It’s not just Muslims who are becoming more radicalized in Europe. FPPassport notes that anti-Semitism as well as anti-Islamic and anti-foreign sentiment are on the rise throughout the region. In Switzerland, for example, there is an effort to initiate a new — and absurdly harsh — deportation policy in which “entire immigrant families would be kicked out of Switzerland if their children committed a violent crime, a drug offense, or benefits fraud.” FPPassport goes on to point out that this isn’t some fringe group who is pushing this measure. In fact…
…it’s the country’s largest party—the Swiss People’s Party.
This increasingly xenophobic — and often racist — trend is not just confined to Switzerland, however.
Uniformed Austrian soldiers recently put a Nazi video on YouTube. Last month, eight men from India were chased down and beaten up by a mob of 50 Germans yelling “Foreigners out!” In eastern Germany, where far-right heckling is a “fact of life” at soccer matches, neo-Nazis took things to a new low in May by targeting a youth match and calling a 14-year-old goalkeeper a “Jewish pig.” And last year when Germany hosted the World Cup, a former government spokesman warned dark-skinned visitors to avoid “no-go” areas where racism is a problem.
Indeed, Germany is a particularly worrying case. As a recently-released EU report indicates, “incidents of racist violence and crime in Germany increased by 14 percent between 2005 and 2006, going up from 15,914 incidents in 2005 to 18,142 in 2006.“