:
Yes, a Gänseblümchen is a daisy. You can't make up a coincidence.
Oily Bell, Daisy Chain: Links to Fahrradikalen - Berlin, 2018
