Poland: Bishop delivers thinly veiled anti-Semitic sermon

Via Times of Israel:

Andrzej Jeż appears to refer to Jews during Easter speech, saying ‘certain nation’ plotted in 1937 to slander Catholic Church by controlling media

A Polish bishop said that “a certain nation” plotted in 1937 to divide and slander the Catholic Church by controlling the media.

Andrzej Jeż, who is the top Catholic spiritual leader in the city of Tarnow near Krakow, appeared to be referring to Jews last month in his Easter sermon, which was filmed.

The video aired Thursday in an article by the Kan public broadcaster.

“A certain nation, I can’t name it because I would be attacked from all sides immediately, said this: ‘Our natural enemy is the Catholic Church. We need to slander them and sow hatred against them, we have to create scandals about their private lives to incite hatred and ridicule against them. We must strengthen our media because then our control will be strong and secure’,” Jez said.

Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said the remarks underscore an internal fight within the Catholic Church between supporters and opponents of that institution’s reform about 50 years ago of its anti-Semitic tenets.

“I’ve never heard anything like this said,” Schudrich told Kan. “What the bishop said goes against modern-day Catholic faith.”

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UK: Nuns used anti-Semitic threats while beating boy of Jewish descent, inquiry told

Via Jewish News:

Nuns at an orphanage used anti-Semitic threats while beating a boy of Jewish descent, an inquiry has heard.

The witness, who was at Smyllum Park in Lanark during the 1940s and 1950s, said he is “haunted” by memories of his time at the facility.

He told how he is still “scared” of nuns, to the extent he could not watch the film comedy Sister Act with his daughter.

His submissions were heard at the Scottish child abuse inquiry in Edinburgh on Tuesday.

Although he did not know of his Jewish heritage at the time, having entered the home at a very young age, he said it was referred to while he was beaten on a number of occasions.

The witness said: “The nuns would say ‘we will beat the Jewishness out of you’.

“If you consider what Hitler did during the war – it was just after that period. I don’t think I was beaten because I was Jewish, it’s just an expression that was used.”

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British Aid Worker: Grenfell Tower Victims ‘Burnt in Jewish Sacrifice’

See also UK: Revealed: Charity leader Nazim Ali who blamed fire tragedy on "Zionists"

Via Tablet Magazine:

Tahra Ahmed, a volunteer aid worker running a prominent aid network that helps survivors of this summer’s Grenfell Tower fire, has said that the 71 people who perished in the tragedy were “burnt alive in a Jewish sacrifice.”

The fire, Ahmed told the Times of London, was a “holocaust,” unlike the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, which she has often referred to as the “holohoax.” On her Facebook page, Ahmed wrote that “Hitler and the Germans were the victims of the Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany.” She also argued that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a Jewish conspiracy, and has claimed on her Facebook page that Grenfell Tower was owned by a Jewish property developer. In reality, it is owned by Kensington and Chelsea Council.

“Watch the live footage of people trapped in the inferno with flames behind them,” she wrote in a post that has stirred controversy in England. “They were burnt alive in a Jewish sacrifice. Grenfell is owned by a private Jewish property developer just like the Twin Towers. I wonder how much Goldman [Goldman Sachs] is standing to make in the world’s most expensive real estate location [Kensington].”

Ahmed’s comments, said Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, a non-profit that monitors anti-Jewish bigotry, reached “a new depth of grotesque antisemitic racism. Worse is that the traumatized survivors have to grapple with the reality that one of those who claims to stand up for them seems to be primarily motivated by a vile hatred of Jews.”

Responding to reporters’ queries, Ahmed said she did not care about other people’s opinions.

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German study: over 50% of Muslim refugees hold anti-semitic views

Via The Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

More than half the asylum seekers in Bavaria subscribe to classic antisemitic views about Jewish power, according to a poll released last week. 

The study, conducted by the Hanns Seidel foundation – a think tank affiliated with the Christian Social Union party in the southern state of Bavaria, polled nearly 800 refugees during 2016 from the Bavarian cities of Nuremberg, Poing und Pliening. Their countries of origin are Syria, Eritrea, Iraq and Afghanistan.  

“More than half of Muslim asylum seekers showed clear tendencies of an antisemitic attitude pattern,” wrote the authors of the 201-page study examined by The Jerusalem Post. 

When asked by the investigators if “Jews have too much influence in the world,” 52% of Syrians said yes, while 53% of Iraqis agreed with the statement. Nearly 60% of Afghans said Jews wield too much influence, while a mere 5.4% of those from Eritrea – a Christian-majority country – held antisemitic views. Some Eritreans said they were familiar with Jews from the Bible. 

The number of Germans who affirmed the antisemitic statement about Jewish influence was 20%. In April, however, a new German government report revealed 40% of the German public hold a modern antisemitic view: the hatred of Israel. 

The Seidel study said “the decisive factor that explains antisemitic opinions is one’s religious group. Antisemitism in all age groups and educational background of Muslim asylum seekers,” is anchored in the educational system of the refugees’ countries of origin. A Syrian refugee named Mustafa said that “In Syria we were taught to hate a Jews a little bit. The government presented Jews as bad [people] who kill...” 

According to the study, there are “emotional prejudices against Israeli families from the side of the refugees.”

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France seeks arrest of hacker who declared war on Jew-hate

Connected:
Anti-semitic political website has over 8 million monthly visits

Via The Jewish Chronicle:

Gregory Chelli (Screengrab from documentary film The Patriot)

Israel is refusing to extradite a militant Zionist hacker who has declared war on antisemitism in France. 

French-born Gregory Chelli, who goes by the online moniker Ulcan, is the subject of an international arrest warrant — but Israel is not bowing to pressure from France, a stance which even prompted a visit by the French foreign minister. 

The 34-year-old is the subject of a film called The Patriot, which recently took part in the DocAviv Festival in Tel Aviv and will soon air on Israeli TV. But the French language film will not be aired in France, according to Haaretz. 

Despite facing 50 criminal charges, Mr Chelli still agreed to give the Israeli newspaper an interview from Ashdod, his home since making aliyah. 

Directed by Daniel Sivan, the film shows how Mr Chelli waged a one-man online war on the rise of antisemitism in his homeland. Born and raised in a middle class suburb of Paris, he grew up in a family without strong connections to either religion or Israel. 

All that changed about a decade ago as antisemitism grew in France and he became active in the Jewish Defence League. 

“It used to be, years ago, that antisemitism was confined to the old-style extreme-rightists whom no one thought of as a sane group. But for some years now, antisemitism has become fashionable, with different, newer explanations given for it,” Mr Chelli told Haaretz. 

Above all, there was the surging popularity of French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, inventor of the quenelle, the inverted Nazi salute. 

“Everyone whose ideology included a Jew-hating side identified with Dieudonné and expressed support, even if they came from opposite sides of the barricade.”  

With a fascination for computer programming, a young Mr Chelli taught himself to hack into websites. And so, driven by his anger over the rise of anti-Jewish hatred, he put his skills into action. He broke into Dieudonné’s official website and sent a list of his 10,000 supporters to the press — which they duly published. 

Since then he has brought down websites and exposed criminals and unacceptable behaviour by posting details of them publicly. 

“Nobody respects the Jews when they complain through the accepted channels. The police force doesn’t work, and therefore I took it upon myself to be the police force of the internet,” he said. (...) 

The Patriot will not be screened in France as film-makers were told it is illegal to show antisemitic symbols such as swastikas and quenelle salutes. 

Director Daniel Sivan told Haaretz: “A lot of the money goes to finance films that are critical of injustices the world over. They’re happy to pay for films with penetrating criticism of the Israeli occupation, for example, but they aren’t willing to see what’s happening in their own home.”

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Netherlands: Far-right website lists ‘Dutch Jews’ and ‘enemies of the people’

Via Dutch News:

The Jewish information centre CIDI is demanding a list of Jewish Dutch people be taken off an extreme right-wing website immediately.

The website Altrechts.com includes a list of ‘Jews and part-Jews’ and a page which ‘attempts to quantify the influence of Jews in the Netherlands and Belgium.

CIDI says the website is extremely worrying. ‘We don’t have to explain what violent anti-semites can dowith such a list,’ the organisation says on its website.

It is unclear who is behind the website which is registered via a Panama server with identity protection. The website, which was offline on Friday afternoon because of a system overload, describes Jews as ‘alien organisms’.

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Hungary is removing statue of philosopher György (Georg) Lukács – He was Marxist and Jewish

Via Hungarian Free Press (h/t glykosymoritis):

Lukács was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His book Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness) remains mandatory reading for those studying philosophy. Thomas Mann was inspired by Lukács and portrayed him as Naphta in The Magic Mountain. Lukács had a major influence on forming the philosophical foundations of the New Left, both in Europe and America and his works are taught in major universities all over the world.

Why does Jobbik want to remove the statue? The fact that Lukács was a Marxist and Communist has little to do with it. Today several prominent Communists (e.g.  Zoltán Komócsin) have streets named after them in Hungary.

Likely Jobbik’s trouble with Lukács is with his Jewish roots. Born Löwinger, his father József changed the family’s name to the Hungarian-sounding Lukács in the late 1800s when György was a toddler, and the family was fully assimilated into Hungarian society. They even obtained the status of Hungarian nobility and were part of the country’s rich and educated class.

Although Lukács had nothing to do with Judaism, Jobbik calls him Löwinger to emphasize his background and they even connect him and other Hungarian cultural and political figures with Jewish roots to the blood libel of Tiszaeszlár of 1882! Jobbik-controlled publications often publish lengthy anti-Semitic tirades (only in Hungarian) similar to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Jobbik politicians claim that Hungary’s culture and the “nation’s soul” have been poisoned by Jews like Lukács. This “pollution” must be “cleansed” and the ruling Fidesz party seems willing to assist the Kulturkampf to rid the country from this “Judeo Bolshevik menace. “

The removal of the Lukács statue is part of an effort to please Jobbik’s and Fidesz’s anti-Semitic voters. It is disguised as an anti-Marxist campaign and as usual in today’s Hungarian politics, Jobbik and Fidesz work tightly together as a carefully choreographed tag team.

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The Israelization of antisemitism

Monika Schwarz-Friesel & Jehuda Reinharz @ Jerusalem Post:

Between 2002 and 2012, the Israeli Embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany received over 14,000 emails, letters, postcards and faxes from all regions of Germany. Figuring that this material could provide us a window into the contemporary German mind vis-à-vis Israel, we conducted a study of these messages and found that the vast majority began with criticisms of Israel’s policies but immediately deteriorated into antisemitic assaults. We call this phenomenon the “Israelization of antisemitism.”

We found a similar pattern in a smaller study of over 2,000 emails sent by citizens of eight European countries to the Israeli embassies in those countries. We believe that the results are representative of similar antisemitic discourse worldwide, including in the United States, as a recent ADL investigation showed that 2.6 million antisemitic messages were posted on Twitter between August 2015 and July 2016.

To be certain that we did not conflate anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments, we defined in advance the definitions of criticism of Israeli policies and anti-Jewish hatred.

Another startling conclusion of our study was that, contrary to popular assumptions, it is not exclusively alt-right, neo-Nazis and/or extreme left-wingers who think this way. On the contrary, the language of contemporary antisemitism, as in the past, is anchored in and spread by the educated mainstream as much as by fringe groups. Rather than physical attacks on Jews – with some exceptions – today’s assaults are verbal, ideological and cloaked in the guise of a critique of policies of the State of Israel.

Antisemitic attacks throughout the centuries have been grounded in demonizing Jews as the ultimate evil. This concept was found repeatedly in the messages we studied. For example, in one 2007 letter to an Israeli embassy, the writer states: “The Israelis are and remain, no matter what a show they put on, the greatest racists, war criminals, warmongers, murderers, child-murderers, violators of international law, torturers, robbers and thieves, Nazis, liars, [and] terrorists....” Another message sent to the embassy in 2008 announces plainly: “Here’s one in the kisser for you, you filthy Jew. You’re to blame for the misery in the world!”

In addition to demonization, a second millennia-long antisemitic idea delegitimizes the very existence of Jews, paving the way first for segregation and then elimination or genocide. Just as Jews have no right to exist, it is claimed, a state so abysmally evil and destructive has no right to exist. In the minds of these antisemites, Israel has become the collective Jew and should be destroyed.

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Poland: Famous author blames Jews for anti-government protests

Via CFCA:

Warsaw - Marcin Wolski, well-known in Poland satirist, publicly accused Jews who, according to his words "are behind anti-government protests".

The Jewish community send complaint to National Council on TV and Radio program by Wolski: "Behind the Vision".

The Jewish community also send to Mr. Wolski an instruction what antisemitism is, and a box of matza, because satirist compared "holy wafer" with matza, telling that this year during Xmass the matza was eaten instead of holy wafer.

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Russia: Duma’s Deputy Speaker speaks against Jews

Via Jewish Press:

The Russian Federation of Jewish Communities (FJC) on Tuesday accused the Duma’s Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy of undermining international peace and called on the Parliament to rebuke him for his statements concerning the handing over of St. Petersburg’s St. Isaac’s Cathedral to the Russian Orthodox Church, Interfax reported.

Tolstoy told a press conference that “the people who are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who pulled down our temples, and jumped out from the Pale of Settlement to the revolver in 1917, and today are working in very respectable places – on the radio, in the legislatures, continue the work of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.”

“We usually hear such statements from irresponsible instigators of anti-Semitic campaigns,” the FJC stated. “When we hear this from the mouth of the State Duma deputy speaker at an official press conference, it directly undermines inter-ethnic peace in the country and stirs up tension.”

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Slovakia: Lawmaker probed for opposing national honors for Jews

Via JTA:

The speaker of Slovakia’s parliament initiated a criminal probe for alleged hate speech against a lawmaker who criticized the conferring of a national honor on Jewish laureates due to their ethnicity.

Andrej Danko, the speaker of the National Council of the Slovak Republic, on Thursday said he would subject the far-right lawmaker Stanislav Mizik to disciplinary action in addition to the probe over his posting on Jan. 10 on Facebook of a text slamming the initiation into the Ľudovit Stur Order of three Jewish recipients out of 20 this year, the news website Dennik N reported.

The honor bestowed on Jewish recipients by Slovak President Andrej Kiska “turns logic on its head,” Mizik, a member of Slovakia’s Kotleba – People’s Party Our Slovakia, wrote on Facebook, because the founders of the Slovak nation “had a negative relationship to the Jews due to their selling out of the Slovak nation, usury and also because of religious issues,” Mizík wrote.

The honoring of Ivan Kamenec, a respected scholar on the Holocaust in Slovakia, Mizik wrote, was inappropriate because Kamenec is “a Communist Party candidate who has often worked as an undercover agent” for the communist-era secret police and a “Marxist, who himself admitted in an interview that he is a Jew.”

Juraj Herz, a Jewish film director, was also ineligible for the award due to his origins as was Eva Mosnakova, a Holocaust survivor who lectures at schools about her survival, Mizik wrote.

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Norway church denounces Luther’s anti-Jewish writings

Via The Times of Israel:

Ahead of Reformation’s 500th anniversary, Lutheran Church distances itself from founder’s anti-Jewish bias.

Norway’s state Lutheran Church has condemned the anti-Jewish legacy of Martin Luther, the 16th century German theologian who started the Protestant Reformation.

In a statement issued Friday ahead of next year’s 500-year anniversary of the Reformation, the Church of Norway’s General Synod said some of Luther’s writings were later used in anti-Semitic propaganda, including in Nazi Germany. 

Noting that such propaganda was also spread in Nazi-occupied Norway during World War II, the synod said that “in the Reformation anniversary year of 2017, we as a church must clearly distance ourselves from the anti-Judaism that Luther left behind.”

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UK lawmaker: Jewish state to blame for rise in jihadism

Via Times of Israel:

A British lawmaker who said Israel would eventually disappear accused the Jewish state of being a major cause in the rise of jihadism worldwide.

Following the statement Thursday by Jenny Tonge, a House of Lords member from the Liberal Democrat party, the Board of Deputies of British Jews called on the party’s head to fire her.

“The treatment of the Palestinians by Israel is a major cause of the rise of extreme Islamism and Daesh,” Tonge said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State terrorist organization. She said Israel was provoking a generation of violent extremists who would have “a justified grudge” against Israel and Britain.

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UK: "Jewish siege of Europe" graffiti

Via ShimritHJ: "Jewish siege of Europe" graffiti at London bus stop

UK: Nazi group crowns "Miss Hitler 2016"

Via Mirror:

A British woman has been crowned Miss Hitler 2016 after taking party in a sick neo- Nazi beauty pageant organised by fascist group, National Action.
The competition attracted entries from across the UK, but saw one women, with the disturbing pseudonym 'A-Bus-Full-Of-Retards', named winner.

In an interview on the group's website, the woman discusses her antisemitic views and described how she became involved with National Action (NA).

She says: "I am an NA activist living in Scotland and dedicated member of our organisation."

The brunette woman poses in pictures on the fascist group's website wearing a kilt and a t-shirt displaying the National Action emblam.

Her face is half-covered with a black scarf with a skull on it, and in several images she is doing the Nazi salute.

In other parts of the interview she adds: "I didn't want to believe that the Jews are the enemy as I was brought up to believe that they are very similar to Christians.

"Eventually the Jewish propaganda became too obvious to ignore and so I became involved with NA."

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Europe: How anti-Semitism became respectable again

David P. Goldman @ Pajamas Media:

Heinrich Heine

[...]  For half a century the horror of a million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis stopped the mouths of the anti-Semites, but that memory has worn off. [...]

Ich, ich dulde dass du rasest, Du, Du duldest dass ich atme, wrote Heinrich Heine of the relationship between Gentiles and Jews in 19th century Europe: I tolerate your rage, and you tolerate my breathing. Things have changed. The crime of the Jews today is to breathe, and especially to breathe the air of their own country. As the body count rises, enlightened opinion once again will blame the Jews for breathing. Muslims will continue to engineer humanitarian disasters (as in the last Gaza War) to solicit Western sympathy, and European governments will attempt to placate their growing Muslim populations by blaming Israel.

The difference between today and the 1930s, to be sure, is that Jews are armed rather than defenseless. I am weary of excusing myself for breathing. Let them hate us as long as they fear us.

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Greece: Golden Dawn lawmaker says Israel ‘eternal enemy’ of Greeks, Christians

Via JTA (h/t CFCA):

Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos called on the Justice Ministry to take action against a neo-Nazi lawmaker after he made anti-Israel comments in parliament.

Speaking during a debate in parliament on Monday, Christos Pappas, from the Golden Dawn party,  called Israel an “eternal enemy of Greece and Orthodoxy.”

Pappas was speaking during a debate on the ratification of Greece’s international agreements with other countries.

“The state of Israel implements genocidal methods and is a regional troublemaker,” he said, according to the Kathemirini newspaper, asking how “a state like Israel could possibly have relations with Greece, which is the cradle of civilization and humanism.”

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Spain: Lawmaker calls Barcelona Jewish community head 'a foreign agent' of the Zionist lobby

Via JTA (h/t CFCA):

Spain’s main Jewish group threatened legal action against a local lawmaker for calling a community leader “a foreign agent.”

Benet Salellas espoused “the most repugnant form of anti-Semitism” and used speech that “is wholly illegitimate in diplomatic discourse,” FCJE said Tuesday in an unusually harshly-worded statement. The group said that unless Salellas apologized and walked back his statements, it would press charges against him for hate speech.

During a May 12 debate in Catalonia’s parliament, Salellas accused Uriel Benguigui, president of the Jewish Community of Barcelona, of being a “foreign agent” and part of a “Zionist lobby,” local media reported.

Salellas — a member of the Popular Unity Candidacy, a left-leaning movement in favor of independence for the Catalonia region — apparently objected to Benguigui’s presence at the meeting of the parliament’s foreign relations committee.

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Salellas' party, the Popular Union Candidacy (CUP), published the following clip on their YouTube page, showing him "standing up to the pressure of the Zionist lobby on the Catalan parliament".

Portugal: Jewish community fearful of anti-Semitism following influx Middle East refugees

King Manuel I decreed that all Jews had
to convert or leave Portugal (1496).

Correio da Manhã reported that hundreds of Jews have applied for Portuguese nationality under a 2013 law granting citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic Jews, who were expelled 500 years ago.

The vast majority -70%-  come from Turkey.

The newspaper contacted the Oporto Jewish community and was told they they would not reveal the exact number of applicants because the massive influx of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere who have come to Europe has created hostile reactions and comments and they do not want the Jews to be victims yet again.

It is not clear from the article what is making the Jewish community so apprehensive.  Is it the massive arrival of Muslims refugees who, for many, hold anti-Semitic views, or of the Portuguese population itself or of a conflation of both?  Will history repeat itself?  No it will not because Israel exists.

Czech Republic: Jews are blamed for both “Islamization” and “Islamophobia”

Via ISGAP:

Moreover, neo-Nazis have very ambivalent feelings about Islam. On the one hand, they do feel some admiration for the authenticity of the Muslim culture, its family values, opposition to Israel and to what they see as Western consumerism.[iii] On the other hand, the very same value of authenticity becomes a problem, once a non-Aryan Muslim crosses the European border. Vice chairman of the neo-Nazi Workers’ Party put it clearly that his movement “does reject the organized mass migration to Europe, not out of hatred against anything Islamic, but out of fears about the preservation of our own identity.”[iv] Another, non neo-Nazi yet antisemitic, voice was even more explicit: “Islam is not a problem on a territory connected with Islam, it is a problem only on our territory.”[v]

The antisemitic far-right explains the Muslim refugee influx as an “organized import” planned by the almighty New World Order, which can be further elaborated as either American conspiracy or Jewish conspiracy. The Jews are depicted as directly responsible for the migration wave either by causing the war in Syria and Iraq, by creating ISIS, or by organizing the import of migrants to Europe for purposes or motives on which the antisemitic scene has not yet managed to agree upon. Videos of brutal decapitations by ISIS are considered fakes filmed somewhere in the Californian desert.[vi] Immigration is described as a “strategic weapon“[vii] of the American Jewish NGOs and as for the ISIS itself, it is considered to be “a project of a secret group of Obama’s advisors”.[viii]

The alleged conspirators are said to be led by two main goals: 1. To destroy European racial identity and, 2. To invoke more support for Israel. Leaders of the antisemitic movements talk about a systematic plan to “destroy White Europe”, allegedly hatched “a century ago”.[ix] The neo-Nazi website Svobodný odpor, wrote about the refugee wave: “It is nothing accidental. It is a long prepared operation with an aim to liquidate Christianity, to liquidate nation state, to liquidate nations and to create a single European nation. The Mordor was thinking for a long time, how to do it, to make the whites give up their states and nations and start considering themselves only Europeans.”[x] The Czech antisemites follow and translate foreign voices that speak in a similar fashion, including David Duke’s claims that the State of Israel wishes to dissolve European identity through forced migration.[xi] Among these popular foreign voices, one can find Russian neo-Nazi intellectual Valeriy Piyakin, who is not afraid to go back thousands of years in history to explain the sources of the alleged Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity through migration.[xii]

(...)
           
In the end, the Jews are being blamed for both “Islamization” (by allegedly inciting the migration to Europe) and “Islamophobia” (by allegedly misusing the anti-Muslim rhetoric to invoke support for Israel). And again, it is not about the Jews themselves – it is about antisemitism as a tool of totalitarian political propaganda. One might look at the Refugee Crisis as just another human catastrophe for which the Jews are being blamed. Immigration is the pretext, Western democracies are the target, Jews are to become the scapegoats. We have spent a lot of time recently talking the “new antisemitism”, but let us not consider the “old” one to be dead. This “old” antisemitism of Protocols and Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theories lives on and begs our attention again.

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