Friday, October 30, 2015

Germany deports Turkish Islamic preacher who called for murder of Jews


The Jerusalem Post reports:

Germany has deported radical Islamic preacher, Nusret C. to Turkey after he called for the obliteration of Jews, Israel and the US, local news reports said.

“The Jews are the worst enemies of Islam,” said Nusret, according to a spokesman of the West German city of Offenbach, where he lived. Nusret rejects equality between men and women and advocates the implementation of Islamic Shari’a law.

The news outlet Hessenschaue.de reported on Tuesday about Nusret’s extradition, which took place on Friday.

Nusret is a leading member of the radical Islamic group Ismail Aga Cemaat. The group is recognized as a threat to Germany’s constitutional democracy and is monitored by the domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office to Protect the Constitution.  Read more.

France: Authorities blamed far-right for Muslim antisemitic attack


A few days ago a Muslim attacked a rabbi and two other Jews next to a synagogue.

I missed the fact that immediately following the attack the French authorities announced this was a far-right attack.  How are Jews expected to take this seriously?



Via The Daily Mail:
A judicial source said the man had ‘far-right tendencies’, and was known for targeting people from a ‘religious and ethnic background,’ including Jews and Muslims.

The source said: ‘He was shouting anti-Semitic slogans during the attack, and kept them up once he had been arrested.’  more
To make matters worse, this article is still online.  And so anybody researching this story would chalk it up as a 'far-right' attack.

German officials: Muslim leaders must help fight anti-Semitism

Via Times of Israel:
Muslim leaders in Germany must help fight anti-Semitism within their ranks, representatives of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union said this week in a meeting with the country’s top Jewish leaders.
Members of the board of the Central Council of Jews in Germany met with Merkel and several top government representatives on Monday. In a statement about the meeting, the CDU said party leaders made it clear that Muslim associations in Germany bear some responsibility for fighting anti-Semitism within the Muslim population. They also emphasized that “every form of anti-Semitism must be forcefully challenged. Israel’s right to exist is part of German identity.”

The CDU statement also said that Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council, had expressed concern about anti-Semitism among young Muslims and noted that many of the refugees now arriving in Germany come from countries where Israel is considered an enemy.

A spokesperson for Schuster told JTA that it was important not to paint all asylum seekers with one brush. The Central Council this week announced special programs in Cologne, Mannheim, Bielefeld and Berlin to reach out to the refugees as part of a nationwide Mitzvah Day on Nov. 15.   more

Netherlands: Jewish cemetery vandalized


Via CFCA:

Nine graves were vandalized in the Jewish cemetery in Oud-Beijerland.  Five tombstones were smashed and four were toppled.

Moldova: Jewish school vandalized with swastikas




Via CFCA:

A Jewish high-school in Chișinău (Kishinev) was vandalized this week with swastikas and curses.

Europe: Funding NGO's "Excessive Force" Campaign



European governments talk about fighting antisemitism while at the same time funding groups that deny it. 

Via NGO Monitor:
Officials from the U.S. State Department, UN Secretary General’s office, and UNRWA have all made statements this week alleging that Israeli police and security personnel, in responding to stabbing and other terror attacks against civilians, have uncritically repeated NGO claims that Israel has used “excessive force” in stopping the attackers (See Appendix 1 for statements). Articles with similar content have appeared in the international media.

This theme is a central tactic of politicized NGOs (and the Palestinian Authority) that seek to criminalize Israeli self-defense, and it has appeared frequently in NGO statements since the terror campaign intensified on October 1. The NGO statements apply a unique, unrealistic and unreasonable standard to actions of Israeli security forces. They also erase efforts by emergency responders and doctors to save the lives of injured terrorists.   

In addition, despite video evidence and severely injured victims, a number of NGOs question or reject the reality of these terror attacks.  more

Thursday, October 29, 2015

UK: Pro-Palestinian arrested for mixing up "Israel" and "Jews"




Somebody should explain to this poor guy that while calling Israel a 'terrorist state' is a-okay in the UK, taking the next logical step and calling every Jew a terrorist is a horrible crime.

Via Jewish News:
A man was arrested in Hackney on Thursday after distributing leaflets accusing Jews of having “a terror mentality” and Israel of being a “terrorist state”.

The while male, who is believed to be a Muslim, was arrested for possession of racially inflammatory material under Section 23 of the Public Order Act 1986.

Shomrim North-East volunteer Chaim Hochauser, who was present at the time of the arrest, said: “We took some calls after Shabbos about a guy distributing ‘Free Palestine’ leaflets at Seven Sisters station. Then today, we took more calls, saying he was hanging these posters from trees all over Hackney. We reported it to the police and followed him. He boarded a bus, where he was arrested. Police found hundreds more of these leaflets in his bag.”

The volunteer force also alleged that the middle-aged man “hurled anti-Semitic abuse” before being arrested by Hackney Police, and provided the Jewish News with a copy of the leaflets, titled: “Israel: the state of organised terror.”  more

France: “A child celebrating a bar mitzvah in France today has not known anything but anti-Semitism"

David Horovitz @ The Times of Israel writes:

When I enter Sammy Ghozlan’s apartment in Netanya, he’s at his computer, looking at an email. It features a photograph of the metal shutters of a Jewish-owned optician store in Paris. Freshly painted graffiti on the shutters shows a Der Sturmer-style purple and black caricature of a hook-nosed Jew. It looks pretty horrible to me, but Ghozlan is not hugely fazed. Routine, he calls it wearily. Unremarkable. Just one more sign of the times.

A former Paris-area police commissioner, Ghozlan in retirement established a liaison organization between French police and the Jewish community, the BNVCA (National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism), alerting both sides to attacks and threats against Jews. He made aliya this summer, but will be paying frequent return visits to France, he says, and is still running the BNVCA. 

I’d arranged to meet Ghozlan after reading an August 2015 Vanity Fair profile of him, headlined “Paris is Burning,” which described him variously as a “Sephardic Columbo” and a “beat-up version of Yves Montand” and said he had made his police counter-terrorism reputation by identifying Palestinian sympathizers rather than neo-Nazis as the perpetrators of a 1980 synagogue bombing on Rue Copernic in which four people were killed. In retirement, it said, he has been “almost alone in his fight to protect the Jews of the banileues” — the suburbs surrounding Paris.

The question I most want to ask Ghozlan, 72, is whether his decision to move to Israel signals that there is no future for the Jews in France. And the answer he gives me is revelatory: “It’s not that there’s no future for the Jews in France. It’s that there is no future for the Jews in France that they want,” he says.

France is not 1930s Germany for the Jews, he elaborated. It’s not the regime, the government, that is persecuting them. Quite the reverse. The government is trying to protect them. But they are persecuted nonetheless, he says, to the point where you cannot wear a skullcap or a Magen David outdoors for fear of attack by Islamic extremists, cannot leave overtly Jewish material in your car for fear of it being torched. Which is why a record 10,000 French Jews are expected to have moved to Israel by the time this calendar year is over, up from 7,000 in 2014, and why there is every likelihood that 2016 will see a still higher exodus. [...]

Ghozlan even asserts that “the French public doesn’t care when the Jews get attacked. If there had been no attack on (the offices of the satirical magazine) Charlie Hebdo (in which 12 people were killed in January), the attack on the Hyper Cacher (kosher grocery two days later, in which four people were killed) would not have been a big deal in France.”  [...]

He points out that the Jews of France now need to live “under protection the whole time: schools and synagogues under military protection,” and says that’s not tenable. “A child celebrating a bar mitzvah in France today has not known anything but anti-Semitism,” he says. “And it’s the same in Belgium, in Spain and in Italy. And now with the migrants, Arab Muslims, you’ll see more Islamism and it’s going to get worse.” 

Does that spell more attacks like Hyper Cacher? “Yes, and the government knows it,” Ghozlan says emphatically. “The intelligence services have been a failure.” Attacks such as Hyper Cacher were carried out by suspects who were known to the authorities and yet were not intercepted. And more potential terrorists are being created all the time, he warns. “Those who carry out such attacks are seen as heroes of Islam. Petty criminals get out of jail and want to do an act of ‘Islamic penitence,'” he says. “They used to ask my friend, an imam, whether killing Jews will get them to paradise.”[...]  Read the whole piece here.

Poland: Vandals spray swastikas on set of Israeli film in Poland


An Israeli film crew who arrived in Lodz, Poland, to begin shooting director Avi Nesher's movie "The Sins" found the set defaced by swastikas and knives. 

Nesher, whose films have won multiple awards in Israel and international acclaim, said that the day before his crew arrived, the crew of another movie had been involved in an incident with local residents. 

"When the residents were informed that the next day an Israeli film would begin shooting, [their behavior] crossed over into violent anti-Semitism, what they called an 'intifada,'" Nesher said. 

In light of the anti-Semitic threats, Polish police decided to ramp up security on and around the set, and assign the actors bodyguards.

"The Sins," set in 1977, tells the story of two sisters who are driven apart by a dark secret but are forced to work together to keep their parents from discovering it.

UK: "Death To Da Jew" graffiti




Via Jewish News (h/t CFCA):
Anti-Semitic graffiti was daubed on a building in Stamford Hill, as police investigate.

Local volunteer neighbourhood watch group Shomrim posted a tweet on Tuesday evening which showed the hateful message “death to da Jew.” in capitals.  more




Europe: EU greasing the wheels of hate

Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor, writes @ Israel Hayom

In order to maintain a prolonged terror campaign, it is imperative to cultivate a deep-seated hatred. This hatred reverberates with university graduate students, law students, phone company employees with a steady and decent paycheck, and even the minds of 13-year-old children. More than anything, however, such a campaign requires funding. Indeed, along with the Palestinian Authority, this terror industry is propelled by European elements, including those with affiliations to European Union governments. Despite their declared ambition of promoting peace and understanding, they are essentially providing this terror campaign with all the fuel it needs -- incitement, justification and glorification.

Incitement
Imams in mosques and the leaders of Fatah and Hamas use the old libel of "Al-Aqsa is in danger" to incite the Palestinian masses. Other organizations, however, also contribute to this narrative, which has proved its effectiveness. For example, the Alternative Information Center, which is registered in Israel and is directly funded, among other sources, by the EU, published a call for "solidarity with the popular Palestinian resistance," while warning that "fanatical groups of settlers supported by the government ... are desecrating the [Temple Mount] compound ... and are calling to destroy the mosque." In addition to accusing Israel of colonialist policies of ethnic cleansing, it is also claimed that Israel and "Zionist militias" are responsible for the destruction of hundreds of churches and mosques since 1948. 


Justification

In an emergency report published by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza-based organization funded by European governments (including some from the EU), Israeli victims are uniformly described as "settlers," which is supposed provide political "justification" for the violence. Moreover, the report turns the attacker into the victim and blames the Israeli security forces for committing crimes. The photograph of 13-year-old terrorist Ahmad Saleh Manasra, showing him wounded and bleeding after being neutralized, became the poster child of Palestinian propaganda; similar to Muhammad al-Dura during the Second Intifada -- used to portray Israel as a child killer. While completely ignoring video footage documenting his terrorist attack and eyewitness testimonies, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights writes in its report that Ahmad was on his way to buy a dove when he was attacked. And if that claim is not enough to render the organization's professionalism and objectives a complete and utter joke -- there are no dove stores in Pisgat Ze'ev either.

Glorification
The Palestinian Bar Association granted the terrorist Muhannad Halabi an honorary degree. At the onset of the current wave of terror, Halabi, a law student, murdered two civilians in Jerusalem and wounded a mother and her toddler son. Even a statutory body such as this uses propaganda to glorify murderers, but receives funding from the EU. The amounts are hard to believe: The PBA received part of a 21 million euro grant delivered in August 2013, after reportedly receiving a similar grant worth 35 million euros over the three previous years. Between 2011 and 2013, the EU gave some 1.5 million euros directly to the PBA to "enhance the professionalism of Palestinian lawyers."

European symbols and images of European representatives in Jerusalem adorn every page of the PBA's website.  Read more.

Spain: Iberia captain welcomes passengers to Palestine as plane lands in Tel Aviv


Via Jerusalem Post:
The captain of a flight from Spain enraged Israeli passengers Wednesday after announcing that a plane approaching Ben-Gurion Airport "would be landing shortly in Palestine," Channel 2 reported.

According to the report, the captain first made the overhead announcement in Spanish and afterward stated in English that in a few minutes the plane would descend into Tel Aviv.

Passengers traveling on the aircraft operated by Spanish airline Iberia said that the captain never mentioned the word "Israel" during his in-flight updates.   more

Germany: Kippah-wearing Jew harassed by Arab men

Via Tagesspiegel:

An Israeli-German wearing a kippah was attacked in a Berlin metro station by four Arab-speakers. 

The man had to pass the four as he exited the station, at which point the men pushed him and insulted him in Arabic (a language he understood).  One of the men apparently spat on him as he left.

The Israeli did not respond and after the incident called the police.  But the four men had disappeared by the time a patrol car showed up.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

UK: Labour Jewish veteran Gerald Kaufman claims 'Jewish money' has influenced Conservatives

The Jewish Chronicle reports:

Veteran Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman has accused Israel of fabricating the recent knife attacks in the country and claimed the Conservative Party has been influenced by “Jewish money”.  Speaking at a Palestine Return Centre event in Parliament on Tuesday, Sir Gerald said that the British government had become more pro-Israel in recent years.

He said: “It’s Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative Party – as in the general election in May – support from the Jewish Chronicle, all of those things, bias the Conservatives.

“There is now a big group of Conservative members of parliament who are pro-Israel whatever government does and they are not interested in what Israel, in what the Israeli government does.

“They’re not interested in the fact that Palestinians are living a repressed life, and are liable to be shot at any time. In the last few days alone the Israelis have murdered 52 Palestinians and nobody pays attention and this government doesn’t care.”

Sir Gerald, Father of the House of Commons, then told the audience of 45 people that the Israeli government had made up the recent spate of violent attacks in order to allow it to “execute Palestinians”.
The Manchester Gorton MP said “a friend of mine who lives in East Jerusalem” had emailed him with the accusations about Israel fabricating the attacks.  Sir Gerald then read from the letter: “More than half the stabbing claims were definitely fabricated. The other half, some were true, the others there was no way to tell since they executed Palestinians and no one asked questions. 

“Not only that, they got to the point of executing Arab-looking people and in the past few days they killed two Jewish Israelis and an Eritrean just because they looked Arab.

“They fabricated a stabbing story to justify the killings before they found out they were not Palestinians.”

Sir Gerald has not responded to a JC request for a comment on his remarks.  The comments were recorded by blogger David Collier.

Mr Collier said of the experience: “What was it like? It took a while to digest. Yes, you pick up straight away on the 'Jewish money' comment, but as he rolls into the influence this has on the Conservative Party and how this plays out on foreign policy, you start questioning as to whether you are really hearing this.

"Is someone really pushing this, in Westminster, in 2015? And nobody in the room raised a protest. How did I feel? It was sickening.”  Read more.

Greece: Members of far-right and antisemitic group arrested for terror attacks


Via Against Antisemitism:
Athensvoice.gr reported that the members of “Team Epsilon” have published on their website violent diatribes against the Greek political system, “the Jews” and “the Zion-Nazis” (they suggest in their texts that even Nazism is a creation of Zionism), but also against the Orthodox Church and “the Free Masons”, while they glorify the “purity” and the “independence” of the Greek nation.  more


France: Politician Blames Media for Attacks on Jews


Via The Forward:
A French Jewish politician from Marseille suggested that the recent assault against three Jews there was connected to hostile media coverage of Israel in France.

Hagay Sobol, a regional alderman for the Socialist Party and vice president of Marseille’s Edmond Fleg Jewish Community Center, made the claim Sunday on Twitter in reference to the stabbing the previous day of a Jewish man by an attacker who also hit and accosted a rabbi and his 19-year-old son. The stabbing victim, 44, was seriously hurt but is no longer in danger.

“In this anti-Semitic attack, we cannot exclude the media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Sobol wrote.  more

UK: 343 scholars pledge boycott of Israeli universities


Via Jerusalem Post:
A week after representatives from the British arts world signed a letter that condemned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, more than 300 scholars affiliated with British academic institutions signed a letter pledging not to cooperate with Israeli academic institutions.

The letter, which was signed by 343 scholars, was set to appear on Tuesday in a full-page ad in The Guardian, according to organizers of the letter of commitment.  more


Denmark: "The Jewish State should be wiped off the map", says TV4 editor

This story is from two weeks ago. 



Via Ekstrabladet:

Torben Lund is a former minister for the Social Democrats, and a current editor at TV4.

He recently posted about the Israel-Palestine conflict on Facebook, saying as follows: " The Jewish State is led by terrorist pigs, Israel should be wiped off the map"

The statement was made in a group called "20,000 signatures for Palestine in the media".  The group posted a picture of a Palestinian girl that it claimed Israel executed for no reason.  Ekstrabladet could not find anything about this girl and where the picture had come from.

Lund explains he didn't mean "wiping Israel off the map" in its literal, physical sense.  He 'just' means that Israel should be dismantled as an apartheid, terrorist regime.  He understands the need to establish a Jewish state after everything the Jews went through during the Holocaust, but he thinks the way it was done is the biggest security-policy mistake since WWII.

Lund has previously been accused of antisemitism, but he says he's only criticizing Israel and that's not antisemitic.

"I have nothing against Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus.  But I have a problem with the way the Jewish state, Israel, is run.  I've been accused of being an antisemite, and for some strange reason that's always done when people criticize Israel."


In February, Lund accused Jewish journalists in Denmark of "Jewish propaganda" against Muslims.  But, remember, he has noting against Jews, he's just a 'critic' of Israel.

France: France2 sets out to prove Jews are lying about antisemitism


Vincent and Nativel are not the first reporters to conduct this experiment, nor are they the first to which nothing happened.  Sometimes Jews are attacked, and sometimes they're not.  But they are the first to cast doubts about the experiences of a Jew.   

Their logic: "If we spent X hours in the streets and weren't attacked, then obviously a Jew who experienced otherwise must be lying."

Way to go French media!

Here's my theory: Jews are fleeing France because the French media (and police and general public etc), don't take Jewish concerns seriously.  They speak high and mighty about fighting antisemitism, but when it comes down to it, the nitty-gritty little details, they'd rather prove Jews are lying then actually do something about the Jewish experience of fear.   

Via Algemeiner:
(...)

Two France 2 reporters, Thierry Vincent and Julien Nativel, decided to put Klein’s thesis about French antisemitism to the test, by producing a video of their own, using the same model. Vincent, though not a Jew, donned a kippah and spent days wandering around Paris. The finished product was released last week.

Lo and behold, as Vincent said he had expected, the results were nothing like those of Klein.
“In the 12 days [I spent] with a kippah [on my head], I experienced no violence or insult,” Vincent asserted. “Antisemitism exists, as all the numbers say, but how is my video so different from that of Zvika Klein? Who is this journalist?

Casting aspersions on Klein — whose newspaper is one of two media outlets owned by American-Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (the other one being Israel Hayom) – was easy for Vincent to do on political grounds. The left-wing leanings of his network, as well as its unfavorable coverage of Israel, are no secret.

Still, he did make a special trip to Jerusalem a few weeks ago to meet with Klein and interview him for a broadcast. It was during that session, Klein told The Algemeiner, that Vincent revealed he had created his own video, which yielded opposite results. Far from taunting him, Vincent showed, the public was friendly.

“I told him I was glad to hear that his experiences as a ‘Jew’ in Paris were positive, because all the French Jews I’ve spoken to say they’re afraid to be visibly Jewish,” Klein said. “And I stood by my own findings, which are more in sync with statistics about French antisemitism than his.”

When asked why Vincent and his crew were so keen on refuting his work, Klein used an exchange he had with Vincent’s cameraman – a non-Jew with a Jewish girlfriend. “He told me that when she saw my video, she said she had to leave the country. He then asked me in an accusatory way whether I grasped the detrimental effect such a video can have on French citizens.”  more

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Belgium: Arafat praised at funeral of Anne-Marie Lizin, a Israel-bashing politician

In the eulogy delivered at the funeral of Anne-Marie Lizin, a Belgian Socialist politician, who served as the President of the Senate from 2004 to 2007, Annie Sugier, from the Ligue du Droit International des Femmes, praised her for having met Yasser Arafat at a time when he was being shunned (persona non grata) by everybody.

Annie Sugier also mentioned that she had seen Lizin on television kissing Arafat, addiding that she was absolutely right to show fondness for him in public.

The Arafat mention was much appreciated and broadcast on Belgian TV channels and relayed by several newspapers.

Nobody mentioned that Ms. Lizin had met with Kadhafi too.

A committed Israel-basher, Ms. Lizin was the most prominent individual to take part in the violently anti-Israel Civil Society Forum in 2009 where she accused the Israeli army to have "acted in a racist attitude in their war in Gaza" (reported by the Kuwait News Agency). 

. NGO Monitor has the story about the Forum and the people she happily hobnobbed with:
"Organizers of a related event, the "Civil Society Forum" (April 17-19) have been presenting themselves as the representatives of all NGOs. In reality, however, they represent a small group of marginal NGOs, including Nord-Sud XXI, a Libyan-linked group that has issued statements accusing Israel of "genocide," "apartheid" and "atrocities." The president of the Conference of NGOs (CONGO), Liberato C. Bautista, has called for participation in the Civil Society Forum, but this is an individual endorsement ignoring the decision of the organization not to participate or support it. The Civil Society Forum is hosting a working group on the "Plight of the Palestinian People and fragmentation of their rights," the only nation-specific topic to be discussed. Other topics include "Intensified forms of discrimination after 9/11, in particular ethnic and religious profiling."

Netherlands: Government chooses terrorism-supporter to judge human-rights groups



It's okay.  She only supports terrorism against Jews.  No reason to get upset or anything.

Via NGO Monitor:
Meet Amira Yahyaoui, a Tunisian "human's rights" activist, a passionate supporter of flotillas and violent acts against Israelis, and one of the five judges chosen by the Dutch foreign ministry to decide who will win a $100,000 human rights "#Tulip_prize".
(...)
Here are some of Yahyaoui's Tweets
"He [the terrorist] is just 16 and was executed by the terrorist state Israel #Intifada" (17 October, 2015)
"Today all Arabs should unite for one priority in the region Palestine and condemn the horrible colonial power supported by "democracies"" (14 October, 2015)
"Today the Palestinian people's fight to evict settlements is called terror" (15 October, 2015)  more


France: French folly - the lessons of history have not been learned

Jerusalem Post editorial:

Will we soon be seeing the distinctive light blue helmets and berets of United Nations peacekeeping forces on the Temple Mount? If France has its way, the UN Security Council will accept a French motion and vote in favor of stationing “independent observers” on the site to “identify possible violations of the status quo.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear Sunday that he rejects the French proposal. But the UN, an institution not known for its impartiality when it comes to the Jewish state, might put pressure on Israel to accept a UN Security Council decision, if one is made.

The French and other nations apparently are under the impression that a UN peacekeeping force would succeed in calming tensions at a site that has been the epicenter of Muslim Palestinian violence.

Apparently, the lessons of history have not been learned.

Of all the many failures of the UN over the seven decades since it was established, UN peacekeeping forces stand out for special distinction as horribly inept and corrupt.

In the run-up to the Six Day War, UN Emergency Forces stationed along the border between Israel and Egypt were useless in preventing Egyptian aggression that led to the outbreak of war. The Egyptians simply told the UNEF to evacuate the area and UN Secretary-General U Thant facilitated.

UN peacekeeping forces on Israel’s northern border have hardly fared better. Called the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, this mission, first put in place back in 1978, is not particularly interim. UNIFIL was greatly expanded in the wake of the 2006 Second Lebanon War. It has an annual budget of nearly $500 million and employs more than 10,000 troops and nearly 1,000 civilian staff.

Under UN Security Council Resolution 1701, UNIFIL was charged with preventing Hezbollah from rearming and ensuring that southern Lebanon would be “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons” apart from the Lebanese Armed Forces and UNIFIL. But UNIFIL has failed colossally. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Hezbollah has been smuggling into Lebanon more advance weapons, including the Russian-made SS-N-26 Yakhont anti-ship missile.

And the failures of UN peacekeeping missions are not restricted to matters related to Israel. In 1994, in Rwanda, a UN Assistance Mission knew about the impending genocide.

But UN peacekeepers failed to stop Hutus from going on a months-long rampage that ended with the murder of nearly a million of the Tutsi minority.

In 1995, at Srebrenica, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men were summarily executed, most by Serbian shooting squads. And this happened after the town had been declared a “safe zone” and the UN had sent a Dutch protection force precisely to prevent such an atrocity. A photo of the Dutch commander drinking a toast with General Ratko Mladic, the Serb commander, demolished beyond repair the UN’s reputation.

More recent outrages include the revelation in 2005 that UN peacekeepers were pimping and raping young women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo instead of protecting them from sex traffickers. Similar allegations have been raised against UN forces deployed in Cambodia, Bosnia and Haiti.

Are these the “peacekeepers” the French want to entrust with guarding a site considered by devout Jews to be the single most holy place in the entire world and which is hallowed by Muslims as well? Do the French truly believe that UN peacekeeping forces with such a horrendous track record will succeed in calming the tensions, or do the French have another agenda? As Netanyahu pointed out in his rejection of the French proposal, no mention is made of the lies and incitement spouted by Palestinian Authority officials that Israel is attempting to change the status quo on the Temple Mount.  Read more.

UK: Jewish neighborhood trageted with car vandalism


Via Yeshiva World:
Police have arrested a suspect who went on a tire-slashing spree in an orthodox Jewish area of north London.

More than 60 tyres were slashed in a single night outside homes in Stoke Newington.

Shomrim of Stamford Hill tweeted a call for all victims to report any vandalism after claiming at least 19 cars were subject to criminal damage last night.

Shomrim told YWN that approximately 64 tires on 19 vehicles were slashed.  more

Netherlands: Church defaced with anti-refugee graffiti, Jewish star





Via NL Times:
A spray-painted message with an anti-refugee message appeared on the Norderlicht church in Wezep, Gelderland sometime between the late night house of Wednesday or early morning hours of Monday. The entryway wall was defaced with the phrase “Nee AZC,” or “No asylum-seeker center,” above the Jewish Star of David symbol.

On Thursday the church is scheduled to host an information evening about an expected arrival of refugees.  more

Germany: By transferring ‘collective will’ to Hitler, the German volk were entirely complicit in Nazi atrocities

So much for not knowing... then and now.

Reviewing two new books on the Third Reich @ The Spectator, Dominic Green argues that, by transferring ‘collective will’ to Hitler, the German volk were entirely complicit in Nazi atrocities

Jews ready to be gassed.
[...] Hitler was dedicated to ‘refighting, and this time winning’ the first world war. His people were less enthusiastic, but gambled on a short, winnable war. Instead, by December 1941, they were back in 1917: war against Russia, America and Britain, shortages of food, and terrible losses. Complicit, they ‘could not escape the consequences of a ruthless racial war of their own making’. Nor did they try too hard. In January 1942, the majority of Europe’s Jews were still alive. By the end of the year, most of them were dead. Gas and burning flesh could be smelt at the railhead 20 kilometres from the camp at Belzec — the home front knew what was happening. Hitler spoke of Ausmerzung (‘extermination’). Photographs of mass executions circulated. The BBC broadcast eyewitness reports. Jewish property was publicly auctioned and Jewish homes were given to bombed-out Aryans. ‘The Jews are being completely exterminated,’ a reserve policeman from Bremen wrote to his wife from the front, ‘please don’t think about it, that’s how it has to be.’

A nation of war criminals buried the enormity in ‘collusive semi-secrecy’, and a ‘spiral of silence’ about the ‘half-articulated, often discomforting awareness of how imperial and genocidal their war had become’. But collective guilt resurrected the image of the crime in paranoid fantasies of ‘Jewish retaliation’. Even before America had entered the war, many Germans believed a rumour about ‘all Germans in America having to wear a swastika on their left breast’ as a punishment ‘because the Jews have been treated so badly in Germany’. The RAF’s campaign of demolition was widely seen as ‘Jewish terror bombing’. In 1944, when Bomber Command had trouble dropping bombs within the prescribed three-mile radius of its targets, many Berliners succumbed to Stephen Spender’s fear, and believed that the British were targeting particular streets and neighbourhoods for their crimes against the Jews.

The worse the war went, the greater the intensification of Nazi ideology and methods, and the deeper the existential complicity of the people. Before the war, Hitler had suspected that the Germans would not be up to their historic destiny, but they embraced his sub-Wagnerian apocalypse of ‘victory or annihilation’, and went down with him to the end. In early April 1945, Victor Klemperer and his non-Jewish wife, masquerading as the Aryan ‘Kleinpeters’, listened as train passengers blamed ‘Bolshevism and international Jewry’, and averred their trust in the Führer. Defeat suited the Nazi world view: as the ‘Asiatic’ horde of Bolsheviks rampaged westwards, ‘Jewish’ capitalism filled the skies with American and British bombers.

The ‘dissonant dualism of German guilt’ began its long chorus. At first, ‘guilt’ meant identifying ‘the agents of Germany’s greatest disaster’. The arrival of the Americans and Russians reminded Germans of another guilt, genocide. Like Spender under the bombs, most Germans experienced their diminishment as diminished responsibility. Not everyone felt guilty, even after the American re-education campaigns of 1945 and 1946. In August 1947, when openly endorsing National Socialism was a capital crime, American investigators reported that 55 per cent of Germans considered National Socialism ‘a good idea that had been carried out badly’. Among respondents who were under 30, or had completed a high-school education, or were Protestants or West Berliners, this figure reached 60–68 per cent. ‘What a disgrace and what a humiliation to have been born amongst the Germans,’ the writer and publisher Hermann Kasack admitted.

Disgrace, humiliation, envy, resentment: power is a word whose meaning and motives we know too well. Superbly researched and clearly written, The German War is an important and significant book. The unholy hieroglyph at the heart of the 20th-century catastrophe has always been in plain sight.  Read more.

Germany: Holocaust memorial in Potsdam desecrated with swastika


Via PNN:

A commemoration plaque for the former synagogue in Potsdam was vandalized with a swastika.


Sweden: Terrorist spoke of "Jewish media-control of Western civilisation"


Via The Telegraph:
A far-Right sympathiser brandishing a sword killed a teacher and student at a school in Sweden on Thursday, in what police called one of the worst events in the country's history.

(...)

Lundin-Pettersson’s social media profiles revealed right-wing and anti-immigration sympathies.

According to Expo, a Swedish magazine which tracks the extreme Right, said the YouTube videos he watched speak of the “multicultural project from hell”, rue the “Jewish media-control of Western civilisation”, and underline “the importance of race in society,“ the reporters noted.   more

France: Attacked rabbi says media is trying to whitewash antisemitic attack


Jews are attacked in France by a knife-wielding Muslim saying "Allah Akbar" and all the French media can come up with is "Man attacks Jews?"

Via Algemeiner:
The rabbi attacked outside a Marseilles synagogue on Saturday morning, the Jewish Sabbath, conveyed his version of events in an exclusive interview with the French-Jewish publication Actualité Juive on Monday.
Wanting to set the record straight, and to “restore some truth,” the rabbi — referred to only by the initial “A” — was responding to what he considers to be misleading reports in the French press about the attack on him, his 19-year-old son and a friend, by a knife-wielding assailant.

For example, the French daily Le Figaro made a point of stressing that the assailant, a Muslim-Arab in his 30s, was drunk and mentally unstable when he lunged at his victims with a knife, after hurling antisemitic epithets at them and mumbling “Allahu Akbar.”

The rabbi, still in shock a mere two days after the assault, in which his friend suffered multiple stab wounds to the abdomen, told Actualité Juive that while he appeared to have been tipsy, “The perpetrator was not crazy.”

(...)

No less disturbing to the rabbi was the reaction of witnesses to the bloody scene. “We were attacked next to a café,” he recounted. “Patrons were there, but none intervened.”  more

Monday, October 26, 2015

UK: Labour councillor suspended after blaming Jews for 9/11, ISIS


Via Jewish News (h/t Watch: Antisemitism in Europe):
A Labour councillor and former Big Brother contestant has been suspended following comments that appeared to link Israel to the 9/11 attacks and Islamic State.

Community leaders called for action after Kensington and Chelsea councillor Beinazir Lasharie was alleged by The Sun to have posted video on Facebook entitled: “ISIS: Israeli Secret Intelligence service”.

She was reported to have written: “Many people know about who was behind 9/11 and also who is behind ISIS. I’ve nothing against Jews..just sharing it.” And later she took to the social network to add: “I’ve heard some compelling evidence about ISIS being originated from Zionists!”

A spokesperson for the Labour Party told the Jewish News she “was suspended this afternoon pending an investigation”. It’s believed to be the first suspension of an elected representative since the election of Jeremy Corbyn.  more

Netherlands: Antisemitism at Vitesse-Ajax game

Via AD:

Antisemitism in a Vitesse-Ajax game.  Vitesse Arnhem fans held up a sign saying "JHK", apparently initials for "Joden hebben kanker" ('Jews have cancer', the Dutch way of saying 'fucking Jews'). 

Fans also sang anti-Jewish songs against their 'Jewish' enemy, Ajax.

Germany: Security agencies concerned about migrant anti-Semitism


Via Jerusalem Post:
Germany’s security and intelligence agencies expressed alarm over the influx of refugees and migrants who harbor radical Islamic views and hatred of Jews, according to a Sunday report in Welt am Sonntag.

According to a security document obtained by the paper and read by top-level agency personnel, “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples as well as a different societal and legal understanding.”

(...)
The dire warnings from the security agencies and officials appear to be the first governmental statement about Arab anti-Semitism. In early October, in a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel, the head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, raised the community’s concern about Jew-hatred from immigrants and refugees from Muslim-majority countries.

He told Die Welt daily, that “among the people, who have sought refuge in Germany, many come from countries in which Israel is an enemy and are raised with this hostility toward Israel.”

He said the migrants “frequently carry over their resentments toward all Jews in general.”

Merkel assured Schuster for that reason, “We must take care of that.” She offered no specifics.  more

France lets Israel down at UNESCO (yet again)

European Jewish Press reports:

The US, Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Estonia voted against a Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which condemns the “aggression and illegal measures taken against the freedom of worship and access of Muslims to Al-Aqsa Mosque and Israel’s attempts to break the status quo since 1967.”
 
The text also condemns ongoing Israeli archaeological excavations ‘’near the Temple Mount and elsewhere in Jerusalem’s Old City.’’

The resolution proposal had originally sought to name the Western Wall a Muslim religious site, but Arab states struck that demand from the draft earlier in the day.

The Israeli foreign foreign ministry slammed the resolution, saying it “aims to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a religious confrontation and its adoption is a disgrace.”

The 58-member UNESCO Executive Council in Paris voted 26 in favor of the resolution, six against, with 15 abstentions.

A number of European countries, such as Austria, Spain, France, Italy and Macedonia were among those that abstained, along with Ethiopia, Angola and Albania.

An initial draft text of the resolution submitted on behalf of the Palestinian Authority had said UNESCO “affirms that the Western Wall is an integral part of al-Aksa Mosque/ al-Haram al-Sharif.”

Under pressure from the Europeans, the US, Russia and UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova, however, that line on the Western Wall was pulled at the last moment by the resolution’s authors – Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

But the resolution retained a line which affirmed, for the first time, that the Mugrabi Gate, whose ramp is built over the women’s section of the Western Wall, “is an integral part of al-Aksa mosque/Al-Haram Al-Sharif.”  Read more.

Germany: Anti-Semitic aggression in Berlin subway

Der Tagespiel reports that a young man traveling on the subway was asked  by a stranger whether he was Jewish,.

He replied that he was Jewish - although he is not - and the man punched him.   The victim suffered light bruises to his face but refused medical assistance.  He went with a friend who witnessed the incident to the police.

The aggression happened on Sunday at around 6.30 a.m. when the 25-year old got off the train at the Hallesches Tor station in Berlin.


The incident is being investigated by the police.  Read more in German.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Czech Republic: Gravestones toppled at Jewish cemetery, mayor thinks it's a prank

Via Times of Israel:
Some 20 tombstones were knocked over at a Jewish cemetery in a southern Czech town.

The vandalism discovered earlier this month occurred in Safov, about 120 miles southeast of Prague, the local media reported. The estimated cost of the damage is about $2,500, according to Jaroslav Klenovsky of the Brno Jewish community, which administers the site.

(...)
The mayor of Safov, Milan Kubes, expressed doubt that the vandalism was motivated by anti-Semitism.

“I think it must have been done by some teenagers who did not realize what they were doing,” Kubes told the newspaper.
 more

UK: Four men chase Jews, shouting abuse and kicking one of them


Via Everyday Antisemitism:
Four men described as being of “Asian” appearance have been arrested in London after chasing Jewish pedestrians, shouting abuse at them about Palestinians and kicking one of them. more

Europe: Terrorism and demonizing Israel - time for a reset

Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor, writes @ Times of Israel:
 
If nothing else, European officials at least get credit for consistency. For decades, in war and peace, terror and calm, they have not flagged in the belief that they can engineer their vision of peace for Israel. 

Having failed in so many previous attempts, the European move is another step in the effort to impose its preferred policies, via the labeling of products from the post-1967 “occupied territories” in order to create economic pressure on Israel. The next step would be to ban these products, and then to single out all Israeli items. (As perpetual victims, Palestinians are deemed to be exempt from contributing to peace, real or imagined.) 

In this context, the claim by the European Union’s ambassador in Tel Aviv that labeling Israeli goods from beyond the Green Line isn’t a big deal was disingenuous. “You seem to be very proud of your own settlement enterprise,” Lars Faaborg-Anderson said in an interview with journalist Raphael Ahrens, “so why is this such a big problem?” His condescension was, to put it mildly, out of line.

The marking of products from beyond the 1949 armistice lines goes far beyond another awkward EU attempt to impose its ideas on Israeli democracy. Product labeling is the embodiment of a strategy to delegitimize Israel and the right of the Jewish people to sovereign equality. It is central to the political war embodied in BDS — boycott, divestment and sanctions — whose stated objective is not peace, but rather “the complete international isolation of Israel.”

To answer Faaborg-Andersen’s sarcastic question, this is the reason that EU product labeling “is this such a big problem.” Behind the facade of promoting peace, demonization is used to justify terror, including false war crimes accusations and BDS campaigns.

Although those promoting this agenda use different methods than the terrorists stabbing Israelis in Jerusalem, Petah Tikvah and Tel Aviv, they have the same goals. Read more.

In Jerusalem speech, Mayor de Blasio calls for 'broken windows' approach to hate acts around the world

From New York Daily News:
As his visit to Israel drew to a close, Mayor de Blasio decried the resurgence of anti-Semitism Sunday - calling for a “broken windows” approach to acts of hatred around the world.
“The cancer of anti-Semitism has grown again,” de Blasio said in a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, citing attacks in France and cemetery desecrations from Poland to Hungary.

De Blasio said hate would flourish unless confronted head on - drawing a parallel to New York's experience fighting rampant crime in the 1990s.

“It can't be stopped by an indifferent society,” he said. “It takes consistency, sending a signal at every turn that no act of hate is acceptable, that even acts that appear small must be addressed.”

De Blasio noted that Police Commissioner Bill Bratton was able to turn the tide on crime by aggressively enforcing low-level offenses. Similarly, even small gestures of intolerance against Jews or other targeted communities should provoke an aggressive response from city and national governments, he said.

“That very simple notion of not looking away when the law was broken started to change us,” he said. "That's what we have to strive for in fighting prejudice and bias…The theory's quite simple: If we don't attend to one broken window, we implicitly extend an invitation to break another and another after that, and another after that."  more

UK: Pupils and staff at school involved in Trojan Horse affair ‘used antisemitic language’


Wiki: Operation Trojan Horse refers to an organised attempt by a number of associated individuals to introduce an Islamist or Salafist ethos into several schools in Birmingham, England.

Via Jewish Chronicle:
A Birmingham school involved in the Trojan Horse scandal encouraged “antisemitic language” between staff and pupils and welcomed speakers from the Jewish anti-Zionist sect Neturei Karta, according to a former staff member who spoke at a disciplinary hearing for teachers involved.

The former teacher, who was head of geography at Park View Academy in Birmingham, said she “heard both pupils and staff use antisemitic language.
“Pupils would say to staff or other pupils ‘you Jew boy’, which was considered a derogatory term.”   more

France: 3 Jews stabbed in anti-Semitic attack

Via Times of Israel:
A rabbi and two Jewish worshipers were stabbed in an attack outside a synagogue in Marseilles, France on Saturday morning.

According to French daily Le Figaro, the knife-wielding assailant was drunk and could be heard shouting anti-Semitic slurs at the time of the assault.

According to the report, the assailant is mentally unstable and is known to local police. He was arrested near the scene shortly after the attack.

One of the victims sustained serious injuries from multiple stab wounds to the abdomen. A police source told the paper his injuries were not life threatening.  more

Friday, October 23, 2015

Greece: Jewish cemetery vandalized with Nazi graffiti




Credit: The Jewish Community of Athens (athjcom.gr)
Via Against Antisemitism:
The entrance of the Jewish Cemetery in Nikaia (an area outside Athens) was  vandalized with threatening graffiti featuring nazi symbols (see photo below), reported today the Jewish Community of Athens.  more



German publishers have refused to translate the most extensive record of Husseini’s fulminations against the Jews

Very few Europeans have ever heard of the Mufti of Jerusalem.  The same can be said about European Jews.  The subject is strictly off limits and is occasionally mentioned in passing.  To illustrate this point, in 2009, the Berlin publicly-funded Multicultural Center's (Werkstatt der Kulturen) decided to remove educational panels of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who was an ally of Adolf Hitler from an exhibit. The organisers "denied that there was an "agreement " reached with the local German-Muslim community to shut down the exhibit". 

Jeffrey Herf writes @ The Times of Israel:

[...] Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World drew on German archives and on the files of the United States Department of State and US intelligence agencies to present the most extensive documentation available about the vast Arabic language propaganda radio broadcasts and printed leaflets that the Nazi regime sent to the Arab societies during World War II. Husseini played a central role in those broadcasts. He became world famous at the time for his incitement on the radio to “kill the Jews” in summer 1942 as Rommel’s Afrika Korps threatened to overwhelm the British and capture the Jews of pre-state Palestine. 

As the German historians Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers have documented in Nazi Palestine: Plans for the Extermination of the Jews of Palestine, had the Germans won the Battle of Al Alamein, an SS Einsatzgruppe was prepared to come to Egypt to carry out mass murders with techniques that had been perfected on the Eastern Front in Europe. The record of Husseini’s ranting and raving on Nazi radio was well documented by American diplomats at the Embassy in wartime Cairo. I used those thousands of pages of translations when I wrote Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. (That work is translated into French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish but for some strange reason German publishers in a country famous for “coming to terms with the Nazi past” have refused to translate the most extensive record of Husseini’s fulminations against the Jews.)  [...]

Though the Prime Minister is thus wrong about Husseini’s role in the decisions that led to the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe, he is right to draw attention to Husseini’s disastrous impact on Palestinian politics and society. In response to the storm of criticism that greeted his remarks, Netanyahu replied:
My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called ‘occupation’, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.
Husseini absolutely wanted to exterminate the Jews, above all, the Jews of pre-state Palestine, and then the Jews of Israel. The evidence of Husseini’s pleas to kill the Jews, of his boundless hatred of Judaism as a religion and the Jews as a people is well documented in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.
He embedded his Jew-hatred in his understanding of Islam as early as a 1937 speech in Syria that the Germans published in German the following year. In the midst of the terrorist attacks he led and incited from 1936 to 1939 in Palestine, it was Husseini who claimed that the Zionists wanted to seize or destroy the Al Aksa Mosque. This lie became a central element of Palestinian propaganda over the decades until recent weeks.
On November 5, 1943, Husseini spoke at the Islamic Institute in Berlin on “Balfour Day,” a day to denounce the Balfour Declaration. The speech was printed in German and broadcast on the radio. I examine it in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. He vents his hatred of the Jews and the British for helping the Zionists. The Jews, he said, had tormented the world for ages, and have been the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence. The Holy Koran expressed this old enmity in the following words: You will find that those who are most hostile to the believers are the Jews.’ They tried to poison the great and noble prophets. They resisted them, were hostile to them, and intrigued against them. This was the case for 1,300 years. For all that time, they have not stopped spinning intrigues against the Arabs and Muslims.

Husseini the Palestinian leader of the war of 1948 and hero to Yasser Arafat and his generation of leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, interpreted Zionism as only the most recent of this supposed age-old Jewish hostility not only to the Palestinians or Arabs as modern national groups but also to the religion of Islam. In the Islamic Institute speech he also referred to a supposed “Jewish desire” to seize the Islamic holy sites, a desire that extended to the Al Akas Mosque. Indeed, the Jews, he said, planned “to build a temple on its ruins.” Haj Amin al-Husseini’s very regrettable but consequential accomplishment was to fuse secular Arab anti-Zionism with the Islamist and thus theologically inspired hatred of the Jews and Judaism. The lies which Mahmoud Abbas and others have told in recent weeks about Israel’s supposed desire to somehow infringe on the rights of Muslims to pay at the Al Aksa Mosque have their origins in lies that are now at least 75 years old. 

Prime Minister Netanyahu added the following:
Unfortunately, Haj Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society. He appears in textbooks and it is taught that he is one of the founding fathers of the nation, and this incitement that started then with him, inciting the murder of Jews – continues. Not in the same format, but in a different one, and this is the root of the problem. To stop the murders, it is necessary to stop the incitement. What is important is to recognize the historical facts and not ignore them, not then and not today.
Here the Prime Minister is on rock solid ground. Far from denouncing Husseini for spreading lies, absurd conspiracy theories and radical anti-Semitism, he has remained a revered figure in Palestinian political memory. The absurdities for which Husseini became famous in the 1940s have continued to play a far too prominent role in the Palestinian political culture ever since. He did incite others to murder Jews. He did spread ridiculous conspiracy theories comparable to those of the Nazis. He did all that he could to help the Nazis in a failing effort to spread the Holocaust to the Middle East and to win the war in Eurpoe. He left behind a legacy of hatred, paranoia, religious fanaticism and celebration of terror so long as it was aimed at Jews and Israelis. The Palestinian authority and Hamas even more so has kept that legacy is alive and well and fills the heads of Palestinian teenagers with rubbish that has led to the terror wave of recent weeks. 

The Prime Minister has erred in his understanding of the timing of Hitler’s decision making but he is right about Husseini’s disastrous impact on Palestinian political culture. Read more.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Polish Episcopate condemns anti-semitism as 'a sin', denies Poles committed genocide


Via Radio Poland:
The Polish Episcopate has published an extensive condemnation of anti-semitism on the 50th anniversary of a landmark Vatican declaration on relations with non-Christian religions.

In a special pastoral letter entitled 'The shared spiritual heritage of Christians and Jews', the Episcopate stressed that “anti-semitism and anti-Judaism are sins against the love of thy neighbour.”

The letter notes that the Church organises an annual 'Day of Judaism', affirming however that “Christian-Jewish dialogue must never be treated as 'the religious hobby' of a small group of enthusiasts, but it should increasingly become part of the mainstream of pastoral work.”

The Polish clerics also acknowledged that the Holocaust, which was planned by “Nazi Germany and largely carried out on the territory of occupied Poland,” nevertheless “sometimes met with indifference among certain Christians.”

According to the Episcopate, “if Christians and Jews had practised religious brotherhood in the past, more Jews would have found help and support from Christians.”  more

Star Wars trailer spurs anti-Semitic boycott movement




Via DW:
The release of the full-length Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer has sent the Internet into a frenzy. Not surprisingly, not all comments were about the likes of Chewbacca or Luke Skywalker.

(...)
As one tweet alluded to earlier, the cast is more ethnically diverse than in previous features, and a small group of Internet users have voiced concerns over what they call "anti-white propaganda" by film director J. J. Abrams. The hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII started in a tweet by a UK-based right-wing activist nicknamed Lord Hummungus. It was then picked up by a blog called End Cultural Marxism. According to the blog, its goal is to fight what it sees as an attempt "to commit genocide against white people through mass non-white immigration, assimilation, transracial adoption and miscegenation." From that point on the hashtag spread, and social media was bombarded with racist comments with regard to the movie and the ethnicity of its cast members - and especially of the director, J. J. Abrams, who is Jewish.  more

Poland: Journalists don't think Palestinian Holocaust denial is newsworthy


A few months ago Abbas made statements to Polish journalists, both implying the Holocaust didn't happen and blaming the Jews for being the new Nazis.  This is quite common logic among antisemites.

At the time I put it aside until I could figure out whether any of the journalists who were present in the meeting thought this is newsworthy.   So far, I haven't found any.   If your'e a Polish journalist who reported about this, you're welcome to point me to your article.

Due to the uproar over Netanyahu's statement blaming Palestinian Nazi-cheering for the Holocaust, I thought it interesting to point out.   Blaming Jews for a new Holocaust is common discourse.   Holocaust denial is becoming common discourse.  Certainly not newsworthy.



Via PMW:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in a speech before a delegation of Polish journalists in Ramallah, referred to Jewish suffering in World War II as a Jewish or Israeli claim that he is willing to respect:

"They say they made sacrifices in World War II - we respect what they say."

He made this statement in the context of libeling Israel, as the second half of his statement accuses Israel of doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews:

"They should not treat us the way they were treated [by the Nazis]. We must not be a victim of the victim. I did not do anything bad to him."  more
 

UK: London man arrested for shouting “Hitler is going to kill you all Jews”


Via Everyday Antisemitism:
A man who shouted “Hitler is going to kill you all Jews” has been arrested in north London. His outburst was witnessed by volunteers from the Shomrim Jewish neighbourhood watch patrol who called police to arrest him.

Greece: Golden Dawn MEPs produce antisemitic video in European Parliament


Via Against Antisemitism (h/t glykosymoritis):
XYZ Contagion, a Greek investigating journalism blog, reported that earlier this month three Golden Dawn MEPs produced a video with antisemitic and anti-immigrant remarks and then published it on YouTube. The video was allegedly shot in a studio of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The three Golden Dawn MEPs are: Lampros Fountoulis, Eleftherios Synadinos and Georgios Epitideios.

Especially E. Synadinos suggested that Angela Merkel and other European “powerful leaders” obey to a plan for “global domination and uniformisation” and referred to the antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. He then accused these leaders of doing nothing to stop “the Americans” and “the Zionists” from executing their “plans” against the European nations.

more

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Malta: "The Jews are the real terrorists. Wherever they go, there is bloodshed and war"



Such comments appear quite often on social media and comments online, and do not often get to the top news.  I guess it's a slow news-day for Malta.

Note that the perpetrator here is a Labour Party candidate.  He does not think it's racist at all to say that Jews are responsible for war wherever they go.


Via Times of Malta:
Social Solidarity Minister Michael Farrugia replied that “everyone has the right to their personal opinion” after a consultant posted potentially anti-Semitic remarks on Facebook.

Family therapist Charlie Azzopardi wrote on his personal Facebook page on October 8: “The Jews are the real terrorists. Wherever they go, there is bloodshed and war” (translated from Maltese).
The comment accompanied a news video of undercover Israeli security forces infiltrating and attacking a group of Palestinian stone throwers during the recent escalated violence in the region.

Speaking to the Times of Malta yesterday, Dr Farrugia said the comments did not reflect his own personal point of view, adding he did not feel he should involve himself in anyone’s personal opinion.

“Dr Azzopardi has to defend that opinion himself,” the minister said. “I can only speak about my opinion about the Middle East, which is that I want to see peace, including a Palestinian State.”
(...)

When contacted, Dr Azzopardi refused to comment on the incident, saying only he would leave it up to the public to decide “what is racist and what isn’t”.

Dr Azzopardi, who unsuccessfully contested the last general election on the Labour Party ticket, is employed by the ministry as a consultant on “family issues” on a €17,000 annual contract.   more

UK: Sir Eric Pickles: Foreign Office is ignoring Palestinian incitement in 'pathological' desire to be balanced

The Jewish Chronicle reports:

Sir Eric Pickles
Conservative Friends of Israel chairman Sir Eric Pickles has accused the Foreign Office of “turning a blind eye” to Palestinian incitement as violence flares in Israel.

The former cabinet minister said Palestinian society had been “harmed by a widespread culture of hate” and “glorification of terror and violence against Jews and Israel”.

Writing for the Conservative Home website, Sir Eric said David Cameron had been unequivocal in his condemnation of incitement and violence.

But he added: “Our Prime Minister’s clear message somehow seems to have become lost in translation in the bowels of the Foreign Office, which has an almost pathological desire to appear balanced whatever the cost. 

“The call for both sides to end incitement equates the acts of a handful of extremists on the very fringes of Israeli society to the state-sanctioned incitement of violence rife within Palestinian society. By doing so, the Foreign Office is turning a blind eye to what is a glaring problem for the Palestinians.”

Sir Eric said officials should condemn “each incident of incitement” and suggest Department for International Development aid should be withdrawn if the Palestinian Authority did not stop encouraging violence. 

“Make no mistake; leading Palestinian officials have inflamed the recent unrest. The British government can no longer afford to be silent,” he concluded.

Last month Sir Eric told the JC his love of Israel went back more than 30 years. He was attracted to its "free speech, independent judiciary, functioning democracy. It's a fundamental part of being a Tory."

Netherlands: Anti-racism group to dicuss 'Israeli racism' on Kristallnacht event



Via JTA:
Hanin Zoabi, an Arab-Israeli lawmaker who recently called for a Palestinian uprising, is scheduled to speak about racism in Israel at a Holocaust commemoration event in the Dutch capital.

Zoabi’s attendance at the event organized in Amsterdam on Nov. 8 by Platform Stop Racism and Exclusion, a far-left group that is shunned by local Jews for its members’ perceived animosity toward Israel and sympathy for Hamas, was announced last week.

Zoabi currently is under investigation in Israel for saying in an interview for a Hamas publication that: “Hundreds of worshipers should go up to al-Aqsa to confront an Israeli conspiracy there. Thousands of our people’s ascents there would turn these events into a real intifada.” She later said her words were “not a call to amplify the attacks.”
Breaking News

The Dutch group that invited her wrote on its Facebook page that in previous years it “paid attention to racism in the world (Germany, Austria, Greece) but not in Israel. Given recent events, discussing racism in Israel is unavoidable.” Zoabi will speak on “Israeli discrimination against Palestinians,” the text read.
The event where Zoabi will speak is in commemoration of Kristallnacht — the German-language name for pogroms perpetrated in 1938 against Austrian and German Jews that Holocaust historians see as the opening shot in the Nazi-led campaign of violence against Jews and their extermination.  more

France: Lots of Jews are considering aliya or leaving France because of worseningt situation

As this article demonstrates, French (and European) Jewish leaders are powerless.  Nothing new about it...

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The French-Jewish community is “very shocked and angry” at their government’s response to the terrorism engulfing Israel, even as they fear local copycats will attempt to import the violence, a senior communal figure told The Jerusalem Post Sunday.

Speaking by phone from Paris, Robert Ejnes, executive director of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), said he and his colleagues have repeatedly lobbied against French proposals to solve the conflict, often made without consultation with Jerusalem.
Referring both to the recent French proposals to push a timeline for two-state negotiations through the UN Security Council and this week’s call for the placement of international observers on the Temple Mount, Ejnes said he believes Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius believes he “should make peace by himself.”

“We as French Jews are very angry that he is taking this position and we have expressed it to him several times,” he said.

Ejnes described a perceived dichotomy between how European leaders approach local anti-Semitism, which is roundly condemned, and attacks against Jews in Israel, asserting that continental governments “do not at all understand the situation in Israel.”

“They think for some reason that we cannot understand that the terrorists who attacked [Paris kosher supermarket] Hyper Cacher are not the same as those in Israel and not motivated by the same motives,” he said.

“We can’t explain and we can’t understand this position,” he said. “It seems like they are transforming everything to be the fault of Israel.

They don’t want to consider the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority.

“They have no idea and do not believe that Israel is the only country that can protect the holy sites of all religions.”

Strong economic ties between France and Muslim states could account for such views, he said.

France last year experienced a 101 percent increase in anti-Semitic acts over 2013, including “numerous cases of physical violence against the Jewish community where individuals were targeted and beaten, and synagogues were firebombed,” according to a recent State Department report.  This led to an upswing in emigration, with 7,231 Jews making aliya – up from 3,293 in 2013. [...]

And while the community’s official position remains that immigration to Israel should be motivated by love of the land and not by fear, “lots of people are considering aliya or departure from France because of the current situation; because of fear to take children to Jewish schools behind high walls and with [security] forces in front.”  Read more.