Friday, March 20, 2009

WTO Protesters treated worse than Nazis treated protesters


WTO
In February 1943, the Gestapo arrested almost two thousand Jewish men in Berlin who had German gentile wives. Knowing the men would be taken to camps if they weren't promptly released, their wives congregated on Rosenstrasse, a street in front of the Gestapo-guarded building where the men were held. The women then did a remarkable thing. They began protesting the arrest and imprisonment of their husbands. They sang, held hands, and they chanted slogans such as, "Give us back our husbands." The Gestapo and Berlin police menaced the women, threatening to arrest them, but they refused to get off the street or stop demonstrating until the men were released. After a week of protests, the Gestapo finally relented and released the men, many of whom survived the war. Although the Rosenstrasse protest took place in the capital of Nazi Germany during wartime, not a single protester was harmed in any way or arrested by the Gestapo or the police. [1]

The significance of the Gestapo's hands-off treatment of German women protesting their Jewish husbands' imprisonment is in its sharp contrast with the behavior of police during the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference in Seattle, Washington that began on November 30, 1999. [2] Martial law was declared over a 50 square-block area of downtown Seattle on the conference's first day after a small number of people broke a few windows, burglarized a couple of stores and overturned some newspaper boxes. No one knows who started the vandalism, but people around the world saw how police used it to justify creating confrontations, to promote mayhem and violate international human rights standards. The police did this by attacking thousands of unarmed and peaceful demonstrators and bystanders with chemical agents, jack boots, truncheons, "flash-bang" grenades, wooden pellets and hard plastic bullets. [3]

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