Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar whose brilliant essay on Europe and Israel I critiqued here, has a piece in The Forward replying to a particularly silly take by J.J. Goldberg on the same piece. Inter alia, he writes:
Archive for the 'Europe' Category
This is a crosspost by Benjamin Weinthal from The Jewish Chronicle.
There is nothing more dreary than contemporary art that sets out merely to be provocative when it is in fact conventional and reactionary. A case in point is the Danish artistic group Surrend’s anti-Israel poster showing maps of the Middle East in which the state of Israel does not exist, with the term “Final Solution” at the top. Not only does this mirror the jingoistic foreign policy of the Holocaust-denying regime in Iran, but it also resonates with many Germans.
Continue reading ‘How Political Artists Do Away With Nations’
Last month, I moderated a panel at AJC’s 2010 Annual Meeting on the subject of Islam in Europe, featuring Paul Berman and Christopher Caldwell, two writers whose work is well-known to Z Word’s audience, and German diplomat Heidrun Tempel. Here’s a video of our discussion (it starts a few seconds after you hit the ‘play’ button, so hang in there.)
Next week, I’ll be at AJC’s annual meeting in Washington, DC. Among my myriad tasks there will be the production of two webcasts, which I encourage readers to register for. On Thursday April 29 at 2.15 PM ET, Paul Berman and Christopher Caldwell will feature on a panel which I will be moderating, examining the future of Islam in Europe. Then, on Friday April 30 at 10.30 AM, Bret Stephens and Roger Cohen go head-to-head in a debate on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. You’ll be able to submit questions online via the webcast player - and I hope you will.
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Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for foreign affairs, paid a visit to Gaza and wrote an op-ed about her experience. She didn’t mention Hamas, which rules the strip with an iron fist, once. That omission wasn’t picked up by the New York Times sub-editors either. Let’s be thankful that the Elder did.
“Ostensibly sold to voters as a weapon against Islamism, an all-too-real political phenomenon in Europe, this new law in fact makes no distinction between religion and ideology, instead choosing to alienate the primary victims of Islamic fundamentalism and the best allies of Western liberals - moderate Muslims.” So says Michael Weiss in an excellent piece for The Daily News on the Swiss referendum which resulted in a ban on the construction of minarets in new mosques.
It bears saying again and again: far right parties are not our allies in the struggle against Islamism, but our deadly enemies. For these boneheads and their leaders, all Muslims - whether from Albania or Yemen, whether a teenage girl facing an arranged marriage or a cleric preaching hatred - are all the same, all just dirty foreigners.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy: “We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity. That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity. The burqa is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”
And there’s this too:
Continue reading ‘Sarkozy: “The Burqa is a Sign of Subservience”’
In the wake of the US decision to disengage from the UN conference in Geneva which insists on billing itself as a pow-wow against “racism,” other countries are beginning to follow suit.
Matthias Küntzel, the German scholar who has written some of the most important academic work on Islamist antisemitism, has authored an op-ed which takes the Berlin Center for Research on Anti-Semitism to task for focusing upon “Islamophobia” - a term whose validity he disputes.
I’ve already looked at a theory about what might be delaying the beatification of Pope Pius XII and I have now come across an even more advanced example of it here. The theory, briefly but not unfairly put, holds that the only thing that is holding the former Pope back from beatification and later becoming a saint is the antipathy of the Jews towards him and their over influence the Vatican.
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
Antisemitism is tolerated in Hungary - and not only in its crudest form, as when a uniformed rabble marches in the streets or when Neo-Nazis provoke Jews in front of their synagogues. It is also part and parcel of Hungarian right wing politics. Usually antisemitism is coded, but the code is very simple. Here is just one recent example.
Continue reading ‘“The cosmopolitan-parasite class…”: Antisemitism in Hungary’
La Nación is an Argentine newspaper comparable in many respects to the Daily Telegraph in the UK. It’s serious, well produced and right wing in a respectable old money kind of way. In today’s edition it carries a brief story from an anonymous special correspondent in Rome which reports on a speech by Pope Benedict XVI exalting the memory of his predecessor Pope Pius XII.
A new survey of global attitudes on subjects ranging from minorities to gender to terrorism makes grim reading. In Europe, malign sentiments towards Jews and Muslims are on the rise. In the Middle East and in the wider Muslim world - from Egypt to Turkey to Indonesia - opinions about Jews are overwhelmingly negative.
I wrote here about Evelyn Hecht-Galinski going to law to try to prevent Henryk Broder calling her what she quite obviously is, an antisemitic anti-Zionist. Well, now she has had her day in court and it has ruled that she cannot restrain Broder from calling her antisemitic as long as he gives reasons to justify his opinion.
José Manuel Sánchez Gordillo is a member of the regional parliament of Andalucía for the United Left/Greens/Andalucía’s Call party and mayor of the town of Marinaleda. In this story in today’s El País, the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent Juan Miguel Muñoz describes how, while returning home from Israel after accompanying a number of Palestinian children back to the West Bank after a holiday in Spain, he was “humiliated” by the security procedures at Ben Gurion Airport and subjected to “every kind of mistreatment, including being obliged to take off his shoes, having his belongings searched in an abusive manner and being questioned at length about his activities.”
Continue reading ‘José Manuel Sánchez Gordillo and Pseudo-Martyrdom’
