Anti-migrant resentment boiled over into anti-Semitism in Poland on Wednesday, when a protest against taking in Muslim refugees ended with the burning of an effigy of an ultra-Orthodox Jew holding the flag of the European Union.Here's video, posted to YouTube by the white supremacist American Freedom Party:
Several dozen people were reported in attendance at the rally, in the western Polish city of Wroclaw, which was held in response to last Friday’s Paris terrorist attacks....
The crown shouted: “United Catholic Poland! National radicalism! Down with the European Union!” The demonstration was organized by the National Radical Camp and All-Polish Youth.
“Our duty, the duty of lawmakers and the government, is to say that we won’t take a single Islamist in to Poland because Poland is for Poles,” proclaimed one of the demonstration’s speakers. .
At the end of the demonstration one of the participants set fire to a previously prepared effigy of a haredi Jew as the crowd chanted, “God, honor and fatherland!”
Could this happen in America? Maybe, though most on the American anti-Muslim right regard themselves as friends of Jews and Israel. More likely to be burned in effigy in this country are Mexicans, liberals, or Democratic politicians, up to and (especially) including the president. Not that that would be any better.
Russia's right up there regarding anti-Semitism, with the Poles!
ReplyDeleteIn the US, we prefer people of a darker hue to be prejudiced against, instead of Jews - our nitwitted Evangelicals LOVES them some Jews and Israel!:
Hell, someone's gotta start to roast in a war before Christ comes back to save the "true" "Christians," and throws the rest of us heathens and non-believers down to Satan's Weber-grill for all of eternity!.
If you've been to Canada or followed how black African descendants make out in Canadian society, it's hard to resist what a Canadian who lives right on the NY state-Ontario border said to me he'd learned in the course of his family's long-term friendship with a family in Plattsburgh, NY - where I've not been for any great time except to note an impression of it looking and feeling like it's located in exurban Dixie. He said that one time in the 1960s, when conversation turned to "the negro situation", his Plattsburgh friend told him the main difference he'd observed between Americans and Canadians was that the latter just hadn't gone thru slavery, a Civil War over it, and Reconstruction & re-entrenchment, cuz if they had, they'd had "those subhuman ni-CLANGs every bit as much as every white American ought to".
ReplyDeleteI've been to Poland. The rightwing politics there all focuses on the same thing it focused on before WWII: "the Jewish Question". Poland doesn't 'enjoy' the benefit of ME Arab, Kurdish & Turkish refugees/immigrants because there wasn't - still isn't - the built-up industry & western-style commerciality to support bringing them in. So, the rightwing there's got no one to hate on but Jews:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/02/poles-dont-want-immigrants-they-dont-understand-them-dont-like-them
No Vic, our Daesh end-timer Christians don't love the "Jews": for both before their precious lord and master will float down out of the sky on a flying white horse with thousands of angels to carry the faithful away to paradise two-thirds of the Jews must be destroyed. No, our Daesh end-timer Christians don't love the Jews, don't love Israel: they want see them destroyed.
ReplyDeleteSemites of course are of a people of Caucasian stock, now represented by the Jews and Arabs, but originally including Babylonians, Assyrians, Arameans, Phoenicians, etc. Am I "anti-semitic?" Damn right, I'm against all of them. If the fabrications the bible, Koran and Torah - shoot, all of "western history" - are of any value at all it is as first-hand documention of one group of people's five thousand year refusal to get along with each other!
Note also that both genetic and historical research indicate the vast majority of modern Jewry are in fact not descended from the biblical Hebrew, the Palestinians, but from Khazars: a sixth century Russian Mongol empire who under political pressure from all three of the Abrahmic Cults to choose not so much converted as assumed the mantle of Judaism as at the time both the Christians and the Muslims held usary, the lending of money at interest, profit at another's expense, to be a sin, Judaism did not.
There is only one race, the human race, and if we don't pull our collective head out of our collective ass and quit bickering over whose imaginary dog has the bigger dick we're not gonna' make it. End of the road, extinction.
I suspect a lot of what is called "Islamophobia" in the USA is nothing of the sort. It would more accurately be called racism against Semitic people in general and Arabs in particular. Most right-wingers reacting purely to outward appearances would be more suspicious of a Druze Lebanese or a Yemenite Jew living in their street than of a Malay Muslim.
ReplyDeleteTen Bears, Ken_L ...
ReplyDeleteA) There may be other ethnicities classified as semites, but the term anti-semite was created specifically as a synonym for anti-Jew.
B) "Arab" is not a racial or ethnic classification. It is a linguistic class - various ethnicities that have Arabic as their native language.
Yes, Char, as noted in Webster's first published dictionary* "anti-semite" was coined specifically as "anti-Jew" in the mid-nineteenth century by the Zionist to stir up antisemitism to justify the invasion of Palistine, and yes "Semite" are not a group of people but a group of related languages and dialects.
ReplyDeleteThat's not the point.
* I have one.
We're not having a scholarly discussion of etymology. According to Mirriam-Webster a Semite is "a member of a group of people originally of southwestern Asia that includes Jews and Arabs" and that's the sense in which I was using it.
ReplyDelete