‘Germany in the early 1930s wasn’t so different,’ stated one public comment. Others argued that the Chicago incident should not be reduced to reinvigorated white supremacy, stressing instead that the US, like Europe, is now breeding general xenophobia. Between the US president’s racially charged policies and his own willingness to use dehumanising language, Donald Trump has ‘unleashed’ (as Gutiérrez put it) a new tolerance for public expressions of bigotry – a claim given credence by a variety of empirical studies. Some, like Luis Gutiérrez, the House representative for Illinois, alluded to the so-called ‘Trump effect’. ‘You’re not an American citizen!’ The biggest news angle of the incident was the derelict response of the police officer present.īut other concerns were rightly raised. ‘Why is she wearing that shit?’ the man snarled, while stalking after her. She captured the incident on Facebook Live. In one incident this year, a woman was aggressively badgered by a white man in a park near Chicago for wearing a shirt printed with the Puerto Rico flag. As they beat Igor, they yelled: ‘You are Polish shit!’ ‘Go back to Poland!’Īnd then there is the United States, where such stories are turning up literally every day. The attackers were other children, some as young as eight. Afterwards, his friend told reporters: ‘This sort of thing happens nearly every day to Polish people here.’ In Northern Ireland in 2015, Igor, an 11-year-old originally from Poland, was beaten so badly that, when his friend arrived to help, he didn’t recognise him. This April, a Polish man in Hull was chased by a gang of 20 men and beaten with a nailed plank of wood. Meanwhile in the UK, in a sad reversal of malice, hate crimes against Polish people increased 10-fold in 2004-2014, and continue to make headlines. Two years later, 60,000 nationalists marched on Warsaw brandishing signs bearing slogans such as ‘Clean Blood’. In Poland – where the nationalistic Law and Justice party ascended to power in 2015 – Amnesty International reported the story of a man who, in 2014, was beaten with sticks in a nightclub by multiple attackers yelling: ‘Fuck niggers, fuck Jews.’ The man was actually Syrian. In Italy, where the far-Right nationalist association Forza Nuova now has more Facebook followers than Italy’s largest Left-wing party, a man recently drove around the town of Macerata shooting black immigrants from his car. France witnessed jumps of over 20 per cent in both 18.Īfrican nationals are also at increased risk. Across the United Kingdom, anti-Semitic crimes rose 34 per cent from 2017 to 2018, hitting an all-time high. Anti-Semitic crimes are rising dramatically all over Europe, including in typically more tolerant countries. But as Islamophobia increasingly becomes a single motive among many in these hate crimes, this story no longer holds up. In Poland, activist watch groups estimate that hate crimes rose 10-fold in the new millennium.įor a while, such trends were chalked up to an enduring Western anxiety over Islamic terrorism. In Spain, hate crimes surged from the low 200s in 2009-2012, to more than 1,100 in each of the years 2013 to 2016. Between 20, for example, Germany witnessed an 87 per cent increase in hate crimes, rising to its highest levels since the Second World War. ‘Next terrorist born.’ ‘Deport the scum.’ ‘I’m hoping for a crib death.’ Hundreds of similar comments flashed across Austrian social-media sites in what has become a familiar piece of the news cycle not only in Austria, but across the Western world. Vienna’s 2018 baby was a girl named Asel. The popular Austrian tabloid Heute has a tradition of publishing pictures of the first babies born around the country in the new year.
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