Slovakia On Why It Votes "No" To EFSF Expansion

"The Greatest Threat To The Euro Is The Bailout Fund Itself"

by Tyler Durden

Clueless

Yesterday we reported that tiny Slovakia's refusal to ratify the expansion of the EFSF 2.0 (even though a 4.0 version will be required this week after the "Dexia-event), may throw the Eurozone into a tailspin as all 17 countries have to agree to kick the can down the road: even one defector kills the entire Swiss Watch plan. Yet an interview conducted between German Spiegel and Slovakia party head Richard Sulik confirms that tiny does not mean irrelevant, and certainly not stupid. In fact, just the opposite: his words are precisely what the heads ot the bigger and far less credible countries should be saying. Alas they are not. Which is precisely why the euro is doomed.

From Spiegel:

Only two countries, Malta and Slovakia, have yet to ratify the expansion of the euro bailout fund. Its fate may be in the hands of a minor Slovak party headed by Richard Sulik. In an interview, the politician explains why he hopes the fund will fail and what he sees as the only way to save the euro.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Sulik, do you want to go down in European Union history as the man who destroyed the euro?

Richard Sulik : No. Where did you get that idea?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Slovakia has yet to approve the expansion of the euro backstop fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), because your Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party is blocking the reform. If a majority of Slovak parliamentarians don't support the EFSF expansion, it could ultimately mean the end of the common currency.

Sulik: The opposite is actually the case. The greatest threat to the euro is the bailout fund itself.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How so?

Sulik: It's an attempt to use fresh debt to solve the debt crisis. That will never work. But, for me, the main issue is protecting the money of Slovak taxpayers. We're supposed to contribute the largest share of the bailout fund measured in terms of economic strength. That's unacceptable.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: That sounds almost nationalist. But, at the same time, you've had what might be considered an ideal European career. When you were 12, you came to Germany and attended school and university here. After the Cold War ended, you returned home to help build up your homeland. Do you care nothing about European solidarity?

Sulik: If we now choose to follow our own path, the solidarity of the others will also crumble. And that would be for the best. Once that happens, we would finally stop with all this debt nonsense. Continuously taking on more debts hurts the euro. Every country has to help itself. That's very easy; one just has to make it happen.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Slovakia's parliament is scheduled to vote on the bailout fund expansion on Oct. 11. How do you predict the vote will turn out?

Sulik: It's still open. The ruling coalition is composed of four parties. My party will vote "no"; the other three coalition parties intend to say "yes." What the opposition says is decisive.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Social Democrats have offered your coalition partners to support the reform in return for new elections. Do you think the coalition is in danger of collapse?

Sulik: I don't see any reason why it would.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What will you do should the EFSF reform pass despite your opposition?

Sulik: For Slovakia, it would be best not to join the bailout fund. Our membership in the euro zone, after all, was not conditional on us becoming members of strange associations like the EFSF, which damage the currency.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If the euro only causes problems, why doesn't Slovakia's government just pull the country out of the euro zone?

Sulik: I don't see the euro as the problem. It's a good project. Everyone involved can benefit from it -- but only if they stick to the ground rules. And that's exactly what we're demanding.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Which ground rules should we be following?

Sulik: We have to observe three points: First, we have to strictly adhere to the existing rules, such as not being liable for others' debts, just as it's spelled out in Article 125 of the Lisbon Treaty. Second, we have to let Greece go bankrupt and have the banks involved in the debt-restructuring. The creditors will have to relinquish 50 to perhaps 70 percent of their claims. So far, the agreements on that have been a joke. Third, we have to be adamant about cost-cutting and manage budgets in a responsible way.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Many experts fear that a conflagration would break out across Europe should Greece go bankrupt and that the crisis will spill over into other countries, including Portugal, Spain and Italy.

Sulik: Politicians can't allow themselves to be pressured by the financial markets. Just because equity prices fall and the euro loses value against the dollar is no reason for giving in to panic.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But do you really believe that politicians can calm the financial markets by stubbornly sticking to their principles?

Sulik: Let's just ignore the markets. It's ridiculous how politicians orient themselves based on whether stock prices rise or fall a few percentage points.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You're not afraid that a Greek insolvency could mark the beginning of the crisis instead of the end?

Sulik: No. There's not going to be a domino effect along the lines of "first Greece, then Portugal and finally Italy." Just because one country goes broke doesn't mean the other ones automatically will.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Nevertheless, banks could run into significant problems should they be forced to write down billions in sovereign bond holdings.

Sulik: So what? They took on too much risk. That one might go broke as a consequence of bad decisions is just part of the market economy. Of course, states have to protect the savings of their populations. But that's much cheaper than bailing banks out. And that, in turn, is much cheaper than bailing entire states out.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Does one of your reasons for not wanting to help Greece have to do with the fact that Slovakia itself is one of the poorest countries in the EU?

Sulík: A few years back, we survived an economic crisis. With great effort and tough reforms, we put it behind us. Today, Slovakia has the lowest average salaries in the euro zone. How am I supposed to explain to people that they are going to have to pay a higher value-added tax (VAT) so that Greeks can get pensions three times as high as the ones in Slovakia?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What can the Greeks learn from the reforms carried out in Slovakia?

Sulik: They have to make cuts in the state apparatus. The Slovaks could also give them a few good ideas about the tax system. We have a flat tax when it comes to income taxes. Our tax system is simple and clear.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: One last time: Do you honestly believe the euro has any future at all?

Sulík: I believe the euro has a future. But only if the rules are followed.

Quotation of the Day…

in POLITICS, REALITY IS NOT OPTIONAL

by DON BOUDREAUX 
… is from pages 148-149 of H.L. Mencken’s "A Mencken Chrestomathy" – a book which, if I were stranded on a desert island and could have only one book with me, I would choose to be my lone piece of literary accompaniment:

After damning politicians up hill and down dale for many years, as rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels, I sometimes suspect that, like everyone else, I often expect too much of them.  Though faith and confidence are surely more or less foreign to my nature, I not infrequently find myself looking to them to be able, diligent, candid and even honest.  Plainly enough, that is too large a order, as anyone must realize who reflects upon the manner in which they reach public office.  They seldom if ever get there by merit alone, at least in democratic states.  Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle.  They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged.  It is a talent like any other, and when it is exercised by a radio crooner, a movie actor or a bishop, it even takes on a certain austere and sorry respectability.  But it is obviously not identical with a capacity for the intricate problems of statecraft.

The killing machine (take II)

Behind Che Guevara’s mask, the cold executioner

By Matthew Campbell

A ROMANTIC hero to legions of fans the world over, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the poster boy of Marxist revolution, has come under assault as a cold-hearted monster four decades after his death in the Bolivian jungle.

A revisionist biography has highlighted Guevara’s involvement in countless executions of “traitors” and counter-revolutionary “worms”, offering a fresh glimpse of the dark side of the celebrated guerrilla fighter who helped Fidel Castro to seize power in Cuba.

“Attacking an almost legendary figure is not an easy task,” said Jacobo Machover, author of The Hidden Face of Che. “He has so many defenders. They have forged the cult of an untouchable hero.”

The Argentine-born Guevara has become ever more fashionable, his prerevolutionary adventures as a medical student dramatised to great acclaim in the film The Motorcycle Diaries and his bearded visage an icon of chic on T-shirts and even bikinis.

Machover, a Cuban exiled in France since 1963, blames the hero worship on French intellectuals who flocked to Havana in the 1960s and fell under the charm of the only “comandante” who could speak their language.

They turned a blind eye to anything that did not fit in with their idealised image of Guevara. A prolific diarist, Guevara nevertheless wrote vividly of his role as an executioner. In one passage he described the execution of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide.

“I fired a .32calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple,” was Guevara’s clinical description of the killing. “He moaned for a few moments, then died.”

This was the first of many “traitors” to be subjected to what Guevara called “acts of justice”.

There was seldom any trial. “I carried out a very summary inquiry and then the peasant Aristidio was executed,” he wrote about another killing. “It is not possible to tolerate even the suspicion of treason.”

Guevara found particularly “interesting” the case of one of his victims, a man who, just before being executed, penned a letter to his mother in which he acknowledged “the justice of the punishment that was being dealt out to him” and asked her “to be faithful to the revolution”.

Such reflections sent a chill down the spine of the author. “The guilty, or those presumed to be so, were expected to recognise the benefits of their death sentence,” he said.

Guevara also carried out mock executions on prisoners. Relieved to discover that he had not been shot, one of the victims, wrote Guevara in his diary, “gave [me] a big, sonorous kiss, as if he had found himself in front of his father”.

The cigar-chomping Guevara went on to become head of the Cuban central bank where he famously signed banknotes with his nickname Che. But his first job after the rebels marched in triumph into Havana in 1959 was running a “purifying commission” and supervising executions at Havana’s La Cabana prison.

“He would climb on top of a wall . . . and lie on his back smoking a Havana cigar while watching the executions,” the author quotes Dariel Alarcon Ramirez, one of Guevara’s former comrades in arms, as saying.

It was intended as a gesture of moral support for the men in the firing squad, says Machover. “For these men who had never seen Che before, it was something really important. It gave them courage.”

In a six-month period, Guevara implemented Castro’s orders with zeal, putting 180 prisoners in front of the firing squad after summary trials, according to Machover. Jose Vilasuso, an exiled lawyer, recalled Guevara instructing his “court” in the prison: “Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary. We must act through conviction. We’re dealing with a bunch of criminals and assassins.”

Machover blames French intellectuals such as Régis Debray, who became an acolyte of Guevara and professor of philosophy at Havana’s university in the 1960s, for the canonisation of this far from saintly figure.

“The legend forged around Che is first and foremost a French creation that became international with time,” says Machover. Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist author who visited Havana with Simone de Beauvoir in 1960, also played a role, describing Guevara as “the most complete man of his epoch”.

Today the cult of Che is thriving. He was recently voted “Argentina’s greatest historical and political figure” and ceremonies will be held all over the Andes and the Caribbean to mark the 40th anniversary of his death on October 9. He was executed in Bolivia where he was fomenting rebellion against the government.

Gustavo Villoldo, a former CIA operative who said he helped to bury Guevara, plans to auction a scrapbook in which he kept a strand of his hair, photographs of the body and a map of the hunt for the guerrilla leader.

“I’m doing it for history’s sake,” he said. Not only that, perhaps: he expects to fetch up to £4m. Viva la revolucion.

The Killing Machine

Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand

By Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer’s viewfinder—and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O’Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan “Che washes whiter.”

Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses, such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a youth in fatigue pants wearing a Che T-shirt, or Flamingo’s Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the fury of local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: “I sell whatever people want to buy.” Revolutionaries join the merchandising frenzy, too—from “The Che Store,” catering to “all your revolutionary needs” on the Internet, to the Italian writer Gianni Minà, who sold Robert Redford the movie rights to Che’s diary of his juvenile trip around South America in 1952 in exchange for access to the shooting of the film The Motorcycle Diaries so that Minà could produce his own documentary. Not to mention Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che on his youthful trip and advises documentarists, and now complains in Madrid, according to El País, over Rioja wine and duck magret, that the American embargo against Cuba makes it hard for him to collect royalties. To take the irony further: the building where Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, a splendid early twentieth-century edifice at the corner of Urquiza and Entre Ríos Streets, was until recently occupied by the private pension fund AFJP Máxima, a child of Argentina’s privatization of social security in the 1990s.

The metamorphosis of Che Guevara into a capitalist brand is not new, but the brand has been enjoying a revival of late—an especially remarkable revival, since it comes years after the political and ideological collapse of all that Guevara represented. This windfall is owed substantially to The Motorcycle Diaries, the film produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles. (It is one of three major motion pictures on Che either made or in the process of being made in the last two years; the other two have been directed by Josh Evans and Steven Soderbergh.) Beautifully shot against landscapes that have clearly eluded the eroding effects of polluting capitalism, the film shows the young man on a voyage of self-discovery as his budding social conscience encounters social and economic exploitation—laying the ground for a New Wave re-invention of the man whom Sartre once called the most complete human being of our era.

But to be more precise, the current Che revival started in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, when five biographies hit the bookstores, and his remains were discovered near an airstrip at Bolivia’s Vallegrande airport, after a retired Bolivian general, in a spectacularly timed revelation, disclosed the exact location. The anniversary refocused attention on Freddy Alborta’s famous photograph of Che’s corpse laid out on a table, foreshortened and dead and romantic, looking like Christ in a Mantegna painting.

Socialism triumphs in EU

Guido Strack – the downfall of a whistleblower

By Sebastian Beck

Asked about his plans for the future, Guido Strack has a terse response: “There’s nothing there.” In his previous life the 46-year-old was an aspiring lawyer, family man, an official in the EU Commission in Luxembourg – a man with excellent career opportunities. Now he sits in his terraced house in Cologne and has time to brood.

Since 2004 he has been unable to work. His marriage has broken down, and he takes pills for depression. “He who wants to be respectable,” Strack says, “will get hammered.” This he has learned down through the years he has been fighting a forlorn battle: Strack vs. the European Union.

This past May, Strack was called before the Budget Control Committee of the European Parliament in  Brussels. He had 15 minutes to tell his story, though the chronology of events alone is a good thirteen pages long, and few experts still understand what it has all been about since that 30th of July back in 2002 when Strack made his fateful decision to notify the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) of abuses in his department.

A few weeks before, the  EU Commission had informed officials of their obligation to warn of financial irregularities and promised them protection against retaliation. And so Strack described how his superiors in the Publications Office in Luxembourg had caused a loss to the European taxpayers that he estimated at least four million euros, from a contract for the summarising and publication of EU legislation.

His life took a Kafkaesque turn.

The contractor delivered “miserable” quality, and delivered late. But instead of demanding contractual penalties, Strack said, his superiors agreed to a revision of the contract, which led to cost overruns of 58 percent.

Strack might have been wiser to keep his mouth shut, for that was the start of his professional decline. OLAF dealt with the case rather listlessly. On 5 February 2004 the investigation was closed. The allegations, the final report concluded, were not sufficient to warrant disciplinary action. Now Strack, the alleged informer, swung into the sights of his chiefs.

A change of workplace didn’t help. The official staff evaluation he received was negative. Strack, the evaluation said, was unable to motivate employees. He received zero promotion points. “I realised then that my career was in the trash can,” he says.

On 1 March 2004 Strack broke down crying in a meeting. That was his last day at work. His former wife told him but not to pursue the matter any further, but Strack mustered his strength for the struggle to be rehabilitated. His life took a Kafkaesque turn. Now he is on early retirement, and the EU Commission has recognised his illness as work-related.

In the hearing in the meeting room of the Audit Committee this May there were only a few deputies. One was Inge Grässle, a European MEP for the CDU. One of her missions is to combat fraud in the EU. “I’ve always believed in going through the official channels,” she says. But this has changed since she first came to Brussels eight years ago. Back then they did not know the word “whistleblower”, the term for employees in companies or public agencies that call attention to mismanagement or worse.

EU has not yet joined the Convention on Human Rights

In the meantime Inge Grässle has learned of a number of similar cases, as people came to her with briefcases bulging with documents. “Each meeting shocked me all over again.” Recently she spoke with “extremely honourable” EU officials about which persons they would report on any suspicion of corruption. The response was always the same: “Never the higher-ups.”

In most cases, whistleblowers suffer the same fate as Strack. The contentious issue is never cleared up, and the huge bureaucracy turns against the troublemaker. “People are being broken,” Grässle says. In the end, their personal relationships and careers are destroyed, and they all become cases for the psychiatrist.” In recent years she has seen the number of whistleblowers in the EU fall off sharply.

In 2006 Guido Strack founded the Society of Whistleblowers Network, which has brought together 74 people. One is a former banker, three are former tax inspectors, and one is a geriatric nurse from Berlin. For years there in Berlin Brigitte Heinisch pointed to staff shortages and lack of hygiene in a home.

Nothing happened, and so she laid charges against her employer. In 2005 she was let go without notice. For years she complained unsuccessfully through the courts before her case was heard in July 2011 by the European Court of Human Rights. Her dismissal was found to be contrary to the fundamental right to freedom of opinion, and she was awarded compensation of €15,000.

Strack can only dream of that. As a EU official, the road to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is barred to him. The EU, in contrast to its Member States, has not yet joined the Convention on Human Rights. Should Strack not give up at last, start a new life, look for another job? “Who would still want someone like me?” he asks. No, he’ll keep on fighting. He can’t help it. What he wants to know, in the end, is whether what he did almost ten years ago was right or wrong. Nine court proceedings are still pending.

A Third Reich Past

Why I Cannot Answer Questions about My Grandfather

Baldur von Schirach (right), the head of the Hitler Youth, is seen with Adolf Hitler in 1936.

 Bestselling German crime author Ferdinand von Schirach is the grandson of Baldur von Schirach, who was head of the Hitler Youth. In an essay for SPIEGEL, he writes for the first time about his relationship to his grandfather and why he cannot explain his grandfather's deeds.

by Ferdinand von Schirach

My grandfather was released from prison when I was a small boy. I was two years old at the time. My family lived in the Schwabing district of Munich in a lovely 18th-century house covered with ivy. The hallways were a bit slanted, a few of the flagstones were broken and the front door would jam. A dark-green door led outside to a cobblestone street. Behind the house was a maze of rose bushes and a fountain with a naked statue of Cupid, the god of love. He still had the bow, but the arrow had gone missing.

I don't remember my grandfather's release. Everything I know comes from things I've been told, from photographs and from films. My father and his brothers picked him up outside the prison entrance in a black car. A wooden press stand had been erected out front just for this single day. My father wore a tightly fitted dark suit. He was very young and very unsure of himself. My grandfather was thin.

Then there are the images from the garden in Munich. The prominent German journalist Henri Nannen sits next to my grandfather on an old iron garden chair. He conducted the first major interviews with him. My family is sitting in the background beneath a chestnut tree. My grandfather speaks slowly and with a peculiar Weimar accent. When one listens to the interviews, one is surprised to hear that these people spoke in dialect. Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect, spoke the dialect of his native Baden region. At the time, everybody said my grandfather spoke in a way that was "print-ready." But that's nonsense. He and the journalists had agreed on the questions in advance, and he had practiced his answers. My grandfather did not say anything that I can relate to.

When I was four, we moved in with my mother's family outside Stuttgart. We lived in a large estate that my great-grandfather had designed before World War I. It had tall old trees, a house with columns and stairs leading up to the entrance, ponds and a nursery. My father used to take me fishing and hunting. It was a world unto itself. I was usually alone. I still didn't know who this grandfather was. He had a collection of walking sticks, some of which had built-in schnapps flasks or little clocks. One contained a fencing foil.

Surrounded by Something I Couldn't Explain

Every day, we would take a walk to a kiosk outside the grounds. He had to walk slowly because he was almost blind in one eye; his retina had become detached in prison. People occasionally addressed him in the street, but I didn't like that. We played the board game Nine Men's Morris every day. He would always win using the same trick. At a certain point, I thought about it long enough to figure out how he did it. After that, he didn't play with me anymore. I was five or six at the time.

Talking with children wasn't something one did very much in our family. But that also had a good side: We were left alone; we lived in our own world. Still, I felt surrounded by something I couldn't explain. I didn't grow up like the other kids in the area; in fact, I hardly had any contact with them. Things continued to be foreign to me, and I never felt completely at home. I couldn't say that to anyone; perhaps children can never say things like that.

At home, no one said the word "prison"; it was just called "Spandau." But, at a certain point, I heard from a visitor that my grandfather had been locked up for a long time. I found that thrilling because I'd just read a book about the pirate Sir Francis Drake. I admired Drake very much, and he had been imprisoned for a long time. I asked my mother what my grandfather had done. I don't remember what she said. It was a very long explanation with a lot of words I didn't know. But I can still recall her voice; it sounded different than it normally did. It must be something bad, I thought, perhaps a curse like the ones in fairy tales.

All of a sudden, he was gone. He hadn't said goodbye to me. Much later, I learned he'd wanted to be alone. He moved to a small guesthouse in the Mosel region. I suppose it was all too much for him after 20 years in a cell. Shortly before he died, I saw him there one more time. That day, my attention was focused on the river, the vineyards and a donkey that lived there and constantly bared its teeth. My grandfather was an old man with an eye patch, a man I didn't know. I don't recall whether he even spoke with me that day. He had the phrase "I was one of you" put on his gravestone. It's an appalling sentence.

Like Creatures from a Tolkien Book

When I was 10, I began attending a Jesuit boarding school. Of course, I was much too young to do so, but somehow it worked out because all of us were too young. We received postal savings books with our allowance: four deutsche marks a month. On the first Monday of the month, the priests would give us our books, and we would go down to the post office to withdraw our money. A long line would form every time as the clerk still entered the figures by hand. On the third or fourth visit, he waved me forward. With glistening eyes, he said he'd known my grandfather and that, from now on, I could always skip directly to the front of the line. I ran away.

PC going wild

Von Trier facing French charges for Hitler rant, says he won’t ever again speak to media

By Associated Press

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Danish film director Lars von Trier says he’s facing charges of violating a French law against justification of war crimes over statements he made about Adolf Hitler and Jews during the film festival in Cannes.

Von Trier addressed the investigation in a brief statement Wednesday that he said would be his last, ever.

“Due to these serious accusations I have realized that I do not possess the skills to express myself unequivocally and I have therefore decided from this day forth to refrain from all public statements and interviews,” von Trier said.

The director said he was questioned by police in North Zealand, Denmark, in connection with charges made by the prosecution of Grasse in France.

Von Trier was ejected from the Cannes Film Festival in May after expressing sympathy for Hitler at a news conference for his film “Melancholia.”

In a rambling speech, the filmmaker spoke about his German heritage, saying his ancestry made him “sympathize with (Hitler) a little bit.” He added that he supports Jews. The director said afterward he had been joking and later issued an apology.

He later retracted the apology, telling GQ magazine that he wasn’t sorry, but wished he had made clear that he was joking.

Peter Aalbaek Jensen, co-founder with von Trier of the Zentropa film company, said he had talked to the director Wednesday, and confirmed he did not wish to speak to the media ever again.

“He has decided today to muzzle himself. He takes this extremely seriously,” Aalbaek Jensen said.

“He is a colorful and entertaining person and he has never had the intention or wish to offend anyone,” Jensen said. “He has now spent five months explaining himself. He is a self-declared socialist and humanist and speaks up for the little people. It would be absurd if he started to praise them (Nazis).”

Von Trier’s comments ignited shock from the moment they spilled out of his mouth, causing Kirsten Dunst, an actress in his film “Melancholia,” to lean over and whisper to von Trier, “Oh my God, this is terrible.”

“What can I say? I understand Hitler, but I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely. But I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end,” von Trier said at the time. “He’s not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit. But come on, I’m not for the Second World War, and I’m not against Jews. ...

“I am very much for Jews. No, not too much, because Israel is a pain in the ass.”

North Zealand police spokesman Henrik Suhr didn’t return calls seeking a comment and the police officer on duty declined to comment on the case.

Making up news

Never a dull moment