Leon Wieseltier writes in The New Republic Nov. 9, 2010: “Over a perfectly prepared bowl of cholent, the coarse stew to which all Galicianer souls are superstitiously attached, I sat in the kosher restaurant in Munich last week, on the gleaming modernist island of the city’s new Jewish institutions, and read the correspondence between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt, which has just been published in Germany. The radio played American oldies of the 1960s, in a pernicious attempt to make me feel at home. The situation was emotionally impossible, of course. It did not help that Thilo Sarrazin’s vile book, in which he deploys against Muslims in Germany the same argument that, from the eighteenth century onward, was deployed against Jews in Germany—they live apart, they have laws of their own, they do not integrate well—was flying out of the local bookstores. Some Germans are again mistaking alterity for a security threat.”
What is “alterity”? According to Google: “the state of being other or different; otherness.”
From my news and Twitter feed today:
* German machete attack: At least one person killed and two others injured near Stuttgart
Man has been arrested by police following assault outside kebab shop
* GERMANY – Perpetrator of deadly knife attack this afternoon is a 21 year old Syrian ‘refugee’. #Reutlingen
* European women are being murdered in the streets by invaders. We’re enriched.
* oh, another terrorist attack from the religion of peace? the sun must have come up today.
