I met this author three times in 2014, 2015, and 2016 in New York City, Negev-Israel, and Europe (Paris, Berlin, and Stockholm) respectively.
As for the so-called humanitarian assistance for the refugees, we have to make a distinction between the former Jewish refugees and the current Muslim refugees/immigrants, because the backgrounds and contexts in history are totally different in nature. (Lily)
Algemeiner（https://www.algemeiner.com/）
(1)France: A Civilization Threatened Again?9 December 2016
by Dr. Judith Friedman Rosen
Standing on the quiet cliffs overlooking the beaches of Normandy, it is hard to believe that 72 years ago, young heroic Allied soldiers disembarked their Higgins boats to begin a bloody assault — eventually breaching the Nazis’ impregnable wall, and turning the tide of World War II in Western Europe.
Over the course of three months, during which they sustained more than 200,000 casualties, American, British, Canadian and Scottish troops — along with French and Polish units — fought their way through France’s formerly bucolic countryside. They eventually reached, and liberated, Paris.
Today, the entire province of Normandy, vital to the political and military life of Europe for hundreds of years, pays daily tribute to those who died pursuing liberty there. The towns of Bayeux and Rouen — with inspiring cathedrals, colorful, artful patisseries, charcuteries, specialty shops, chocolatiers and bonbonnieres, cafes and restaurants — are chock full of tourists paying homage to the glorious victory.
Yet a constant fear threatens this tourist mecca, and all of France: the French open-door policy to Muslim immigrants, who reject Western values and liberty. Some of these people have brought terror to France. Antisemitic and anti-Christian murders have plagued Rouen, Paris, Toulouse and beyond.
Miles up the coast overlooking the Straits of Dover is Calais, where the Nazis mistakenly thought the Allies would attack. Prior to its recent evacuation, a huge number of Muslim immigrants were camped here, in what was called the “Jungle.”
After the “Jungle’s” demolition, the migrants returned to camp out on the streets of Paris.
Tents, blankets and sleeping bags of young, male migrants are spread along the thoroughfare leading to St. Denis. Some mornings, they are cleared away by police, only to return by nightfall. And still, more and more migrants edge their way into the Parisian landscape.
Michel Gurfinkiel, the French conservative journalist and public intellectual, noted that “there is a clash of culture and civilization” in the outer Paris boroughs. Some of these areas, he says, are “no go zones” — lost to the Republic. Unlike the Asian and Indian immigrants, he says, many of the Muslims are not willing to integrate into the society — and are trying to force their values such as Halal, the prohibition of pork and female modesty onto the French populace.
Danielle Guerrier of the Catholic Diocese tearfully lamented that the newcomers have chased the Christians out of her district, which houses the famous St. Denis Basilica Cathedral — home to the necropolis of the kings of France. People, she says, are afraid to come to work in the district. She asks, “What is the future of France? What kind of major collision will occur when 30% of French Muslims want Sharia law and less than 25 % identify as French citizens?”
Although many politicians, bureaucrats and clergymen feel that they have a grip on the influx of Muslim immigrants into France, how will they prevent terrorism and preserve the freedoms that were won at Normandy 72 years ago?
(2)The Sweden Democrats and Liberal Jews
22 November 2016
by Dr. Judith Friedman Rosen
Upon learning that high-profile Swedish MP Kent Ekeroth was to speak to a gathering of foreign visitors in the Riksdag (parliament building), speakers from majority parties — the Social Democrats and the Moderates — pulled out of the event.
Ekeroth and his opposition party, the Sweden Democrats, are lightening rods, as they support containing and regulating mass, open immigration to their country — the fifth-largest in Europe in terms of land mass, but with a population of only 10 million. The Sweden Democrats believe that many ills of the economy — and the healthcare, justice and education systems — can be attributed to immigration. They have thus pushed for border controls and the monitoring of Muslim activity. They stand for integration and assimilation into the culture of the nation.
Ekeroth, a proud Swedish nationalist, is the son of an immigrant Jewish mother from the Former Soviet Union province of Kazakhstan. As a child at a school filled with immigrant kids, he was bullied by groups whom he has referred to as “from Africa and the Middle East.”
Immigrants arrive in Sweden demanding rights and benefits beyond that which the country can afford. Meanwhile, the aging indigenous population — in need of social services — can ill afford to pay for the demands of the newly arrived foreigners. Senior citizen residences, vacation villages and hotels have been turned into immigrant housing, paid for with the mandatory 17% value added tax collected from Swedish citizens.
It would seem the Swedes have largely become too cowardly and politically correct to outwardly admit their concerns and fears. In a consensus culture wherein it is forbidden to question another person’s feelings, college students are reluctant to publicly express their true opinions. If an asylum-seeker is from Somalia or Afghanistan but claims he is from Syria, he is to be taken at his word, because, “Who are we to judge?” As I recently heard a tour guide tell visitors, “Swedes do not ask questions.”
Yet, as much as the progressive majority would like to rule out the Sweden Democrats, they are quietly becoming the fastest growing political entity in the country. Few will publicly identify with it, but within the private space of the ballot booth, the party is popular. As a local taxi driver told me, “Don’t tell anybody, but I support them. How dare a new Muslim immigrant come into my child’s day care center and demand that all the children in the group be required to eat only chicken sausages [as pork is forbidden in Islam]?”
But, according to Ekeroth, relations between the country’s 20,000 Jews and the Sweden Democrats are “tense.” This in spite of the fact that the party showed its support for the community by opposing the 2014 vote by the Riksdag’s Committee of European Union Affairs that unilaterally recognized a Palestinian state. As is the case in the US, many Swedish Jews are highly liberal, support mass immigration and have not taken kindly to the party.
What many Swedish Jews — who see it as their duty as a minority to protect other minorities — fail to recognize is that many Syrians are hard-core antisemites. But Lena Posner-Korosi, a leader in the Swedish Jewish community, explains that she, and many others, see Sweden — a country without a legacy of antisemitism — as the refuge that saved their families from the Holocaust, and consider it “a Jewish concept” to lend their humanitarian support to the refugees of today.
(End)
