Margaret Thatcher, Britain's 'Iron Lady' Prime Minister, Dead at 87

[Draughts]

Thatcher's great relations with Russians:

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/vladimir-kara-murza/margaret-thatcher-understood-russia


"It has often been said that Margaret Thatcher was more popular in Russia than she was in her own country. This was especially true in the late 1980s, when she, together with Ronald Reagan, played an instrumental role in the weakening of Soviet Communism, helping Russians liberate themselves from totalitarian rule. Having forced the Kremlin into an “arms race” it could not win, Thatcher and Reagan accelerated the demise of the Soviet system, making its political and economic bankruptcy evident to the entire world, including, not least, to the Russian people.

Thatcher was enchanted with Mikhail Gorbachev—“the man I can do business with,” as she famously referred to him—much to the displeasure of her longtime friend Vladimir Bukovsky, a legendary Soviet-era dissident who often acted as the British prime minister’s unofficial adviser on Russian matters. Gorbachev wanted to preserve the system by reforming it, Bukovsky explained to her, whereas what the Russian people (and the world) needed was to be free of that system altogether. Countering Thatcher’s argument that Gorbachev was a “pragmatic” leader, Bukovsky affirmed that “a pragmatic Communist is a Communist who has run out of money.”
“We argued [about Gorbachev], it came to shouting and banging of the fists on the table,” Bukovsky recalls. Finally, in 1992, when the Soviet Union was gone, and Thatcher was in retirement, Bukovsky brought her a piece of paper he had copied at the former Communist Party Central Committee Archive in Moscow. It showed Gorbachev’s signature on the 1984 authorization to transfer $1 million from Soviet funds to the striking British miners led by socialist firebrand Arthur Scargill who were trying to bring down Thatcher’s government.
In April 1990, Margaret Thatcher became one of the first Western leaders to welcome Boris Yeltsin to the world stage, inviting him to Downing Street. The British prime minister was gradually but surely shifting her support from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, the rising star in the Russian democratic movement, who would soon forever lower the red flag over the Kremlin.

Thatcher’s interest in Russia—and her support for the cause of freedom in Russia—did not wane after her own retirement and the demise of the Soviet system. “I had heard back in London that the Governor of the [Nizhny Novgorod] province, Boris Nemtsov, was … committed to a radical programme of what some call Thatcherism but what I had always regarded as commonsense,” she wrote in her seminal book Statecraft, recalling her 1993 visit to Nizhny Novgorod. Having become governor in 1991, Nemtsov embarked on an ambitious program of free market reforms that would propel his region from 70th to 7th place in the country in terms of socioeconomic development. Political leaders from around the world—including Newt Gingrich and Alain Juppé —came to Nizhny Novgorod to witness its “economic miracle.” “The Governor and I took a walk down Bolshaya Pokrovskaya street,” Thatcher continued. “All the stores here were privately owned. Every few yards we stopped to talk to the shopkeepers and see what they had to sell. No greater contrast with the drab uniformity of Moscow could be imagined … A combination of excellent local products, talented entrepreneurs and laws favourable to enterprise applied by honest and capable political leadership could generate prosperity and progress.”

Thatcher would continue to support Boris Nemtsov when he became leader of the democratic opposition to Vladimir Putin, sending personal greetings to the conventions of Nemtsov’s SPS party in 2001 and 2003. “The last time I saw her was at her 80th birthday party [in 2005],” Nemtsov recalls. “She approached me and asked me just one question: ‘When will he [Putin] leave?’” “She clearly understood what is Putin and what is Putinism,” concurs Vladimir Bukovsky, “She would say [to me] with great regret, ‘Why is your country so unlucky?’ … She was upset about what was going on [in Russia].”

The world was fortunate to have Margaret Thatcher as one of its leading statesmen at such a pivotal time in history. It is to be hoped that someone, one day, will be able to match her foresight and determination, and her caliber of personality and leadership."

[Lewinsky Stinks, Dr. Brennan Rocks]

Unfortunately IZ, most Irish have chosen to be anti-Semites, anti-Westerners, and allies of the Fakestinians and all other gutter rats they know about. Does this make all that the British have done to them right? No, but the majority of Irish, today, are evil people.

[Draughts]

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/dark-side-tolerance-british-anti-semitism

"The specter of anti-Semitism is stalking Britain. It is guilt-free and unrestrained by historical literacy. According to a recent survey, many British children believe Auschwitz is a brand of beer. Placards equating the swastika to the Star of David have become so common a feature at demonstrations that the linkage has become virtually common wisdom. The Holocaust is not so much something that happened, as something that is happening now—to Palestinians. With all the obstacles to ignorance presented by an informed understanding of the past now being smoothed away, the future is increasingly shaped in Britain by a politically tinged anti-Semitism that seeks to impose itself on national culture wherever possible and by whatever means available. This triumphalist movement’s fanciful but murderous perception of Jews has become one of those bad ideas whose bad consequences are everywhere on display in British society.

As Israel’s military operation in Gaza came to a halt in mid-February, a Jewish defense organization had already recorded some 270 cases of anti-Semitic attacks and harassment in Britain. This figure included 88 violent assaults and 74 cases of damage to Jewish property. The year 2009, therefore, is likely to surpass the total of 598 and 541 anti-Semitic attacks for the entire years of 2006 and 2008 respectively, hitherto the highest on record. These incidents were mostly disorganized, local disturbances in the street or the playground that were anecdotal in character but nonetheless a barometer of evolving public opinion. A man, incidentally a lawyer, shouts “Jew boy” at a fan of the rival team at a football match. In Birmingham, a 12-year-old girl and the only Jewish child in the school is terrorized by a mob of twenty youths shouting, “Kill all Jews” and “Death to Jews.” In the East End of London, windows are smashed and “Kill Jews” daubed on a supermarket, part of a chain started by a Jewish owner.
Such events have played out against a backdrop of demographic change whose net effect has been to remind Britons which side their bread is buttered on. There are roughly 300,000 Jews in Britain. Over the decades, Muslims have been immigrating legally and illegally, often not identified as Muslims in censuses, and therefore not easily quantifiable. But according to best estimates, there are probably 2 million in Britain.

True to their pragmatic nature, the British dealt with Muslim immigration by improvising an informal policy of multiculturalism, which in practice became a high-flown euphemism for separation. Politicians did not bother to think through the consequences of the new social world being created as a fact on the ground. In what was assumed to be their best interest, Muslims were encouraged to stay together but apart, to build mosques, keep to Islamic dietary injunctions, and cultivate their original languages and customs. When these customs included Jew-hatred, the authorities, which had enabled these developments by surrendering their ideal of assimilation, had little choice but to look away. Whether to promote further multiculturalism or to reverse it, and if so how: these are questions that demographic critical mass and past political incoherence forbid being asked today."

[Irish Zionist]

She'll be roasting in hell tonight, imagine the smell she's causing.

 

[angryChineseKahanist]

She'll be roasting in hell tonight, imagine the smell she's causing.

 

hey its benny hill!

[Sveta]

http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/media_cdo/aid/132947/jewish/Margaret-Thatcher-on-the-Rebbes-Leadership.htm

Great, I just saw this on Twitter too.

I also got this:

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/128755/margaret-thatcher-and-yom-hashoah

Margaret Thatcher and Yom Hashoah
According to the late Iron Lady, saving an Austrian Jewish girl was her proudest moment

As tributes begin to pour in from across the world to honor Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister who passed away earlier today, the hope is that the global mourning for Thatcher will not obscure another important observance–Yom Hashoah.

Fortunately for us, history sometimes dovetails nicely and the remembrances of Thatcher–who held many honorifics as a long-serving prime minister and woman pioneer in British politics–can boast Thatcher’s sensitivity toward and fidelity to the important Jewish causes of her era. Leading this, I’d like to point back to Charles Johnson’s thorough exploration of Thatcher’s relationship with the Jews, written in late December of 2011.

Johnson starts with what Thatcher often said was her greatest accomplishment, which was not her work in helping to topple the Soviet Union or being the first British woman to hold the post of prime minister, but rather, was her work as a child to save a Jewish teenager in Austria from the grasp of Hitler’s terror.

    In 1938, Edith Muhlbauer, a 17-year-old Jewish girl, wrote to Muriel Roberts, Edith’s pen pal and the future prime minister’s [Margaret Thatcher] older sister, asking if the Roberts family might help her escape Hitler’s Austria. The Nazis had begun rounding up the first of Vienna’s Jews after the Anschluss, and Edith and her family worried she might be next. Alfred Roberts, Margaret and Muriel’s father, was a small-town grocer; the family had neither the time nor the money to take Edith in. So Margaret, then 12, and Muriel, 17, set about raising funds and persuading the local Rotary club to help.

    Edith stayed with more than a dozen Rotary families, including the Robertses, for the next two years, until she could move to join relatives in South America. Edith bunked in Margaret’s room, and she left an impression. “She was 17, tall, beautiful, evidently from a well-to-do family,” Thatcher later wrote in her memoir. But most important, “she told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-Semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: The Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.” For Thatcher, who believed in meaningful work, this was as much a waste as it was an outrage. Had the Roberts family not intervened, Edith recalled years later, “I would have stayed in Vienna and they would have killed me.” Thatcher never forgot the lesson: “Never hesitate to do whatever you can, for you may save a life,” she told audiences in 1995 after Edith had been located, alive and well, in Brazil.

Throughout Thatcher’s life, this commitment never waned. Divisive as she was, her energetic work to supplant British support for the Arab boycott of Israel, her hectoring of Soviet Union officials about the treatment of Jewish refuseniks, her inclusion of Jewish leaders in her cabinet (to the frustration of some), and her landmark visit to Israel–the first by a sitting British prime minister–will likely keep her as a cherished figure in the collective Jewish memory for a long time to come.

Baroness Thatcher!

[Yerusha]

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!

[maelgwyn]

She was anyones for a few bob!