In a few hours, the police are expected to destroy an illegal Roma camp. Protesters are gathering, many fear riots.

“A poll has been released showing nearly two-thirds of people now support equal marriage in Northern Ireland,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports.

Michael Sells of Tablet Magazine has written an informative article well worth reading.

“Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has said hundreds of Roma migrants left without an overnight base after police cleared out a huge ‘shanty town’ in Malmö are not Sweden's responsibility,” The Local reports. The Prime Minister tells journalists that the responsibility for ensuring the migrants have roofs over their heads remained with Romania and Bulgaria.

Ana Swanson of the Washington Post interviews British journalist Michael Booth, who has written a book on the Nordic countries. He makes an important note on Denmark’s high taxation: “Danes do tend to feel that they get value for money, but we should not overlook the fact that the majority of Danes either work for, or receive benefits from, the welfare state.”

“Sweden’s Migration Minister Morgan Johansson has urged refugees in northern Germany to stay put, after declaring that the Nordic nation is now unable to guarantee beds for all asylum seekers,” The Local reports.

I don’t think people fleeing war care about beds. Their goal is survival.

“The name of the shop is ‘Hitler’ and I like him because he was the the most anti-Jewish person,” 20-year-old Hijaz Abu Shanab tells the Jerusalem Post.

Images: Israellycool.

I think this is a stunning portrait.

Israeli cartoonist Shlomo Cohen comments on Sweden’s naïve attitude towards Palestinian authorities. The Swedish government is one of the biggest financial backers of the Palestinian leadership and has a fondness for downplaying its links to terrorism.

“The group’s inaugural meeting took place on October 18 and it now has 60 members,” Jerusalem Post reports.

It great news that the European de facto capital gets an organisation like this. Far too many gay Jews feel they have to choose between the two identities.

“The Mormon Church has deemed married same-sex couples to be apostates of the faith and their children ineligible for baptism in a reaffirmation of opposition to gay marriage,” Reuters reports.

There is more than a one-in-three chance Britain will vote to leave the EU, condemning the economy to near recession and profound uncertainty, leading investment bank Morgan Stanley has warned.

Tonight, people will remember the pogrom that happened in Europe in 1938. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is still alive on this continent and it’s therefore unfortunate that many of those planning to commemorate the pogrom choose not to address it. The online “watchdog” Kultwatch writes (in my translation):

The night between 9 and 10 November 1938 more than 1,400 synagogues and prayer houses were burned and destroyed, about 7,500 Jewish shops and even homes vandalised, 400 Jews were murdered, and 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The Nazis called it Kristallnacht, but we prefer the term November Pogrom, which was a multi-day pogrom, directed against Jews. Now, on Monday, a series of commemorative demonstrations are held in cities around Sweden. We have looked at the events pages on Facebook for twenty-one of these. Several are clean memorials, but the majority focus exclusively on contemporary victims of racism.To consider and take action against racist structures and trends in today's society is a given. Not to do so means to assume the role of spectators. What frightens us is the ignorance of, and invisible fulfilment of Jewish contemporary vulnerability. Of the twenty-one different events, fourteen mention modern-day racism, but only two (Helsingborg and Gothenburg) mentioned contemporary anti-Semitism, attacks on Jews, and Jewish victims of present-day racism.

The text in its original Swedish: “Natten mellan den 9 och 10 november 1938 brändes och förstördes över 1 400 synagogor och bönehus, omkring 7 500 judiska butiker och även bostäder vandaliserades, 400 judar mördades och 30 000 judiska män skickades till koncentrationsläger. Nazisterna kallade det Kristallnatten, vi föredrar benämningen Novemberpogromen, vilket var en flera dagar lång pogrom riktad mot judar. Nu på måndag hålls en rad minnesmanifestationer på orter runt om i Sverige. Vi har tittat på eventsidorna på Facebook för 21 av dessa. Flera är rena minnesstunder, men majoriteten fokuserar både på att minnas och på att ta ställning för nutida offer för rasism. / Att ta ställning och agera mot rasistiska strukturer och tendenser i dagens samhälle är en självklarhet. Att inte göra det innebär att inta rollen som åskådare. Vad som skrämmer oss är dock oförståelsen för, och osynliggörandet av, judars samtida utsatthet. Av 21 olika events nämner 14 av dessa nutida rasism, men endast på 2 av dessa (Helsingborg och Göteborg) nämns nutida antisemitism, attacker riktade mot judar och judars utsatthet i dagsläget.”

The Norway’s twelve bishops have voted to back the creation of a special liturgy for the marriage of same-sex couples, opening the way for the first gay church marriages within the next two years.

David Cameron has delivered a speech in which he set out the four targets of his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the European Union:

• Restricting access to in-work benefits until British and European citizens have worked for four years.
• Protection for Britain and other countries outside the eurozone to ensure that they cannot have rules for the single market imposed by eurozone countries.
• To “write competitiveness into the DNA of the whole European Union”.
• Exempting Britain from the EU’s founding principle to forge an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe and to instead bolster the role of national parliaments.

An anti-racism event in northern Sweden has grabbed global headlines for failing to include a Jewish speaker, but the man who organised it defends the event, The Local reports.

The story has been covered by Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel.

The news just came and few details are known. This means that those 25,000 people in Malmö who work in Copenhagen will have to bring their passport for the first time since the 1950s.

“Police officials in France say there has been an explosion in a bar near a Paris stadium and a shootout in a Paris restaurant, leaving at least 18 dead,” France 24 reports.

Update: It’s also been reports about an ongoing hostage situation at a restaurant.

Update: Some news agencies say about 100 people dead.

Update: Media reports that terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire.

Update: Two suicide bombers where amongst the terrorists.

Update: At least 154 people killed in Paris attacks, CNN reports.

“Two men who French police are seeking to trace in connection with the Paris attacks registered as refugees with Greek authorities earlier this year,” AFP reports.

What the Islamic State and other terrorist organisations want is for the rest of us to fear them and thereby subscribe to their polarised worldview. Don’t let them fool you into racism and xenophobia!

“The Paris terrorist attacks were carried out with the help of three French brothers living in Belgium, the authorities said on Sunday,” the New York times reports.

Yair Lapid:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not connected, in any way, to the wave of mass murder being carried out in the name of fundamentalist Islam. In fact, even ISIS doesn’t claim that it attacked the heart of Paris because of the Palestinians. In their own words, they did it because of the situation in Syria. That makes it even more unclear why [Swedish Foreign] Minister Wallström was looking for an excuse for them at our expense.

“[Swedish Foreign Minister] Margot Wallström ended up in hot water after she told Swedish broadcaster SVT that the decades-old conflict in Palestine was a factor of radicalisation in the Middle East, hours after Friday's terror attacks in Paris,” The Local writes. Her boss, however, knows better:

But Löfven, who heads up Sweden’s centre-left Social Democrat-Green coalition, hit back on Tuesday, saying the criticism levelled against the foreign minister was unfair.In a comment to the TT news agency he described her remarks as “long and proper reasoning about what creates terrorism and that people are drawn to these movements. It is not linked to criticism of Israel. It is a legitimate discussion.”

This rationalizing is unfounded. The Islamic State hasn’t in any document or broadcast said that its actions in Europe are a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their objectives are purely religious. In fact, it has explicitly stated that it opposes the radical Palestinian terror organisation Hamas.

David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times explains:

The upstart polemicists of the Islamic State, however, counter that its critics and even the leaders of Al Qaeda are all bad Muslims who have gone soft on the West. Even the officials and fighters of the Palestinian militant group Hamas are deemed to be “unbelievers” who might deserve punishment with beheading for agreeing to a cease-fire with Israel, one Islamic State ideologue recently declared.

Religious radicalisation is far too often explained as a symptom of oppression, but the truth is that the most radical theologians generally come from a religiously liberal background. The parents of many extreme jihadists are likewise often secularised Muslims. To combat the root of radicalisation, we must understand that it thrives on a lack of religious knowledge, which allows for the most naïve and extreme interpretations to be unchallenged. A person with a healthy relationship with religion knows its complexity.

About an hour ago, Sweden’s security service revealed at a press conference on Wednesday that police were hunting a suspected terrorist and that the terror threat level has been raised to “high” for the first time in history.

“All EU citizens would face much tighter and systematic ID checks when leaving or entering Europe’s 26-country free-travel area, under new demands France is making of its EU partners following the terror attacks in Paris,” the Guardian reports.

“Sweden terror suspect held after police raid,” The Local reports.

“The Islamic State group is aggressively pursuing development of chemical weapons, setting up a branch dedicated to research and experiments with the help of scientists from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region,” the Associated Press reports.

“Europe’s first woman suicide bomber was a party animal with a string of boyfriends who had shown no interest in religion,” Daily Mail reports.

This is yet another example of how those with the least knowledge about religion are more prone to the most extremist theology.

שבת שלום!

Stiftsgården Åkersberg, Höör, Sweden.

“A whopping 91 percent of respondents told major pollsters Sifo that they think consumption of narcotics should remain illegal,” The Local reports. “Seven percent opted against a ban and three percent said they did not know.”

The problem is that the ban doesn’t work. People who use cannabis recreationally are rarely a problem in proportion to the cost of police hunting them down and courts fining them. Meanwhile, the much small group of people who are at risk of heavy hard-drugs addiction don’t seek help out of fear of being put in prison. Drug use is, and ought to be seen as, a social and a health issue and not a criminal one.

A painting from 1630 by Rembrandt (1606–1669).

“A shopping centre in Sweden forced a youth group it had commissioned to paint a mural to cover up a hijab they had put on a woman by concealing it under a haircut,” The Local reports.

“The man who police say staged a deadly shooting attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that offers abortion services said ‘no more baby parts’ after his arrest,” Huffington Post reports.

“It will blow a lot, both onshore and offshore,” meteorologist Charlotta Eriksson says.

I just had to post that quote.

Wikipedia: “Computer rage is physical or verbal abuse toward a computer or computer-related accessory due to heightened anger or frustration.”

That’s how I feel now after a weekend of trying to update my database. Nothing works the way I want it to. Aargh!

“Remember that the physical demolition of the iron curtain started with the cutting of the barbed wire fence between Hungary and Austria,” Timothy Garton Ash of the Guardian writes. “Now it is Hungary that has led the way in building new fences, and its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in stoking prejudice.”