A large number of children and youth again participated in this year’s Berlin Al-Quds march. They carried signs that read “Zionism is racism!“, “Zionism promotes antisemitism!“ and shouted the legally restrained slogan “Death Israel“ (“الموت لاسرائیل”) .
A 14-year-old boy who placed lit fireworks in the pockets of Jewish pedestrians has escaped with paying £20 in compensation and a referral order. The boy was arrested on 31st January in Hackney after volunteers from Shomrim, the Jewish neighbourhood watch patrol, chased and detained the boy, then called the police who arrested him.
The Hackney Youth Offender Panel issued a contract for a total period of a year and ordered the youth to pay £20 in compensation in a stunningly lenient verdict which will do nothing to deter such attacks.
Campaign Against Antisemitism will be raising this judgement with the Ministry of Justice as an example of disturbingly light sentences for antisemitic crime.
A boy of three is among hundreds of children being investigated by police amid a surge in hate crimes .
Figures obtained by the Sunday People under Freedom of Information laws reveal 138 youngsters aged 10 or under were reported for racial or religious abuse last year.
This compared with 70 in 2011.
(...)
A nine-year-old boy allegedly told a classmate “My dad told me not to sit next to Jews” and the boy of three was quizzed by police in Manchester for causing harassment, alarm or distress to his victim.
The findings come after a week in which reports of hate crimes rose dramatically in the wake of the EU referendum .
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| An illustrative photograph
of a school
shower (Wikimedia Commons) |
Belgian elementary school students are accused of anti-Semitic bullying of a Jewish classmate, whom they allegedly sprayed with deodorant while he was showering at school to simulate Nazi gas chambers. The three students told their Jewish classmate they were “gassing” him during the incident, according to his mother.
The Jewish student was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse over the past two years at his elementary school in the Brussels suburb of Braine-le-Chateau, according to a statement Friday by the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism. All the involved students are now 12 years old.
The mother of the alleged victim filed a police complaint last week over the bullying, which she said her son detailed to her. Francis Brancart, an education board official, confirmed Thursday that his office was looking into the matter, which he said may require the opening of an independent inquiry, the news agency Belga reported. He said he could not confirm the veracity of the complaints.
The alleged incident in the showers happened early last year. The three students pressed the deodorant canisters’ nozzles to the boy’s body, his mother said, causing burns and skin irritations on his back. She said it was one of dozens of incidents in which her son was subjected to violence, anti-Semitic jokes and intimidation.
The student complained to faculty but his mother said the teacher in charge ignored the complaints, even after her son asked for and got permission to stay indoors during recess to avoid harassment. [...]
The principal said the teacher handling the mother’s complaint did not relay the anti-Semitic character of the harassment to her. She said the three students involved in the deodorant incident were reprimanded for their behavior, which they said was part of a game.
LBCA president Joel Rubinfeld told Belga he interviewed other students who confirmed the anti-Semitic nature of the “gassing” incident and the recurrence of jokes and taunts referencing the Holocaust in the student’s bullying by the three other classmates.
The case reported last week is one of several recent anti-Semitic incidents in Belgium, including the bullying of a high school student who was forced to change schools amid alleged inaction by the institution where the harassment occurred. Last year, Belgian media reported on the online shaming by classmates of a pro-Israel high school student who also left the public education system for a Jewish school.
Such cases, Rubinfeld said last year, are turning Belgian schools into “Jew-free” zones.
Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs called on authorities to identify and punish high school pupils who during their graduation ceremony sang about burning Jews.read more
The incident happened last week during the graduation gala of the Elde College in the town of Schijndel, 70 miles southeast of Amsterdam, the Brabants Dagblad daily reported on Wednesday.
As they approached the party, several graduates sang: “Together we’ll burn Jews, because Jews burn the best.”
The phrase is part of a chant heard several times in recent years during soccer matches connected to the Amsterdam’s Ajax football team, whose players and supporters are often dubbed “Jews” because of the historic Jewish presence in the city, which is sometimes colloquially called “Mokum” after the Yiddish word for “place.” But the gala incident had nothing to do with soccer.
The student body and organizing committee of the Elde College gala expressed their sincere apologies for the incident, but Jacobs said the guilty parties “must be prosecuted for hate speech.”
How do you win an award with a British Charity whose mission statement isread more
To enable young people (aged 11 – 25 years in London and Essex), to achieve their potential by inspiring, investing in, developing and promoting activities that increase their personal, social, emotional and physical development.
Obviously, you make a hate speech containing nothing but blood libels against the State of Israel (a speech that also includes the statement "Islam is perfect" and ends with the raising of the Palestine flag and the call to "Free Palestine" which is wildly applauded).
A watchdog on anti-Semitism in the Netherlands recorded a 26 percent decrease in anti-Semitic incidents in 2015 over the previous year but noted a “worrisome trend” in the growing number of incidents involving schools.read more
The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI, recorded 126 incidents last year, compared to the 171 in 2014, according to its report published Monday. The 2014 number was the peak year for incidents.
Despite the decrease, the number of incidents in 2015 is the second highest since 2010, which had 124.
Last year, 36 incidents were in the victims’ direct environment, meaning those involving neighbors or acquaintances the victims knew as opposed to anonymous threats and abuse online, read the CIDI report. Five incidents involved physical violence against people and six were cases of vandalism.
The most common category of incident was insults shouted or spoken on the street, accounting for 19 percent of the total, or 24 incidents. There were 12 cases of online anti-Semitic harassment in the form of emails and electronic messages.
One case featuring violence was reported in Amsterdam by a non-Jewish woman of Moroccan descent who is married to a Moroccan Jew. Parents of her daughter’s classmates pressured and confronted her during school activities over her relationship with the Jewish man, she said. A father of her daughter’s classmate grabbed the woman by her throat after calling her a “Jew’s whore” and threatening to shoot her at a swimming pool, the report said.
CIDI did not press charges because the victim declined to cooperate.
Hernroth-Rothstein’s remarks came on the heels of a Facebook post she uploaded this week, bemoaning the antisemtism suffered by one her two young boys. It reads:
So I’m feeling tired. Really tired and sad. When my son came home today to tell me that a classmate had said “someone should throw that f—–g Jew in an oven and burn him”, he wasn’t angry, bur rather resigned. It’s not the first time, right? Nor will it be the last.
I work really hard every day to give my children a strong Jewish identity here, in the Galut [Diaspora]. I am not here because I want to but because right now, I have to, and those who know me know that I have made many difficult decisions and personal sacrifices in order to assure that my family’s Jewish lineage lives on and that we stay observant despite the hostile surroundings.
I am a single mother raising Jewish boys and I am so very tired. I am tired because every time this happens, every time someone calls my child a “dirty Jew” or makes them feel like less than human because of who they are and what they are it takes something from them and from the strength and values I am working so hard to instill in them.
How do I do this? How do I live in a remote place and provide my children with Jewish education, Jewish pride and faith and most importantly – how do I counteract this society that keeps telling them to be less (and ultimately nothing) of what they are. Less Jewish, less annoying, less in the way of the “ordinary” world.
My son is resigned and he is sad and that makes me sad and tired, too. As a parent, we sacrifice so that our children may reap the rewards. We do so they won’t have to, we hurt so they may heal. But tonight as I hang up the phone with the principal, the parents, the teachers and the counselor I wonder if I may be losing the fight and getting lost on my way from mitzrayim [Egypt].
Tomorrow there will be meetings, a lot of nodding and assurances that “bullying” is unacceptable in a Swedish school. However, this is not bullying, this is a hate crime that has been trivialized so many times that it starts to sound like boyish banter. Nothing will come of these meetings, and I know this because I have been to so many of them before. They will say the right words and commit the wrong acts and then it is up to us to stay standing.
I pray we get angry soon. But for now, I’m just really really tired.
The mother of a Jewish boy who said she took her son out of a Brussels public school because of anti-Semitic bullying filed a police complaint against the school’s management for alleged incitement to discrimination.
The complaint, first reported Tuesday by the RTBF broadcaster, concerns the school’s alleged inaction on reported abuse that, according to the pupil, went on earlier this year at a high school in Uccle, an affluent neighborhood. The mother said the bullying at the Athénée Royal Uccle 2 school forced her to enroll her son at a Jewish school last month. The boy was identified only as Samuel (not his real name) and his mother as Helene.
According to the report, the abuse began after Samuel had a falling out with his former best friend, who was the only person at the school whom Samuel had told that he was Jewish. The friend told the rest of the class Samuel was Jewish and on Feb. 5, a classmate allegedly told Samuel “get lost, dirty Jew.” A fistfight ensued, ending without serious injury, according to Helene, who said the school treated the incident as a common brawl rather than racist harassment.
Over the following weeks, other pupils threatened Samuel and made anti-Semitic statements at him “two, three times each week,” said Helene, who added she specifically enrolled her son at a public school so that he would not have a parochial worldview that she feared would develop at a Jewish school. In one incident, a pupil reportedly told Samuel: “If you’re in favor of Israel we’ll break your skull.”
When Helene came to pick up Samuel from school on March 22 following terrorist attacks that killed 32 people that day in Brussels, she heard a pupil declare inside the school that the attacks were Israel’s fault, adding “Allah hu akbar,” an Arab-language religious expression which means “Allah is the greatest.” [1] [...]
Joel Rubinfeld, the president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, or LBCA, who studied the case, said the school’s actions meant that “the victim had to go away, the perpetrators – they got to stay.” He also noted the affluence of the Uccle neighborhood and that its schools have a better reputation than heavily Muslim schools in central Brussels, where few Jews would now enroll their children.
“There is no sanctuary for Jews in the public education system,” Rubinfeld said.
Samuel’s case is one of several recent incidents, including the online shaming last year by classmates of a pro-Israel high school student who also left the public education system for a Jewish school. These cases, Rubinfeld said last year, are turning Belgian schools into “Jew-free” zones.
[1] The RTBF reports this differently. The mother saw groups of youngsters and heard them reacting to the terrorist attacks: "It's the Jews' fault. It's Israel's fault. They should all be killed. Allah hu akbar". ("C’est la faute aux Juifs, à Israël, faut tous les buter! Allahou Akbar!')
A criminal charge has been laid against a 18-year-old grammar school pupil in Potsdam because he constantly spreads racism and Holocaust denial via Youtube and in the classroom.
The leader of the Jewish community in France denounced Monday what he called the "unbearable" situation of Jewish children ‘’who suffer physical and verbal abuse at public school.’’
In an interview with radio channel Europe 1 ahead of the annual dinner of CRIF, the political representative body of French Jews, Roger Cukierman declared: "In many schools, Jewish children are beaten, insulted because they are Jewish."This is the reason why today out of fear only one third of Jewish children go to public school," said the CRIF President.He observed that the Jewish community "retires into oneself’", a phenomenom that is particularly damaging at the level of school of the Republic.""This is the reason why today out of fear only one third of Jewish children go to public school."
Anti-Semitism is a persistent problem in some Dutch schools and especially among Muslim pupils, according to a new government-commissioned report on discrimination in education.
The findings appeared in a 55-page report titled “Two Worlds, Two Realities – How Do You Deal with It as a Teacher,” which was published last week by Margalith Kleijwegt, a Dutch-Jewish journalist, at the request of the Dutch ministry of education.
The report, which is based on visits to schools and conversations with dozens of teachers since January 2015, say that teachers sometimes feel powerless to change the deep-seated biases and violent attitudes of some pupils, including on Jews.
One female teacher from Amsterdam of high school pupils following a vocational education program told Kleijwegt of a lesson about democratic values and against discrimination, in which a female pupil of Moroccan descent stood up and said: “If I had a Kalashnikov [assault rifle], I’d gun down all the Jews.” She then made shooting gestures and sounds.
Shocked, the teacher tried to make the pupil empathize with a Jew but felt she was not getting through to the pupil.
“I wasn’t getting there,” the report quotes that teacher as saying. “I asked her to imagine a 5-year-old Jewish girl who lives here. What would she have to do with Israel’s policies? Unfortunately, there was no place for empathy. The pupil didn’t care about that girl. She had only one message: The Jews should die.”
A 14-year-old boy has been arrested in Hackney after a group of youths attempted to place lit fireworks in the pockets of Jewish pedestrians. Volunteers from Shomrim, the Jewish neighbourhood watch patrol, arrived almost immediately and witnessed the boy chasing one victim and hurling a lit firework towards him. The Shomrim volunteer chased and detained the boy, then called the police who arrested him.
Arif Arslaner, founder of Kubi, an organisation that provides social work to seven schools in Frankfurt an Main, says the insults are particularly prevalent amounst Muslim students. He advises that it is important to distinguish between ideological hatred and students “merely” parroting hateful rhetoric to be provocative.
He notes the difference between Muslim and non-Muslim students is that the latter are less open, rather than less hateful. Kanbicak supports this view, noting that amongst students from more traditional German backgrounds, outright antisemitism is taboo and is more likely to be cloaked as criticism around Israel.
German news platform Hessenschau has reported that “Jew” has become a common insult amongst pupils in schools across German.read more
One teacher and educational scientist, Türkan Kanbicak, notes that “You Jew”, “You spastic” and sexist insults are very common. She remarks that, while she determinedly challenges all such incidences, many of her colleagues appear indifferent and say nothing.
