It’s that time again: Eurovision!
Every year it disappoints me, yet every year I return. And once more, the Eurovision Song Contest is upon us. For the uninitiated (though I can’t imagine there are that many people unaware of exactly what this affair entails), I have selected some of my favourite Eurovision winners from ABBA to Loreen, both of whom are Swedish, by coincidence I presume. My selection indicate two things: first, that Eurovision had a kind of musical peak between 1974 and 1982; and second, I started watching Eurovision after 1997, and in spite of the overall decline in quality, I keep doing so.
ABBA, “Waterloo” (Sweden, 1974)
Marie Myriam, “L’oiseau and l’enfant” (France, 1977)
Izhar Cohen and the Alphabeta, “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” (Israel, 1978)
Johnny Logan, “What’s Another Year”(Ireland, 1980)
Nicole, “Ein Bisschen Frieden” (Germany, 1982)
The Scandal of Scandinavia
Denmark’s experience of the Holocaust is unique among the occupied nations of Europe, protecting and ultimately saving nearly the whole of its Jewish population from deportation and extermination. But today, Denmark suffers from a new, bourgeoning, and dangerous kind of anti-Semitism, one that mixes strident anti-Zionism with a distain for Jewish customs and practices. This is not only a problem in Denmark, but an inescapable, growing burden throughout Scandinavia.
The Danish Jewish Museum and the Museum of Danish Resistance both tell that remarkable story. By August 1943, the tide of war had turned against Nazi Germany: the Allies had landed in Sicily; a German offensive at Kursk failed; and the British and Americans had strafed Hamburg. Anticipating the war’s end, the Danish resistance increased its activities, including violent disturbances, strikes, and sabotage. The Danish national government resigned on August 28, and the German administration declared martial law the following day.
Since the beginning of the German occupation on April 9, 1940, Denmark had avoided the adoption of anti-Jewish policies, such as the yellow star and the confiscation of businesses. An apocryphal story circulated that King Christian X — whose daily horseback rides through the center of Copenhagen came to symbolize Danish sovereignty — took it upon himself to wear a Star of David. This story, though untrue, spoke to the special relationship between the monarchy and the Jewish community. Following the imposition of martial law, however, the Nazi Plenipotentiary Werner Best moved to liquidate Danish Jewry.
The news was leaked via a German naval attaché, Georg Duckwitz, to Danish politicians who in turn alerted Jewish community leaders. Before German forces could arrest them, 7,000 Danish Jews were able to escape via train, car, and boat to neutral Sweden. This required cooperation and collaboration across Danish society, and not just the resistance movement. Local fishermen helped ferry the Jews to Sweden, and the domestic police force looked the other way. “Everyone who helped the Jews believed at the time that they were acting directly against the wishes of the Germans, and at great personal risk,” Laurence Rees asserts in Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution.
Not all Scandinavian countries distinguished themselves as Denmark did during the Holocaust. But it can be said that Scandinavians as a people have been less overtly and traditionally anti-Semitic than other Europeans. Indeed, the most recent Anti-Defamation League survey of anti-Semitic attitudes found that Norway performed far better than countries like France, Spain, and Germany. Twenty-three percent of respondents thought it was probably true that “Jews have too much power in international financial markets,” 21 percent believe “Jews have too much power in the business world,” and 25 percent felt “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.” This is in no way comparable to countries like Poland and Hungary, where more than half of those surveyed believed these statements were possibly true.
The problem today, then, is not widespread traditional anti-Semitism but rather a new kind of hate, derived mainly from the failure to distinguish between Israel, Zionism, and local Jewish communities in political discourse. Put simply, anti-Zionism has rechanneled anti-Semitism. This exists alongside of, and sometimes combines with, an extremist, mainly Muslim anti-Semitism, which is especially acute given the proximity of Scandinavia’s small and vulnerable Jewish communities to larger and less well-integrated immigrant communities from North Africa and the Middle East. Finally, pervasive cultural attitudes stressing modernity and conformity above pluralism and tradition have seen the rejection of circumcision and other central symbols of Jewish identity. Taken together, these trends have fostered an unhealthy and disturbing sense of otherness that sees the Jews, with their connection to a foreign state and their peculiar customs and rituals, as markedly different from everybody else — and less welcome because of it.
All eyes on François Hollande
Following the killing of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and numerous other hate attacks in France this year, all eyes will be on how President François Hollande deals with Muslim extremism in 2013.
Malmo in Sweden remains a hotbed of antisemitic violence and, this month, Israeli tourists were advised not to wear kippot in Denmark after a string of attacks in the Copenhagen district of Nørrebro. In both cases, certain sections of the countries’ Muslim communities were to blame.
In Hungary, the ultra-nationalist Jobbik party continues to spout Jew-hate, and an Italian version of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn is seeking political legitimacy in Italy. This year will be another challenging one for Europe’s Jews.
Nobel Prize a Reminder to Europe
Recognized for its contribution over the course of six decades “to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday. There has been the usual carping from the reliably reactionary elements in the American commentariat – “The once-significant award has become the self-esteem builder for undeserving underachievers, a sort of gold star for grown-ups”, states Jennifer Rubin. But one would be hard pressed to find a supranational institution which has done more to foster “fraternity between nations” than the EU and its predecessors.
The Nobel Committee was explicit in its intent when it awarded the Prize to the EU. With Europe “currently undergoing grave economic difficulties and considerable social unrest”, they wished for the continent’s leaders to recommit themselves to “the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights”.
An excellent idea indeed, and to that end, it is necessary to recognise that while the peoples of Europe have never been closer – thanks to the absence of barriers on the movement of goods, services, capital, and people – the dual problems of racism and anti-Semitism which have long plagued Europe have not been entirely vanquished. In fact, in spite of our best efforts, during this period of austerity and turmoil, tensions between classes and communities have only increased, including incitements against European Jewry.
Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/164300/nobel-prize-a-reminder-to-europe/#ixzz29OS1nv5b
Julian Assange: When Rape Doesn’t Matter
It is a sign of just how low the international left has sunk since the loss of the Soviet Union and the attacks of September 11 that they are willing to defend genocidal dictators and alleged rapists, all in the name of vapid anti-Americanism. This reactionary faction has become so farcical that it now resembles parody, as a recent comment piece in The Guardian by Mark Weisbort pointedly demonstrates.
For the sake of clarity, Julian Assange is wanted by Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. Assange has refused to go to Sweden to answer these suspicions, stating that the allegations are part of a smear campaign. Indeed, Assange has gone through the British courts up to and including the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to avoid facing these serious allegations. When it became clear that he would have to leave the UK, Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London seeking political asylum, arguing that if he were to fly to Sweden, the government there would extradite him to the United States on other charges.
You might not know any of this if you read Weisbort’s article, however. After all, it does not use the words ‘rape’ or ‘sex’ once. Rather, Weisbort argues that “the Swedish government has no legitimate reason to bring him to Sweden, this by itself is a form of persecution”. Rather, it can be inferred from Weisbort’s musings that these sexual molestation and rape allegations are mere fabrication, a cover for a wider plot to organise “a second extradition to the United States, and persecution here for his activities as a journalist”.
Loreen, the winner of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden, singing the only decent song of the entire evening, “Euphoria”.
(Source: youtube.com)
