Saturday, January 29, 2005   Top German Judge Says Far-Right Party Ban Possible By Dave Graham BERLIN (Reuters) - A controversial far-right party in Germany could be banned despite the failure of an earlier attempt to outlaw it, the head of Germany's highest court was quoted as saying by a newspaper on Saturday. David Irving comments: SO "democracy" begins to show its real face in Germany.    The moment a political party really begins to speak for the people, the powers-that-be reach for their ultimate weapon, the unelected, undemocratic, Supreme Court, and appeal to it to ban the party.    So much for the new freedoms of which Washington is now speaking.    Bild am Sonntag is part of the Axel Springer newspaper group, in which every journalist is required to swear a six point undertaking, including to print only the truth not to criticise Jews, whatever their actions not to publish any information detrimental to the reputation of Israel We kid you not.      NOTE too the familiar tactics -- which also led to my banning from German soil in 1993: the extreme Left, financed by you-know-whom and, earlier, German trades unions and the Soviet authorities in East Germany, create violent riots against lawful speakers and parties; they assault police, damage public property, and deface builkdings.    The law-abiding citizens are then penalized for these crimes of the Left-wing agitators. And guess whom the Supreme Court then sides with? The remarks of Hans-Juergen Papier, president of the constitutional court, coincided with violent clashes between police and demonstrators protesting at a rally by the National Democratic Party (NPD) in the northern city of Kiel. Papier said that although the court threw out a government bid to ban the NPD in 2003, future attempts could still succeed. "The suspension of proceedings to ban (the party) then, does not represent a pre-ordained decision on future efforts to ban (it)," Papier wrote in a guest contribution for Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper, due to appear on Sunday. "These facts need to be remembered," he added. In Kiel, demonstrators threw bottles and stones at police protecting some 450 supporters of the NPD as they attended a public address by the party. Discontent over the NPD event drew around 7,000 protesters, according to police estimates. "There (were) massive and hard clashes," a police spokesman said, adding that tires and rubbish containers had been set on fire and that police had sprayed protesters with a water cannon. Police said over 40 largely left-wing demonstrators were detained. Many street signs and shop windows were vandalized. The center-left government has likened the NPD to the embryonic Nazi party and tried to have it outlawed on the grounds that it stirred racial hatred. Despite Papier's comments, Bavaria's Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein, who in 2000 kickstarted the push for the NPD ban, advised against a fresh initiative for the moment. "I want to remind people that the NPD ban proceedings failed due to a minority (vote) among the judges -- the majority wanted to continue proceedings," he told Reuters by telephone. The opposition conservative lawmaker said a ban would require a three-quarters majority in the constitutional court. Prior to its ruling, the court had suspended proceedings after it emerged the government's case against the NPD included testimony and speeches from paid informants. The NPD, which seeks to promote policies that favor ethnic Germans and is strongly anti-Jewish, produced the far-right's best showing in six years in September when it won nearly 10 percent of the vote in state elections in Saxony. It provoked outrage last week by walking out of a minute's silence for Nazi victims and referring to Allied strikes [Website: saturation bombing attacks which killed 100,000 civilians and refugees in two hours] on the German city of Dresden in 1945 as a "bombing holocaust." © 2005 The Washington Post Company   Rumsfeld cancels Germany trip, DPA reports

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