anti-Semitism - 3 Quarks Daily

by Barbara Fischkin

John Hume, Nobel Prize Laureate — John Hume—who won the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work in Northern Ireland—as I imagine him looking down today from the heavens.

“John Hume would not have tweeted. He would have been on Kinnaird Avenue.” —As stated by Sara Morrison in conversation with Jenny Holland

A twenty-first century version of the Northern Irish “Troubles” erupted this month on Kinnaird Avenue in Belfast. This was not a continuation of the centuries-long war between Catholics and Protestants. It was about race, not religion. The attacker was a Sudanese immigrant. The victim and his main savior were white men born in Northern Ireland. The attacker brutally stabbed his victim, gouging out an eye. The savior ended the attack with a hurley stick, the Irish version of a baseball bat.

The riots that followed—labeled as anti-immigrant which sounds correct to me, if over simplified— involved masked mobs, weaponized bricks, petrol bombs and the ensuing arson, burnt homes, displacements and similar decibels of the fear that has engulfed Ireland for centuries, albeit with different enemies. And then, of course, as happens everywhere riots occur, the police arrived: The Police Service of Northern Ireland, with its riot squads and water cannons.

This happened between June 8 and 11. On June 13, thousands in search of a happier ending, gathered outside City Hall to condemn racism in Northern Ireland.

The above is what I think happened from reading news reports. And social media. Most not from Belfast, itself.

Northern Ireland has long been a place reported on from afar. My husband and I, as American journalists, moved to Ireland to live in both Dublin and Belfast in 1984, as that sectarian violence—religion-based with many eruptions over centuries—was underway. We went on a grant my husband was given from St. John’s University in New York, pushed by Irish-Americans who felt the current “troubles,” were underreported. Despite knowing this, it was shocking to find out that so many other international foreign correspondents reported on Northern Ireland from London. Or from farther away. A New York Times reporter based in London, described how terrified she was to finally spend an overnight—or perhaps more—in Belfast. This was something my husband and I did regularly. Read more »

by Andrea Scrima

Sequel to the essay “Musings on Exile, Immigrants, Pre-Unification Berlin, Trauma, Naturalization, and a Native Tongue.”

It’s disorienting when cities lose their gray zones—the undefined plots of fallow land that used to line the banks on the Brooklyn side of the East River, for instance, the nineteenth-century warehouses, docks, and quietly deteriorating, decommissioned refineries. Crumbling cement made porous by weather and weeds, the whole of it replaced now by faceless, blue-hued high-rise towers of glass and steel that sprang up like mutant mushrooms over the past decade and a half to block the path of the evening sun along the waterfront, erase the sharp glint of silvery light that once illuminated defunct railroad tracks at sundown, their perfectly parallel lines momentarily ablaze with the recollection of past importance. In Berlin, wasteland terrains could be found nearly everywhere before the Wall came down: the long stretch of a discontinued S-Bahn line that led from Monumentenstrasse and over the bridges at Yorckstrasse up to the former railway terminus Anhalter Bahnhof, now a ruin consisting of no more than a fragment of the once-massive building’s façade, where a semicircular set of overgrown train tracks opened onto the remains of a round loading dock. A decade and a half after Allied bombs had obliterated much of Germany, its division into two countries produced a haphazard border that sliced through the massive reconstruction project underway, blocking streets and cutting through buildings and canals and occasionally giving rise to little pockets of land connected to West Berlin by long roads flanked on either side by the Wall. Read more »

Tag: anti-Semitism

New Troubles In Belfast

Monday, July 3, 2023

On Fallow Land, Fairies, and Phillip Jenninger’s Controversial Speech before the West German Parliament