Paris, Berlin bristle as Obama backs Turkey for EU

By Kerstin Gemhlich and Mark John

PRAGUE (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama urged the European Union on Sunday to accept Turkey as a full member of the 27-nation bloc, in remarks rejected outright by France and met coolly by Germany.

The disagreement was a rare outward sign of divergence at an EU-U.S. summit stage-managed to relaunch transatlantic ties that were strained under the Bush administration and which both sides are now eager to mend.

“The United States and Europe must approach Muslims as our friends, neighbors and partners in fighting injustice, intolerance and violence, forging a relationship based on mutual respect and mutual interests,” Obama told the summit.

“Moving forward toward Turkish membership in the EU would be an important signal of your (EU) commitment to this agenda and ensure that we continue to anchor Turkey firmly in Europe,” he told EU leaders.

Turkey has long been seeking to join the bloc, and Obama’s comments were a reaffirmation of U.S. support for that goal.

But there is resistance among EU states such as Germany and France to its membership, including among ruling conservatives.

Sarkozy said it was up to the EU member states to decide on Turkish entry and reiterated his opposition. “I have always been opposed to this entry,” he told France’s TF1 television.

“I still am and I think I can say that the immense majority of member states shares the position of France,” he said.

“Turkey is a very great country, an ally of Europe, an ally of the United States. It will stay a privileged partner. My position hasn’t changed and it won’t change,” he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it was clearly in the interest of all to forge ties between the EU and the Muslim world, but asked to comment directly on Obama’s remarks, she noted only: “It’s clear there are different opinions.”

Merkel said the form of any future connection between the EU and Turkey was still not clear, a reference to the possibility of a privileged partnership stopping short of actual membership — a formula favored by French and German conservatives.
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Europe jihadist push goes underground

William Maclean

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Prisons and private homes have taken over from mosques as recruiting hubs for Islamist radicals in Europe, a shift that cannot be tackled simply by short-term government security measures, an academic said on Wednesday.

Under pressure from state surveillance and disapproval from local communities, activists who once trawled high-profile mosques for recruits increasingly use more discreet venues including makeshift prayer halls and bookshops, said Peter Neumann, a political scientist at Kings College, London. “This pattern of withdrawal from open agitation is consistent across Western Europe,” said Neumann, author of “Joining al Qaeda,” a report on radicalisation in Europe published by an independent British-based think-tank.

“A lot of open activities that used to go on at mosques are now taking place in private flats and apartments, as mosques themselves become more vigilant and clamp down,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of a security conference in Belgium.

“It’s been driven underground. It’s much more difficult for people like Abu Hamza to be operating out in the open, although it doesn’t mean they have gone away,” he told Reuters.

He was referring to Abu Hamza al-Masri, a firebrand Muslim preacher who acted as a magnet for radicals drawn to his mosque in north London in the 1990s, an easy surveillance target for police watching out for such activities.

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World depressions lead to a rise in anti-Semitism. All over Europe, the evidence is around us

Denis MacShane

The periodic crises that have shaken world capitalism in the century and a half since Marx wrote Das Kapital are marked by a common political phenomenon. It is the rise of political anti-Semitism. Attacks on Jews and Jewishness constitute the canary in the coal mine that tells us something is going seriously wrong.

Last month a 32-year-old IT worker, Michael Booksatz, was beaten up in the streets of north London by two hooded men shouting about Palestinians. Jewish students at the London School of Economics – home to many brilliant Jews who fled Hitler’s Germany – are now frightened by anti-Jewish abuse from Islamist students. Graffiti such as “Kill the Jews” or “Jihad 4 Israel” appear close to synagogues in London.

The Metropolitan Police report four times as many anti-Jewish incidents in recent weeks as Islamaphobic events. The respected Community Security Trust, which records anti-Jewish attacks with scrupulous rigour, reports as many attacks on Jews – verbal, vandalism and some violent – in the first weeks of 2009 as in the first six months of last year.

As the world enters a new era of crisis, anti-Semitism is back. History, as ever, begins to repeat itself. The slumps and stock market fever expressed in Zola’s novel, L’Argent, or the populist anger against Wall Street at the end of the 19th century gave rise to the virulent anti-Semitic politics witnessed in France in connection with the Dreyfus case or the takeover of Vienna by openly anti-Semitic politicians. The Great Depression gave rise to the worst expressions of anti-Semitism ever seen, namely the politics that led to the Holocaust. But even in Britain the Duke of Wellington of the time was leader of a secret anti-Jewish organisation which had the initials PJ – Perish Judah – on its letterhead.

The economic crises of the 1970s led to a marked increase in the vote for the National Front in Britain and the openly anti-Semitic BNP, its successor extreme party, is doing very well in local elections – below the radar of the national opinion polls.

The distress and upset over the terrible pictures of children killed in Israel’s attacks on Hamas in Gaza have allowed anti-Israeli feelings to be more violently and vehemently expressed than ever before. Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic. But all anti-Semites hate the existence of a Jewish state and hiding behind code words such as anti-Zionism increases the density and viciousness of their anti-Jewish utterances.

In Italy, the streets of Milan are daubed with slogans urging Italians not to buy goods at Jewish shops – an echo of the Nazi slogan “Kauft Nicht Bei Juden”. In Germany, radio phone-ins are full of accusations that the bankers accused of being responsible for the current economic crisis are Jews. In anti-Israel demonstrations in Berlin, placards stating “It was a good idea to use gas” or “I’m anti-Semitic and that’s a good thing” were carried. Thus every Jew is made to feel as if they do not fully belong in the countries where they were born or the societies that they participate in.

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