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EU lawmaker protests over anti-abortion 'Nazi' barb

Updated: 16/Nov/2005 18:05

The banner comparing abortion to the Shoah at an exhibition at the European Parliament in Strasbourg

Photo: Marcel Conradt

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An EU lawmaker claimed Wednesday that she was jostled and labeled a "Nazi" at the Strasbourg EU parliament for challenging ultra-conservatives who likened abortion to the Holocaust in an exhibition.

Belgian Socialist MEP Veronique De Keyser said a scuffle erupted when she asked organizers to take down a banner comparing abortion to the Shoah at an exhibition presented by the Independent Democrat Polish MEP Maciej Marian Giertych on Tuesday.

"The comparison of abortion with the Shoah is scandalous," she told EJP, adding that the organizers "reacted with violence" when she sought to have the poster removed.

The comparison of abortion with the Shoah is scandalous

Veroniaue De Keyser, Socialist MEP

Two photos at the exhibition showed children behind barbed wire, one of them in a Nazi death camp, she said. "A determined intervention... managed to have the entire exhibition withdrawn by the security services of the Parliament" she added.

"I was shocked by the manner these people confiscated the Shoah for fundamentalist religious ends," De Keyser said. "I then tried to flip over the controversial picture of the concentration camp and I was hit and insulted," she added.

The Belgian MEP said that, if the exhibit was in fact allowed by the Parliament it was supposed to focus on children protection and not abortion. "The link between abortion and death camps is unacceptable," she said.

According to De Keyser, the Parliament analysed the exhibit and decided to dismantle it because it altered its initial purpose.

A parliamentary new era

"I feel we have entered a new era in the EU" De Keyser said. "I have never seen this kind if violence since I took office." De Keyser was elected in September 2001 at the EU Parliament.

We presented the same exhibition at the Polish Parliament and we did not have any problem

Maciej Marian Giertych, Independent MEP

Some members from the conservative Popular Party supported her opposition to the picture she said, "not every conservative or catholic recognize himself or herself in such shameless manipulation."

"In September 2004, another Polish MEP, Urszula Krupa from the Independent Democracy group, also made an outrageous link between the killing of school children in Beslan by Chechen terrorist with abortion," De Keyser said.

"Things are changing at the Parliament, because of the "integrist" influence of some of the Eastern European countries."

Censorship

For Maciej Marian Giertych, the Polish MEP who instigated the exhibition, the Parliament showed a lack of tolerance and "censored a legal and permitted exhibition."

"We presented the same exhibition at the Polish Parliament and we did not have any problem there and for the one held in Strasbourg we had a permit to do it," he told EJP.

"The exhibition was about Life of children in Europe and the protection of children from injury, from a pre-natal stage through out childhood."

"Our opponents did not agree with the linkage between abortion and the concentration camps, but we disagree."

When asked why he specifically picked children from death camps and not children who suffer from starvation or from forced labour, he replied that the Shoah had a stronger meaning for Europeans.

For Giertych, the exhibition was not prohibited because of the Nazi camp picture but simply because of the opposants complain. "This picture was in our initial proposal, and we had an 'ok' for it," he said.

"Through this picture we tried to show the different type of children suffering and compare it with abortion which is a pre-natal suffering of a child," Giertych stressed.

De Keyser explained that this type of unacceptable comparison was so common in Polish because it has still not got rid of its anti-Semitic plea.