Twenty-three months ago, Jennifer and I left San Francisco for London. Though we miss the Bay Area, and have weathered many difficulties since, we’ve never been more convinced that the decision we made to leave America was the right one.
In The Egyptian Plumber and My ‘Eurabia’ Problem, I discuss how the move has impacted me politically. What I’ve learned, where I’ve learned it, in Milano, as well as in Berlin. Check it all out, in this week’s edition of The Jewish Daily Forward.
Note the misspelling of “Arafat.” It’s unclear the author is aware he’s dead. Kotbusser Dam, Berlin, 13/7.
Compare the messaging. The first image, on the left, is a campaign flyer for Italy’s anti-immigrant Lega Nord party, photographed in March, outside our apartment in Milan. Notice the Turkish national flag depicted subsuming the northern Italian province of Lombardy.
The image on the right is a government-commissioned poster offering support to Turkish immigrants, displayed at a train station in Berlin. Given how accustomed we’d become to seeing Lega posters the past year, the German advert’s vibe took us totally by surprise.
I couldn’t think of a better expression of Italy’s anxiety about its increasingly multicultural character than this bus advert for designer jeans. Shot in front of our apartment building in Milan last week, it’s also featured as the main photo on Zeek‘s landing page today. I wanted an image that would speak to Wednesday’s feature, Mya Guarnieri’s We’re Not White Trash. We’re Jews.
The same logic applies to this picture, which we ran on Monday. Published in conjunction with Bruce Wilson’s Their Religion is Hatred, I was hoping the photo would help capture, however indirectly, the stress felt by Arab migrants, like this woman, standing in front of Lega Nord campaign posters, already condemned by an elections campaign monitor. (See “Manifesto Abusivo.”)
Though this photo has already expired (replaced today by the bus advert photo), its caption read “War in the ghetto,” since the shot was taken on Via Padova, the symbolic heart of Milan’s immigrant community. The bus picture, similarly, bears the caption “Dreaming of Multiculturalism,” as a means of explaining what it reflects, rather than what it intends to express. Everything is documentary.
Elections for Europe’s parliament are now officially over. As predicted, throughout the continent right-wing parties coasted to victory in nearly every single contest. Aided by a combination of failing economies, the scapegoating of immigrants, and low voter turnout, the stunning victory of avowedly racist parties such as the United Kingdom’s BNP (British National Party) inspired newspapers such as The Guardian to run front page features today asking whether fascism was resurgent in Europe, for the first time since 1945.
Italy’s version of this trend is of course parties like the Northern League. Champions of clear and arresting posters like these, the message being promoted – hatred of Muslims, in particular – places the organization in the vanguard of European parties currently emphasizing anti-immigration as a significant part of their platforms. Located two blocks from our apartment, on a street heavily frequented by Arabs and south Asians, I can only imagine what this design may have made passers by feel. Some welcome card, indeed.
Finally an excuse to make a bad Raymond Carver pun. My analysis of the surrogacy role that Israel played in the 2008 US presidential election campaign, in Friday’s edition of Religion Dispatches.
Tehrangeles has officially been taken over by American members of Hezbollah, and appropriately renamed to reflect the identity of its new, turban-bedecked rulers.
So reported an email from an LA-based Mashdown reader this morning, claiming that he snapped the Hezbollywood picture above as he drove to Canters for a light breakfast.
The subject line: Shi’ite Culture Jamming.
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