Saturday, July 24, 2010

Please Tell me that you’re Kidding

Assimilation, Euro-Style, at an event meant to celebrate social diversity and togetherness:

"The Germans say: Foreigners out!" the girl replied. "Why can't we say: Jews out?" Then she ran away.
Of course officials are “concerned”. They're always "concerned". Maybe even concerned enough to actually do something about this neo-Kristallnacht consensus that been ubiquitous for a decade.
Following an anti-Semitic attack in Hanover, German authorities have identified a new source of anti-Semitic hatred in Germany: young migrants from Muslim families. The ideological alliance has officials concerned.
The author goes on to parrot the tripe about the neo-fascists, who invariably gravitate toward the idea of a muscular, all powerful state, as being “right wing”.
It was supposed to be a carefree festival in Sahlkamp on the outskirts of the northern German city of Hanover. Billed as an "International Day" to celebrate social diversity and togetherness, the June celebration included performances by a multicultural children's choir called "Happy Rainbow" and the German-Turkish rap duo 3-K. Music from Afghanistan was also on the program.
But then the mood suddenly shifted.
When Hajo Arnds, the organizer of the neighborhood festival, stepped onto the stage at about 6:45 p.m. to announce the next performance, by the Jewish dance group Chaverim, he was greeted with catcalls. "Jews out!" some of the roughly 30 young people standing in front of the stage began shouting. "Gone with the Jews!"
The striking stupidity of this kind of story, as frequent as they are, is that the people righting them up always seem to be pretending to ‘just realize’ the state of affairs, and exhibit a kind of puzzlement at connecting the dots.

Further in the nuance-land report, there never seems to be a shortage of retrograde European nostalgia:
During a football match in April, for example, supporters of SV Mügeln-Ablass 09, a district-league football club in the eastern state of Saxony, chanted "a tree, a noose, a Jew's neck" and "we're building a subway, from Jerusalem to Auschwitz," until the match was stopped.
The litany of defaced cemeteries and modern day pamphleteering on the internet also makes the expected appearance, but the dots that no-one seems to be able to connect is the historical frequency that these same demonization movements re-emerge.

Perhaps they’re covering their eye with a kind of foreknowledge of the outcome, if they are as passive about it as they were in the last century. Perhaps heads turn away from a kind of self-awareness of how ‘natural’ these phases of factional hated comes to those noble people of the “EMEA”.

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