The tomb of Joseph van Raalte in Vlissingen was vandalized, along with another grave.
Police suspect the grave was targeted. Van Raalte, who passed away in 1926, was the first manager of the Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding company.
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| Impact seen from the outside |
MG: I have children myself, I have grandchildren, and you don’t want to see this in the world today. Now everybody is talking about Boko Haram and ISIL beheading people. I saw beheaded children in Gaza, I have pictures.
I don’t show them because they are simply too inhumane, but nobody is accusing Israel of a massacre of children. It is always directed to somebody else who is called under the general term of terrorists.Nobody else saw it, nobody else recorded it, nobody else reported it, only Mads Gilbert, famous doctor and speaker of truth to power. And he can't show us the pictures, because they're too inhumane.
Gilbert (translation mine): 'By the verb 'beheaded' I meant I saw dead Palestinian children wholly or partially without heads, after Israeli attacks on Gaza this summer. I specifically didn't use the verb 'decapitated' [talks about Norwegian translation]. I obviously never meant or claimed that Israeli soldiers physically and directly beheaded children with their own hands."
Beheading typically refers to the act of intentional decapitation, either as a means of murder or execution; it may be accomplished, for example, with an axe, sword, knife, wire, or by other more sophisticated means such as a guillotine.Maybe he simply doesn't speak English well? We can't fault him for that.
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| Alyah from France |
More: Washington Post
Mehdi Hasan, political director of the Huffington Post, UK, has a post up entitled, “If Mary and Joseph Tried to Reach Bethlehem Today, They Would Get Stuck at an Israeli Checkpoint.”
(...)
Seriously, this sort of historical revisionism, treating ancient Jewish Judeans as if they were Palestinian Arabs, and then analogizing modern Israel to the oppressors of Jesus and his family, a common trope in the UK, would be laughable if it were not so pernicious. Pernicious not simply because it’s a ridiculous distortion of history, and not simply because it’s often accompanied by a large dose of anti-Semitism, with Palestinians playing the role of Jesus and the Israelis being the foreign oppressors crucifying him. But pernicious because it goes to the true heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict–the failure of the Arab side to recognize that the “Zionists” are not the “European settler-colonialists” of Third Worldist imagination, but a people with a three thousand year plus tie to the Land of Israel, whose religion was born there, who ruled two separate kingdoms there, who have prayed toward Jerusalem for two thousand years in their ancient Hebrew language, and so on.
The "Christmas spirit" seems to be in the air among all the anti-Israel NGOs - and a new annual report by NGO Monitor released Tuesday reveals how that has found expression in a whole array of religiously motivated slanders of the Jewish state with a distinct undertone of anti-Semitism.
In the report, NGO Monitor analyzed Christmas cards, nativity scenes, and holiday messages released by well-known NGOs, charities and church groups. What it found was groups such as Pax Christi, Sabeel, and a slew of others used religious motifs to attack Israel and advance BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaigns.
"The recurring exploitation of religious holidays and theological language to advance discriminatory anti-Israel campaigns shows that nothing is holy for the BDS movement," said Naftali Balanson, managing editor of NGO Monitor. "The church groups that support these NGOs, as well as the governments that fund them, must immediately repudiate the disturbing antisemitism emanating from NGOs that purport to promote human rights."
So if commemorating the Holocaust in the public sphere requires Jews to play down their affiliation with Israel, and to elide the intimate connection between what the Holocaust represents and the significance of a Jewish state in our own time, then I’d say we are better off without Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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| Dominique Leparre, communist mayor of Bezons |