Anti-Semitism

Hamas’s attack on 7 October and Israel’s retaliation led to a wave of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe. How do we address this?

An old friend once told me that being a decent person means having a guilty conscience. And there is enough to feel guilty about as 2015 unfolds. Ethical uncertainty over how a liberal society should deal with the intolerant has become strikingly evident following the murders of four French Jews in a kosher grocery and twelve editors and staff members of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine located in Paris, by partisans of al-Qaeda and, its rival, ISIS.

Do we really want more Europe, integration and solidarity? Or should we perhaps first ask exactly what ‘more Europe, integration and solidarity’ should look like? The results of the European elections in Poland show that ‘old federalism’ is retreating.