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Anonymous ID: ceddfd June 8, 2024, 12:06 p.m. No.20989564   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>9575 >>9642 >>9661 >>9893 >>0102 >>0107 >>0115

German politician flees to Russia

Former AfD member claims authorities in Hamburg were planning to seize her children

 

Hamburg MP Olga Petersen has sought refuge in Russia, telling Bild that she feared having her children taken by the German state over her perceived support for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

Petersen left Hamburg with her children last month, prompting widespread speculation about her whereabouts. Several weeks before her disappearance, her party – the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) – expelled her from its Hamburg faction for traveling to Russia as an election observer in March and declaring the vote “open, democratic, and free.”

 

Alexander Brod, a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, told TASS last week that Petersen had settled in Russia with three of her four kids.

 

Petersen broke her silence on Friday. “I have indeed taken my children out of the country,” she told Bild. “I want to know that my children are safe and that they remain in my care. Without my children, I would no longer see any meaning in life.”

 

According to Brod’s account, social workers had begun proceedings to take the three children – all of whom are in elementary school – into state care. Petersen offered no further details on the alleged efforts to take her children, and Bild questioned these claims, stating that the kids had been reported to youth welfare workers over behavioral problems.

 

Expressions of support for Russia’s military operation in Ukraine are illegal in Hamburg, with a court in the city sentencing a man to three years in prison last May for sharing “pro-Russian ideas” and using the ‘Z’ symbol – painted on some Russian military vehicles operating in the conflict – on his Telegram channel.

 

While there were no criminal proceedings being taken against Petersen, any kind of prison term would have resulted in her losing custody of her children. German courts can also strip a parent of their custody rights if they are deemed abusive, violent, or negligent.

 

Although Petersen has been expelled from the AfD’s faction in Hamburg, she remains a member of the region’s parliament and will appear on ballot papers as an independent in Hamburg’s district election on Sunday.

 

“I will remain a member of the Hamburg Parliament and will fulfill my obligations to the best of my knowledge and belief,” she told Bild, adding that she will ensure her children’s safety before deciding whether she is “fit for political action again.”

 

https://www.rt.com/russia/599020-afd-petersen-flees-russia/

Anonymous ID: ceddfd June 8, 2024, 12:37 p.m. No.20989667   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>9684 >>9725

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The Contradictions of 'Queers for Palestine'

 

The Israel-Hamas war has made political allies out of some unusual bedfellows. Yet the strangest pairing on display thus far is probably "Queers for Palestine," most notably because those protesters would risk summary execution should they take their demonstration to the Gaza Strip.

 

The movement isn't new. But following the terrorist attacks launched against Israel by Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza, it has seen a sort of reemergence at various protests. "Queer rights! Trans rights!" protesters are heard chanting in a video taken in New York City. "We say no to genocide!"

 

That protesters appear to be blaming Israel for those attacks—which have included, among other things, Hamas militants murdering people, filming those acts, and putting the videos on social media for the victims' families and friends to see—is perverse. But to marry that cause to LGBT rights is simply unhinged from reality.

 

Indeed, gay and transgender people—both in Gaza and the West Bank—face an extraordinary level of persecution, persecution that may result in a yearslong prison sentence or even death.

 

In 2016, Hamas militants executed one of their own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, for allegedly having sex with another man. Ishtiwi's allegiance to the group was clear: Just two years prior, he had overseen 1,000 soldiers and an assortment of attack tunnels. But not even his loyalty could save him after they lodged accusations he had engaged in homosexual activity. Prior to executing him with three bullets to the chest, Hamas reportedly tortured him by whipping him, hanging him from a ceiling for hours, and cranking loud music into his cell in order to deprive him of sleep.

 

Last year, in the West Bank, 25-year-old Ahmed Abu Marhia's severed head was found on the side of the road after he was murdered for being gay. The killer videoed the execution and shared it on social media.

 

When it comes to "Queers for Palestine," what's richly ironic is that many LGBT Palestinians seek asylum in Israel—the same country these stateside protesters are rallying against.

 

At the heart of this contradiction is the tendency within social justice movements to pick a clear protagonist and antagonist, the oppressed and the oppressor, and to proceed from there in one-size-fits-all fashion. Some progressives decided long ago that Palestine is the former and Israel is the latter, which is the seed from which everything must grow. Palestine, then, stands not only for anti-colonialism but also LGBT rights and reproductive rights, despite that those rights, in any meaningful sense of the word, do not actually exist there.

 

Meanwhile, this orthodoxy requires that Israel symbolize a weed and everything that comes with it. The country, then, must typify genocide, regardless of the fact that it has been the victim of relentless terror attacks this month. And it has to represent a hostility toward minorities, including gay and transgender people, notwithstanding that it is one of the most tolerant societies for those very people.

 

To be sure, Israel's government isn't perfect. There are aspects of the Israel-Palestine debate, and the territorial disputes, that are more complex than many would probably like to admit. This aspect? Not so much, because "Queers for Palestine" is about as convincing as "minks for fur coats."

 

https://reason.com/2023/10/27/the-contradictions-of-queers-for-palestine/