Via Guido Fawkes:
Since her suspension from the Labour Party was lifted in 2016, Naz Shah seemed to have genuinely learnt from her mistakes and put the nasty business of antisemitism behind her. That was until last week, when the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion was filmed speaking at a Pro-Palestine rally in Bradford. Recently released footage shows protestors chanting in Arabic “lift the curse of the Jews off the Muslims in Palestine!”, “God, support them with your soldiers! God, we ask you to make the Jews lose!”, and, “God, purify al-Aqsa from impure people”. Turns out spotting Antisemitic rallies is more difficult when there’s no 10-foot hook-nosed, red-eyed inflatable there…
Pictures, posted on social media, show protestors holding placards that read “Zionism is racism” and “Tell me Israel how are you any different than Hitler”. It seems that Naz Shah just can’t keep out of trouble…
To her credit Naz Shah was quick to distance herself from these signs. In a tweeted statement Naz Shah wrote:
“Over recent weeks, a small minority of individuals have been trying to infiltrate demonstrations about the situation in Palestine to spew hatred.
I was made aware that an individual at one of the rallies I spoke at, made remarks following the rally in Arabic – a language I do not speak. The individual was not a speaker but gained access to a microphone – the translation of their comments given to me are not remarks I’d ever make.
I will never shy away from using my voice to raise the plight of the Palestinian people but I will never tolerate antisemitism and I totally condemn anyone perpetrating it.”
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Via
Times of Israel:
Several thousand people, many of them Jews, rallied in several cities in France to protest a court’s ruling not to try a Muslim man who confessed to killing his Jewish neighbor while shouting about Allah.
Republique Square in Paris became crowded with protesters over the ruling last month on the fate of Kobili Traore, a 29-year-old Muslim. He brutally killed Sarah Halimi in 2017.
Reaffirming an earlier ruling, the Paris Appeals Court last month asserted that Traore killed Halimi because she was Jewish but cited psychiatric evaluations saying his consumption of marijuana before the incident gave him a “delirious episode” that made him not legally responsible for his actions.
Several thousand Jews marched in Marseille in protest of the ruling, which leaders of French Jewry, including the CRIF umbrella of French Jewish communities, have suggested was designed to avoid scrutiny of Muslim anti-Semitism.
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Via
Jewish Chronicle:
An
actor who starred in The Office shared a statement on social media that
said "some rich Jews play the ‘anti-semitism’ card to protect
themselves" in a discussion over Labour's disastrous election result.
Ewen
MacIntosh, who played Keith Bishop in the iconic sitcom, posted a long
statement that he attributed to “one of the wisest Jewish men I know” on
Facebook response to Jewish comedian and writer Lee Kern.
The
statement accuses Jews of "hyper-sensitivity" that "leads us to see ANY
criticism of Jews" as racism, says "outrageous activities of The State
of Israel towards the Palestinians" inspire antisemitism and claims
"many Jews" are "rich" and therefore their "position is threatened" by
Labour.
“One can see how certain people make the amalgam of
‘Jewish = Genocidal rich evil people who wish to rule the world’ and
that 'some rich Jews play the ‘anti-semitism’ card to protect
themselves' from Labour," the statement says.
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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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Via
Jewish Chronicle:
A leading member of the fringe pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour group has been filmed by the JC issuing a chilling “warning” to Jewish leaders opposing antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party suggesting: “You are part of the problem.”
Accusing the same “Jewish leaders” of “turning a blind eye to the extreme right”, Glyn Secker, JVL's secretary, told a Labour-backed pro-Palestinian march in central London at the weekend: “What on earth are Jews doing in the gutter?”
Dulwich and West Norwood Constituency Labour Party (CLP) member Mr Secker was loudly cheered by around 3,500 pro-Palestinian activists as he delivered his inflammatory speech at the start of the National Demonstration for Palestine in Portland Place, central London.
He said: “Here's a warning to the Jewish leadership.
“While you foment your campaign of allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn and the left to silence Israel's critics while you cry wolf, month after month, year after year in the Labour Party and remain blind to the explosion of the far-right and Islamophobia, you are not part of the solution - you are part of the problem.”
Mr Corbyn and his shadow chancellor John McDonnell had openly supported the march on which there were regular calls for the destruction of Israel, the “right of return” for “seven million Palestinian refugees” and claims by one speaker that Israel, America, Australia and India are “despicable settler colonial states.”
Three counter-demonstrators - two of whom raised an Israeli flag while another professed “love for both Israel and Palestinian - needed protection from around ten Metropolitan Police officers on Regent Street after a succession of visibly seething activists attempted to lunge at them.
(...)
When confronted later by the JC over his remarks, Mr Secker claimed not to have spoken of “Jews”.
In a statement on Twitter, JVL suggested he had directed his comments towards “these Jews” - those who had allegedly aligned themselves with the far-right. The audio recording however shows no use of the word “these”.
Mr Secker - a former member of the far-left anti-Zionist Socialist Workers Party - has previously been the subject of complaints from Jewish members of his local Labour Party about his hostile comments.
He was also a member of the Palestine Live Facebook group which was littered with antisemitic remarks.
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Via
Times of Israel:
Antonio Antunes denies his NY Times caricature of Netanyahu as a dog leading blind Trump is anti-Semitic, says it critiques Israel’s ‘criminal conduct in Palestine’
The Portuguese cartoonist behind the New York Times cartoon that depicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog has rejected charges of anti-Semitism, calling critics part of the “Jewish propaganda machine.”
Antonio Moreira Antunes, who draws for the Expresso newspaper published in Lisbon, told CNN Wednesday that Jews were not “above criticism.”
The calls of anti-Semitism were “made through the Jewish propaganda machine, which is, anytime there’s criticism it’s because there’s someone anti-Semitic on the other side, and that’s not the case,” Antunes told CNN.
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On Monday, Antunes said the cartoon was “a critique of Israeli policy, which has a criminal conduct in Palestine at the expense of the UN, and not the Jews,” Expresso reported.
“The Star of David is an aid to identify a figure [Netanyahu] that is not very well known in Portugal,” the cartoonist explained to Expresso.
He blamed right-wing figures saying: “The Jewish right doesn’t want to be criticized, and therefore, when criticized they say ‘We are a persecuted people, we suffered a lot… this is anti-Semitism.'”
Antunes claimed he was personally hurt by the Times’ statements of apology since publishing the caricature, saying the paper should have seen his work as “a political issue and not religious.”
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Via
Times of Israel:
A Norwegian rapper who cursed Jews while performing at an event in Oslo promoting multiculturalism will not be charged with hate speech because his words may have been criticism of Israel, prosecutors said.
Kaveh Kholardi said “f***ing Jews” on stage at an event last year for which he was hired by the city.
Tor-Aksel Busch, Norway’s director of public prosecutions — a title equivalent to attorney general – rejected legal action last week, the news site Document.no reported Sunday.
Pro-Israel activists had filed a police complaint but it was dismissed. Busch rejected their appeal, explaining that whereas what Kholardi said “seems to be targeting Jews, it can however also be said to express dissatisfaction with the policies of the State of Israel.”
At the concert, the rapper wished Muslims a happy Eid al-Fitr holiday and acknowledged Christian listeners. He did not mention Israel.
On June 10, 2018, five days before the concert, Kholardi wrote on Twitter “f***ing Jews are so corrupt.”
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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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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.
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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Via
Jerusalem Post:
The Berlin-based Center for the Research of Antisemitism faced a flurry of criticism this week from Israeli and German experts for employing a researcher who worked for a British organization that promotes the London version of the al-Quds Day rally. The rally calls for the destruction of the Jewish state each year.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Jerusalem office for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Jerusalem Post, “You would imagine something like this would be done in Iran. Set up an institute to study antisemitism and invite antisemites to work there.”
The center, which is part of the Technical University of Berlin, hired Luis Hernandez Aguilar, who was previously listed as a research officer of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a main organizer of the Iranian regime-sponsored al-Quds Day march.
According to a June report in the London-based The Jewish Chronicle, Hezbollah flags were on display at the march in London, where one speaker said Israel should be “wiped from the map.” Shaykh Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour claimed Zionists’ “days are numbered,” wrote the paper. Speakers at the al-Quds march have also spread wild anti-Jewish conspiracy theories over the years.
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Via
Jerusalem Post:
Eduard Dolinksy, a prominent Ukrainian Jewish activist, was banned from posting on Facebook Monday night for a post about antisemitic graffiti in Odessa.
Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said he was blocked by the social media giant for posting a photo. “I had posted the photo which says in Ukrainian ‘kill the yid’ about a month ago,” he says. “I use my Facebook account for distributing information about antisemitic incidents and hate speech and hate crimes in Ukraine.”
Be the first to know - Join our Facebook page.
Now Dolinsky’s account has disabled him from posting for thirty days, which means media, law enforcement and the local community who rely on his social media posts will receive no updates.
(...)
Dolinksy says that he has been targeted in the past by nationalists and anti-semites who oppose his work. Facebook has banned him temporarily in the past also, but never for thirty days. “The last time I was blocked, the media also reported this and I felt some relief.
It was as if they stopped banning me. But now I don’t know – and this has again happened. They are banning the one who is trying to fight antisemitism. They are banning me for the very thing I do.”
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Via
TheJC:
The chair of Jewish Voice For Labour has sparked fury by comparing the internationally recognised definition of antisemitism to controversial 1980s legislation that banned promoting homosexuality in schools.
Speaking at Wednesday's meeting of Finchley and Golders Green Labour Party, Jenny Manson claimed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition prevented support for Palestinians, in the same way Section 28 prevented support for gay pupils.
The comments infuriated many in the room.
Jack Lubner, 17, was said to have been left "upset and intimidated" after Ms Mason strode towards him after he said he objected to her remarks.
He tweeted: "Jenny should be ashamed of herself. How dare she."
Local Labour member Luisa Attfield, tweeted: "As a Jewish lesbian I am offended and as person with a brain its a baseless comparison."
(...)
JVL, a pro-Jeremy Corbyn group founded in September 2017, has backed a campaign to support the new antisemitism guidelines Labour's national body approved, which omit key examples from the IHRA Jew-hate definition about how criticising Israel can be antisemitic.
The issue has caused huge outrage among the Jewish community.
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Via The Sun:
Labour bosses have been blasted for hiring a leftie lawyer who is friends with members accused of anti-Semitism to advise them.
Gordon Nardell QC was last week announced as the party’s new in-house legal counsel to help deal with the backlog of anti-Semitism cases - and will oversee the party’s disciplinary processes.
But critics claim his links to grassroots members accused of anti-Semitic comments undermines his independence, and it could be a conflict of interest if he rules on their cases.
It has been revealed that the former councillor and wannabe-MP has a long history of links to the hard left and is friends on Facebook with suspended members.
Labour figures have demanded that the new General Secretary, Jennie Fornby, think again about her decision to hire him in the role.
Jewish groups have demanded more progress on dealing with pockets of anti-Semitism in the party, and were left fuming after Jeremy Corbyn refused all of their demands. Labour has set an August deadline for resolving complaints relating to anti-Semitism.
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Via Weekly Standard (Irwin M. Stelzer):
Jews worry too much. That seems to be the point of a recent article in the otherwise sensible Economist. Sure, two German rappers won that country’s highest music award by bragging their torsos are “better defined than an Auschwitz inmate’s” and vowing to “make another Holocaust.” But, says the Economist, the intended targets of this aspirational Holocaust were “unclear” and could “possibly [be] rival hip-hop artists.”
No reason to worry then that Germans were not alone in figuring out “whom.” The rappers’ invitation to another Holocaust was broadcast on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
There’s more. Pears Institute scholar David Feldman is quoted by the magazine for the proposition that “competitive victimhood” prompts “claims of oppression by Jews, Muslims, and other groups [to] step on each other’s toes.” Anti-Semitic, is merely part of a “general wave of chauvinistic sentiment” that has also seen hostility towards Muslims, gays, and Roma to rise. The comfort that Jews should take from this is similarly unclear.
In the past, French, German, and other European Jews could look to a short hop across the channel for a safe haven. Now, not so much.
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Via
Artuz 7:
French President Emmanuel Macron said that anti-Semitism was the reason for the deadly stabbing in 2003 of a young Jew whose killer was found unfit to stand trial.
Macron said this in a letter dated May 20 to Meyer Habib, a French-Jewish lawmaker who last month wrote the president to request belated recognition for Sébastien Selam, a 23-year-old DJ who was killed by his Muslim neighbor, as a victim of anti-Semitic violence.
“Recalled because of the heinous killing of Mirelle Knoll, the memory of this young Frenchman who fell a victim to the darkest of fanaticism lives on,” Macron wrote. Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, was stabbed to death in her Paris apartment on March 23. Prosecutors said a neighbor and an accomplice killed her, partly because she was Jewish.
The memory of Selam, Macron wrote, is part of “our national community, which is profoundly affected by anti-Semitic crimes like the one perpetrated against Sébastien Selam,” Macron wrote. It was the first time that a French official recognized the slaying as anti-Semitic. However, this recognition is symbolic and will not be reflected in the judiciary’s records on the case.
A French court in 2010 ruled that Selam’s killer, Adel Amastaibou, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was unable to control his actions. He was released from a psychiatric institution earlier this year, in what Habib described in his letter to Macron as an “affront” to Selam’s relatives. Meyer wrote this on Facebook on Sunday.
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Via
JTA:
A former Polish presidential candidate said she has filed a lawsuit against the director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews over a tweet deemed anti-Semitism in an exhibit.
In a tweet Monday, Magdalena Ogórek announced the lawsuit filed in Warsaw District Court against Dariusz Stola.
Ogórek, who is now working as a broadcaster for Polish Television, also posted on Twitter a letter of support signed by several people, including Eli Zolkos, a member of the Jewish community who calls himself “an assistant to the Chief Rabbi of Poland.”
“Zolkos is not my assistant and has never been my assistant,” Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told JTA.
Last year, Ogórek suggested on Twitter that Sen. Marek Borowski changed his surname “from Berman to Borowski.” The Polin Museum used the tweet as a contemporary example of an anti-Semitic statement in its exhibit “Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath,” which deals with the organized anti-Semitic campaign by Polish authorities that resulted in the exodus of several thousand Jews from Poland.
Ogórek had threatened to file the lawsuit unless the museum removed the tweet and apologized. The museum did not respond to the threat.
“Please remember that you have the support of many people from the Jewish community in Poland, because of the unnecessary and harmful attack on you,” read the letter of support to Ogórek signed by Zolkos and Tomasz Małodobry, a board member of the Anioły Kultury (Angels of Culture) Foundation.
The letter said the museum’s use of the tweet creates an anti-Polish and anti-Jewish atmosphere.
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Via
Times of Israel:
The influential leader of Poland’s ruling conservative party on Saturday accused “enemies” of the country of trying to fan anti-Semitism, as Warsaw is under fire over a controversial Holocaust law.
The new law sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone ascribing “responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich — or other crimes against humanity and war crimes” and set off criticism from Israel, the United States and France.
“Today, the enemies of Poland, one can even say the Devil, are trying a very bad recipe… This sickness is anti-Semitism. We must reject it resolutely,” said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the Law and Justice (PiS) party.
“But this doesn’t mean that we provide fodder” for those who insult Poland, he said.
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Via
Tablet Magazine (h/t
glykosymoritis)
Lansman was likely referring to leftist activists on the ground who have attacked the party’s nascent efforts to expunge anti-Semites as a “witch hunt.” But he might as well have been referring to activists on the internet, who have been quietly attempting to erase traces of the party’s Jewish problem from Wikipedia.
Last month, these enterprising editors attempted to delete the entire “Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party” page from the online encyclopedia. The ensuing debate over the prospect can be read here. The initial advocate for deletion called the entry “an attack page” that “lacks notability,” as though an outpouring of prejudice that caused nearly half of the Labour party’s own sitting politicians to denounce it was simply a slander served up by shadowy (presumably Jewish) smear artists. Other similarly inclined editors asserted that there should be no “Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party” page given that there was no parallel “Anti-Semitism in the Conservative Party” page, as though the solution to incomplete documentation of hate is to suppress that which has already been documented.
To be sure, like many Wikipedia pages, this one could surely have used more citations, research, and polish. But that was clearly not what its critics had in mind. They did not want to remedy the page’s deficiencies, but to eliminate it entirely. Ultimately, the facts of the case won out, and no consensus was reached to delete the page. It remained published but in limbo.
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Via The Jerusalem Post (Alan Baker):
The annual Holocaust remembrance events, whether in the UN or in individual countries, held on and around the official, international day of remembrance on January 27, have now passed, until next year.
The hollow and disingenuous lip-service payed by international leaders to the greatest tragedy that has befallen the Jewish people, has passed.
The annual “day in the sun” of professors, Holocaust researchers and experts, whether in research centers in Israeli universities or elsewhere, is over until next year.
Life must go on.
The international community can now get back to its routine and regular agenda of political correctness. It can get back to ignoring and sidestepping the most tragic violations of human rights in the centers of conflict in Syria, Africa and elsewhere.
(...)
Europe can get back to ignoring its own serious and pressing immigration issues to concentrate on its fixation with blaming Israel and with allowing itself, through naiveté and political correctness, to be manipulated by a corrupt, divided and violent Palestinian leadership intent not on peace with, but on the boycotting of Israel.
So what, then, remains of the annual Holocaust remembrance events? What practical measures are the international community taking in order to prevent future Holocausts? Is the international community doing anything to stem the alarming resurgence and spread of antisemitism – especially in Europe – often under the guise of anti-Israel sentiments and actions?
Apart from arguing among themselves as to the best way to define antisemitism in today’s international realities, what are the leaders of the world’s Jewish organizations doing to encourage countries to act definitively to criminalize and prevent antisemitism?
The trepidation of the world’s Jewish leadership – whether out of political correctness or just pure fear – and their hesitation to come out and boldly present antisemitism to the world as an age-old phenomenon that stands on its own, that has existed from time immemorial and that cannot and should not be equated with other forms of racism and bigotry, is perceived by the world as indulgence, absolution and weakness.
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