“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.
It’s called racism.
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.
Continue reading ‘Durban II: More Withdrawals on the Cards’
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.
Continue reading ‘Islamophobia and Antisemitism’
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.
Continue reading ‘Let’s Be Fair To Benedict XVI’
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.
Continue reading ‘The Jews and 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.
Continue reading ‘Pew Survey Shows Bigotry on the Rise’
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.
Continue reading ‘Hecht-Galinski and Broder Again’
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’
An oft heard complaint from practitioners of the new, cool, environmentally responsible, GMO free antisemitism is that participants in the great Zionist conspiracy use their influence in the media to stifle criticism of Israel. This leads them to make much use of such phrases as “speaking out”, “refusing to be silenced” and suchlike.
Continue reading ‘Stifling Criticism - The Case of Evelyn Hecht-Galinski’
The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung recently quipped that Belgium was the “most successful ‘failed’ state.” Hard to believe, but many citizens of one of the European Union’s most prosperous countries don’t believe that Belgium - qua Belgium - has a future. And their angst has important implications for current thinking about resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Continue reading ‘Why Belgium Matters’
Jo Goldenberg’s restaurant in Paris on the day it was attacked in 1982
Now that Siné has been fired from his post at Charlie Hebdo (see Elif Kayi’s posts here and here), he’s become a cause celebre for those parts of the left which insist that antisemitism is a scurrilous tactic designed to divert attention from the Palestinians by suppressing free speech.
Continue reading ‘Siné: Free Speech Martyr or Bigot?’
Where is the last place you’d expect to find an article showing Israel in a positive light, an article comparing Israel favourably with a developed, western European country that is often held up as some kind of model for others to follow? Well, Indymedia would have to be pretty high on your list. It’s normally willing to make excuses for every kind of dictator and religious fanatic imaginable, as long, of course, as they stick it to Israel and the United States.
Continue reading ‘Ireland and Israel’
Elif Kayi, Z Word’s European press reviewer, reports on the continuing row in France over the sacking of Siné, a prominent satirist, after he published an article widely-judged to be antisemitic.
The furore around the Siné affair has split France’s opinion-formers into two groups. On one side, those who depict the case as being about freedom of speech. On the other, those who insist that the controversy - triggered by the veteran satirist being fired from the magazine Charlie Hebdo after he wrote that Jean Sarkozy, son of the French President, would “go far in this life” by converting to Judaism and marrying his wealthy Jewish girlfriend - raises deeply disturbing questions about antisemitism in France today.
Continue reading ‘Siné: “The Only Leftist of the Far Right in France”’
