There's a terrible rise of anti-semitic hate speech in the name of Islam in Germany. Wipe out the Jews is being heard by children who watch Hamas run channels. Paradoxically I am similiary dismayed by the New York Times article about how the Obama campaign is intentionally distancing him from any contact with American Muslims. Now more than ever we need a President who will openly embrace the Muslim community. With Obama's multi-enthic upbringing, I would expect nothing less.
I just read this long and terrifying piece in der Spiegel about the rise of anti-semitism in Germany. I have a brother in Munich who is riasing his family there. He attends a reconstructionist synagogue and sends his son to the Jewish school there. I can't believe that I have to worry about them.
Sowing the Seeds of Hate: The Hamas satellite station Al-Aqsa recently used a Mickey Mouse clone to teach Muslim children -- in Gaza and Europe -- to hate Jews.
"Sanabel, what do you want to do to help the Al-Aqsa Mosque?" Farfur asks on the children's program of Hamas's Al-Aqsa television station. "We want to fight." "And what else?" "Wipe out the Jews." Now Farfur, the cartoon character on Hamas's children's television program, is satisfied. Farfur is a carbon copy of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, but the Hamas version does something that Mickey would never do: He entertains children while propagating the murder of Jews.
In 2007 the German Interior Ministry published a study on the worldviews of "Muslims in Germany," the most comprehensive of its kind to date, which confirmed this trend. According to the study, "anti-Semitic attitudes were found among young Muslims far more often than among non-Muslim immigrants or domestic non-Muslims."
Germany's immigration policy of marginalizing Turkish guest workers and limiting citizenship is a big reason why there is alot of hostility of Muslims to Germany in general. I heard a Muslim from Detroit say that here many Muslims feel that they can advance and be full American citizens. They shouldn't be treated as second or third class citizens. It's bad enough all the profiling that goes on at the airport.
I was just up in Stevens Point for the annual alternative energy fair. Wonderful stuff. I was reading the local paper and read that Stevens Point was honoring a local community of Jews that had been there since the 1850's. All over Wisconsin, Sheboygan, Milwaukee, Jews came and prospered and were folded in the local communities. Muslim communities deserve nothing less.