Germany accused of mislabeling anti-Semitic attacks by Muslims as 'far right'

Via JTA:

The annual al-Quds Day march in Berlin is often cited as a prime example of the rise of so-called new anti-Semitism in Europe: hatred of Jews in connection with Israel, often by people from Muslim societies.

Despite attempts by organizers in recent years to suppress some expressions of anti-Semitism, the march by hundreds of participants features frequent calls about killing Israelis, Zionist conspiracies and chants of “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” Flags of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are on display, and imams regularly preach anti-Semitic verses from the Quran to the crowd in Farsi and Arabic.

“Under the guise of ‘Israel criticism,’ they use classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, identifying Israel as having ‘Jewish characteristics’: ‘domineering,’ ‘greedy’ or a ‘child killer,'” sociologist Imke Kummer observed about the marchers.

(Iran launched al-Quds Day in 1979 to express support for the Palestinians and oppose Zionism and Israel, and international events of support have followed. Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.)

Such agitation is seen worldwide. To many, it’s especially troubling on streets where the persecution of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators was so brutal that it moved whole societies in Europe to vow “Never again.”

Curiously, however, some of the incidents documented at the Quds Day march in Berlin have been classified by authorities as forms of far-right anti-Semitism, independent watchdog groups have discovered.

Critics say the march example and other mislabeled incidents are facilitating attempts to politicize anti-Semitism and complicating the apparently losing battle to solve it.

“It means we can’t really use the official statistics on anti-Semitism in Germany,” Daniel Poensgen, a researcher at the Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism, or RIAS, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Germany’s Interior Ministry did not respond to JTA’s request for comment.

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Belgium: Man arrested after attempting to attack a Orthodox Jewish woman in Antwerp

Via KolHaolam:

ANTWERP: A Muslim man was arrested after attempting to attack a Orthodox Jewish woman in Antwerp, Belgium near Belz Shul, suspect arrested.

UK: Muslims harass pro-Israel group in Hyde Park

Here you'll see a smorgasbord of antisemitism: Muslim fundamentalism, Holocaust-denial, accusations of Christ-killers

All because Jews dared stand with an Israeli flag in Hyde Park.

France Investigates Imam for Incitement Over anti-Semitic, anti-Israel Sermon

Via Haaretz:

Prosecutors in France have launched an investigation for incitement against a senior Muslim cleric from Toulouse who recited anti-Semitic religious passages and predicted Israel’s destruction.

On Tuesday, the Toulouse Prosecutor’s Office opened the probe against Mohamed Tatai, the imam of the newly inaugurated Grand Mosque of Toulouse and the leader of an interfaith dialogue group, the Sud Ouest daily reported.

In a sermon delivered on December 15, 2017, Tatai recited a Muslim text, called a Hadith, stating that on Judgment Day, the Muslims will kill the Jews.

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Germany: Most Germans have never met a Jew

Via Handelsblatt (Mark Leonard):

[…] But since 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel announced her policy of Willkommenskultur (“welcoming culture”) and opened Germany’s doors to refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria, unease about resurgent anti-Semitism has been growing in the German establishment, and particularly in the Jewish community. […]  

Attacks on Jews have sparked outrage from the many Germans who thought such scenes had vanished forever from their country’s streets. But, in addition to the more visible abuses, German Jews have also begun to talk about more subtle changes in their everyday lives as major German cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Berlin grow more multicultural. […]

[…] most Germans have never, and will never, meet a Jew, for the simple reason that Jews constitute a vanishingly small share of the population. Frankfurt, home to the country’s second-largest Jewish community (behind Berlin), has only 7,000 Jews, out of a metropolitan-area population of 5.7 million.

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Sweden: Politician denies calling Jews ‘impure’

Via Times of Israel:

A Swedish politician from Malmo who has worked on integration of immigrants denied saying that Jews and Armenians have “impure spirits.”

Muhammad Khorshid, who represents the Liberals on the city council of the municipality in southern Sweden, told Expressen that the comment in his name from 2016 on Facebook belonged to a fake account. The person behind that account wrote in Turkish about the two ethnicities: “We call them out for their impure spirits,” the daily reported Thursday.

The issue is the subject of an internal probe within the party, the report said. 

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France: Jewish scholar Alain Finkielkraut is worried for France’s future

Via The Times of Israel:

If Jews in France have long had a charged — at times painful — relationship with their country dating back centuries, they now face a new, particularly pernicious reality, says prominent French Jewish intellectual and writer Alain Finkielkraut.

“I’m extremely worried — as much for French Jews as I’m worried for the future of France,” says Finkielkraut, during a recent interview with The Times of Israel in his Paris apartment. “The anti-Semitism we’re now experiencing in France is the worst I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and I’m convinced it’s going to get worse.”

Sitting at a long table in his living room, whose walls are lined with tall shelves laden with books, Finkielkraut, 69, comes across as a serious, deep-thinking man. (…)

His commentary is often trenchant, especially concerning the plight of his 500,000 Jewish compatriots. Among the worrisome developments that preoccupy him is what some call “internal migration.”

“Due to the increased hostility Jews are facing, especially in certain suburbs of Paris, many feel the need to leave where they’ve lived for a long time,” says Finkielkraut, referring to a growing unease caused by virulent anti-Semitism in predominantly immigrant areas.

“In recent years, tens of thousands of Jews have moved, some to Israel, most to neighborhoods where they feel more secure. Such a situation would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. It’s without precedent in France and, what’s really terrible, it’s going to continue,” he says.

For Finkielkraut, the origin of this malaise is clear.

“It’s a terrible phenomenon linked to immigration,” he says. “And as immigration is increasing, so is the rise in this anti-Semitism. Not only does a big part of the left refuse to recognize this, but they explain to us that the immigrants are the new Jews and that it’s important to know how to welcome them as the country should have done for Jews during World War II.

“What’s crazy is the situation is going to get worse with the complicity of people who claim to have learned the lessons from the Holocaust. We are at an absolutely diabolical juncture,” Finkielkraut says.

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Denmark: Imam charged over call to kill Jews

Via Times of Israel:

Danish prosecutors on Tuesday charged an imam with calling for the killing of Jews in the first case of its kind in the Nordic nation and which sparked political outrage.

Imam Mundhir Abdallah, who preaches in the Copenhagen neighborhood of Norrebro at the Masjid Al-Faruq mosque, which media have linked to radical Islam, is accused of citing a hadith or koranic narrative calling for Muslims to rise up against Jews.

“Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them,” Abdallah said in a Facebook and YouTube video post in March, according to a translation of the original Arabic provided by the US organization the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“These are serious statements and I think it’s right for the court to now have an opportunity to assess the case,” public prosecutor Eva Ronne said in a statement.

This is the first time the prosecution has raised such charges under a criminal code introduced January 1, 2017 on religious preaching.

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Bosnia: Anti-Semitic graffiti found on homes of Jewish community members

Via European Jewish Press:

Jewish community leaders in Bosnia have expressed concern after anti-Semitic graffiti were discovered this week in the country’s capital Sarajevo and in Tuzla on homes of community members.

“We received this news with regret and bitterness, aware that these incidents will not violate the good neighbourhood relations that Bosnian Jews have built with their fellow citizens from other ethnic and religious groups,’’ the Jewish community said in a statement issued on Friday.

“We appeal to the competent authorities to identify and punish the perpetrators,” it said, stressing that the country has no recent history of anti-Semitic incidents.

Jews have been equal citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina for more than 450 years and they did not deserve something like this, said the community President Jakob Finci. […]

About 1,000 Jews live in the country, half of them in Sarajevo and the rest in Mostar, Zenica, Tuzla, Doboj and Banja Luka.

Two-thirds of the community left after the outbreak of conflict in the former Yugoslavia (1992-1995), but the tendency toward emigration has slackened. Some 90% of the community is Sephardi. However, only older people still speak Ladino.

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France: Jewish man, 69, attacked in Paris by assailant shouting about Allah and Hitler

Via JTA:

A 69-year-old Jewish man wearing a kippah was assaulted in Paris by a young Arab man who shouted about Allah and Hitler.

In Tuesday’s incident, the alleged assailant hit the Jewish man, pushed him to the ground and dragged him by his hair while shouting “Alla hu akbar, long live Hitler, death to the Jews,” the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, wrote in a statement Wednesday. The call in Arabic means “Allah is the greatest.”

Police apprehended the suspected assailant, the report said. A police physician recommended transferring the suspect to a psychiatric institution for observation because he was in a “state of over-excitement,” according to the information received by BNVCA.

It was the third time this year that French police sent a man who displayed violent behavior toward Jews for psychiatric evaluation.

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Austria: Turkish man beats Jews in front of kosher shop in Vienna

Via Arutz Sheva 7:

Several Jews were physically assaulted in Vienna on Thursday outside of a kosher restaurant. The incident occurred in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district Thursday morning, on Tabor Street.

According to Austrian media outlets, a 24-year-old Austrian man of Turkish origin attacked three Jewish men in front of a kosher restaurant and near a synagogue.

Witnesses say the assailant jumped one of the victims, knocking him to the ground. The suspect then began to beat the victims.

“I had just walked out of the synagogue,” one victim, Daniel, told Heute, “and I had my kippah and Tefillin [phylacteries] on, so I was easily recognizable as a Jew. He came at me from behind while I was on my phone and didn’t see him. He jumped me from behind.”

Daniel says he suffered injuries to his hip, but was thankful the attacker was not armed. “I’m glad he didn’t have a knife with him.”

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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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Germany: Group of men attacks German Jew wearing Israeli pin and kippa

Via The Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

A large group of men attacked a 17-year-old German Jew who wore an Israeli pin and kippah on Friday night in what the police believe was an antisemitic attack.  

Media in the German city of Dusseldorf reported that some 10 men of “North African or Mediterranean” appearance pushed the young Jewish man, causing painful injuries. The men also insulted the youth, whose name was not published in German media reports.  According to the police, the suspects are between the ages of 18 and 23.  

Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon tweeted in response to The Jerusalem Post story: “Those are not just separate and distinct events. It’s a pattern, a pattern of antisemitic attacks by Muslim migrants against the members of the Jewish community, just because they are Jewish. It is unacceptable anywhere, and doubly so in Germany.”  

Michael Szentei-Heise,the executive director of the Jewish community in Dusseldorf, told the WAZ daily newspaper that the attack showed, “For the safety of Jewish citizens in Germany it is catastrophic.”

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Sweden: Caught between jihadists and neo-Nazis, Jews fear for their future

Via JTA (Cnaan Liphshiz):

When Carinne Sjoberg dissolved the Jewish Community of Umea in northern Sweden, she knew it would send shockwaves far beyond the small congregation that she had spent decades building.

The move in May owed to intimidation by neo-Nazis, making it the first time in decades that a Jewish organization in Western Europe acknowledged that it felt compelled to close shop over safety concerns.

Neo-Nazis from the Nordic Resistance Movement, beginning in 2016, pasted stickers with fascist imagery on Umea’s Jewish community center, “making the place look like after Kristallnacht,” Sjoberg said. The closure followed surveillance activity on the center by the neo-Nazis, who published details about individual visitors.

“I didn’t take it lightly,” Sjoberg, a 56-year-old Jewish mother of two, told JTA about the decision to close. “I hate giving neo-Nazis this victory. But I can’t bear the responsibility for people’s lives, not under such threats,” she said of her city’s Jewish community of 70 people.

The closure caused a national uproar. Amid intense media coverage in Sweden of the affair, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven mentioned it in a speech denouncing anti-democracy forces in his country.

But the indignation did little to change the fact that in Sweden, Muslim extremism and the far right are part of a broader set of challenges to Jewish communal life. So while the Jewish community of Stockholm may be growing, the problems are nonetheless causing some Swedish Jews to fear for their future as a minority here.

“We have a vibrant community in Stockholm but even here we face multiple threats, from Muslim extremism to far-right violence,” said Aron Verstandig, president of the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities — an umbrella group with approximately 6,000 members out of Sweden’s estimated 20,000 Jews.

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France: A double whammy for the Jews of France

Via JNS (Lyn Julius):

France does not want to admit that its terrorism problem has ideological roots. It prefers to blame economic grievances, despair or mental illness.

The sun may have been shining, but these are dark days for the Jews of France. They have sustained a double whammy.

The first is that the murderer of Sarah Halimi, who shouted “Allah Hu Akbar” as he tortured and hurled the Orthodox Jew to her death from her balcony in April 2015, may not even stand trial. Kobili Traore has been declared “mentally incapable” by a panel of psychiatrists. After months of foot-dragging by the judge, the panel has reversed the findings of an earlier evaluation, which had retained the charge of anti-Semitism as an “aggravating circumstance.”

The second blow delivered to the Jewish community concerns the shoddy treatment of French historian and director of the Paris Holocaust memorial Georges Bensoussan. Over the last three years, Bensoussan has been fighting charges of “Islamophobia” and incitement to hatred against Muslims. In a television debate, he had said that Arab anti-Semitism was endemic, quoting the words of an Algerian sociologist that “Arabs sucked in antisemitism with their mother’s milk.”

Thus far, Bensoussan has been acquitted in the French courts. But his reward has been to be unceremoniously dismissed from his job after 25 years of faithful service. His contract had still had two years to run, but the lock to his office was changed. When he was eventually allowed in to collect his possessions, a minder looked over his shoulder.

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Germany: Police arrested 10 people over alleged anti-Semitic attack in Berlin

Via The Times of Israel:

German police arrested 10 people Sunday over an alleged anti-Semitic attack in a Berlin park.

The group, aged between 15 and 25, including three women, were detained following the assault in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Police did not give the names or nationalities of the suspects or the victim, but German daily Welt reported that all involved are Syrians.

Police said the victim had approached the group in a park to borrow a lighter, but his cigarette was snatched away.

The 25-year-old was wearing a chain with a Star of David, which police said was ripped from the victim’s neck by one of the men, while spewing “anti-Semitic insults.”  

The attacker allegedly repeatedly punched the victim in the face, before fleeing. The victim was treated in a hospital after suffering cuts to the head.

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Germany: 10 arrested after man is punched in alleged anti-Semitic attack

Via Times of Israel:

German police arrested 10 people Sunday over an alleged anti-Semitic attack in a Berlin park.

The group, aged between 15 and 25, including three women, were detained following the assault in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Police did not give the names or nationalities of the suspects or the victim, but German daily Welt reported that all involved are Syrians.

Police said the victim had approached the group in a park to borrow a lighter, but his cigarette was snatched away.

The 25-year-old was wearing a chain with a Star of David, which police said was ripped from the victim’s neck by one of the men, while spewing “anti-Semitic insults.”

The attacker allegedly repeatedly punched the victim in the face, before fleeing.

The victim was treated in a hospital after suffering cuts to the head.

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Holland: Jewish community remains an important target for terrorists

Via Bad News from the Netherlands:

The annual report of the BLEW advisory body for the security of the Dutch Jewish community says that the Dutch Jewish community remains an important target for terrorists. Jews get much attention in jihadi propaganda. The worldwide increase in antisemitism also proves that Jews are threatened. BLEW concludes that it is of great importance to maintain existing security measures. The organization is unhappy with the decision to remove a number of police posts from Jewish institutions. 

read more (in Dutch) @ CIDI

France: Prosecutors announce investigation into anti-Semitic mosque sermon

Via Times of Israel:

Public prosecutors in the French city of Toulouse announced Friday they are opening an investigation into a senior Muslim cleric who recited anti-Semitic religious passages and predicted Israel’s destruction in a sermon.

Mohamed Tatai, the imam of the newly inaugurated Grand Mosque of Toulouse and the leader of an interfaith dialogue group, is to be investigated for “possible incitement to hatred.”

On December 15 Tatai recited a Muslim text, called a Hadith, stating that on Judgment Day, the Muslims will kill the Jews.

The Prophet Muhammad “told us about the final and decisive battle: ‘Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him – except for the Gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews,’” he said.

He added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “afraid that Israel would not live longer than 76 years – as is written in the prophecies.” He then said that an Israeli journalist, whom he did not name, said the 2016 funeral of the late president Shimon Peres was “the funeral of Israel.”

The video of the Arabic-language sermon was posted in December on the YouTube channel of the Grand Mosque of Toulouse. The Middle East Media Research Institute translated the video and posted it on its website.

As part of the French investigation, the translation will be checked for accuracy before prosecutors determine if a crime was committed.

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Holland: Muslim political activist wishes cancer on ‘filthy Jews’ at pro-Israel paper

Via JTA:

A former staffer at a Muslim political party in the Netherlands sent an email to a newspaper that was attacked this week saying “May you get cancer, you filthy, far-right cancer Jews.”

Hussein Jamakovic, who worked for the Denk Muslim party, which Dutch Jews allege is anti-Semitic, wrote the message to Telegraaf, the country’s largest-circulation daily, as well as three other news organizations.

The message came amid elevated concern in the Netherlands for the safety of journalists following the attack Tuesday on Telegraaf, when a van drove into the newspaper’s entrance in Amsterdam. Police do not have any suspects in custody.

Telegraaf is seen to have a center-right editorial line. The pro-Israel publication features an activist and a hostile attitude toward radical Islam. It also covers organized crime regularly and thoroughly.

Jamakovic’s message was over reports of his alleged expressions of sympathy for the Islamic State terrorist group. He also sent the email to the DDS, WNL and GeenStijl news sites.

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