Germany: Anti-Semitism 'deeply rooted' in German society: public prosecutor

Via The Local:

More than 70 years after the end of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism remains entrenched in German society, Berlin's top legal expert on the matter says, admitting victims sometimes struggle to obtain justice.

"Anti-Semitism has always been here," said Claudia Vanoni, who is in charge of prosecuting cases targeting Jews.

"But I think that recently, it has again become louder, more aggressive and flagrant," she told AFP in an interview.

Last September, following a spate of such crimes, the Berlin authorities created the post of anti-Semitism commissioner, appointing Vanoni to the role.

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Belgium: I spoke to the creators of the anti-Semitic carnival float. They’re not sorry.

Via JTA:

I had hoped to introduce some nuance to what was condemned universally as crass racism. Were the creators aware that they were trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes? Did they get carried away in the aesthetics of the float without really considering the content? Was there a level of irony or parody an outsider couldn’t understand?

But rather than offering real explanations, or even expressing any regret for the fallout or trying to acknowledge where it came from, Soleme doubled down. The 52-year-old father of three, who works for the Aalst Police Department, said he thought the float was funny and cited the support of his mayor.

“Mayor Christoph D’Haese totally has our backs, he told us we’ve done nothing wrong,” Soleme told me. D’Haese even told the group that his office would cover any fine imposed by the authorities, Selome said.

D’Haese defended the Vismooil’n group, saying on Tuesday that its float was not intended to offend and that “such things should be allowed at the Aalst Carnaval.” The event was added in 2010 to UNESCO’s list of events that contribute to the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.”

Filip de Vidts, a technician and the secretary of Vismooil’n, even referred me to D’Haese for a reaction. Treasurer Johan de Plecker, who works for the Education Ministry, did not reply to my request for an interview.

As for Soleme, he has “absolutely no regrets” about participating in the display.

“I think the people who are offended are living in the past, of the Holocaust, but this was about the present,” he said. “There was never any intention to insult anyone. It was a celebration of humor.”

The Jewish theme, he said, was “because we weren’t sure we’d be doing a 2020 tour [because of rising costs]. So that would mean we’d be taking a sabbatical, and it went on from there.”

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UK: "In my personal experience, anti-Semitic sentiments are usually conveyed with a wink and a nod"

Frank Furedi @ Spiked:

There is a spiral of silence surrounding anti-Semitism today. Statements signalling negative views towards Jews are almost always coupled with the phrase, ‘I am not anti-Semitic’. In my personal experience, anti-Semitic sentiments are usually conveyed with a wink and a nod. For example, recently I was having a drink with a well-known English public figure after a panel discussion. Suddenly, he got animated by ‘those people who work at Goldman Sachs’. When I pretended not to understand and asked, ‘What do you mean by those people’, he looked away in embarrassment. His reaction spoke to a growing phenomenon – the anti-Semitism of bad faith.

Belgium: Antisemitic carnival float had puppets of smiling Jews, sacks of money and a rat

Via Independent:

A carnival parade which featured Jewish caricatures standing amid piles of money has been compared to Nazi antisemitic propaganda and provoked fierce criticism in Belgium.

One float in the city of Aalst’s annual feast on Sunday was decorated with two huge figures of men with large sideburns, crooked noses and wearing shtreimels, a fur hat worn by some Orthodox Jews. One had a rat on his shoulder.

It was followed by several trucks on which dozens of dancing people wore similar outfits.

“The caricatures, like those of Der Stürmer, of Jews with a crooked nose and suitcases, are typical of the Nazism of 1939,” a spokesperson for Belgium’s Forum of Jewish Organisations said. ”This has no place in 2019, carnival or not. The Jewish community naturally accepts humour is very important in a society, but there are limits that cannot be exceeded.”

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Germany: foundation under fire for awarding prize to antisemitic BDS group

Via Jerusalem Post:

The Central Council of Jews in Germany and American Jewish organizations blasted the Roland Röhl Foundation for its decision to award in March a peace prize to a BDS group which is widely considered to be antisemitic.

(...)

The group is called Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East and is an energetic supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that targets the Jewish state.

The nearly 100,000 member Central Council of Jews in Germany classified Jewish Voice as an “antisemitic association,” according to a German DPA wire service report.

Dr. Josef Schuster, the president of the council, wrote a letter last week the city of Göttingen’s Mayor Rolf-Georg Köhler urging him to take a stand against the antisemitism prevalent in the group.

“The association is an active supporter of events of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel,” wrote Schuster, adding “I certainly do not have to explain which historical precursors have had boycotts against Jewish institutions or Jews in Germany, and what associations are created with such actions.”

Schuster was referring to Hitler movement to boycott Jewish businesses – a nascent phase in the Holocaust. Köhler, who is a member of the foundation’s board, announced on Wednesday that the city will not participate in the award ceremony this year, according to a report in the daily paper Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten by the journalists Thoralf Cleven and Ansgar Nehls.

In response to Schuster’s criticism, the mayor called for the slated March 9 event to be suspended until the antisemitic allegation could be clarified.

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Ukraine: Mall displays Nazi swastika on staircase

Via Jerusalem Post:

A shopping mall in Ukraine that is located on a street named for a collaborator with the Nazis decorated a staircase with a large swastika.

Images and footage from inside the Horodok shopping mall on Kiev’s Bandera Avenue surfaced Monday on Facebook.

They show shoppers climbing up and down the staircase, whose middle-section stairs feature a large swastika locked in a white rhombus encircled by red, similar to Nazi Germany’s flag. The street where the shopping mall is located is named for Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who briefly collaborated with Nazi Germany in its fight against Russia.

His troops are believed to have killed thousands of Jews.

The street used to be Called Moscow Avenue. It was named for Bandera in 2016 despite protests by some Jewish community leaders and Ukrainian Poles, whose community also suffered war crimes by Bandera’s troops.

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UK: London’s Jewish Housing Association Defeats Discrimination Challenge

Via Hamodia:

A ruling issued by the Divisional Court of the High Court of Justice in London, made public on Tuesday, has upheld the right of an Orthodox Jewish Housing Association to allocate housing exclusively to Jewish families.

Agudas Israel Housing Association (AIHA) was founded to serve the U.K.’s Orthodox Jewish community and builds, part-owns and manages properties in London, Salford and Canvey Island.

The claimants against AIHA, who are not Jewish, had wanted to be allocated a home in AIHA’s new Aviv development in Stamford Hill, but were not given the chance to bid. The claim against Hackney London Borough Council and AIHA, challenged AIHA’s policy of allocating its social housing properties on the basis that they precluded any persons who are not members of the Orthodox Jewish community from becoming tenants. The claimants applied for a Judicial Review of the case.

Following a detailed investigation of the social housing market, and the specific characteristics of Hackney’s Orthodox Jewish Community, including anti-Semitism and religious needs, the Divisional Court ruled that AIHA’s policy was lawful and found against the application for Judicial Review, concluding that AIHA served a specific need and tried to do so with access to only 1 percent of Hackney’s social housing stock

In what is potentially a landmark ruling, the court recognized that Orthodox Jewish community members’ way of life requires them to live close by each other as a community – to the extent that many prefer to live in unsuitable properties rather than to move away from their community.

It also sadly acknowledged widespread and increasing overt anti-Semitism in society and prejudice, including in the private rental sector, specifically against Orthodox Jews, due to their higher visibility as Jewish.

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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.

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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.

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France: Tax protests often feature anti-Semitic rhetoric

Via JTA:

Protests in France over taxes are giving rise to anti-Semitic rhetoric, a prominent watchdog group said.

The head of the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Antisemitism, or BNVCA, Sammy Ghozlan, said Wednesday that “the ‘Yellow Jackets’ movement has an anti-Semitic base that repeats conspiracy theories about Jews and power.”

Launched last month as a protest against a proposed rise in diesel and fuel taxes, the movement has expanded into an anti-government drive featuring violent riots that have shut down the French capital several times. Some protesters have been filmed carrying signs and chanting slogans describing French President Emmanuel Macron as a “whore of the Jews” and their “puppet.”

Such language “was present from the very beginning of the protests and persists,” Ghozlan said, although he added that it exists “on the margins” of the protests. France has seen a 69 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2018 over the past year.

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UK: Company apologises to Jewish residents for telling them to take down their mezuzot

Via Jewish Chronicle:

A management company has apologised to its Jewish residents for threatening to take their mezuzot down if they did not remove it themselves.

Warwick Estates said on Monday it was sorry for the "overzealous" letter to residents of Cedarwood Court, near Stamford Hill, which said hanging mezuzot on front doors breached the terms of the residents' leases and they could be billed if they did not take them down.

The letter was sent last week, saying hanging objects outside their homes was against the terms of their leases. It specifically singled out the mezuzah, the rolled-up scroll of parchment Jewish families customarily hang on their front doors.

One residentsaid she had never seen anyone complain about the mezuzot in 10 years living in the area and the mayor of Hackney said he would intervene.

On Monday, the company backtracked, a day after the JC reported the letter and the anger it had caused locally. 

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Germany: When a Nazi comparison makes sense: the BDS movement against Israel

Via The Hill (Benjamin Weinthal and Asaf Romirowsky):

In a remarkable finding in their May report, intelligence officials of the German state of Baden Württemberg wrote that propaganda from the neo-Nazi party Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way) calling to boycott Israeli products “roughly recalls similar measures against German Jews by the National Socialists, for example, on April 1, 1933 (the slogan: 'Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!')"

The historical significance of the parallel between contemporary calls to boycott Israeli products and the Hitler movement’s economic warfare against German Jewish businesses should not be ignored.

The Nazi efforts to strangle Jewish companies in order to isolate and dehumanize German Jews was a nascent phase of the Holocaust. Hence the boycott campaign against Israel is just another dangerous recurrence of history in a new form.

Fast forward to 2005: According to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement’s declaration targeting the Jewish state, a key demand is the return of all “Palestinian refugees” to Israel. The “return” of the alleged millions of Palestinians refugees—based on a bogus definition of refugee status—would spell dissolution of the Jewish state. Anti-Semitism at its core is about discrimination against Jews.

The proliferation of pro-BDS activities in Germany prompted Felix Klein, the German government commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism, to write in the daily Die Welt in August that “the BDS movement is antisemitic in its methods and goals.” He added that BDS’s “Don’t buy!” stickers on products from the Jewish state are “methods from the Nazi period.”

According to the German intelligence report from May, boycotts of products from the Jewish state are a “new variation of anti-Semitism.” This is the first instance of a domestic intelligence agency labeling boycotts targeting Israeli products as anti-Semitic and a security threat.

The following month, in June, an intelligence report from the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate arrived at the same conclusion. “The Third Way’s slogan ‘Boycott Products from Israel’ and … betray significant parallels to the anti-Jewish agitation of the National Socialists,” the agency wrote.

The intelligence agency copied a graphic from The Third Way’s website featuring the slogan, “Boycott products from Israel: 729=Made in Israel.” The number 729 is used in barcodes to identify Israel-based companies, although not necessarily where a product was manufactured.

It is worth noting that the party platform of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union declared in 2016, “Who today under the flag of the BDS movement calls to boycott Israeli goods and services speaks the same language in which people were called to not buy from Jews. That is nothing other than coarse anti-Semitism.”

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Germany seems to once again be embracing anti-Semitism

Victor Davis Hanson @ Hoover Institution:

Every 20 to 50 years in Germany, things start unraveling. Germans feel aggrieved. Ideas and movements gyrate wildly between far left and far right extremes. And the Germans finally find consensus in a sense of victimhood paradoxically expressed as national chauvinism. Germany’s neighbors in 1870, 1914, 1939—and increasingly in the present—usually bear the brunt of this national meltdown. […]

Germany has always had a “Jewish Problem.” In the late nineteenth-century, German academics became obsessed with pseudo-research about eugenics and racial purity—which often led to talk of both Aryan purity and crass anti-Semitism that played out in the real world with disastrous results during the Holocaust. After World War II, Germany tried to make amends through introspection, some reparations, and the subsidized sales of military supplies to Israel. Yet Germany seems to once again be embracing anti-Semitism quite aside from its fierce opposition to Israel. Dieter Graumann, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has warned of the present climate: “These are the worst times since the Nazi era. On the streets, you hear things like ‘the Jews should be gassed,’ ‘the Jews should be burned.’ We haven’t had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn’t criticizing Israeli politics, it’s just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else.”

In response to the growing hatred, Felix Klein, Germany’s newly appointed special envoy entrusted by the Merkel government with addressing the nation’s growing anti-Semitism—much of it the result of the influx of Muslims—recently shrugged it off, simply pointing out that more and more Jews are leaving Germany: “It is quite understandable that those who are scared for the safety of their children would consider leaving.” […]

In a perfect world, Germany would address its frustrations through introspection. After all, no one forced Berlin to take in over a million problematic refugees from the Middle East. No one forced it to export goods on easy credit to leveraged buyers who visibly lived far above their means. No one forced it to renege on its NATO defense promises and responsibilities. No one forced it to have a long and catastrophic history with the Jewish people. And no one forces it to expect perpetual U.S. military protection while continually setting record trade surpluses.

Despite the long postwar history of U.S.-German friendship, and despite Germany’s financial and economic power, the country is becoming psychologically isolated, if not unhinged. While Germans broadcast their anti-Americanism, they seem oblivious that Americans may likewise be tiring of German petulance.  

If we are entering yet another historical period of dangerous German resentment, the ensuing result will bode ill for everyone involved.

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Europe: US Vice President Mike Pence cited attacks on Jews in Europe

Via JTA:

Wrapping up a rollout of a major Trump administration effort to fight for religious freedom, Pence made the remarks Thursday on the final day of the Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C., after singling out Iran for its persecution of religious minorities.

“While religious freedom is always in danger in authoritarian regimes, threats to religious minorities are not confined to autocracies or dictatorships,” he told government officials from from 80 countries, including Israel. “They can, and do, arise in free societies, as well — not from government persecution but from prejudice and hatred.”

The vice president noted a rise in religious intolerance in Europe.

“Just 70 years after the Holocaust, attacks on Jews, even on aging Holocaust survivors, are growing at an alarming rate,” he said. Pence cited what he said was a record high last year in attacks on British Jews, and warnings of Jewish leaders in France and Germany not to wear kippahs.

“It is remarkable to think that within the very lifetimes of some French Jews — the same French Jews that were forced by the Nazis to wear identifiable Jewish clothing — that some of those same people are now being warned by their democratic leaders not to wear identifiable Jewish clothing,” he said.

“These acts of violence and hatred and anti-Semitism must end,” Pence said to applause.

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Germany: Antisemitic insults and knife attack against a woman in Hamburg

Via Watch Antisemitism in Europe:

On Tuesday a drunk 61 year old man yelled antisemitic slurs towards a 63 year old lady in a public bus in the city of Hamburg. He also attacked her with a knife and left her injured.

Read more in German @ Focus

German Jewry: a bleak future

Via Jewish Policy Center (Benjamin Weinthal):

[…] A second telling example of the growing—or perhaps continued—indifference was the April attack by a Syrian refugee on Adam Armush, an Israeli Arab, because he dared wear a kippa (yarmulke) on a Berlin street.

The assault triggered headlines in the German and foreign media because there was video evidence of the attack. Der Spiegel’s influential columnist Jakob Augstein blamed the Israeli for having “come up with the idea to wear the kippa and use it as a provocation.” Augstein—who inherited significant ownership in the Spiegel news organization—has played a key role in mainstreaming media anti-Semitism. The Simon Wiesenthal Center ranked him ninth on its “2012 Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs” list for his bigoted statements.

Armush told the Deutsche Welle news outlet: “I am not Jewish, I am an Israeli and I grew up in Israel in an Arab family,” adding, “It was an experience for me to wear the skullcap and go out into the street yesterday.” He said he filmed the attack “for the police and for the German people and even the world to see how terrible it is these days as a Jew to go through Berlin streets.”

For observers of Jewish life in Germany, the anti-Semitic attack on Armush came as no surprise. In 2016, the spokesman for Hamburg’s nearly 2,500-member Jewish community, Daniel Killy, said a breakdown in security in the Federal Republic has created a highly dangerous situation for Jews.

“No, we are no longer safe here,” Killy told the tagesschau.de news outlet. Killy said the collapsing sense of state power, excesses of the extreme right-wing, the loss of political credibility, and “the terrible fear of naming Islamism as such” have all contributed to creating a climate of insecurity for Jews.

The response to the attack on Armush was a call for an anti-anti-Semitism protest. “Berlin wears the kippa” was the name of the feel-good rally on April 25 against Jew-hatred. It attracted some 2,000 people, according to press reports. The real number of attendees is believed to have been fewer than 1,500, in a city of 3.7 million. The demonstration took place under conditions that resembled those in a maximum-security prison.

A second protest against anti-Semitism in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Neukölln in Berlin had to be called off after a mere 20 minutes because of the anticipated violence of pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators.

To put things in perspective, roughly 150,000 people marched in Berlin in 2015 against a planned free trade deal between the United States and Europe.

Germans frequently invoke the phrase “nip it in the bud” at Holocaust remembrance events when referring to anti-Semitism. Dead Jews trigger widespread commemoration events across the country, but the fight to stop anti-Semitism against living Jews limps—at best—on both legs. A detached observer might ask of modern Germany: Have we learned anything from the Holocaust? […] 

Germany’s woefully inadequate system for classifying anti-Semitic crimes is also cause for alarm. As anti-Semitism rises in the country, the authorities continue to classify Islamic-animated anti-Semitism as a “politically motivated right-wing extremist crime.” A telling example, cited in Die Welt, was an outbreak of Hezbollah-related anti-Semitism that was registered as right-wing extremism. 

Supporters of the Hezbollah terrorist organization participated in an anti-Israel march during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Twenty Hezbollah supporters yelled the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil” (Hail Victory) at a group of pro-Israel activists in Berlin. The “Sieg Heil” call violates Germany’s anti-hate law and was designated as a far-right extremist crime.

The result is German whitewashing of the leading cause of lethal anti-Semitism in Europe: jihadi-based eliminatory anti-Semitism.

The Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, who is head of Munich’s Jewish community, said in 2017: “The Muslim associations have for decades not only done nothing [to combat anti-Semitism], rather they have allowed anti-Semitic hate preachers from Muslim countries to bring their anti-Jewish ideology into German mosques and into the heads of young Muslims.”

Germany’s tiny Jewish community—100,000 among a population of over 82 million in the Federal Republic—is in dire straits today and faces an increasingly precarious future. Chancellor Merkel and mainstream German society would do well to remember the words of the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw: “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved with indifference.” Acute indifference is now the norm in Germany.

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France: Are the Jews of France doomed?

Via The Algemeiner (Shmuley Boteach):

"For all the reports that we American and Israeli Jews read about growing French antisemitism, especially emanating from sectors of the Muslim community, and for all the reports of French Jews wanting to either make aliyah to Israel or emigrate to Canada, French Jewry is still thriving.  

What has changed is that it’s becoming more and more subterranean. Yes, you can still find large numbers of synagogues, kosher restaurants, and Jewish community centers. What you don’t see on the streets, however, is Jews. Or you see them, but you don’t necessarily know they are Jews. Overt, identifiable symbols of Jewishness — like a kippa, Magen David, or tzitzit — are disappearing from French streets and cities."

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Iceland: What do Icelanders really think about Israel? (video)

Via Rudy Rochman:

On the way to Iceland, I was told that many Icelanders were against Israel and that their media had been feeding them lies for years. I was also told that they had recently started a petition to boycott the Eurovision competition in Israel next year. 

Rudy Rochman Facebook

Germany: Less than half of Germans think Jews don't have too much influence in the world

Percentage who didn't answer the question added in brackets.

Via Marcel Dirsus @ Twitter

Anti-semitism in Germany: 

Percentage of people who believe that Jews have too much influence in the world
AfD supporters: 55%     [22%]
Linke supporters: 20%   [30%]     
Green supporters: 17%   [47%]
FDP supporters: 19%     [35%]
SPD supporters: 16%     [37%]
CDU/CSU supporters: 19%   [41%]

(Source: Allensbach/FAZ)

Europe: Time to leave? The question that Jews must ponder

Via Commentary Magazine (Melanie Phillips):

[…] The same people who claim to see anti-Semitism in European populism or the political base of Donald Trump regularly accuse Jews of claiming anti-Semitism just to “sanitize the crimes of Israel” or “bring down Jeremy Corbyn.”

This reaction is worse, far worse, than the anti-Semitism itself. It’s worse even than indifference. For it imputes to the Jews malicious intent in claiming that Jewish people are being maliciously targeted. It says they are lying. It blames the Jews for their own victimization.

This reaction is the inescapable evidence that the Jews are being abandoned. Those of us who have loved Britain for its gentleness, its tolerance, its decency, its stoicism, its reasonableness, and the dampness of both its weather and national temperament feel as if we have been orphaned. But maybe we were living all along in a fool’s paradise.

Some people think Europe is over, that the demographics are against it and that it will become a majority-Muslim culture in a few decades. My guess is that Europe won’t go down without a fight. If that happens, the Jews are likely to get it in the neck from all sides. Whichever way it goes, it’s not a pleasant prospect.

So is it time to leave? It’s very personal, and I wouldn’t presume to advise anyone what to do. I can only speak for myself and say that for some years now, I’ve been spending a great deal of my time in Israel. Because even with 150,000 Hezbollah rockets pointing at us from Lebanon, even with Hamas trying every day to murder us, and even with Iran working toward its genocide bomb to wipe us out, Israel is where I feel so much safer and the air is so much sweeter, and it’s where Jews are not on their knees and where no one will ever make me feel I am not entitled to live and don’t properly belong.

Israel is where we have astonishingly renewed ourselves as a nation out of the ashes of the Shoah. Israel is where all those who want us gone meet their nemesis in the political realization of the eternal people. Israel is the ultimate, and ultimately the only, definitive and triumphant repudiation of anti-Semitism and the true vindication of the millions of us who perished in the unspeakable events that we memorialize on Holocaust Memorial Day.

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