Nick Meo, Telegraph – Jews leave Swedish city after sharp rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes (H/T Normblog)
It’s all perfectly natural. I was unhappy about Tibet, so I attacked Chinese on the streets of Los Angeles.
Christian Tau, Z-Word Blog – The Anti-Jewish Riots in Oslo
Are we picking up a pattern here?
Jonathan Chait, The New Republic – Noonan And Republican Hubris
Like the good Reagan speechwriter she was, Peggy Noonan is in love with the sound of her own voice, and rarely makes sense.
Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post – Scientology Church hires reporters to investigate newspaper
As for accepting payment from the church, they said: “We were as objective in doing this job as we were in pursuing all the other assignments we’ve done for news organizations during the past 25 years.”
How do you hold reporters in contempt? I guess you hold them in contempt.
Thomas P.M. Barnett – Assasinating Al Qaeda: not a problem
[D]efinitely something to remember when you are fed that soft-on-terror crap from the GOP.
It’s really more than the northern states, though.
What do you think of Milne’s article about the UK sentencing of the participants in the Gaza action protest?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/25/anti-muslim-hatred-threat-to-all
The “democratic protest” he is referring to was very violent. Police were injured, there was a lot of property damage. To me it sounded like a cross between a riot and a lynch mob.
In any case, the idea that one should be able to assault anyone over a cause perturbs me. And that seems to be what Milne is implying.
I haven’t thought there was much hope for Europe since the 2004 incident in Oslo when the police prevented identifiably Jewish people from marching in the Kristallnacht commemorative march.
There is irony, and then there’s tragic irony.
MoM, FYI, I’ve been waiting to include a response to your other comments in my reply to SW.
On Scandinavia, I think first, generally, Europe learned pretty close to nothing from WWII other than that it didn’t want war anymore, which, isolated from other lessons, is a dangerous lesson to learn. Second, those Northern republics have lived in a cocoon these past sixty years that could not be farther from the messy reality of much of the rest of the world, particularly that of Israel. Of course, the Muslim influence is a whole new factor, but Europeans never needed help with their antisemitism.
Regarding the Malmo story – this has been building for years.
In Malmo it really is the Muslims, but the racial/ethnic attitudes in the northern republics are hardening.
I have a brother who travels quite a bit, and he says the Swedish people are the most racist he ever encountered.
I don’t know quite how to account for it, but it always seems the past is waiting two steps ahead of us.