The disturbing turmoil in the United States over Muslims and immigrants is not at all an isolated case. Columnist Clovis Rossi of Brazil’s Folha newspaper writes that even nations considered the most tolerant in the world are experiencing right-wing upsurges that bode ill for the virtues of tolerance and coexistence.
For Brazil’s Folha, Clovis Rossi writes in part:
for the first time in that country’s history, the extreme right, the Swedish Democrats, overcame the minimum electoral barrier (4 percent of the vote) to gain access to Parliament. They received 5.7 percent and will occupy 20 seats in a Parliament of 157.
Sweden, a paradigm of coexistence and tolerance, would be the last country to open the doors of its Parliament to a xenophobic and anti-immigrant movement. In fact, they would be the second to last, if The Netherlands, the previous such paradigm, had not succumbed and given the Liberty Party of Geert Wilders the third-strongest political role in the country, moving in the June elections from 9 to 24 chairs in Parliament (not to mention breaking one of the oldest records of tolerance that was one of the nicest characteristics of the Dutch). … To give you a, let us say, more universal idea of who Wilders is, last week he was the guest of honor of the Tea Party march, the ultraconservative movement in America.
Extreme right-wing parties are now part of the Italian government and occupy seats in the Danish, Hungarian, Austrian and Bulgarian Parliaments, not to mention the possibility that Wilders’ Liberty Party could end up participating in the Dutch government (negotiations for forming that government are creeping along). And that is to say nothing of the anti-Roma actions of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy government.
One gets the clear impression that the flood of immigrants seeking European (or American) paradise will no longer be tolerated. As long as they were needed to fill jobs that the locals rejected because of low salaries or poor conditions, they were accepted. Now their numbers haunt the citizenry. Looking at the Swedish case alone, 14 percent of their 9.3 million inhabitants are foreign. To that you can add 6 percent who, though born in Sweden, are children of foreigners.
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