This is Europe
Bookworm on Feb 12 2008 at 12:00 pm | Filed under: Anti-Semitism, Europe
Reading this, you can’t tell if it happened in 1938 or 2008:
An American tourist was kicked out of a cafe in Belgium for being Jewish.
Marcel Kalmann, a 64-year-old professor, told the Antwerp Jewish magazine Joods Actueel that he was ejected from the renowned restaurant Le Panier d’Or in Bruges after a waiter saw his yarmulke under his cap.
“We are not serving Jews, out of here,” the magazine reported.
Kalmann also told Joods Actueel that he was mistreated at the police station where he went to file a report and was told the incident would not be considered anti-Semitic. He said he will file reports against both the restaurant and the police.
Kalmann was born in the Auschwitz concentration camp three days before its liberation.
The mayor of Bruges has ordered a police inquiry into the incident and apologized to Kalmann, the European Jewish Press reported.
I’m sure all this will change, though, once President Obama tells people to be nice again. (That was sarcasm, for those not familiar with this blog.)
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6 Responses to “This is Europe”
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Hello Bookworm,
It is amazing the silence at the worldwide rise of anti-Semitism. No protest. No complaints, except for a few Jewish folks here and there…
As your post pointed out, where we are today feels like the run up to World War II. The similarities don’t stop at the rising antisemitism. Everywhere you turn you find a correlative event.
If this had been America, and a white person said that to ANY person of color, you can bet the hue and cry from the left would be deafening.
But it’s an anti-Semite (Muslim?) refusing service to a Jew, in Europe, and therefore the left will be completely silent…
~mike
Amazingly–or maybe not–I have not seen ANY coverage of this story except for in the conservative blogosphere. Where are all the Liberal Jewish bloggers? Nothing to say about this? Infuriating, but unsurprising………
BHG
You know, BHG, my husband has a colleague, a Jewish man in his mid-40s who told me husband — “I just don’t care about Israel.” This shocked even my husband because, while he may be non-religious, he does support Israel. That someone of our generation could be so utterly cavalier about Israel goes a long way to explaining things. We’re the last generation fairly close to WWII, the War of Independence, the 1967 War and the 1973 War — and he has no emotional resonance with those events. I guess the next generation will be even more cold and distant.
Leaving the Left’s anti-Americanism aside, there seem to be several similarities between 1938 and 2008. An isolationalist desire to bring the troops home, a general anti-military perspective,
(”I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier” is now “Recuritment is unacceptable”.), a palpable refusal to see a growing danger, and an almost comical rush to appease that danger. And then the seemingly atavistic rise in anti-Semitism.
I suppose you could find “similarities” between any two randomly chosen periods if you worked hard enough at it. But current trends are rather disturbing.
Al
There is a new Hollywood movie that just came out called ” In Bruges” and now there is this incident in Bruges…
I think the Jews who own Hollywood are doing a publicity stunt.
I’m kidding!
I was just playing the conspiracy-theory-every-where-leftist.
All kidding aside there is fact a rise in anti-Semitism, and one of the reasons is the way the MSM reports the news about the Israel - Palestine conflict.
It is anti-semitic in subtle and minuscule doses but it is definitely anti-Semitic.
Only an anti-Israel pro-Palestine leftist would deny it.
Just take the Egyptian wall; why was it pretty much never mentioned in the news?
where was the outrage from the left and their MSM about this wall that was hurting the poor poor little peaceful Palestinians?
And why was the Israel wall mentioned in the MSM every chance they got?
Well the MSM is not anti-Egypt, we know that…