The New Antisemite: January 2019

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Netherlands: Jew harassed in Amsterdam town square, hours after Holocaust memorial ceremony

Via WNL:

Michael Jacobs, a pro-Israel activist, often stands in Dam Square protesting against pro-Palestinian demonstrations. This often leads to clashes.

On Sunday, a few hours after a Holocaust memorial ceremony, he again stood to protest a pro-Palestinian protest, and harassed by a young man who cursed Jews and yelled at him repeatedly "aren't you ashamed of being Jewish?".

YouTube removed the clip documenting of the incident, for "violating YouTube's Terms of Service".

Italy: Woman attacked in Rome

Via CFCA:

Rome – “Today in Rome: I’m standing in front of Feltrinelli, waiting for a person, a guy with a swastika on his arm, approach to me and spitt in my face, I was so shocked that I did not even react. He probably did it because I had a canvas bag from the Yiddish course in Tel Aviv, proof of antisemitism .

France: Court Sentences Antisemite Alain Soral to One-Year Prison Term for Incitement

Via Algemeiner (h/t glykosymoritis):

One of France’s most vocal antisemites, Alain Soral, was sentenced to a year in prison by a criminal court in Paris on Thursday, after he was found guilty of inciting racial hatred in an article that described Jews as “manipulative, domineering and hateful.”

The offending article was published last March on Soral’s playfully-titled Égalité et Réconciliation (“Equality and Reconciliation”) website — an online home for antisemitic, extreme nationalist and anti-capitalist activists and writers.

Following the announcement of Soral’s sentence, the French Union of Jewish Students (EUJF) tweeted, “Justice has put a new stop on this little propagandist of hatred.”

...

Originally a communist, the Swiss-born Soral crossed to the far-right National Front (FN) before carving out his own path in 2007. A purveyor of conspiracy theories about “Jewish” and “Zionist” power, Soral has for several years worked closely with Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, an antisemitic propagandist who presents himself as a comedian.

Poland: Far-right group leads anti-Semitic protest at Auschwitz during commemoration ceremony

Via Independent:

Far-right Polish nationalists organised an anti-Semitic protest during a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony at Auschwitz.

The small group of hardline activists held their demonstration inside the former concentration camp at the same time as the official Holocaust commemorations on Sunday.

The 50 protestors from the Polish Independence Movement were led by Piotr Rybak, who was once jailed for burning an effigy of a Jew.

Mr Rybak told reporters they were there to oppose the official – and historically accurate – narrative that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis with the active collaboration of some Poles.

"It's time to fight against Jewry and free Poland from them,” Mr Rybak said, a Polish newspaper reported.

Greece: Jewish cemetery memorial in Thessaloniki targeted, again

Via ekathimerini:

A monument on the campus of Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University (AUT) which commemorates a Jewish cemetery destroyed by the Nazis was targeted again by vandals on Friday.

The perpetrators smashed the marble commemorative signs placed in the old cemetary which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942.

This is the third time the monument has been targeted. In July 2018, vandals twice daubed paint and painted a cross on the monument.

Italy: Focus on racist and anti-Semitic chants is a 'psychosis', say Lazio

Via France24:

Lazio blasted as "a psychosis focusing on either a minority or non-existent incidents" after racist and anti-Semitic chants overshadowed the team's 4-1 Italian Cup win over Novara at the Stadio Olimpico on Saturday.

The chanting early in the first half was heard in Lazio's North End and was aimed at the club's bitter city rivals AS Roma, with taunts of "Yellow, red and Jewish" and "This Roma that looks like Africa".

It also targeted police who had clashed with fans on Wednesday at Piazza della Liberta in the capital when celebrations to mark the club's 119th anniversary turned violent.

Eight police were injured and four supporters arrested.

"I am here to talk about the racist and anti-Semitic chants that are supposed to have happened," club spokesman Arturo Diaconale told a press conference after the game.

"I am one of the 98 percent of people in the stadium who didn't hear them.

"The club naturally condemns any racist or anti-Semitic chants, but we have to consider the dimensions of the phenomenon.

"I think it's a form of psychosis focusing on either a minority or non-existent incidents.

"I read about chants as if the entire stadium had participated. We mustn't turn this into a mass panic over nothing. I invite our colleagues in the media to give the right degree of consideration to incidents that would normally be ignored," added Diaconale.

UK: 170,000 antisemitic Google searches made in Britain each year

Via Jewish Chronicle:

Around 170,000 Google searches with antisemitic content are made every year in the UK - around around ten percent of which involve violent language or intentions - a new report has revealed.

Using Google search data from 2004 to 2018, the report by the CST and Antisemitism Policy Trust also showed that Britain ranks third in the world for searches about “Zionism”, behind only Israel and Lebanon – 29 percent higher than in the US.

Searches for the word in the UK rose 25-fold in April 2016, after Ken Livingstone made comments about “Hitler supporting Zionism”. “Hitler Zionism” is the fourth most popular search about Zionism in Britain.

Other data, focused on different parts of the country, showed that antisemitic searches are just as high in cities that mostly vote Labour as they are in cities that mostly vote Conservative, and that antisemitic searches are higher in Wales than any other part of the UK.

Germany: 'Drastic increase' of violent anti-Semitic attacks in Berlin, according to figures

Via The Local:

The number of anti-Semitic violent attacks in Berlin more than tripled in Berlin in 2018 compared to the previous year, according to provisional police statistics.

The German capital’s first commissioner for anti-Semitism, Claudia Vanoni, who took up her post on September 1st last year, said seven violent anti-Semitic attacks were recorded by police in 2017, compared to 24 incidents which were recorded between January and mid-December 2018.

Vanoni described it as a “drastic increase” in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung published earlier this week.

These are provisional figures which may change if, for example, more crimes are reported.

When it comes to non-violent anti-Semitic crimes, according to Vanoni police recorded a total of 305 incidents in Berlin in 2017. Last year, 295 cases were recorded up until mid-December.

“Considering that cases are usually reported later, there will probably be a slight increase in the number of cases in 2018,” said Vanoni, regarding these figures.

The majority of these cases involve offensive language against others and damage to property, such as hate-filled graffiti.

World Council of Churches trainees use antisemitic rhetoric, advocate BDS

Via Jerusalem Post:

The World Council of Churches (WCC) is training volunteers to promote boycotts of Israel and engage in antisemitic rhetoric, with funding from several Western governments and the EU, as well as support from the United Nations, a new report by research institute NGO Monitor has found.

The WCC flagship project – Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) – has sent 1,800 “ecumenical accompaniers” from around the world to serve as observers in the West Bank and Jerusalem over the past 15 years, and aim to have 25 to 30 of these unofficial observers on the ground at all times. This is the only program of this kind run by the WCC.

(...)

The WCC calls itself the broadest organized group of churches, and says it seeks to represent 350 member churches in 110 countries and 500 million Christians throughout the world. Its website says that the group’s goal is Christian unity.

Yet one of the ways it seems to achieve that is through anti-Israel advocacy, which at times has explicit antisemitic overtones, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. This definition has been accepted by the EU, which along with some of its member countries, provides funding for the EAPPI.

WCC leadership and EAPPI volunteers have repeatedly made comparisons of Israeli actions to those of Nazi Germany in their advocacy sessions. For example, WCC general secretary Dr. Olav Fyske Tveit said: “I heard about the occupation of my country during the five years of World War II as the story of my parents. Now I see and hear the stories of 50 years of occupation.”

(...)

The WCC supports boycotts and divestment from settlements, but EAPPI activists have called for a boycott of all of Israel.

The EAPPI publication “Faith Under Occupation” called in 2012 for “sanctions and suspension of US aid to Israel,” to “challenge Israel in local and international courts” and “economic boycotts.”

EAPPI National Coordinator in South Africa Dudu Mahlangu-Masango signed a letter to then-president Jacob Zuma calling “on our government and civil society to instigate broad-based boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel” in 2012. She repeated this call in a 2018 television interview, calling for “total sanctions” on Israel.

The organization also seeks to combat Christian Zionism. In a 2015 WCC event, Zionism was called “heresy” under Christian theology, modern Israelis were said to have no connection to ancient Israelites, and Israeli society was noted to be “full with racism and light skin privilege.” Their leadership also compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.

France: Paris woman’s nose broken in alleged anti-Semitic assault

Via JTA:

A French-Jewish woman told police that two teenagers hurling anti-Semitic insults robbed and hit her on a main street of Paris suburb.

The woman, aged 20, said in her complaint to police that the incident happened Monday in the heavily Jewish suburb of Sarcelles north of Paris, the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, wrote in a statement Tuesday.

Prying her cellphone out of her hands, the two assailants, whom she said were black, hit her face while saying: “Are you afraid, you Jewess?” she told police. A passerby intervened, allowing the woman to flee to her home with a broken nose and bloody face, the report said. She was on her way home from work, she also said. The two alleged assailants fled the scene. BNVCA called on police to investigate and apprehend the suspects.

Romania: Firm discriminated against Jewish employee, court rules

Via Jerusalem Post:

A judge in Romania awarded $5,700 in damages to a Jewish man who sued his employer for not giving the claimant time off on Passover and humiliating him because of his ethnicity.

Bernard Ciurariu won his workplace discrimination against NTT Data Romania last week in the city of Iasi, the news site Info Crestin reported.

The claimant was “punished because he did not go to work during the Jewish Passover, although the law affords him days off on that holiday,” the judge said, according to the report.

This and other forms of discrimination began against Ciurariu after the death of his father last year. His employers learned that he is Jewish because his father received a Jewish funeral. From then on, he was excluded from projects relevant to his work and sidelined at the workplace, he complained.

Belgium: Kosher slaughter ends in northern Belgium, threatening supplies to Europe

Via Times of Israel:

As the year 2018 came to a close Monday, it brought with it an end to kosher slaughter in the northern Flanders region of Belgium, home to half of the country’s Jewish population and a major supplier of meat for European Jewish communities.

In June 2017, the parliament in the Flemish region, one of the five sectors that make up the country, unanimously passed a resolution banning ritual slaughter without stunning.

The decision followed a similar one approved in May 2017 by the Walloon Parliament in the south, Belgium’s largest region. Both measures take effect in 2019.

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