The psychosis of avian influenza has also reached Germany and there’s no shortage of comments on it in the press. Matthias Kamann writing in Die Welt (22/2) observes: “ An animal disease as a national pathology. Avian influenza is becoming a surrogate for the elaboration of unresolved problems: economists have led Germany’s anxieties to a level of hysteria and calculated how much growth would be lost with 100,000 deaths as a result of bird flu. The Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe has just rejected the law on the safety of air navigation and the army is being sent to rot in Rügen. And the false report about a proposal to cancel the world football championship [due to be held in Germany] betrays how oppressed we are by the problems of security of this great event. But are not those the problems we ought to solve, instead of seeking to remove them by devoting our attention to the problems of veterinary medicine? Perhaps in that way the mind could be free to seek more rational strategies against avian influenza. But politics have been caught in the trap of the escalation of the media society. Those who don’t speak immediately of catastrophe would have to resign as soon as even a single person falls sick with the disease. The politicians ought to fear the virus of panic as much as the H5N1 virus. For them there remains the hope of rubbing their eyes in astonishment when confronted by a sudden end to all this, as in the case of BSE“. Writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Stephan Börneke points out: “ Much of what happens at Rügen … is a concession to an irritated public opinion. But it is debatable whether the military operations can really circumscribe the epidemic. […] Perhaps the vaccinations, though not devoid of problematic implications, represent the best response to keep the avian epidemic under control. The fact that they have so far not been taken into consideration also depends on trade relations, because a vaccinated bird, since difficult to distinguish from an infected bird, cannot be exported. But this cannot be an argument to be taken into consideration, at the present time“. The weekly Der Spiegel (20/2) also devotes attention to the issue: “ Virologists and politicians are surprised by the rapidity with which the dreaded avian influenza has reached German territory. Now the experts are quarrelling about how best to prevent the contagion: domiciliary arrest for chickens or mass vaccination?“. The death of the young Jew Ilan Salimi, kidnapped and tortured for 21 days by a gang of juvenile delinquents, has re-ignited the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in France. The daily Le Monde (23/02) dedicates an editorial to the question with the forthright title: “Barbarians”. “This crime says the paper committed by a gang of barbarians is destined to leave a lasting scar on our consciousness”. Even more so if we add to it “ the anti-Semitic component which makes it doubly repugnant. It will be up to the judiciary to determine, on the basis of the facts of the case, what influence (decisive or marginal) racism may have had in the choice of the victim. And it will be up to the judiciary not to diminish its scale so as to prevent conflict between the communities”. The risk is there, at least to judge from the words of the Procurator of the Republic in Paris: “No evidence permits us to connect this murder to a racist motivation”. Very different was the view expressed by the Minister of the Interior Sarkozy, who spoke of “anti-Semitism as an amalgam” explaining that those who committed this crime “acted in the conviction that Jews are rich”. “This is called anti-Semitism says the editorial ; the question of money is one of the threads that connects traditional forms of anti-Semitism with the newer forms linked with the Israeli-Palestinian question”. Again on the question of anti-Semitism, the British daily The Guardian (22/02) comments on the well-known case of the historian David Irving, notorious for his theories denying the Holocaust. For this reason he was put on trial in Vienna and sentenced to three years in prison. After the sentence, Irving declared that his ideas had been wrong. A volte-face justified, he explained, by the fact that only in recent times had he been able to read some documents of leading Nazis (especially Adolf Eichmann of the SS) on the genocide of the Jews, which had hitherto been concealed from him. “So Irving made a mistake says the editorial in the paper but it’s impossible to say whether he is lying or really convinced. One thing is certain: by acting like this he has shredded out all his work aimed at exonerating Hitler from the decision of the Final Solution and diminishing the Nazi responsibility for the genocide. The neo-Nazis in the world have lost an icon, and that’s good news”. “Mission impossible?” is the headline carried by the weekly The Catholic Herald (17/02) over an article dedicated to the forthcoming visit of the Pope to Turkey, in November. “The Pope is not a coward. He could not have accepted a more difficult challenge… The myth of Ali Agca, the attempted assassin of John Paul II, still alive in the far right, and the recent murder of Father Andrea Santoro are justifiable causes for alarm”. “We trust that Benedict XVI, in his first visit to an Islamic country, will avoid the policy familiar to some of calming Islamic sensibilities and privilege instead a more open approach. The Pope ought to condemn the persecutions of Muslims against Christian minorities. Only a few Turks are fundamentalists, and they might listen to him”.———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1454 N.ro relativo : 14 Data pubblicazione : 24/02/2006
