Topic #1 for the month of August has been and continues to be the ugly return of racism in American politics. The very thin veneer of anti-Muslim sentiment that has been driving the “Ground Zero Mosque” story grows thinner and thinner every day, as the video of the black guy who was mobbed by the anti-Muslim protesters in New York clearly demonstrates, and as the nonsense about Barack Obama being Muslim has now seemingly infected somewhere around a quarter of the entire population. It’s “Scary Black People” Month 24/7 on FOX, as Rachel Maddow recently pointed out, and “Muslim” is just the code-word-du-jour for a certain word that rhymes with Tigger.
But racially-tinged politics and the threat of ethnic violence has been popping up all over Europe, as well. Writing at Project Syndicate, World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder decries the return of violent anti-Semitism and a series of incidents in the Swedish city of Malmö. Confounding the issue, he says, is state-sanctioned anti-Semitism playing into the hands of anti-Israel Muslims living in European countries, even as Muslims themselves find their own battles with intolerance.
International financier George Soros also has an article at Project Syndicate about the efforts of a number of European governments to expel the Roma people from their countries. The Roma are more commonly, though derogatorily, known as “Gypsies”, and have been a persecuted ethnic minority for centuries. Not unlike the Jews prior to the foundation of Israel, the Roma have no home country to speak of. They mostly come from Southeastern Europe, but through diaspora have ended up in just about every country. The Roma are highly stigmatized as a “criminal element” throughout Europe, but the recent actions in France and Italy to expel them are unusual in targeting the ethnicity as a whole as a criminal group, sadly reminiscent of pre-war imperial times.
