Remember the principled stance taken by many in Denmark when the cartoons featuring Muhamed were published there? There clearly is a dark side in Copenhagen as well, evincing serious anti-semitism [ht MA]. This is tragic. I hope everyone fights against things like this, regardless of the ethnic group.
As MA said when he sent me the link, "Not so wonderful Copenhagen."The son of a Muslim father and an Israeli Jewish mother, Jacob began his education at a private Muslim school, where he was bullied because of his Jewish background and had to keep his distance from the other kids during recess. When he was transferred to a regular school, the abuse grew even worse; it wasn’t even safe for him to walk home alone. In eighth grade, his teacher told him to say that he was Palestinian and that his mother was Russian. “I had to lie about who I was,” he recalls. But it didn’t work. They knew. Eventually, a group of his classmates ganged up on him and stabbed him in the leg. “You can’t go here anymore,” his teacher said. ...
Jacob’s testimony was featured in the media – and, as Jyllands-Posten now reports, the hubbub just made his life even tougher. Some time after the hearing, two Middle Eastern men passed him in the street. “That’s him,” one of them said. “Jew pig!” shouted the other. On Facebook, strangers called him a “Jew pig” and “Nazi pig” and “Jew dog.” (Plainly, the imagination of these people is severely limited.)
In the wake of his moment in the media spotlight, Jacob’s mother was advised by several school officials to transfer him to a school outside of Nørrebro. She was stunned by the suggestion: Jacob had lived in the neighborhood almost his entire life; neither of them wanted to flee. But in August, he finally gave up, packed up, and moved out. He now resides in what he considers a safer part of town. Not that it’s made his life a bed of roses: a couple of weeks ago, he was on Strøget, the main pedestrian street in Copenhagen – Tourist Central, basically – when a couple of “Arabic kids” grabbed hold of him and made a serious effort to drag him away with them. Who knows what they had in mind. Fortunately, two companions of Jacob’s managed to come to his aid. (As someone familiar with Strøget, which is almost always quite a busy, bustling thoroughfare, I can’t help but notice that no passersby appear to have tried to help.)