Successive messages flying into your inbox, did you read this? The minister of health, Andreas Loverdos, was present at a “workshop for the promotion of public health” in Athens yesterday, December 15, 2011. The minister comes from the social-democrat PASOK party, and he has ambitions of becoming its next leader and then possibly enough, a future prime minister. Direct quotes:
Loverdos described “unregistered prostitution as a huge problem for the city, and its relationship with the spreading of AIDS”. He emphasised that this is a “problem affecting the Greek family, as the spreading runs “from the undocumented female migrant to the Greek male customer, to the Greek family” … and he concluded by demanding: “female prostitutes carrying the AIDS virus must be deported from the country”.
(source: Eleftherotypia daily)
In only a handful of words, Loverdos managed what would have been inconceivable only a few years ago. He has managed to encapsulate a Nazi-like discourse treating women, migrants and patients all as human trash that need be expelled from public view and from “our” lives as a whole. Along with him, the subservient mayor of IMF-run Athens, Kaminis (elected on a premise of civil society, remember) signed a memorandum of agreement with the minister.
If one were to visit the minister’s personal webpage, they would find the top page feature being an article on “the new identity of Olympiakos”, a popular football team in Greece. At the time when public health is being dismantled bit by bit across the country, a discourse treating segments of the population as unwanted garbage is perfectly combined with an ode to the spectacle — it should only be expected to be so. Until the moment, of course, when people reveal garbage such as Loverdos for what they truly are, and wipe them out of existence. That moment cannot come soon enough.
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As even a sociology professor could tell you, things are not going well economically for Greece. That country is experiencing a full-blown economic depression in which 100,000 businesses have closed and a third of the population is living in poverty. The situation gets worse every day and in many of the poorer areas people are literally going hungry.
Every euro – every cent – counts as the government scrambles to avoid catastrophe. What can we possibly do, the desperate cry rings out. But nil desperandum, a solution presents itself: Spend nearly €20 million on building a spanking new mosque in Athens for the city’s quarter of a million Muslims. Now the interesting thing is that the vast majority of those are illegal immigrants. I kid you not. Even the Gruaniad admits that “as a gateway to the EU of illegal immigrants, Greece’s Muslim population is growing”. It could have added ‘by leaps and bounds’.
So the question arises, why would a bankrupt country whose citizens are facing destitution even consider spendingg so much for a mosque for mainly illegal immigrants? Well, this report gives us a clue. “The move comes amid thinly veiled threats of violence by thousands of Muslim residents of the city who have been pressuring the government to meet their demands for a mosque or face an uprising. Many of the estimated 200,000 Muslims living in Athens are illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan.”
And as we know, threats of violence from these people cannot be taken lightly. So that’s it. Illegal Muslims flood a small bankrupt European country, and because they threaten violence the country feels it ( and not some bloated Saudi plutocrat) might have to pay for their new mosque. No doubt the execrable European Court of ‘Human Rights’ is fouling up the pitch somehow as well.
Why not trot across the border to Turkey, where a ‘devout’ Islamic government rules the roost? In fact the vast majority of those illegals actually passed through Islamic Turkey to get to mosque-less Athens. You see the Turks don’t **** about dealing with illegals. And anyway, said illegals have a fair idea that the threat of violence in an EU country should get them what they’re looking for.
Yep, it’s on the level of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party all right. But one good thing, which goes back to my ‘worse is better’ theory: ‘Extreme right-wing groups’ (yeah, right) are agitating strongly against the initiative. And they’re getting a lot of support from ordinary Athenians.
We do indeed live in interesting times.
This is Evangelos Venizelos, treasury secretary of Greece:
http://www.welt.de/multimedia/archive/01532/mcz_veni2_BM_Bayer_1532761p.jpg
That smiling, obese mug should answer all questions about Greek financial management.
I always suspected Mr Venizelos of “eating alone” as the Italians are fond of saying about persons with an overdevelloped sense of financial entitlement.
Apparantly though, he left some scraps for an opressed minority. More of that, I say!
With any luck, he’ll soon be light enough for even a rusty Greek lamppost to bear his weight.
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