While Europeans appear to have generally welcomed the election of Barack Obama, The Washington Post reports on some exceptions:
The day after Obama’s victory, a leading Austrian television journalist said on camera that he “wouldn’t want the Western world to be directed by a black man.” A Polish lawmaker stood up in Parliament and called the election result “the end of the white man’s civilization.”
One of the milder gaffes came from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. On Thursday, during a visit to Moscow, he praised Obama for being “young, handsome and even suntanned.”
…..
Some racist comments have come from people who have expressed such views before. “Africa Conquers the White House,” read a headline on the Web site of the National Democratic Party of Germany, a political party that sympathizes with neo-Nazi groups. In an accompanying article, Jürgen Gansel, a party leader and an elected lawmaker in the German state of Saxony, blamed Obama’s victory on “the American alliance of Jews and Negroes.”
Or in the case of Michelle Obama’s cousin, Jewish Negroes.
Offensive opinions have also originated from the other end of the political spectrum. Die Tageszeitung, a Berlin newspaper that supports socialist and leftist causes, predicted Obama’s election in June when it published a large front-page photo of the White House under the headline, “Uncle Barack’s Cabin.”
The reference was to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” an anti-slavery book written by 19th-century author Harriet Beecher Stowe. But editors of the paper insisted they did not mean to imply that Obama would be an Uncle Tom, or a submissive slave. Rainer Metzger, a deputy editor, said the headline was satirical.
“I’m sure 99 percent of our readers would understand it correctly,” he told the German magazine Der Spiegel. “As for the rest, well, tough luck. You can’t please everybody.”
Yonis Ayeh, a board member with the Initiative of Black People in Germany, a group that criticized the Die Tageszeitung article when it was published, said racial prejudices are common, if not always blatantly expressed.
“Sometimes you have people or groups who say, ‘We are the left wing, we are the good ones, we are not racist,’ ” he said. “But it doesn’t matter if you are right wing or left wing. It’s not just the neo-Nazis and the skinheads.”
Reminds me of those who deny the existence of leftwing antisemitism (as opposed to anti-Zionism, of course).
