Tuesday, October 19, 2010

A Courtroom Farce

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Last night we posted translated articles about the courtroom antics of the injured parties in the Geert Wilders trial. Our Flemish correspondent VH has kindly transcribed and translated a video showing a portion of the farcical proceedings.

The translator adds this introduction:

Monday, October 19, 2010 was a messy session day in which the aggrieved parties were permitted to explain the damage they suffered due to alleged expressions by Geert Wilders.

In the video below, Mohammed Enait — the lawyer who refuses to rise for a judge, often calls the Dutch “aboriginals”, and refuses to shake hands with a woman — takes the floor following another lawyer for the aggrieved parties, Nico Steijnen, who keeps walking though the courtroom.

Many thanks to VH for the translation and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling. If the video isn’t working, the “Blogger bug” is responsible — click the “read more” link, and then watch it:


A full transcript is below the jump.

00:00 Enait: Him, he who insults me rough, me loads me sham[e], he …
00:06 Judge: Mister Enait… for all clarity,
00:07 in the courtroom you speak to the judge.
00:08 And he is sitting here.
00:09 Moszkowicz: And I have a question, president:
00:10 is Monseigneur representative of himself now?
00:12 Judge: He is representative, as I understand,
00:14 of the ‘Movement for the Restoration of Respect’,
00:16 that is what I asked him.
00:18 Enait: That’s a movement also for instance the Foundation Amin,
00:22 that you also see in the records,
00:23 that is the all Muslims in the Netherlands,
00:25 in that respect I am for security reasons,
00:29 because I was dealing with certain .
00:31 ultra-trailer-parkers who eh… threaten me…
00:32 Judge: But Mister Enait, you must just answer
00:34 the question with a yes or no, and according to me
00:36 I think you just have to answer the question…
00:38 Enait: No because Mister Moszkowicz… is doing so turbulent about,
00:40 I thought I answer one with extenso…
00:44 Judge: Thus, Mister Moszkowicz, the court assumes Monseigneur
00:47 is the representative on behalf of
00:48 the ‘Movement for the Restoration of Respect’.
00:50 Moszkowicz: Thank you.
00:52 Judge: Go ahead, you have…
00:53 Enait: He who insults me rude, overloads me with sham[e]…
00:57 he who openly slanders me, him, I offer the brother-hand,
01:02 I did not think so. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
01:06 History repeats itself,
01:08 the first time as tragedy, the second time as comedy.
01:12 This adage was initially the [???] who greeted,
01:16 who the banal party I represent, had gesticulated for themselves,
01:20 when they approached the problem Wilders, Nomen est Omen.
01:25 Wilders, or “little Hitler” as he by the respectable
01:29 former [GreenLeft] MP Mohammed Rabbae was called…
01:32 Judge: I am going to interrupt you now already, because I have…
01:37 well, as has been announced by your colleague,
01:39 you should put forward a purely factual argumentation
01:41 of the damage suffered by your clients,
01:45 and I get the impression, based on what I’ve just heard,
01:49 it’s not going down that road.
01:51 Enait: Well, I will be going there, but as my colleague just also
01:55 needed building blocks, I also need building blocks to get there…
01:58 Judge: I prefer that you start with the factual argumentation.
02:00 Moszkowicz: May I still make one comment?
02:02 Judge: That you may.
02:03 Moszkowicz: Thank you. Mr. Wilders believes
02:04 that everything can be said.
02:06 I do not think so, thus the moment here that a representative
02:12 of the Dutch Bar, compares my client with Hitler,
02:15 you then overstep the mark. I say it quite explicitly hereby:
02:19 Mister Wilders thinks he must be able to say that,
02:21 but I think that cannot be,
02:24 and I hope Monseigneur for the rest of the time will behave just a little.
02:26 Judge: Well, Mister Moszkowicz, I have not interrupted Mr. Enait,
02:29 not without reason,
02:30 Moszkowicz: No, I understood that, president.
02:32 Enait: But you interrupted me without me being uh …
02:35 finished my sentence, because I quoted a member of parliament…
02:38 Judge: But that Mr. Enait, is also a characteristic of interrupting …
02:40 Moszkowicz: I keep receiving documents here…
02:41 all the time, from Monseigneur…
02:43 what are you doing?… But no, I don’t want them…
02:49 Judge: Mister Steijnen, Mister Steijnen,…
02:52 Moszkowicz: He is sort of dancing it is all the time … What is this?
02:54 Judge: You all the time walk across the room, through the picture,
02:57 it is quite annoying, do you want…
02:58 Moszkowicz: What is this?
02:59 …to limit yourself to walk to the court once
03:01 and then hand over your documents?
03:03 Moszkowicz: Where have I ended up in?…
03:05 [to Nico Steijnen] No I do not want them…
03:10 Judge: Ladies and gentlemen, I would really appreciate it
03:12 if everyone were to keep his mouth shut when I speak,
03:14 I now have the floor, so everyone keep his mouth shut.
03:16 Mister Steijnen, you no longer walk through the room;
03:18 Mister Enait, you refrain from indecent language;
03:21 whatever the freedom of speech, in the room, in the courtroom
03:24 we deal with each other in a decent way,
03:26 and that also applies to you.
03:28 

19 comments:

In Hoc Signo Vinces† said...

In hoc signo vinces

The judge missed the chance to get them for contempt of court, having said that the entire prosecution is in contempt.

Juniper in the Desert said...

Its utterly outrageous that he can call Wilders the little Hitler while accusing Wilders of insulting him!!!

toro said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
EscapeVelocity said...

Muslims dont treat kuffar in a decent manner judge. Islam/Shariah is a bitch.

Baron Bodissey said...

toro --

Gates of Vienna's rules about comments require that they be civil, temperate, on-topic, and show decorum. Your comment violated the last of these rules. We keep a PG-13 blog, and exclude foul language, explicit descriptions, and epithets. This is why I deleted your comment.

Use of asterisks is an appropriate alternative.

----------------------

toro said...

This is [extremely] hilarious. The lawyers representing he "aggrieved parties" are simply [unintelligent]. Maybe I break some forum rule by posting such statement, but both of them are. They believe they are right, but they are not capable to speak Dutch in proper sentences!? This is absurd. "Little Hitler"!? These guys are not lawyers, these are clowns. They cannot be serious.

toro said...

Ok. I get it :)

This is [extremely] hilarious. The lawyers representing he "aggrieved parties" are simply [unintelligent]. They believe they are right, but they are not capable to speak Dutch in proper sentences!? This is absurd. "Little Hitler"!? These guys are not lawyers, these are clowns. They cannot be serious. :)

goethechosemercy said...

Having failed to use order to defeat Wilders, his opponents are now using chaos.
"for all clarity" indeed.
There is no clarity when the fight comes first.

sulber nick said...

My impression of lawyers (and I used to work with them closely) was that generally they were an articulate and intelligent bunch. Many were unprincipled and most were bullsh*tters, but they were generally bright... How on earth did Enait pass the Dutch bar exam?

I am reminded of an incident my wife related recently - she was speaking to a consultant in oncology at the hospital where she works about one of the surgeons on his team, a Muslim; the consultant's assessment of the man - I wouldn't trust him to operate on my ingrowing toenail. How do such incompetents get into such high esteem careers?

Mad Dog Gazza said...

Baron, please stop referring to your problem as a "Blogger bug". Its nothing of the sort.

Your HTML embed tag isn't closed properly. I'm not sure how you're copying that from YouTube because it doesn't do that when I copy YouTube embed code for my blog.

Are you copying the "embed" code (lower right) under the video on YouTube itself? This is the right one to use rather than the "Blogger" option under "Share" (the latter creates poorer code).

You'd also want to get rid of the CENTER tags around your videos and use a DIV with a CSS style for centering. Contact me if you need the code. (This isn't important but Blogger's post editor has a problem with its handling of the CENTER tag.)

Baron Bodissey said...

Gary --

Easy, careful how you admonish me. For video embeds I click "embed" on the YouTube video, and paste the resulting code in my HTML. I never use "compose" in Blogger; I always use straight HTML.

I spent too many years building web pages with "ten fingers and a text editor" to do otherwise. I generally dislike WYSIWYG interfaces.

Besides, this has to be a Blogger bug, otherwise the embed would either work in both instances -- both before and after clicking "read more" -- or it would never work at all. Any way you cut it, that's a Blogger error.

However, the <center> tag is an interesting idea; I haven't tried that. I'll use the Ulfkotte post as a test case, and remove the tag. Then we'll see what happens.

Baron Bodissey said...

Gary --

Test completed. Unfortunately, removing the <center> tag didn't help.

So...

1. I am using exactly the HTML specified by YouTube for an embed;

2. It fails to work on the main page;

3. It works after clicking "read more";

THEREFORE:

4. It's a Blogger bug. QED.

There's no getting away from it -- there isn't any problem with the HTML involved, so a Blogger "feature" is the only possible explanation.

Besides, there are Google groups devoted to discussing it. One guy claims to have written a java script workaround that you can put in your template, but I'm not going to tinker with the template right now.

Blogger just needs to man up, acknowledge the problem, and fix it. But I'm not holding my breath.

Mad Dog Gazza said...

I noticed the Blogger editor having a problem with CENTER when switching between 'edit HTML' and 'Compose'. After a few switches, there's white space around it that shouldn't be there. This is just a stylistic annoyance more than anything else.

I seldom use CENTER. A DIV with a style of "text-align: center;" will always suffice.

All my videos are placed in these.

However, if you use the code from YouTube's embed, then the EMBED tag should be closed correctly. If it wasn't the editor would throw up an error on the next save (either auto or manual). I get those with other videos that use the shortcut method to close an embed. But its simple enough to correct that.

But this just leaves your problem. I used FireBug with FireFox to find the problem. The closing embed is missing on the home page (the shortcut method appears to be used instead), hence the failures. Since it doesn't happen on my blog, it must be something else. That's why I thought you might not be using YouTube's embed.

I'd suggest trying to replace the CENTER with a DIV to see if that makes any difference. If not, the problem lies elsewhere.

Mad Dog Gazza said...

I doubt that there's anything in your template that would affect it. Like I said, there's no problem with mine.

But not all templates are the same. I'll have another look tomorrow with FireBug and see if I can spot anything else.

Baron Bodissey said...

Gary --

I removed the <center> tag and didn't replace it. There's nothing left but the embed tag, exactly as specified by YouTube. Nothing removed, nothing added.

Therefore it's a Blogger problem. There's no getting away from it.

We may be able to find a workaround, but the problem is still caused by Blogger.

Mad Dog Gazza said...

I have more news to report.

I checked your site with Google Chrome (to try its debugger but also because I don't have flashblock installed).

Well, it works fine with Chrome.

I normally read your site with FireFox, and I have the problem there. So I wonder if you use FireFox.

Baron Bodissey said...

I use IE8. As far as I know, all the people who have complained about the problem use IE.

Chrome, being a Google product like Blogger, is apparently programmed to go around the issue.

laine said...

"How on earth did Enait pass the Dutch bar exam?...consultant's assessment of (Muslim surgeon)... - I wouldn't trust him to operate on my ingrowing toenail. How do such incompetents get into such high esteem careers?"

Likely some form of affirmative action greased their way. That was obvious with the Muslim so- called psychiatrist who committed jihad at Fort Hood. It was clear that his performance was sub-par all along yet he kept being advanced in the army. The most obvious example sits in the White House today. Even Obama's staunchest supporters can't make the case that a white man with the same lack of qualifications, the gaffes and unsavory associations would have even gotten out of the starting gate.

goethechosemercy said...

Two words: multicultural clientage.
If you promote an incompetent, he will be more dependent and in a less advantageous position to question you.

Unknown said...

"How on earth did Enait pass the Dutch bar exam?"

That's what's puzzling everyone here..the man is practically unintelligible. He is known for his longwinding, rambling sentences. He famously and hilariously wrestles with idiom, mixes his metaphors with great applomb, wrongly changes register, and then definitely looses the thread of his own discourse
And this man was pronounced the winner of an essay contest by De Volkskrant, one of the big papers in the Netherlands..
We Dutch are very keen on encouraging the members of 'victim' groups..