Friday, October 20, 2023

Three German News Stories

 1.  Shocking political push by the Scholz coalition (SPD-Greens-FDP).....they suggested late yesterday that they were now open to the idea of denying citizenship to anyone who was anti-Semitic. Even if you just 'act' in that fashion....in their vision of the problem....you've crossed the line.

Odds of this passing?  At the rate of discussion, I would imagine the law will be crafted within a week, and be ready to pass by the end of November.  But it begs the question....if you are on some 'warning' and can't get citizenship in Germany....shouldn't the temp-visa also fall into play?  

This will end up being a shocker for probably a quarter-million people who were on the 'track' to stay and eventually become Germans.  If you approached them and discussed how it'd be back in the old country....they will grumble a good bit.

2.  This dead Tunisian guy who conducted the shooting attack in Brussels last week?  He'd applied for asylum in four EU countries.  Yeah, there's some history with this guy....but he's dead.

3.  Just an observation over the Gaza hospital propaganda story.  When this first broke....I looked at Google imagery and just simple noted that this wasn't a big hospital.  My humble guess was a 100-bed hospital, with a parking lot on the rear.  Beyond that....I didn't really follow that much of the traditional news in Germany (ARD, ZDF....the public TV folks).  They had a 'story' to tell, and it was mostly Hamas-fed.

So the next day....looking at the picture of the scene, it's obvious that it (a small rocket situation) had hit the parking lot....not the hospital itself.  Crater?  Maybe big enough for a bath-tub or two.  A number of burnt cars.  The whole story laid out from the evening by the TV crowd?  Obviously falling apart.

My issue?  These are all the people who whine about misinformation and disinformation....the big news news crowd.  Yet they participated in the flow of such information, without much analysis or waiting for better facts.  

In some ways....it's the best they can do, because they've marginalized the news business to a level of crap.  

Yeah, I'm skeptical to the 9th degree but you might understand how I got to this level of being skeptical. 

No comments: