Front Page of Polish Paper - 'How to Spot a Jew'

The right wing is alive and in charge in Poland today as that country joins Hungary and Italy in descending into illiberal democracy. It therefore should come as no great surprise that the latest edition of the Polish weekly, Only Poland, has on its front page an article entitled "How to Spot a Jew."

Listed were markers such as "Names, anthropological features, expressions, appearances, character traits, methods of operation" and "disinformation activities."

The list of supposedly Jewish traits was accompanied on the front page by a headline reading "Attack on Poland at a conference in Paris," a reference to a Holocaust conference held in Paris last month. 

The article ran with a photo of Jan Gross, the Polish and Jewish Princeton scholar who wrote Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, the seminal text on a massacre of the Jewish people of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbours during the Nazi occupation in Poland.

...Andrzej Grzegrzolka, director of the information centre of the Polish Parliament, or Sejm, initially said that since the paper was being sold in kiosks, the responsibility for regulating sales did not fall on the information centre. 

He later relented and said the information centre would request that Only Poland be removed from the set of periodicals delivered to the Parliament.

Will Trump Embolden Bigots in Canada?

Yesterday we read Kinsella's post about a white power, Alt.Right handbill posted in his neighbourhood. Today we have an account from CBC Ottawa of a woman, Anna Maranta, a rabbi no less, who awakened in the early hours of Tuesday morning to find a swastika and the word "kike" spray painted across the front door of her Glebe home.

"I went to bed a little later than usual and woke up in the middle of the night, around 2:30, and as I was walking back to my room coming down the hall I saw a reflection on my front door, which is a glass window door, that kind of startled me," she said.

"I knew right away it was a swastika."

Rabbi Maranta raised the obvious concern:

"It's one thing to be marching down the street and be yelled at from the sidelines," she said. "This is somebody who came onto … my property, onto a lit porch, somebody who knows my routine, and so it's likely somebody … I know in this neighbourhood, and that hurts me even more."

Maranta believes the election of president-elect Donald Trump could be related to the racist graffiti on her door.

"My first thought is that this is an example of what happens when you allow somebody who is in a position of power to speak openly racist, bigoted, misogynistic language and don't censor [it] in any way," Maranta said.

"It allows other people to express their feelings, to express their hatred, and to feel like they've been given permission to do so because no one has effectively silenced that."

Is this an early glimpse into an AmeriKan contagion creeping across our border? Maybe, maybe not. That said we have to treat it as a threat not just to targeted people of colour, immigrants, Muslims or Jews. It's a threat to our society, to what in part distinguishes us from the sometimes narrow, intolerant bigotry that now seems to flourish elsewhere whether in the US, Britain, continental Europe, South Asia, the Middle East - pick a corner of the world. If we don't want that ugliness in Canada we have to choose to reject it. We have to get serious about hate crimes and reinforce minority protections. We have to realize that America can no longer be our beacon which means we can no longer outsource our economic, military and foreign policy to Washington. We have to chart our own course something we once were pretty good at doing when we had this leader named Trudeau.

Eisenhower saved his departing speech to warn Americans of the dangerous rise of what he termed the "military industrial complex." The warning went unheeded and that complex as it was in the 50s has metastasized throughout American society, the US economy and the nation's body politic. What will Obama have to say as he vacates the premises for his successor? He's given hints in statements during his farewell tour of Europe.

Barack Obama has warned of a "rise in a crude sort of nationalism" following the Brexit and US presidential votes.

Speaking in Greece on his final foreign trip, he said: "We have to guard against... tribalism built around an 'us' or a 'them'."

He said the US was painfully aware of the danger of divisions "along lines of race or religion or ethnicity".

Mr Obama said the UK's vote to leave the EU and the US vote showed that people generally were now "less certain of their national identities and place in the world" and that had produced populist movements both on the left and the right.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald, has a report on how Trump's victory has traumatized school children, especially kids of colour, in the United States.

Let's Not Kid Ourselves. We're Backing Anti-Semitic Fascists.

Your Country is on Their Side

The Guardian's Seumas Milne dismembers the rank hypocrisy of our position on Ukraine, the role we played in creating this crisis and the villainous cutthroats we're backing.

Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double standards. But western denunciations of Russian intervention in Crimea have reached new depths of self parody. The so far bloodless incursion is an "incredible act of aggression", US secretary of state John Kerry declared. In the 21st century you just don't invade countries on a "completely trumped-up pretext", he insisted, as US allies agreed that it had been an unacceptable breach of international law, for which there will be "costs".

That the states which launched the greatest act of unprovoked aggression in modern history on a trumped-up pretext – against Iraq, in an illegal war now estimated to have killed 500,000, along with the invasion of Afghanistan, bloody regime change in Libya, and the killing of thousands in drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, all without UN authorisation – should make such claims is beyond absurdity.

...The US and European powers openly sponsored the protests to oust the corrupt but elected Viktor Yanukovych government, which were triggered by controversy over an all-or-nothing EU agreement which would have excluded economic association with Russia.

In her notorious "fuck the EU" phone call leaked last month, the US official Victoria Nuland can be heard laying down the shape of a post-Yanukovych government – much of which was then turned into reality when he was overthrown after the escalation of violence a couple of weeks later.

The president had by then lost political authority, but his overnight impeachment was certainly constitutionally dubious. In his place a government of oligarchs, neoliberal Orange Revolution retreads and neofascists has been installed, one of whose first acts was to try and remove the official status of Russian, spoken by a majority in parts of the south and east, as moves were made to ban the Communist party, which won 13% of the vote at the last election.

...Fascist gangs now patrol the streets. But they are also in Kiev's corridors of power. The far right Svoboda party, whose leader has denounced the "criminal activities" of "organised Jewry" and which was condemned by the European parliament for its "racist and antisemitic views", has five ministerial posts in the new government, including deputy prime minister and prosecutor general. The leader of the even more extreme Right Sector, at the heart of the street violence, is now Ukraine's deputy national security chief.

Neo-Nazis in office is a first in post-war Europe. But this is the unelected government now backed by the US and EU. And in a contemptuous rebuff to the ordinary Ukrainians who protested against corruption and hoped for real change, the new administration has appointed two billionaire oligarchs – one who runs his business from Switzerland – to be the new governors of the eastern cities of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk. Meanwhile, the IMF is preparing an eye-watering austerity plan for the tanking Ukrainian economy which can only swell poverty and unemployment.

...Clearly, Putin's justifications for intervention – "humanitarian" protection for Russians and an appeal by the deposed president – are legally and politically flaky, even if nothing like on the scale of "weapons of mass destruction". Nor does Putin's conservative nationalism or oligarchic regime have much wider international appeal.

But Russia's role as a limited counterweight to unilateral western power certainly does. And in a world where the US, Britain, France and their allies have turned international lawlessness with a moral veneer into a permanent routine, others are bound to try the same game.

Fortunately, the only shots fired by Russian forces at this point have been into the air. But the dangers of escalating foreign intervention are obvious. What is needed instead is a negotiated settlement for Ukraine, including a broad-based government in Kiev shorn of fascists; a federal constitution that guarantees regional autonomy; economic support that doesn't pauperise the majority; and a chance for people in Crimea to choose their own future. Anything else risks spreading the conflict.

The Dark Face of European Anti-Semitism

I am a regular critic of Israel, particularly its policies and acts toward the Palestinians and its destabilizing nuclear arsenal.  One cannot speak of these things without inviting accusations of anti-semitism plainly intended to stifle critics.

Anti-semitism does, however, remain a real and ongoing challenge to us all and to our hopes for a better society.  Katrina Lantros Swett, writing in The Guardian, has a disturbing account of the rise of anti-semitism in Europe.

In Hungary, my parents' native country, the leader of its third largest party recently urged the government to create a list of Jews posing "a national security threat" – even as the government, including its parliament, condemned this statement. 

Even in western Europe, where some of America's strongest historic allies reside, antisemitism also remains. Since 2000, anti-Jewish graffiti increasingly has appeared in Paris and Berlin, Madrid and Amsterdam, London and Rome, and synagogues have been vandalized or set ablaze in France and Sweden.

In Malmo, Sweden, physical attacks have fueled a Jewish exodus. A generation ago, Malmo was home to 2,000 Jews; today there are fewer than 700. In France, "unprecedented violence" took place last year..

Compounding the problem are four factors. First, European officials remain reluctant to identify the ideological or religious motivations of the perpetrators. Second, surveys show that negative attitudes towards Jews among Europe's population remain widespread. Third, these surveys confirm that some of this bias reveals itself through certain criticisms of the state of Israel: while no country is beyond reproach, when criticism includes language intended to delegitimize Israel, demonize its people, and apply to it standards to which no other state is held, we must call it antisemitism.  

Yet, there are other reasons to care. When Jews face trouble, so often do other minorities. And as the second world war taught a whole generation of Americans, the same forces targeting Jews often oppose freedom for all. The fight against antisemitism is a key element in freedom's battle against tyranny. It is a fight to preserve civilization and further human progress. 

I am with Ms. Swett, right up to the point where she tries to stigmatize criticism of Israel as anti-semitism.    Some of it is but much of it isn't.   There is much legitimate criticism of Israel that, in fact, is based on demanding it accept the very standards to which every other state is held, standards it steadfastly refuses to accept.

Oh Sure, Blame the Recession

B'nai Brith Canada claims the recession is behind what it claims is a marked increase in anti-Semitism in this country.

"Any time there's bad economic times, the Jews get blamed for it," said Marvin Kurz, national legal counsel for B'nai Brith Canada, which released yesterday an audit of reports of anti-Semitic incidents made to the group.

"The ancient tie between Jews and money that predates Shakespeare and Shylock continues to be stuck in some aspect of our collective memories."

In the audit released, B'nai Brith stated that anti-Semitic incidents in Canada jumped by 8.9 per cent last year to 1,135, a high for the 27 years the group has recorded the reports. Almost half, 547, were in the last four months of the year as the economy worsened.

Define "incident." With the new, improved and vastly expanded definition of "anti-Semitic" that includes legitimate criticism of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians. Having blamed the increase of anti-Semitism on the recession, Mr. Kurtz seemed to trip and stumble when he then blamed it on anger toward Israel:

"Whenever something happens in Israel, anti-Semitism in Canada and around the world increases," added Kurz.

Middle East tensions – often a trigger for anti-Semitic behaviour in past years – were largely absent throughout the fall, the audit states. However, once fighting broke out in Gaza in December, there was another spike in incidents.

Across Canada, there were 151 incidents in December, 70 of which coincided with fighting in Gaza and 36 of which occurred in the closing days of the year, as tensions in the war-torn area heightened.

...In the audit, B'nai Brith calls for tougher restrictions on racist groups and their symbols, and suggests that racist motivations be given greater prominence during the investigation of a crime, rather than just at sentencing.