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German
Police raid 300 homes of Music Nazis
BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) —
German police raided the homes of more than 300 people Wednesday whom they suspect of posting neo-Nazi music files on the Internet for others to download, the Federal Crime Office said in a statement.
David
Irving comments:
LET ME JUST GET one small thing straight here (as Monica L might have said to President C): I can imagine nothing worse than a Germany governed by people to whose ears this kind of noise is
music. But these raids on private homes in Germany do seem to raise questions at several levels; for example, if it was really the violent nature of the lyrics that upset the gentlemen in green, are they also raiding the homes of millions of downloaders who listen to gangsta- rap: from what I
have read, those sings use pretty violent language too. More ominous is the question of how the German police built up their “to-raid” lists: it is unlikely that they carried out a monster street-survey of every German town and city asking, “Do you listen to/enjoy/download neo-Nazi music? Download it? If so please fill-in your name and street address
HERE: …”
MORE likely is that the German police have developed software that enables them to trace the identities of people conducting such online transactions, and are using these data to compile lists of the street addresses of subscribers to the domestic, school, or office dial-up, or
DSL, services which are used to download the music, and are using these lists to conduct their raids. Today music — tomorrow, what else?
People subscribing online to
Skeptic magazine, or Der
Spiegel? Who knows how far the horizons of the German police force will reach, once they have climbed out of the
Klosettendeckel [toilet seats] which seem to have been the previous limiter to their field of view? Will they prosecute people who download the books by me, David
Irving? The German police have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing, from their experiences of the last hundred years.
They still click their heels and shout Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst — it is just that the armbands are of a different color now.
Police said the nationwide raids
followed investigations into 342 people who had
posted songs by skinhead bands on the Internet. The
songs contained lyrics inciting racial hatred, the
crime agency said.
Police said they would carry out 333 raids by the end of Wednesday at the homes of people who posted songs on a music sharing Web site. “Inciting racial hatred is more than just a petty crime,” said Federal Crime Office President Joerg
Ziercke. “Skinhead music groups create an enemy image and help propagate extreme right ideas.”
Inciting racial hatred,
displaying Nazi emblems like the swastika and
performing the stiff-armed Hitler salute used
under Adolf Hitler are crimes punishable
by imprisonment in Germany, the country which
carried out the Holocaust. The Federal Crime
Office started clamping down on Internet trading
of music inciting neo-Nazis to hate and attack
Jews and foreigners in 2001.
The songs convey Nazi ideology and contain lyrics such as these from the group Tonstörung (Sound Interruption): “Sharpen your long knives on the pavements; delve them into Jewish bodies.”
More than 100 people have been killed in racist violence in Germany since unification in 1990. Most of the attacks are random and involve skinheads picking on foreigners in the street. Property has also been attacked. Swastikas have been daubed on
Jewish gravestones, bricks thrown at Turkish kebab shops and firebombs hurled at asylum hostels. Most synagogues have 24- hour police guards.
German police raided homes of more than 300 people on
Wednesday whom they suspect them of sharing neo-Nazi music files on the Internet.
Copyright 2004
Reuters. All rights reserved.