What do you think of Milne’s article about the UK sentencing of the participants in the Gaza action protest?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/25/anti-muslim-hatred-threat-to-all

The “democratic protest” he is referring to was very violent. Police were injured, there was a lot of property damage. To me it sounded like a cross between a riot and a lynch mob.

In any case, the idea that one should be able to assault anyone over a cause perturbs me. And that seems to be what Milne is implying.

There is irony, and then there’s tragic irony.

On Scandinavia, I think first, generally, Europe learned pretty close to nothing from WWII other than that it didn’t want war anymore, which, isolated from other lessons, is a dangerous lesson to learn. Second, those Northern republics have lived in a cocoon these past sixty years that could not be farther from the messy reality of much of the rest of the world, particularly that of Israel. Of course, the Muslim influence is a whole new factor, but Europeans never needed help with their antisemitism.

In Malmo it really is the Muslims, but the racial/ethnic attitudes in the northern republics are hardening.

I have a brother who travels quite a bit, and he says the Swedish people are the most racist he ever encountered.

I don’t know quite how to account for it, but it always seems the past is waiting two steps ahead of us.