GLOBAL JOURNALIST: Is it xenophobia, or is it nationalism?

Charles Davis, associate professor, Missouri School of Journalism: In recent days, the French government has rounded up hundreds of Roma people and deported them to Romania. In Russia, skinheads attacked people at a rock concert. In the United States, thousands of people converged at Washington, D.C. to take back the Civil Rights movement for a pro-Christian, anti-tax picnic of sorts. But what is really going on here? Glenn Beck represents a simmering nativism popping up in countries across the globe. Is nationalism veiled as xenophobia in the U.S. and abroad? To discuss this, we have Pastor Howard Bess, retired Baptist minister and columnist of The Frontiersman and Consortium News, in Palmer, Alaska; Michael Schwirtz, reporter of the Moscow Bureau, New York Times, Moscow; and Leigh Phillips, reporter of the EU Observer, Brussels. I’ll start with Leigh in Brussels. The removal of the Roma in France has been dominating headlines across the EU. It is certainly not the only instance of a nativist response in the EU to the “other.” Could you lead us through the state of xenophobia in the EU and underscore the removal of the Roma in France?