Re: Cut le merde Gustave........you are the one who is dead wrong:
"In November, 1992, a grandmother and two young girls were killed in a firebomb attack in Moelln, near Hamburg. Television news reports carried pictures of frightened and defenceless immigrants being besieged by what commentators regularly referred to as “skinheads”...
As most of your excerpts show, anti-immigrant violence in Europe is still restricted to far-right/neonazi fringe groups or Zionist/Judeofascist militants... I never contended that there was no racist violence in Europe --quite the contrary, since I've told you repeatedly that Europe's problem was RACIAL unlike the US's CULTURAL challenge(s). And I was the first to report on SI the ugly outbreak of Arab-bashing in El Ejido, Spain, in 2000 (see below). Actually, this latter instance of anti-immigrant violence is the European case closest to what happened in Australia last December.
I maintain, however, that racism in the US Sunbelt is much, much more virulent and dangerous than European racism. First, most Europeans would be quite surprised that white Americans view Mexicans as nonwhites --it's as if Spaniards, Sicilians and Greeks were billed non-Europeans by the rest of Europe! So far, only post-fascist Gianfranco Fini has called Sicilians "Africans".... After all, Mexicans --unlike Muslim (North-)Africans-- write and speak a European/white language (Spanish) and are overwhelmingly Catholic.
There are two other reasons that explain the difference: first, Europe doesn't have a "Second Amendment" that provides for militias and gun-toting vigilantism; second, Europe doesn't have a legacy of racial terrorism (KKK lynchings, Jim Crow). Of course, there was the disastrous rise of Nazism in the 1930s, when German fascists attempted to emulate US racism and eugenics in Europe --against Jews and other white minorities instead of Negroes and nonwhites-- but it lasted only 15 years (1930-1945) unlike the US's 200 years of official racism....
Tuesday, 8 February, 2000, 15:30 GMT
Spain struggles with race riots
Riot police in Spain have again clashed with hundreds of protesters on the third consecutive day of violence directed against immigrants from North Africa.
The local immigrant community has asked the authorities for protection after rioting left their property ransacked and their cars overturned.
Clouds of smoke wafted over the south-eastern Spanish region of Almeria as a plastic recycling factory, set alight by anti-immigrant protestors, burnt to the ground.
There were clashes in and around the Moroccan quarter of El Ejido as riot police tried to clear roads blocked by the demonstrators.
Spanish state radio reported that more than 30 people were injured and seven others arrested as police prevented protesters marching on El Ejido.
Stabbings
The violence erupted on Saturday when a Moroccan man was arrested on suspicion of stabbing to death a Spanish woman in a local market.
The death came two weeks after another Moroccan man was arrested in connection with the stabbing to death of two people.
In response, hundreds of Spaniards marched through the town shouting racist slogans. Police reinforcements were called in after protesters went on the rampage, burning cars and shops belonging to Moroccans.
The Spanish Foreign Minister, Abel Matutes, appealed for calm, saying that Spaniards must get used to the influx of North African immigrants attracted by the fast-growing economy.
He told state radio: "We need to reflect on how we need to change our behaviour in a pluralist society that with each day will ... have more immigrants, that each day will need more immigrants to take our country forward."
The Moroccan ambassador to Madrid, Yamal Eddin Mechbal, called on his countrymen "to behave like civilised people, containing your rage and ire" in response to the attacks, the Spanish news agency Europa Press reported.
El Ejido is the centre for fruit and vegetable production on Spain's southern coast - an industry that relies heavily on cheap immigrant labour.
news.bbc.co.uk |
