Gretta's shady past

The furore over Gretta Duisenberg's idiotic remarks has died down a little but it's not yet slipped from people's radar. Nor should it. I received an email from someone who'd read my blog on Gretta's Nazi comparison, and then asked me in the ensuing email exchange whether Gretta is a classic pathological anti-Semite, or just very very stupid. That's a hard question to answer. But it did jog memories of an article I'd read in a Dutch newspaper some indeterminate time ago about Gretta's past. Through the marvels of Google I found Stop The Lie, a Dutch pro-Israel site which has been keeping track of such things. Even better, I found the link to the article I was looking for. It appeared in the daily newspaper De Telegraaf on June 6th, 2002 and carried the headline "Gretta Duisenberg had ties with left-wing activists."

That is a understating matters a little bit. I guess I'll just translate the relevant part of the article:

... Gretta Duisenberg had sympathized in the past with people in shady circles of left-wing activists. For instance Gretta Bedier de Nieuwenhuizen, as she was called at the time, had close ties with the Transnational Institute, based in Amsterdam. Member of the staff there was the Pakistani Eqbal Ahmad, who was suspected of terrorist activities. The TNI is a left-wing think-thank headed by Basker Vashee, an activist of the Rhodesian Marxist Liberation Front (ZAPU). Vashee counted Gretta amongst his best friends, as he stated more than once. His ZAPU fought a bloody war of independence in Africa against the regime of Ian Smith.

Before she married Duisenberg in August of 1987, Gretta was also a confidante of Philip Agee. This ex-CIA agent became public enemy #1 after he'd betrayed the identity of American secret agents in the Soviet Bloc. Some of them were them liquidated.

He lived in the TNI building on the Paulus Potterstraat in Amsterdam and was ultimately deported from this country. Before it came to that he asked Gretta to be a witness at his wedding with an American ballerina.

As a result of her colorful friends Mrs. Bedier de Praire came to the attention of the Secret Service when she had a relationship with Hans van Mierlo, who at the time was minister of Defense. Because he was responsible for all ongoing investigations of the military intelligence agencies in this country, the Americans were worried that information might leak to Agee and his buddies.

This goes slightly beyond being stupid. Somebody who's very very stupid might fall for Arafat's propaganda, or even the Soviets' propaganda. There were plenty of well-meaning idiots who were in the same boat, and who somehow always ended up supporting the side of unspeakable evil.

But Gretta takes it a step further. She's beyond the scope of the merely gullible. This woman has a history of consorting with the evil and depraved. As someone who frolicked with a traitor who was responsible for the murder of American agents in the Soviet Bloc, she has forsaken all moral right to speak out on behalf any oppressed. When people were being brutally oppressed by the evil of communism just a few hundred miles from where she lived, she was actively sympathized with the henchmen of tyrannical regimes. This is somebody who has no moral compass, no sense of right and wrong, not the slightest sliver of intellectual integrity. This woman is evil, pure and simple.