A distasteful little item from a long piece by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, on anti-Semitism in Europe.
[T]he new anti-Semitism flourishing in corners of the European Muslim community would be impoverished without the incorporation of European fascist tropes. Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a comedian of French Cameroonian descent who specializes in Holocaust revisionism and gas-chamber humor, is the inventor of the quenelle, widely understood as an inverted Nazi salute. His followers have taken to photographing themselves making the quenelle in front of synagogues, Holocaust memorials, and sites of past anti-Jewish terrorist attacks. Dieudonné has built an ideological partnership with Alain Soral, the anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist and 9/11 “truther” who was for several years a member of the National Front’s central committee. Soral was photographed not long ago making the quenelle in front of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.
Ugh.
For y’all’s info: la quenelle.
WTF?
The world isn’t just going to hell in a handbasket. It’s being carried by somebody who’s going as fast as they can on a moving walkway
Two wrongs don’t make a right. And two Rights teaming up just make a mess for everyone else.
Meanwhile, does that comedian really see himself as a gift from God?
And in the US there are skin heads who follow bands called ‘Prussian Blue’ after the Zyklon-B residue left in the gas chambers (though the members of that band have renounced white nationalism in their mid teens).
Dieudonné has just received a suspended prison term for his comments after the Hebdo massacre. I think it is pretty obvious that the guy is a racist, anti-semitic piece of crap dancing a very thin line with comments that are intentionally ambiguous. But those statements would be protected by the first amendment in the US. The US has no shortage of holocaust deniers but they have never been able to gain the public notice that they have in Canada, Germany or France by setting themselves up as martyrs in censorship trials.
As a European who has lived in the UK, Germany, France and the US, I found Goldberg’s piece very deceitful and one-sided. He had an agenda to peddle and no scruples about peddling it with anecdotes and half truths. Comparing the rate of anti-semitism in different countries is pretty hard to do. But anyone who listened to Netanyahu’s election comments in the last couple of days would have to concede that there are actually far more anti-semites in Israel than any other country on earth. At least if you believe Arab Israelis count as people. If you count the folk living in the occupied territories as well and accept the claim that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism then the anti-semites would be in the majority.
The UK might well elect a Jewish Prime Minister in May, something Goldberg does not bother to mention. Perhaps because despite being the son of a very prominent British Zionist, Milliband leads the Labour party whose members tend to reject Zionism.
The organizations Goldberg is taking his information from are hardly impartial or without an axe to grind either.
The figures that can be compared are the murder rates in the US and Europe. If you take out gun deaths they are essentially the same. Gun deaths are almost non existent in Europe due to very strict gun control laws. The third world murder rate in the US is almost entirely due to gun murders.
The fact is that Europe is by far the safest place to live regardless of what ethnic group you belong to.
Rather amusingly, it seems that the two UK groups Goldberg uses as evidence for his claims are rivals and keen to throw dirt at each other. CST is a bit like the blue angels subway vigilantes in NYC, you can guess how well that goes down (as the CAA supporters point out). And as for the poll showing that half of UK Jews have considered leaving, it turns out to have been a Web poll (as the CST supporters point out).
If this is one of those Christian Science Monitor polls that people have to click through to read the article then 50% is the expected outcome regardless of the question because most people will not read it.
http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/columnists/128716/time-stop-point-scoring