View Single Post
Old March 4th, 2007 #42
William Robert
Banned
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 1,911
Blog Entries: 3
Default 2007 German horror tale

2007 German horror tale
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed...4730-5162r.htm

Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.

On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from "school phobia."

Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools. The home-schooling community in Germany is tiny. As Hitler knew, Germans tend to obey orders unquestioningly. Only some 500 children are being home-schooled in a country of 80 million. Home-schooling families are prosecuted without mercy.

Last March, a judge in Hamburg sentenced a home-schooling father of six to a week in prison and a fine of $2,000. Last September, a Paderborn mother of 12 was locked up in jail for two weeks. The family belongs to a group of seven ethnic German families who immigrated to Paderborn from the former Soviet Union. The Soviets persecuted them because they were Baptists. An initiative of the Paderborn Baptists to establish their own private school was rejected by the German authorities. A court ruled that the Baptists showed "a stubborn contempt both for the state's educational duty as well as the right of their children to develop their personalities by attending school."

All German political parties, including the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel, are opposed to home-schooling. They say that "the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with." The home-schoolers receive no support from the official (state funded) churches, either. These maintain that home-schoolers "isolate themselves from the world" and that "freedom of religion does not justify opposition against the obligation to attend school." Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and church leaders still do not understand true freedom: that raising children is a prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a benevolent parent and often an enemy.

Hermann Stucher, a pedagogue who called upon Christians to withdraw their children from the state schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of "neo-Marxist activists," has been threatened with prosecution for "Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung" (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities). The fierceness of the authorities' reaction is telling. The dispute is about the hearts and minds of the children. In Germany, schools have become vehicles of indoctrination, where children are brought up to unquestioningly accept the authority of the state in all areas of life. It is no coincidence that people who have escaped Soviet indoctrination discern what the government is doing in the schools and are sufficiently concerned to want to protect their children from it.

What is worrying is that most "free-born" Germans accept this assault on their freedom as normal and eye parents who opt out of the state system with suspicion.

The situation is hardly better at the European level. Last September, the European Court of Human Rights supported Hitler's 1938 schooling bill. The Strasburg-based court, whose verdicts apply in the entire European Union, ruled that the right to education "by its very nature calls for regulation by the State." It upheld the finding of German courts: "Schools represent society, and it is in the children's interest to become part of that society. The parents' right to educate does not go so far as to deprive their children of that experience."

While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their dictatorial past — upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do — there is reason for Americans to worry, too. The United Nations is also restricting the rights of parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children. In Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N. Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes.

Last year, the American Home School Legal Defense Association warned that the U.N. Convention could make home-schooling illegal in America, even though the Senate has never ratified it. Some lawyers and liberal politicians in the states claim that U.N. conventions are "customary international law" and should be considered part of American jurisprudence.

At present, young Melissa Busekros' ordeal is a German horror story. Could it soon be an American one?

Not so Free in Germany
http://www.winnipegsun.com/News/Colu...3/3690101.html

I will forgo the pleasure of drinking German lager and eating sauerkraut for the foreseeable future and I ask freedom lovers to consider joining me.

I am joining an international boycott of German goods because of that country's drift away from fundamental freedoms.

We in North America do not hear much much about Germany, as our media focuses on exotic hotspots, but I have noticed a discernible trend suggesting people should pay attention to the loss of freedoms in so-called advanced Western democracies, like Germany.

The most ominous example is the Busekros family. An online petition is calling for a boycott of German products due to their treatment.

The horrendous crime of this family, and others across Germany, is they chose to homeschool their children, a right taken for granted here. Homeschooling is illegal there, and authorities seem out for blood.

It took 15 German officers to take 15-year-old Melissa Busekros from her home, as the German government began cracking down on these nasty enemies of the state. By court order, school officials ordered the breakup of a family with five children, after the state asserted its belief that Christian homeschooling is a "parallel culture" that Germany can do without.

One child was even placed in a psychiatric ward and her parents denied the location.

Homeschooling parents in Germany have been imprisoned for teaching their children in a Christian lifestyle. The Home School Legal Defense Association estimates there are 40 other ongoing cases in Germany against homeschoolers.

Homeschoolers do not get much attention because they are a minority, but it is this minority that needs the most protection from a majority willing to deny their rights.

The essence of a free state is the existence of pluralistic civil society where different choices are permitted. The German authorities apparently do not respect the convictions of religious communities which believe family ought to be the first teacher, not the omnipotent state. My parents considered homeschooling me out of concerns over the expunging of Christianity from public schools. I'm glad we did not live in Germany.

What is frightening is that the law forbidding homeschooling was adopted during the Nazi era on the grounds that the state needed to take control over every aspect of life.

One German homeschool advocate said, "We are not far away from an intolerant dictatorship. Parental rights are more and more abolished. If you do not educate the way the state wants, the so-called Judenamt (youth welfare office) is quick to check out if they can take away the custody of your children."

If this was the only troubling sign from Germany, I would stop, but it is not. This attack on homeschooling comes on the heels of the conviction of Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zundel, who was sentenced to five years in prison for "denying the Holocaust," which is considered seditious in Germany.

Call me a fool, but ideas and thoughts should be challenged in the forum of open debate, not through criminal sanction. The Holocaust is one of the most documented events in history, so there is a reason Zundel is marginalized. Freedom is nothing if it does not protect the most vulnerable and reviled.

As for me, I will be throwing out my Kinder Surprise eggs and asking the German Embassy to help stop the harassment of German families.

Last edited by William Robert; March 4th, 2007 at 09:57 PM.