Netherlands: Textbook omits Jewish connection to Jerusalem

Via Times of Israel:

A Dutch publisher that previously created school textbooks accusing Israelis of ethnic cleansing has released a new volume omitting Jerusalem’s significance to Jews.

The omission occurred in a textbook about social issues titled “Plein M” by Nordhoff Publishers for preparatory middle-level applied education level schools, including public schools. It states Jerusalem is holy to Muslims and Christians, but does not mention its holiness to Jews.

It also states that Jews and Christians were “mostly treated well” by Arabs throughout history. It does not mention capital taxes and many pogroms perpetrated against Jews in Arab countries before and during the flight of at least 800,000 Jews from those countries in the 20th century. Today, there are fewer than 7,000 Jews living in Arab countries.

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Likoed Nederland, a pro-Israel group, called the book a form of “historical falsification” in a statement Sunday, adding it “reads like Palestinian propaganda.”

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Germany: 'The word Jew was not a common insult when I went to school...it is now.'

Via CNN:

Rachel always thought it was best to hide her religion from her high school students. The trouble started a few years ago when she let slip to a student that she was Jewish.

"I found swastikas scribbled in their textbooks, they drew penises around my name on the blackboard, and they'd yell like 'Hey, Jew' at me during class," said Rachel, a teacher in Berlin. "It became harder... to do my job."

Rachel, whose name has been changed because of safety concerns, went to her headmaster, and then to the police, but she said neither took her complaint seriously and would not intervene.

She said things got worse. The students saw Israel as a menace, an oppressor of the Palestinian people and viewed her as a stand-in for the Jewish state, she said. They took out their frustration by screaming anti-Semitic slurs at her.

Last year, she decided to switch schools for her own safety. She has not told her new students she's Jewish.

In a country still haunted by the Holocaust, anti-Semitic incidents in the classroom offer clear evidence that deep wounds haven't healed. Some Jewish teachers and students say they are caught between a surge of traditional right-wing anti-Semitism and threats from Muslim immigrants angry at Israel.

Unsure of how to deal with anti-Semitism in the classroom, Jewish teachers very often keep incidents to themselves to avoid tipping off their own religious identity, according to Marina Chernivsky, the head of the Berlin-based organization Kompetenz Zentrum für Pravention und Empowerment (or Competence Center for Prevention and Empowerment), which provides counseling to individual and institutions after anti-Semitic and discriminatory incidents.

She recently held a workshop to help Jewish teachers deal with anti-Semitism in their classrooms. Around 20 Jewish teachers attended the session; Chernivsky said it was the first time many of them opened up about the problem.

"It's not normal to be Jewish in Germany so anti-Semitism is not normal to talk about," Chernivsky said. "It's very taboo."

It took history and politics teacher Michal Schwartze years to reveal her religion to her students.

The Frankfurt based 42-year-old said she didn't feel comfortable teaching about the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anti-Semitism in Europe without being transparent with her students.

"I don't say hey I am Jewish, but I make it clear that I am personally affected," said Schwartze.

A few years ago, Schwartze penned an article in her school's newspaper encouraging students to stop using the word "Jew" as a slur. She said she took a risk writing the piece, but it raised awareness around anti-Semitism at her school.

"Fortunately, I have colleagues who are sensitive and a headmaster who has an interest in preventing anti-Semitism," says Schwartze. She cautioned that Jewish teachers who don't have similar support need to "hide their identity."

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Germany: Jewish leader slams “Antisemitic stereotypes” in school textbooks

Via Legal Insurrection:

The head of Germany’s leading Jewish organisation criticized the use of “antisemitic stereotypes” in the school textbooks.

Josef Schuster, president of The Central Council of Jews in Germany, slammed the Germany’s schools and textbook publishers for doing too little to root out the problem. Many textbook illustrations in German textbooks resemble the anti-Semitic depictions from the Nazi-era newspaper “Der Stürmer,” while at the same time failing to provide the appropriate historical context to the imagery, Schuster said.

Criticism aired by Schuster is based on a detailed study published by Germany’s Georg Eckert Institute. The study evaluated history textbooks being used in schools across the country. German weekly Der Spiegel reported the details:

“There are too many illustrations [in the textbooks] which have been shaped by antisemitic stereotypes and thus reminiscent of Der Stürmer, [and] don’t offer an objective representation,” Schuster said. Der Stürmer was an antisemitic Nazi propaganda newspaper.

“We have too many textbook that treat Judaism in a very rudimentary way,” criticized Schuster. “Judaism was not restricted to the period between 1933 an 1945. “There was Jewish life in Germany many centuries before that and fortunately we have it today. One, however, don’t see that in the textbooks.”

The content regarding the case in point deals with the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era and the Holocaust. School textbooks often show antisemitic imagery, confirmed Dirk Sadowski, researcher at the Georg-Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. (…)

Sadowski and his colleagues took three years to examining 84 history books of various grades and from several states and were surprised to find how simplistically the Jewish life has been depicted.  

Josef Schuster refers to this study when he complains that “many school textbooks take the perspective of the perpetrators, particularly when it comes to the topics of National Socialism and Shoah.” The antisemitic depictions of the Nazi-propaganda “are hardly put in the context. The antisemitic stereotype are thus reproduced, but not dealt with critique.” [Translated by the author: Vijeta Uniyal]

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Germany: JFK School latest site of anti-Semitic bullying in Berlin

Via Handelsblatt Global:

Just days after a Berlin court sentenced a man for an anti-Semitic attack, Berlin’s prestigious John F. Kennedy School acknowledged that a student had been the victim of months of anti-Semitic bullying.

School officials are still unclear of the scope of the bullying, but a newspaper report said students had put swastika stickers on the Jewish ninth-grader’s backpack, made remarks about trains to Auschwitz and blew smoke in his face, saying it should remind him of the fate of his forefathers.

“There wasn’t enough effort in the beginning to rectify the situation,” Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, told Tagesspiegel, a sister publication of Handelsblatt Global. Ms. Berger had been in touch with the school administration for weeks and said the complaints were originally dismissed as juvenile pranks. She first contacted the school by letter on June 12 but has yet to receive a reply.

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Poland: Christmas play at Polish consulate in Ukraine included anti-Semitic message

Via JTA:

A Christmas play presented at the Polish consulate in Lviv, Ukraine included an anti-Semitic message.

Oleg Vyshniakov, honorary consul of Israel in Ukraine, criticized the Christmas show presented last week at the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland by students of the Polish school in Lviv. During the show, the students presented a nativity scene featuring unusual characters in which one of the children was wearing a black hat with side curls and had a sign stuck to his back reading “Jew for president.”

Other characters included in the scene were King Herod, the Grim Reaper and the Devil.

“It crosses all lines of common sense when in an official state institution people promote anti-Semitism, and children take part in this terrible event,” Vyshniakov wrote in a post on Facebook which included a photo of the scene.

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France: Parisian teacher fined 1,500 euros for saying 'Jews organized the Holocaust'

Via Jerusalem Post:

 A French court fined a teacher from a Parisian high school €1,500 last week for making anti-Semitic remarks including that the Jews “planned and organized the Holocaust.”

The ruling was welcomed by the World Zionist Organization on Tuesday.

According to an AFP report, the English teacher from the Lycée Janson de Sailly school made the anti-Semitic comments in 2016 on her Facebook account, which is accessible to students.

The court found her guilty of denying crimes against humanity and of racial defamation. She was also ordered to pay 500 Euros in damages to several organizations who brought the civil action, including SOS Racisme and the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism.

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Greece: Feeling of victimhood contributes to antisemitism

Via Ekathimerini (h/t glykosymoritis)

Typically, most of the problems seem to begin in the classroom.

“It is school that hits people in their impressionable years, particularly as the secularization process is gradually eclipsing the role of the Church,” Dinas said.

More than other institutions, experts say, Greek schools foster a feeling of victimhood, and serve for the socialization and reproduction of an underdog culture which is identified as the fundamental source of Greek anti-Semitism.

“There is this shared conviction that Greeks have been treated more unfairly and suffered more pain than any other people,” Dinas said.

“This creates a feeling of inferiority, envy and competition,” he said.

According to the poll, about 70 percent believe that Greek people have suffered a genocide that is worse or similar to that suffered by the Jews.

It is estimated that 6 million Jews died in Nazi death camps in the Second World War. Greece’s Jewish population, which stood at 73,000 before the war, is currently estimated at 5,000.

“As long as Greek society develops a competitive stance to the Jewish experience and seeks the role of the absolute victim of history and of the great powers that be, the harder it will be to deal with the phenomenon of anti-Semitism,” the report said.

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Belgium: Antisemitic cartoonist named 'cultural ambassador' for Belgian town

Via Elder of Ziyon: 

Luc Descheemaeker (aka O-Sekoer) has been named the "cultural ambassador par excellence" for the city of Torhout, Belgium. 

Belgian news site Nieuwsblad says he deserves the award because his cartoons have been shown worldwide. 

This is true. He was a winner of Iran's Holocaust Cartoon contest with this entry.

The town of Torhout is quite aware of this because there was worldwide publicity for the school he taught at honoring him despite this clearly antisemitic cartoon. 

And he has drawn other antisemitic cartoons as well, like this one that blames Jews for being blown up by terrorists:

This one with a similar motif doesn't bother with the seeming even handedness of the previous cartoon, squarely blaming Jews for terrorism:

There is no way for any honest person to interpret these cartoons as anything but antisemitism. 

A JTA reporter in Belgium who covered the previous honor for Descheemaeker was shaken by the tacit support for antisemitic expression in Belgium:  

I wanted to see if this see-no-evil approach from government offices in a country whose leaders often declare a zero-tolerance attitude to anti-Semitism surprised me. But the real shock was the response from the Belgian media to JTA’s coverage of the affair.

De Morgen, one of Belgium’s largest and best-respected dailies, ran an article that omitted reference to Descheemaeker’s caricatures of Jews. It described the Iranian competition as a “controversial” affair “themed on the Holocaust,” which the paper said was instituted as a statement about freedom of expression following the publication of insulting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark. 

(UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, had called the contest “a mockery of the genocide of the Jewish people.”) 

Descheemaeker, who is described in the paper as an internationally acclaimed caricaturist, is quoted as saying in reaction to the uproar created by his work: “There is still such a thing as freedom of expression.”
Knack, a popular news site, took the same editorial line. 

Confused, I reached out to Joel Rubinfeld, founder of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism and former president of the CCOJB umbrella group of French-speaking Belgian Jewish communities. I wanted to know whether Belgian education officials were more tolerant of expressions of anti-Semitism than their counterparts from other Western European countries.
“It’s a problem,” he said. “We’ve encountered a number of cases where schools did not take the necessary measures when Jewish pupils were targeted in anti-Semitic bullying, for example.” 

A teacher who last year told a Jewish high school student, “We should put you all on freight wagons,” was allowed to keep his job following an internal inquiry. It ended with him apologizing while denying any anti-Semitic intent in the first place. 

Cases involving anti-Semitic abuse among students are regularly ignored at Belgian schools, “which don’t apply the measures necessary to make these cases stop,” Rubinfeld said. 

One student was forced to leave his public school and was enrolled in a private Jewish one last year following harassment, which included a threat to “break his skull” if he showed support for Israel. Also last year, the Belgian media reported on the online shaming by classmates of a pro-Israel high school student. He also left the public education system for a Jewish school.

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More about Luc Descheemaeker (aka O-Sekoer):

Belgium: Catholic school supports teacher who won prize at Iran Holocaust-mocking cartoon contest

Belgium: Jews are Nazis, Trump is a Nazi - guess who isn't a Nazi?

German State removes antisemitic school book in circulation since 2012

Via The Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

"BANK ROTHCHILD on three lines in yellow on the left of the image

The German state of Thuringia announced on Friday it will remove a school book with an antisemitic illustration depicting a video game character – alongside the words “Rothschild Bank” – consuming Europe. 

A Thuringian Education Ministry representative told the MDR Thüringen news outlet that “like in many other federal states,” Thuringia will remove the book, and called criticism of the book “justified.” 

The cartoon shows a video Pacman figure devouring Europe, with the Jewish banking family named next to the cartoon. 

Nazi-era propaganda promoted the anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that the Rothschilds were attempting to conquer the world and destroy the German nation. The Nazis produced an antisemitic film The Rothschilds in 1940. 

In 2014, Sabine Wölfle, a Social Democratic politician from the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, was accused of endorsing an antisemitic video that she posted on her website titled: “The Power of the Rothschilds.”
The schoolbook has been in circulation since 2012. The Thuringian Education Ministry representative declined to comment on the number of books in use in Thuringia’s educational system published by Klett-Verlag. 

The Berlin-based publisher said it was halting all further deliveries of the book, calling the error “serious.” 

It told Vice online magazine blogger Philipp Frohn that the “regrettable mistake” would be corrected in a future edition, which will not come out for several years. 

“The message to pupils... is clear: The driving force behind the whole nasty affair is a bank. A Jewish bank,” he added 

The publishing house said no one noticed over the years “the antisemitic caricature and there was no feedback from teachers as well as students and parents.”

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German school expels Jewish teen over Nazi salute

Via Times of Israel:

A Jewish teenager has been kicked out of a vocational school in Germany for allegedly raising his arm in the Hitler salute in the classroom.

But Maksym M., 18, insists he was just raising his hand when attendance was taken at the Blindow-Schule in Leipzig, according to the Bild newspaper, which also reported that he has been doing well in the program. The state prosecutor declined to bring charges against him.

His parents told Bild that they were waiting for an apology from the school.

“Our son was punished for something that he did not do,” they said.

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Germany: Muslim students protest Holocaust remembrance, school supports 'criticism'

Via Jerusalem Post:

Muslim students of Arab and Turkish origin protested participation in an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Germany, while their high school’s administration showed understanding for their criticism of Israel.

“Some Muslims students said they would not participate in the event,” said Florian Beer, a teacher at the school in the city of Gelsenkirchen in North Rhine-Westphalia state, Der Westen newspaper reported on Thursday.

The Holocaust remembrance event was part of a global commemoration in which participants take selfie photographs along with a sign saying “I Remember“ or “We Remember.“ A blackboard at the school was defaced with the sentence: “F*** Israel, free Palestine.” The school was not able to identify the perpetrator.

(...)

The Weiterbildungskolleg Emscher-Lippe school, where the protest unfolded, has 500 students, 40% of whom have a migrant background.

School director Günter Jahn told Der Westen it was good that there was student opposition to the remembrance event. “It is important that there is criticism. That is the basis for a discussion.” He added that in certain communities, criticism of Israel is demanded.

The school is located in the northern part of the Ruhr region and Gelsenkirchen’s population in 2015 was roughly 260,000.

Some of the students allowed themselves to be photographed with the remembrance signs but declined to permit the photographs to be displayed on the Internet. A number of students, according to Der Westen, asked, “Why always the Jews?” The students added there are, after all, other problems in world.

Beer said the school likes to be provocative because there are always events at the school that leave an “aftertaste of antisemitism.” He added that representatives from the World Jewish Congress have been invited to come speak at the school.

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Lithuania: Teacher fired for helping students with Holocaust film

Via Jerusalem Post (h/t Honestly Concerned):

 It’s not every day that Lithuanian high school students block the entrance to their school to keep out their principal and demand the return to work of a beloved teacher who, in their opinion, was unfairly dismissed. In fact, as far as I could determine, the action taken recently by students at the Laisves (freedom) Gymnasium (high school) in Naujoji Vilnia, a suburb of the capital, Vilnius (Vilna), is unprecedented since Lithuania regained its independence in 1990.

So what prompted this unusual case of student insubordination, which garnered headlines in the largest of the Baltic republics? At this point, we must differentiate between the official version of the story and what appears to be the real reason for the events which took place at the high school several weeks ago. According to the principal, the teacher in question, Marius Janulevicius, who teaches Lithuanian language and literature, had spoken harshly to one of the school’s female cleaning staff, which prompted his immediate dismissal. Such a step might seem unduly harsh, but the real reason for his dismissal apparently had nothing to do with that incident. It was because of an unusual, and unprecedented, film project undertaken by Andzej Davlevic, Dominykas Versalovicius and Deividas Svencionis, three of the school’s pupils, with the encouragement and tutelage of Janulevicius. The film, The Forgotten, commemorates the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

These same students had originally approached their history teacher with the idea for the film, but she strongly discouraged them, suggesting it would be far better to deal with historical tragedies which had befallen Lithuanians.

“Don’t deal with the fate of the Jews,” was her unequivocal message. But the three boys were determined to deal with the Holocaust and were able to carry out the project in their free time, with the enthusiastic help of Janulevicius.

The film was produced and put online (but has still not been screened at the school), and once it became public knowledge the reprisal from the school came very swiftly – once an excuse presented itself to fire Janulevicius. The authorities, however, did not anticipate the reaction of the students, who rallied to his defense, barricading the school and locking the principal in her office.

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Croatian School Removes Anne Frank Exhibition

Via BalkanInsight (h/t glykosymoritis):

A travelling exhibition about Holocaust victim and diarist Anne Frank was removed from a high school in the coastal town of Sibenik after the school’s director complained that it portrayed the Croatian fascist Ustasa movement negatively, local media reported on Thursday.

The educational exhibition for pupils depicts the life of Anne Frank but also shows the broader context of World War II and the Holocaust, as well as its effects on Croatia and the region, highlighting crimes committed against Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist by the Ustasa.

School director Josip Belamaric asked the organisers of the exhibition, the Hermes NGO – local partner of the Amsterdam-based Anne Frank House museum – to remove six panels describing the local context of the war.

“According to these panels, it seems that the Ustasa were criminals who slaughtered Serbs, Jews, starved children, and the [Yugoslav anti-fascist] Partisans were innocent. What about the crimes committed by the Partisans?” Belamaric old local news site Sibenik In.

Belamaric asked why there were no billboards showing what happened in May 1945 when “Partisans killed Croats” in Bleiburg in southern Austria, or about the Yugoslav prison camp on the island of Goli Otok which was run by the Communists.

Maja Nenadovic from the Anne Frank House told BIRN that this was the first problem they had encountered after 23 successful exhibitions in Croatia, which attracted over 40,000 visitors.

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Germany: Teachers union apologizes for Israel boycott activity

From The Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal): 

Despite the apology mixed messages continue from some of the union leaders.

 The president of Germany’s teachers’ union, Marlis Tepe, apologized in a letter to her Israeli counterpart Yossi Wassermann for a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions initiative against the Jewish state that was spearheaded by German teachers in the northwest city of Oldenburg.

“I want to inform you, that GEW [Education and Science Workers’ Union] is being publicly confronted with allegations of supporting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign against Israel,” wrote Tepe in a late September letter obtained by The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. She added, ”I would like to apologize for the irritation and uncertainty caused by this  incident which is also disturbing for GEW members and damages the reputation of our union.”

The letter from the president of the nearly 281,000 member Education and Science Workers’ Union to Wassermann, the secretary-general of Histadrut Hamorim (teachers’ union), was a clear rebuke of the anti-Israel leadership of the local GEW in Oldenburg.
“As president of the GEW I would like to expressly emphasize that our union does not support any kind of BDS or anti-Israeli initiatives. On the contrary: For many years we have been supporting the cooperation between Israel and Germany, particularly youth exchanges, and we are committed to Holocaust education,” wrote Tepe.

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Germany: Teacher posed as a Jew to push anti-Israel agenda

Some antisemites in the British Labour Party claim to be Jewish.  The same is apparently true in Germany as well.

Via Jerusalem Post:

A teacher in the German state of Lower Saxony who advocates a complete boycott of Israel posed as a Jew in order to sign a petition calling for all Palestinian refugees to be returned to the Jewish state.

The petition, titled “Jews for Palestinian Right of Return,” was located online by The Jerusalem Post on Saturday night. The 2013 anti-Israel document also said that “the Zionist regime officially denies the Nakba, the ethical equivalent of Holocaust denial.”

Speaking from Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, told the Post on Monday that the fact that the teacher, Christoph Glanz, posed as a Jew “shows he is fanatically dedicated to promoting his antisemitic agenda.”

Zuroff continued by saying “it is absolutely insidious” that Glanz falsified his identity to advance “hatred of Israel.”

(...)

The phenomenon of anti-Israel Germans who have posed as Jews to bash Israel has precedents.

In 2010, Edith Lutz, a non-Jewish German who tried to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza aboard the catamaran Irene, said she converted to Judaism. German media reports revealed she did not convert to Judaism, but the Irene was dubbed the “Jewish boat” and garnered widespread media attention because of the presence of a small number of Jews onboard.

 In 2012, a non-Jewish German poet and anti-Israel activist acknowledged that she fabricated her supposed service in the IDF during the First Lebanon War.
 

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Germany: Pro-BDS antisemitic teacher investigated by politician

From the Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

A German lawmaker launched an investigation involving a German school teacher and his alleged antisemitic statements and conduct at a public school in the city of Oldenburg in the state of Lower Saxony.

“Antisemitism and antisemites are not tolerated in our schools,” Jörg Hillmer, the deputy chairman of the Christian Democratic Union Party in the state government, told the Jerusalem Post by email on Friday, adding “We will increase the pressure on the state government with a parliament questionnaire to clarify” the case of the teacher Christoph Glanz.

Social Democratic Party (SPD) MP Michaela Engelmeier originally accused Glanz of anti-Semitism and racism.

A spokesman for the SPD faction in the Lower Saxony parliament, Michael Höntsch later agreed, stating “I share completely the statements of my friend and comrade Michaela Engelmeier.” Höntsch is the SPD spokesman against right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Höntsch also told The Post he agreed with Engelmeier’s remark that “BDS is, to the core, anti-Semitic.”  [...]

The Lower Saxony parliamentary inquiry appears to be first instance of a public school teacher under investigation for allegedly playing down the Holocaust in the school system, advocating a full boycott of the Jewish State, and calling for the destruction of Israel.  [...]


In a similar case last year involving allegations of antisemitism, school authorities suspended Daniel Krause, a 34-year old school teacher from the town of Unna in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Krause called in to a radio show program on Holocaust Remembrance Day and  said: "Personally, I'm not at all privately interested in Auschwitz... actually, industrial livestock farming affects me more emotionally."

Krause also spoke at an extremist right-wing political rally in 2012 for the anti-immigrant political party “Pro NRW.”

Klaus Thörner, the head of the German-Israel friendship society in Oldenburg, accused Glanz of minimizing the Holocaust, after Glanz said at a school event commemorating the Holocaust in 2013 that Israel committed a genocide on the Palestinians.

Glanz said he has been involved in anti-fascist activity. The only German political parties calling for a total boycott of Israel along the lines of Glanz are the neo-Nazi parties NPD and The Third Way. Multiple Post email press queries to Glanz’s email address were not returned. Glanz has said that the allegation of antisemitism leveled against him is “absurd.”

Glanz has defended in a YouTube comment the idea that Israel should be relocated to Baden-Württemberg in southwestern Germany.

Glanz’s twitter feed, which is named “intifada of peace,” is filled with attacks on the Jewish state, including “Israel's government is a racist freak show.” He accused Israel of a “crime of against humanity” and “ethnic cleansing.” Glanz wrote Israel is guilty of “immoral child abuse under the disguise of memory of the Holocaust victims.”

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German-wide teachers union says BDS anti-Semitic

From the Jerusalem Post:

The teachers’ union in Oldenburg, Germany, has formally apologized for its publication of a pro-boycott Israel article in its September magazine.

“With the publication of this article from the field of the so-called BDS campaign, we made a big mistake,“ Heinz Bührmann, chairman of the of Education and Science Workers’ Union (GEW) in Oldenburg, wrote on Monday. The local union’s parent-teacher organization termed BDS “anti-Semitic” on its Twitter feed.

After The Jerusalem Post first reported on Saturday that the GEW’s paper advocated BDS, the union reversed its position and removed a statement from its website that suggested a defense of the publication of the article.

The monthly paper was sent to the GEW’s 1,200 members in the area of Oldenburg in the state of Lower Saxony.

“Not one member of the Oldenburg GEW district executive board is... racist or anti-Semitic,“ said Bührmann, claiming the BDS “campaign was, for us, completely not known as problematic. Our lack of knowledge is to blame.“ The union leader said the executive board did not author the article, but was responsible for its publication.

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Sweden: Malmö launches campaign to tackle anti-Semitism

Via The Local:

A new campaign launched in southern Swedish city Malmö hopes to fight anti-Semitism by encouraging thousands of school students to talk about the issue.

The project, a combined effort between the Jewish Community of Malmö and the City of Malmö, will focus on creating dialogue about anti-Semitism by exploring the shared experiences between the city’s Jews and many of its young people.

“We are actually quite similar in our experiences. Many Jews here are children or grandchildren of refugees who fled war and came to Sweden,” Jewish Community of Malmö chairman Fredrik Sieradzki told The Local.

“That’s the great thing about this new education programme, it uses that shared experience and it makes it easier to talk.”

The project will use movies, exercises and discussion materials on the topics of anti-Semitism, racism, and seeking refuge to help encourage discussions, with 288 teachers receiving special training.

When the materials were tested among different school groups, the result was that adolescents with similar experiences started to get more involved in discussions.

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Belgium: Ilan Pappé is the guest of conspiracy theorist Michel Collon

Ilan Pappé will be speaking at a conference organised by Belgian conspiracy theorist Michel Collon.  The event is scheduled to take place on 25 September at Charleroi and is sponsored by the Belgian authorities (province of Hainaut).  Pappé will be talking about the "Propaganda by Israel, how to spot it and how to combat [sic] it".

Who is Michel Collon?  French feminist writer Caroline Fourest calls him the "king of Belgian conspiracy theorists".  Michel Collon is a minor figure in the "anti-Zionist galaxy" and has never made it to the top.  But he tries very hard and his anti-Zionist credentials and obsession can't be faulted...

Conspiracy Watch points out that Collon is a friend of truther and conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan.  Michel Collon is pictured below with two big big stars Dieudonné and Thierry Meyssan.

Dieudonné M'bala M'Bala, Thierry Meyssan and Michel Collon

Collon deems it is his duty to enlighten the European populace about the vile Zionists and published a book adapted to their poor level of knowledge of such an important matter.  The extremist and Islamist blog Soutien Palestine, Collectif Cheikh Yassine revealed Collon's concerns and how he intended deal with them: 

"How can the truth be restored when the Zionist myths are omnipresent in the media and even in schools? How to argue in a way adapted to the audience level (especially the public from Europe, pummeled by its media)?"

Michel Collon also has his conspirationist idea about who is behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre:  

"The Kouachi brothers were in fact trained and armed by Fabius and his pals to make war on a government that was inimical to the multinational corporations from the U.S. and elsewhere."  

Note: Laurent Fabius is a former French PS minister who is considered to be Jewish.

Several French far left groups have campaigned very efficiently against Collon because of his being a conspiracy theorist and connections with far right antisemitic groups.  See Conspis hors de nos villes and  Confusionisme.info.

Ilan Pappé seems to have no objections to be associated with the "king of Belgian conspiracy theorists"... 

Michel Collon's blog: Investig'Action

German teachers’ union urges total boycott of Israel

Obviously no calls for the boycott of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar etc.  Only Israel.

From the Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

The teachers union in the city of Oldenburg published an article in its September paper calling for a complete boycott of the Jewish state, sparking criticism from Israel’s embassy, German teachers and pro-Israel activists, as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

It appears to be the first call to boycott Israel or Jews from a German organized labor group since the Holocaust. Critics accuse the union of stoking modern Jew-hatred.

The anti-Israel activist and teacher Christoph Glanz outlined the goals of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement in his two-page article in the magazine of the Education and Science Workers’ Union (GEW).

“The GEW is an important institution in Germany. That is why we are surprised and disappointed, that the Oldenburg chapter chose to re-publish the pamphlet of a BDS activist in its magazine,” the embassy told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.  [...]

The GEW article was titled, “Palestine/Israel: Documenting injustice and call for justice – not possible in Oldenburg?” The German-Israel Friendship Society (DIG) in Oldenburg – a city in Lower Saxony state with a population of nearly 164,000 – was the first group to slam the union’s leadership.

In a public letter released in August, the chairman of DIG-Oldenburg, Klaus Thörner, wrote that DIG “protests the publication of the article of the Oldenburg teacher Christoph Glanz... who is an activist of the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic BDS campaign.”

It is unusual for a mainstream German publication to call for a boycott of Israel, because the boycott of Jews was such a big part of the Nazis’ actions in the lead-up to the Holocaust.

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