Harry’s Place

I’m wondering if our European readers think this article by Andrei Markovits at Jeff Weintraub’s blog is a fair take on the reaction on their side of the Atlantic to Barack Obama’s presidential nomination.
Ever since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination for President, the overwhelming response from the European media and from cultural and political elites […]

Haaretz reports:

WARSAW - This was not a pogrom, but it was close. Sunday’s incident in Krakow at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was rife with overtones of hatred. “The Jews are attacking us! We need to defend ourselves,” shouted Prof. Bogoslav Wolniewicz, to stormy applause.
About 1,000 people gathered for special services Sunday […]

This is, of course, a series of grossly unfair stereotypes.
I’ll admit, though, that the depiction of some Italian behavior reminded me of certain experiences in Israel– which probably suggests nothing more than that both are, culturally, Mediterranean countries, for better and for worse.
(Hat tip: Norm.)

These are tough times if you are the leader of the successor organisation to the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Power resides elsewhere, your five year plans are somewhat limited in scope by the advancing age of your party membership, you find you can’t have a decent purge, and even the consolations […]

Finland is a funny place- albeit one where I have consumed quite a lot of expensive alcohol in the past. It would be true to state however that they do things quite differently in the land of the midnight sun.
Take the recent elections for example. The Intopii computer company unveiled software to assist those voters […]

There is a law report in today’s Times on an important case involving Trade Union membership.
The case involved Jay Lee: a driver for Virgin Trains who was a BNP candidate. He was expelled by ASLEF. He brought a case to the Employment Tribunal, which ruled that Lee was expelled in breach of breached section 174 […]

Bad news from Chechnya. (One might ask: in recent years, has there been any other kind?): But, as the latterly largely unreported war there has receded from view – not least because of the almost complete silence of the Russian media, Novaya Gazeta excluded, and the great difficulty for any other journalists or investigators to […]

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution which was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks, cheered on by large numbers of western communists.
The editorial in The Times today makes a number of valuable points about the failure of the west to intervene, the lessons the Soviet ruling class learnt from 1956 and also the […]

With everything else going on in the world now, please spare a thought for Belarus opposition leader Alexander Kozulin– who challenged President Alexander Lukashenko in last March’s fraudulent election, and who has been sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for “hooliganism and incitement to mass disorder.”

According to a story on IslamOnline, a conference kicked off this weekend in Istanbul on the “challenges facing European Muslims and the opportunities within their reach”.
Alas, no one seems to have explained the point of the conference to our old friend Dr Qaradawi.
In his address, Qaradawi condemned the escalating Israeli aggressions against the Palestinian people […]