UK: Jews threatened, harassed in two antisemitic incidents

Via Artuz 7:

Police in the Hackney quarter of London are investigating an attack against a hareidi Jew that took place last week. One suspect has been arrested in the incident.

The Jewish resident of the quarter was attacked as he walked home from the neighborhood synagogue. He came across an individual who began calling him anti-Semitic names, and threatened to harm him. Quickly, the victim of the attack summoned for assistance, and police arrived within minutes, rescuing him from the thug who was still threatening him with physical harm.

This is the second such attack in a month in the neighborhood. Last month, two religious Jews were “treated” to a raft of curses and epithets as they attended a funeral. The two were threatened with broken necks, with the thug promising to “rub them out.”  more

Russia: Anti-Semitic journalist comes up wtih Israeli vegetables conspiracy theory

Via IzRus:

Following Arab riots on the Temple Mount, anti-Semitic journalist Maxim Shevchenko wrote on his Facebook page that "the insult of al-Aqsa and by extension Russia- a country where there are tens of millions of Muslims- has become the norm of racist Israeli policie"/

He also pointed out that Uri Ariel, Israel's Agriculture Minister, who entered the Temple Mount, is responsible for filling up Russia with genetically-modified rubbish grown in the occupied territories.

And then whe ent on to attack Putin, who allows such things.  Europe doesn't allow to import such produce, the Indians rebelled against the British for far less, but Russia is apparently a kind of colony.


Background on Shevchenko: Journalist accuses Crimea of committing 'Zionist crimes',  'Palestinians waging holy war against world evil'

Germany: Anti-Jewish graffiti

Via CFCA:

Bonn – an antisemitic graffiti was erased in Bonn’s north bridge.

Vandals sprayed on the bridge: "Be strong against the Zionists", "anti-Zionism", "remove the Jews" along with a swastika and a picture of the devil.

UK: Pro-Israel ‘lone warrior’ stares down weekly anti-Israel protests in London

The same can be said for France, Belgium and other European countries. The Israel-bashing militants throughout Europe are extremely well organised and committed. They are powerful and there are lots of them whose hatred for Israel knows no bounds.  One hardly hears from the groups ("organized Jewish communities") which are committed to the defense of Israel. 

The Times of Israel reports:

A familiar figure at anti-Israel demonstrations, with his gigantic bushy red beard and white crocheted deep skullcap, he could well be — at first sight — a white Englishman who has converted to Islam. 

But Joseph Cohen, 32, is in fact a lone warrior, putting the case for Israel while standing in a sea of dissent. Intriguingly, Cohen says he draws much inspiration for his methods from young Muslim activists. 

Cohen was a founder of the grassroots Campaign Against Antisemitism last year, but has recently decided that “anti-Semitism wasn’t the problem — anti-Israel/Zionism is.” He left the CAA and launched his own campaign, the Israel Advocacy Movement.  [...]

After his move to London, Cohen says he was “disappointed at the hostility between Jews and Muslim communities, in north-west London in particular.”  [...]

“I got very positive feedback. I was in touch with lots of Muslims and I began to go to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and I was shocked at the level of anti-Semitism,” Cohen told the Times of Israel.

“Now, as a Jew I feel generally very comfortable in Britain. It is generally a very tolerant country. But I felt there was a massive failure on the part of the organized Jewish community when it came to dealing with these demonstrations. We have failed to explain our case to the general public,” he says.

By signing up to the social media and newsletters of every pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist group in the country, Cohen has kept himself apprised of their level of activity and reckons that he now attends a demo or an anti-Israel event every week. Often, he is the only pro-Israel voice there.

“Almost every time there is no presence from the pro-Israel UK organizations. I ask lots of people to go with me and they all say no,” says Cohen.  More.

France: Air France wipes Israel off of the map... literally

The Jerusalem Post reports:

 Passengers on an Air France flight to Paris noticed something missing from their in-flight map. 

An Air France in-flight map omits Israel, according to a passenger who sent a photo to the Facebook page of the pro-Israel organization Stand With Us. In the photo of the map, there were only indicators of where the West Bank and the Gaza strip are.

Since posting that photo, other members of the Facebook page have started posting their own photos, taken on Air France flights, of the in-flight maps sans Israel.

In a letter to Air France chairman and CEO, Frédéric Gagey, the Simon Wiesenthal Center director for international Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, noted that, “French members of our center have sent us reportedly captured shots from the English and French language of an Air France flight-path, taken last week between New York and Paris, and the locations ‘Israel’ and ‘Tel Aviv’ are glaringly absent.”

The letter noted that, “We are asked whether Air France has succumbed to the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] campaign to delegitimize the Jewish State by literally wiping it off the map?” Air France issued an apology, saying they “deeply regret this incident, due to a map scale and display problem which is currently being resolved.”

In 2009, British Midland International Airlines, a subset of British Airways, apologized for omitting Israel from their in-flight maps, also attributed to a technical error.

 

UK: Antisemitic Twitter harasser ordered to pay compensation

Via Huffington Post:

A teenager has been ordered to pay compensation to Lord Alan Sugar after sending an anti-Semitic tweet.

The 17-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, sent The Apprentice star messages, including one beginning "old Jewish" followed by a swear-word.   more

Europe: Only the EU continues blindly to insist on the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Via Mosaic Magazine - Elliot Abrahams writes @ Pressure Points:

Syria is coming apart and there are millions of Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. ISIS threatens Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq– which is also coming apart. The new Iran nuclear deal would deliver $150 billion in cash to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the removal of sanctions will bring even more money to the Revolutionary Guards. ISIS and other jihadis are increasingly active in Sinai. Hamas has a firm grip on Gaza.


What is the European Union’s reaction to all these threats? To focus on the single aspect of Middle Eastern affairs that is right now calm, and to intervene in ways likely to reduce the calm and create more turbulence. You’ve probably guessed it: fresh from the great and historic victory in the Iran nuclear deal, they now turn once again to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

The EU’s foreign-policy chief, Federica Mogherini, said “We need to build a framework—regional and international—that can lead to a more positive environment for the process to start.” Apparently it has not occurred to her that emboldening and enriching Iran is a not a great way to create a “more positive environment.” Nor is attacking Israel yet again for construction in settlements, which the EU did again on Monday, stating that it is “ready to take further action…to protect the viability of the two-state solution.” That’s a veiled threat of sanctions against Israel.  [...]

Some things have changed in the last few years, of course, but all of them will make an agreement even harder to reach. The growth of terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda makes an Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank even more dangerous to Israel and Jordan- and to the Palestinians. Abbas’s advanced age makes it ever less likely that he will take a leap and sign any agreement, and as the years pass since the last Palestinian elections (Abbas was elected to a four year term in 2005) he has less and less legitimacy to make such decisions.

So the European decision to turn its efforts to insisting on a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement are foolish and will lead nowhere. With one exception, perhaps: it seems likely that they will blame Israel for their failure, so perhaps the effort will lead to more criticism of Israel from EU governments.

It should be obvious, looking at the Middle East today, that Arab governments such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan are not clamoring for this EU effort and recognize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is marginal to their own security needs and nightmares. Only the EU continues blindly to insist on its centrality. To the Sunni Arab governments, Israel looks like an ally against the jihadis and against Iran. Perhaps this new European effort cannot be headed off, but it will achieve nothing positive. Instead it will be another example of the sort of wishful thinking about international security that EU diplomacy must shake off if it is ever to be truly effective.  More.

Bulgaria: Sports fans attack Israeli team during game

Via Jerusalem Post:

Ashdod SC players said they feared for their lives after being forced to run for cover from local fans in Bulgaria during Monday's so-called friendly match against CSKA Sofia.

(...)

Ashdod's players and coaches were lucky to escape with bruises, with coach Eyal Lachman being hit in the face by a glass bottle.

"From the start of the match they began throwing bottles at us and were singing anti-Semitic songs against Israel," said Ashdod striker Michael Ohana. "We prayed that we would be able to leave the stadium safely. You don't think about it when it happens, but there is no doubt that our lives were in real danger at that moment."

France: At Netanya, on Israel’s coast, a French ‘bubble’ rises

The Times of Israel reports:

In this photo taken Wednesday, July 29, 2015, a French immigrant to Israel receives her Israeli ID during a ceremony in the coastal city of Netanya central Israel. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

The coastal city of Netanya markets itself as the “Israeli Riviera” and walking along its main pedestrian boulevard, one would be hard-pressed to tell it apart from its twin city of Nice. Barely a word of Hebrew is spoken, and real estate ads, restaurant menus and cafe conversations are mostly in French.

An increase in anti-Semitic attacks by Muslim extremists in France, home to the world’s third-largest Jewish population, has spawned an unprecedented wave of immigration to Israel. Netanya, with its seaside chic and established French-speaking community, has become their top destination. 

Last year, for the first time, France was Israel’s top source of immigrants, according to the Jewish Agency, a nonprofit group that works closely with the government and acts as a link for Jews around the world. A record 7,200 French Jews arrived in 2014, double the number from the previous year. Of those, about 2,000 came to Netanya, a Mediterranean city whose beaches remind many new arrivals of their Moroccan, Tunisian or Algerian origins.

The surge, which marked the first time in Israeli history that more than 1 percent of a Western country’s Jewish population immigrated in a single year, came even before the shooting rampage that killed four Jews in a Paris kosher supermarket in January and devastated the community’s already shaky sense of security.

For Fanny Rhoum, a 33-year-old mother of two whose children went to school across from the Hyper Cacher, the supermarket where the attack happened, that was the tipping point. Three days after the attack, she came to Israel to start planning her move.  

“We had become paranoid … every event brought our departure closer,” she said Wednesday upon receiving her Israeli ID card in Netanya, just two days after arriving on a special flight from Paris with another 200 immigrants.

“Here we get the feeling that we can protect ourselves. There we have the impression that we are on our own and if, God forbid, something happens we will have to manage.”

Seated nearby, 63-year-old Jeanette Malka said she waited for her retirement to move to Israel and now hopes her children and grandchildren will join her. “It’s no place to raise Jewish children,” she said of France. “We like Netanya a lot. We feel at home here.”  Her husband, Chaim, was clearly relishing wearing his small black skullcap — something he said he feared to do in public in Paris.  More.

French Jewish families about to immigrate to Israel at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris on July 27, 2015 (Jeremy Fournée/The Jewish Agency for Israel)

Europe: The Brussels functionaries feign innocence and ask: boycott? what boycott?

The old predispositions hardly died out. The humanistic ardor of interwar Poland vibrantly lives on in today’s Europe. So does its insidious slyness.

Sarah Honig writes @ the Jerusalem Post:

Poland made history on Monday morning, April 19, 1937. It taught the world how to implement a boycott without actually admitting that it’s doing anything of the sort.

Headliners of today’s European Union have learned the lesson well, even if few of the EU’s sanctimonious sermonizers can likely cite the source and inspiration for their very unoriginal charade.

The Polish non-boycott was no mean feat on the eve of WWII, when dark clouds of impending doom already gathered over the heads of European Jewry.  Given the bestial goings-on and the brutish anti-Jewish boycotts next-door in the Third Reich, Poland appeared positively refined by comparison – the soul of sophistication.

The Poles never sank as low as the crude and vulgar Germans. They didn’t adopt the practice of daubing storefronts with giant Jude inscriptions, smashing windows or sending out storm troopers to form scary picket lines, carry offensive signs in the formidable Teutonic tradition and warn off the super-race away from subhuman Jewish shopkeepers.

Instead, Poland’s Minister of Industry and Commence Antoni Roman issued an edict that looked impeccably non-discriminatory.  It ordered that all business signs boldly display the proprietor’s name, directly above any other incidental scrap information such as what was sold at the premises. Precise rules were stipulated regarding the size of the letters required. What could possibly be wrong with that? The measure applied to everyone throughout the republic. Surely nothing could be more equitable. No single community or grouping was targeted.

Technically this was not an anti-Judaic decree. Quite the reverse: here was an exemplary act of public service born of the public-spirited conviction that the public was entitled to know the identity of each vendor everywhere.  No way could the Polish government be blamed for the fact that Jews – estimated (depending on the location) at between one-tenth to one-eighth of the population – on the whole had surnames that instantly betrayed their ethnic extraction.  [...]

All the while, Poland – obliged pro forma by the Treaty of Versailles to treat its Jews fairly and likewise hoping not to tarnish its image in the League of Nations – could feign innocence: Boycott? What boycott? This isn’t esoteric nitpicking into an irrelevant past. The old predispositions hardly died out. The humanistic ardor of interwar Poland vibrantly lives on in today’s Europe. So does its insidious slyness.

The EU, of which Poland is a member, exudes all the insincerity (to resort to gross understatement) which permeated Poland between the two world wars. Its faceless Brussels functionaries can, with just as much guile as their Polish predecessors, feign innocence and with just as much affectation ask: Boycott? What boycott?

EU headliners react with the gruffest of righteous indignation to the very suggestion that they enable economic boycotts against the Jewish state. Their denials are vehement. How can any upstanding individual conceivably insinuate that the EU is anything but admirably civic- minded and justice seeking? Its ethical standards apply identically to all, don’t they? According to the gospel from Brussels, Israel bears the blame for the fact that the EU’s in-house red-tape entanglers must now diligently scrutinize postal codes and busy themselves with codifying detailed stringent guidelines obliging members states to clearly and prominently label all products manufactured by Jews in Judea and Samaria (including even negligible assembled components).  More.

Europe: Fighting the coming EU economic war against Israel

Legal Insurrection reports:

Prof. Eugene Kontorovich testifies before
the House to unlawful and discriminatory
European Union policies.

The Security Subcommittee of The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on July 28, 2015, on The Impact of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.

The Tower has a write up on the full scope of the hearing. [...]

In this post, we focus on the testimony of Northwestern Univ. Law Professor Eugene Kontorovich. [...]

The Coming Unlawful EU Economic War Against Israel

The real fight currently is not so much over BDS, which has almost no economic impact on Israel itself, but over possible EU adoption of BDS-style policies. If the EU does so, it would be engaging in unlawful and discriminatory trade practices uniquely against Israel:

In the next few months – possibly as early as September – the European Commission plans to adopt a measure requiring special labeling for Israeli goods related to “settlements,” as well as other restrictions, including the outright exclusions on some agricultural products.
These are not general measures applying to trade with what the EU considers occupied territories; rather, they are special sanctions aimed solely at Israel. Thus the statements of European officials show that these actions are another step in a systematically implemented series of increasingly serious trade restrictions against Israel. Proposed future steps include restrictions on all Israeli banks because of their operations in disputed territories.
In other words, the EU is self-consciously attempting to pioneer a new model for trade with Israel and relationship to the areas under Israeli jurisdiction that fundamentally differs from its relationships with other countries.
The proposed EU measures are unlawful trade barriers against Israeli products. They violate European duties under multilateral and bilateral trade agreements. In particular, the proposed measures raises strong claims by Israel under articles 2.1 and 2.2 of the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, as well as the Articles IX, X and XIII of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, Article 2.3 and 5.6 of the Agreement on the Applications Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, among others.

Every excuse the EU raises for treating Israel differently does not hold up to scrutiny:

Nor is there any merit to the EU’s contention that its trade obligations to Israel only apply to what it regards as Israeli sovereign territory. There is no principle in trade law restricting the application of trade agreements to sovereign territory. Trade agreements often apply to areas where sovereignty is not recognized or disputed, such as Taiwan, the Falkland Islands (Malvinas), and the Palestinian Authority. Indeed, the EU itself includes occupied Western Sahara within the territorial scope of its treaties with Morocco, undermining its contentions about Israel.

Keep in mind the proposals seek to level the playing field internationally against dishonest and unlawful attempts to single Israel out using standards and sanctions not applied to any other country, much less any of of our allies. 

Europe cannot be trusted to do the right thing. As history and current events prove. More.

Germany: Berlin Wall monument smeared with anti-Semitic graffiti

Via DW: 

A well-known monument depicting the Star of David on a German flag has been vandalized, Berlin police said. The incident comes as thousands of Jewish athletes are competing at Maccabi Games in the German capital.
Deutschland Vaterland an der East Side Gallery Berlin

The anti-Semitic slogans were discovered at a section of the Berlin Wall belonging to the iconic East Side Gallery, officials announced Saturday.

The outdoor gallery features over 100 original murals by artists from all over the world, who painted their works on the largest surviving segment of the Wall. The unknown vandals defaced the picture called "Vaterland" by German artist Günther Schaefer, scrawling hate speech over the mural showing the Star of David on the German flag.  more

UK: Teachers' union promoting “one-sided and partisan” literature on Middle East

Via Jewish News:

Jewish leaders have expressed concern over a new educational resource being promoted by the National Union of Teachers to British schools, claiming it is “one-sided and partisan” in its portrayal of the Middle East.

A five-part series profiling Palestinian children “living under military occupation,” produced by charity Edukid, was “inspired by a union visit to Palestine in 2013,” said NUT General Secretary Christine Blower.

The union facilitated access to Palestinians in the West Bank and Nazareth, but despite protestations by Edukid that it tries to remain “neutral”, no Jewish Israeli children were profiled, although thousands having endured years of rocket fire from Gaza.

“We are concerned that the literature presents a one-sided and partisan view of the political situation,” said a Board of Deputies’ spokesman.

“We have raised this issue at a senior level with the Department for Education, who share our concerns. We have also requested a meeting with the NUT to discuss the issues raised.”

Chris Turner, chief executive of Edukid, claimed: “We tried to get the Jewish perspective, and spoke to two organisations in Israel about profiling Jewish children, but both declined to work with us when they found out we were also profiling Palestinian children.”   more

Germany: Jews assaulted in Berlin

Via Jerusalem Post:

Two youths taunted six Jewish men with anti-Semitic insults and tossed an object at the group, police in the German capital said on Friday. The attackers fled and are being sought for alleged attempted assault and hate crimes. The incident took place in the Berlin district of Neukölln, a neighborhood with a large Muslim population. Separately, police arrested “a man with an Arab background” for yelling anti-Semitic insults at two security guards at the Hotel Estrel, where 2,000 people and athletes associated with the European Maccabi Games are staying, the Die Welt paper reported on Saturday. The hotel is 900 meters from the Al-Nur Mosque, a hotbed of radical Islam.

The head of the German umbrella organization for the Maccabi, Alon Meyer, warned Jewish athletes about traveling in large groups through Neukölln and wearing visibly Jewish items such as Stars of David or kippot. According to the Maccabi Games’ rules of conduct, athletes should not make themselves recognizable as Jews in “sensitive areas of Berlin,” and it is preferable that they travel in taxis and not wear kippot.

Neo-Nazis also threated the Jewish athletes on their Web platforms.  more

UK: Man assualted outside synagogue

Via Jewish News:

A man has been arrested for assaulting an Orthodox man outside a shul, before using anti-Semitic slurs.

Volunteer neighbourhood watch group Shomrim said a male pushed an Orthodox Jewish man before 11pm on Thursday night, and used anti-Semitic slurs. The incident occurred outside a Synagogue by Clapton Common.