Belgium's outrageous systematic campaign to demonize Israel at the United Nations

Via The Times of Israel:

Israel is angry at Belgium for what Jerusalem says is a systematic campaign to demonize the Jewish state at the United Nations, including by hosting a “radical” pro-Palestinian activist next week at the Security Council.

In February, Belgium holds the rotating presidency of the council and is using this privilege to invite speakers who, according to fuming Jerusalem officials, hold an extreme anti-Israel bias. They were especially outraged about Brussels inviting Brad Parker, a senior official for a nonprofit called Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), to speak at the council’s session.

“Belgium has positioned itself as one of the Security Council member states most hostile toward Israel,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat told The Times of Israel on Thursday. “Inviting a one-sided radical activist such as Mr. Parker to brief the Security Council is yet another negative record.”

Israel’s Ambassador to Belgium Emmanuel Nahshon on Thursday took to Twitter to express regret at Brussels inviting “terror supporters” to the Security Council. “This is extremely disappointing and we will express our outrage in the strongest possible terms.” 

read more

Belgium: Despite condemnations, carnival is expected to display again antisemitic puppets

Via European Jewish Press (EJP):

The city of Aalst in Belgium is located only 51 km from the Kaserne Dossin in Mechelen, the transit camp from where more than 25,000 Jews and Roma were deported from 1942 to 1944 on 28 transports to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Only 1,219 Jews survived. A Holocaust Museum in Mechelen recounts these tragic events.

Aalst is famous for its infamous annual traditional carnival which almost every year displays antisemitic floats. Last year, Jewish groups, but also the European Commission, condemned the carnival’s racist and antisemitic caricatures on display, including a float featuring two giant puppets of Orthodox Jews with hooked noses and rats sitting on money bags.

Caricatures which shocked the Jewish community as they were reminiscent of Nazi period propaganda.

In December, UNESCO, the Paris-based United Nations agency for education and culture, decided to remove the carnival from its ”World Cultural Heritage” list.

It said in a statement that it "stands by its founding principles of dignity, equality and mutual respect among peoples and condemns all forms of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia."

Despite this decision and overall condemnation, organisers of the 2020 carnival edition released at the end of last year dozens of ribbons depicting Jews in a stereotypical fashion with a hat, ringlets, a hooked nose and golden teeth. They also made fun of UNESCO.

One month after ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the Aalst carnival procession which will take place on 23 February is expected to display again the puppets dressed as Jews with hooked noses. The Forum of Jewish Organizations said it is submitting a new complaint to the European Commission in advance and is hoping to prevent the procession.

read more

EU statement against Trump peace plan blocked by several countries

Via European Jewish Press (EJP):

At least six European member states on Tuesday opposed a push by E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borrell for a joint resolution by the 27 members states of the E.U. Foreign Affairs Council criticizing the Trump peace plan and warning Israel against annexing parts of the West Bank.  

Italy, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic and at least two other unnamed nations opposed the resolution following intense lobbying efforts by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, according to Israeli media reports. Israel reportedly argued that the proposed resolution was one-sided and encouraged the Palestinians to avoid negotiations.  

Apparently outraged by the failure, Borrell issued his own independent statement on Tuesday, warning that the European Union is committed to a two-state solution featuring “an independent, democratic, contiguous, sovereign and viable state of Palestine,” and that the US deal “departs from these internationally agreed parameters.”  

“Steps towards annexation, if implemented, could not pass unchallenged,” he added.  

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Haiat took to Twitter to criticize the E.U. foreign policy chief’s “threatening language towards Israel.”  

“The fact that the High Rep of the EU, Josep Borrel [sic], chose to use threatening language towards Israel, so shortly after he assumed office & only hours after his meetings in Iran, is regrettable &, to say the least, odd,” said Haiat. “Pursuing such policies & conduct is the best way to ensure that the EU’s role in any process will be minimized.”

Portugal: Antisemitic cartoonist wins, then loses, prize in France

Elder of Ziyon's reader Nara posted this comment about antisemitism in Portugal:

I know the outcome in Portugal. This cartoonist will be hailed as an hero of free speech and everyone here will stand by his side (this was what happened when cartoonist Antonio of the New York Times was condemned). Israel hatred is mainstream in Portugal (dominated for decades by a sociological left wing). If you want to learn something about Israel you have to read foreign press but you need to be previously interested in the issue to do such research. Otherwise, you will only know the hardcore anti-Israeli tale: that in the Middle East there is an oppressed people called "Palestinians" who are being put in ghettos and then randomly killed by Jews by no reason except sadism. When Eurovision was held in Tel Aviv, several well-known Portuguese artists signed a letter asking for a boycott. This letter made very serious accusations against Israel, namely that the Nation State Law established the superiority of the "Jewish race" over other races, and that in Gaza people were being killed by Israeli soldiers with impunity. The letter made no explanation of these killings and no mention of Hamas. I suppose that this letter was more extreme than other BDS letters in other countries. Because here nobody cares. In fact, nobody refuted these claims. Publicly showing support for Israel is rare. The Jewish community is very very tiny [about 600 people]. The Sephardi Jews who applied for Portuguese nationality also do not stay here, they just use the law in order to gain access to Europe.

Via Elder of Zion:

The artist for the grotesque, antisemitic cartoon shown above is Portuguese cartoonist Vasco Gargalo. He has a history of such antisemitic cartoons; he also entered in Holocaust cartoon contests from Iran.

Gargalo received an award entitled "Prix Plumes libres pour la démocratie" from the magazine "Courrier International" and the City of Strasbourg last November.

Gargalo has quite an oeuvre.

Published on 2 December @ Sábado magazine and on Gargalo's twitter account.

Even an Israeli winning Eurovision was too much for him to stomach. Because all Israeli Jews are evil and they must not win international competitions.

Yeah, he's an antisemite.

The president of B'nai Brith France, Phillipe Meyer reacted by calling the award an "aberration, provocation, infamy." As soon as this was publicized last week there were other strong condemnations.

Finally, the magazine and City of Strasbourg withdrew the reward, calling the Nazi cartoon above "heinous" and saying that had they known about the cartoons, they would never have awarded the prize.

France: Attack against a young Jewish man wearing a kippah (Jews are rich)

Via BNVCA (French National Bureau for Vigilance Against Antisemitism):

 A new antisemitic attack was perpetrated in the Paris metro against a Jew wearing a kippah.

The victim, aged 25, was at the Jaurès underground station on February 2 at midnight.  He was approached by four men described as of North African origin, aged between 30 and 40.

They tried to rob him and then asked for cigarettes. One of the thugs told him that he could buy him cigarettes because the Jews have got money.

One of the attackers pinned the victim against the wall.  Luckily passengers came to his rescue by freeing him and by stopping the perpetrators from boarding the train.

As the BNVCA rightly points out: "Once a again the old cliché of the Jew and money poisons certain minds".

read more (in French)

By way of example, the "elite' Portuguese cartoonist Vasco Gargalo, who works for the Portuguese mainstream media, drew this portrait of the Jew carrying bags of money.

Portugal: Btsalmo demands firing of mainstream magazine cartoonist after antisemitic cartoon

Portuguese magazine Sábado posted this cartoon by Vasco Gargalo representing the crucifixion on a Jewish Magen David (and not on a Christian cross) of a black controversial politician Joacine Katar Moreira (by the way, her party, Livre, removed its political confidence from Katar Moreira).  Is the magazine Sábado implying that Israel treats its black citizens like this - putting them to death in this vile and cruel way ?  Interestingly, there wasn't a single protest in Portugal with regard to Gargalo's antisemitic drawings.  A quick look at his Twitter account shows his utter detestation and disgust of Israel and its Jewish citizens.

Via Judean Rose:

Btsalmo, a human rights organization based in Israel, has written to the editor of Sabado Magazine, demanding the dismissal of cartoonist Vasco Gargalo for his cartoon of a “Palestinian” Holocaust.

The cartoon depicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shoving a PA flag-draped coffin into an oven bearing the infamous slogan from the gates of Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei, “work will set you free.”

Portugal: Conservative politician called saviour of Jews a 'loan shark' of the Jews and praised Salazar (update)

Update:

Abel Matos Santos resigned from the CDS-PP executive committee

At issue are the statements that Abel Matos Santos made, from 2012 to 2015, in various publications on the social network Facebook, with praise for Salazar and PIDE. Portugal’s consul in Bordeaux, Aristides Sousa Mendes, also called the “loan shark of the Jews”, who helped save thousands of Jews during World War II.

Calling Aristides de Sousa Mendes a corrupt loan shark for the Jews is revolting.  When died in 1954, he was so poor that he was buried in a Franciscan habit because he did not own a proper suit.

Via Time 24 News:

The CDS “cannot be conniving” with the statements of its leader Abel Matos Santos about Aristides Sousa Mendes, writes this Thursday in a statement to the Israeli Community of Lisbon (CIL).  

It is a reaction to the positions of the member of the centrist executive committee and a former candidate for the leadership of the party, who on social media called the “Jewish loan shark” to the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, which saved 30,000 lives from the Nazi Holocaust. It is with “amazement and surprise” that CIL reacts to the words of Matos Santos, that Expresso reported on Wednesday.  

Its content, considers this Jewish organization in Portugal, is “offensive to the memory of one of the greatest diplomats in Portugal, the consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Justo entre Nações”. The statement is signed by CIL President José Oulman Carp.  

During World War II, Sousa Mendes disobeyed Salazar’s orders to allow 30,000 Jews to pass through Portugal, issuing visas and allowing them to escape the concentration and extermination camps. He claimed to have done it as an “act of conscience”.  

He ended up demoted by the dictator, but he was one of the first people recognized as Just Among Nations by Yad Vashem, an organization that preserves the memory of the victims of the Shoah, based in Jerusalem. Thus considered in 1966, he is one of four Portuguese distinguished with the title, alongside the also diplomat Carlos Sampayo Garrido (2010), Father Joaquim Carreira (2014) and José Brito-Mendes, of Portuguese origin but listed as French for being emigrant.

read more 

Ukraine: Senior economist says Ukrainians let Jews ‘dominate’ them

Via JTA:

A senior economist in Ukraine said the country’s leaders secretly are serving Israel.

Local Jews said Joseph Sytnik, a department head at the Lviv Polytechnic University, was espousing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Sytnik penned the text on Tuesday and posted the essay on Facebook alongside photographs of Israel visits by Ukraine’s current president, Vlodymyr Zelensky, and previous prime minister, Vldymyr Groysman, who are Jewish, and former president Petro Proshenko, who is not. Each of the men was shown wearing a kippah.

Back home, Sytnik wrote, Ukrainian politicians are “sinners, advancing slavery and self-destruction.”

But “at the Western Wall in Jerusalem they take off their Ukrainian masks for a moment, refuse their roles, which they perform spectacular in Ukraine and become real. For in that place they have a drop of conscience, faith, sense of duty and responsibility for their roots, there they feel fear for their sins, there they are truly afraid of their God and the law.

read more

Finland: Turku synagogue vandalised on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Via Yle:

Turku Synagogue was vandalised overnight Sunday, according to a report in local paper Åbo Underrättelser (in Swedish, subscription-only).

On Monday morning, the synagogue's front door, steps and walls were found to have been splattered with a large amount of red paint.

The chair of the Jewish congregational supervisory board, Harry Serlo, told Yle that he was informed about the vandalism as he was headed on vacation, saying that the matter would be reported to police.

Newspaper Turun Sanomat reported that the paint looked like it had been thrown onto the synagogue with paint-filled balloons (in Finnish).

read more

Germany: Israel's flag flown on smokestack in Germany to insult Holocaust

Via The Jerusalem Post:

Unknown antisemites raised an Israeli flag on a 40-meter high smokestack in the eastern German city of Leipzig on Monday – the day the international community commemorated the liberation of Auschwitz on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Bild reporter Markus Langer first reported on the outbreak of antisemitism, terming it a "disgusting provocation."

read more

Germany: Foreign minister warns of ‘massive exodus of Jews’

Via Jewish News:

Germany’s foreign minister has called for strengthened efforts against anti-Semitism to ward off the possibility that many Jews may decide to leave the country.

Heiko Maas said in an article for the weekly Der Spiegel newspaper that German politicians must do more “but there is one thing they can’t do: replace solidarity in everyday life”. […]

Mr Maas said anti-Semitism has become part of everyday life now for Jews in Germany and “it doesn’t surprise me that nearly every second Jew in Germany has thought about leaving the country”.

“We must urgently take countermeasures so that such thoughts don’t turn into bitter reality and it doesn’t come to a massive exodus of Jews from Germany,” he wrote.

“That people of Jewish faith no longer feel at home here is a real nightmare – and a disgrace, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.”

read more

UK: Labour frontbencher took six months to remove anti-Semitic posts from his Facebook despite saying he was 'mortified' by them

Via The Telegraph:

Labour frontbencher who claimed that he was "mortified" to discover he had "accidentally" shared anti-Semitic posts failed to remove the remarks from his Facebook page for another six months after his apology.  

Afzal Khan, the shadow immigration minister, who said he was "sincerely sorry" for sharing a post in 2015 which referred to an "Israel-British-Swiss- Rothschilds crime syndicate" and "mass murdering Rothschilds Israeli mafia criminal liars", only removed the post from his Facebook page yesterday afternoon [24 January], after being asked by The Telegraph why it remained. Campaigners had alleged that Mr Khan's failure to remove the remarks called into question the sincerity of Mr Khan's apology.

read more

Belgium: Jews let down by discredited anti-discrimination agency UNIA

Via The Jerusalem Post:

Belgian police will open an online hotline for reporting antisemitic and racist incidents, and some Jews hope it will replace the country’s discredited anti-discrimination agency.

Michael Freilich, a Jewish member of Belgian parliament, announced the hotline’s opening Wednesday.

Going in person to a police station is intimidating for many victims, and Belgian Jews no longer trust UNIA, the Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunities, and its hotline, Freilich is quoted as saying.

Recently, the right-leaning government of the Flemish Region — one of Belgium’s three states — pulled out of UNIA to set up its own anti-racism body.

In 2017, the Region’s Forum of Jewish Organizations said they “lost all confidence” in UNIA over its lawyer’s defense of a Palestinian man accused of hate speech for calls to slaughter Jews at an anti-Israel rally. The same UNIA lawyer later helped convict the Palestinian.

In an email leaked in 2017, the lawyer, Johan Otte, called the Palestinian’s guilty verdict “distorted justice instead of true justice,” even though UNIA was one of two complainants who had initiated the trial. […]

In 2011, a police superintendent, David Vroome, told the media that an employee of a predecessor of UNIA said that Jews “think they can get away with everything because they have money, financial power but also because they keep triggering our guilt over the Holocaust.”

The predecessor group defended the employee and accused the officer of a “dishonest account.”

read more

Belgium: New Antisemitism scandal as daily paper accuses ‘Zionists’ of ‘playing Holocaust card"

Note: De Standaard is a right leaning (Catholic) daily paper - Dyab Abu Jahjah was a columnist for De Standaard for many years. Israel-bashing is widespread in Belgium at all levels of society. As Ben Cohen points out that: "The ADL study additionally noted that “in Europe, support for Israel boycotts was found to be highest in Belgium, where 18 percent said they supported BDS [the ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ campaign against Israel.]”

Via The Algemeiner

One of Belgian’s leading newspapers was excoriated by Israel’s ambassador in Brussels this week for publishing an opinion piece that amounted to what he called “cheap, distorted and devious antisemitism and anti-Israel drivel.”  

The offending article — in the mass-circulation Flemish-language daily de Standaard — was authored by a Belgian journalist, Johan Depoortere. Titled “How the Zionists ‘Discovered’ the Holocaust,” the article’s appearance was timed to coincide with the commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp.

Illustrated with a photo of the followers of Neturei Karta — a miniscule group of ultra-Orthodox Jews who are bitterly opposed to the Zionist movement and shunned by the Jewish mainstream — Depoortere’s piece began with the observation that the millions of Jews exterminated by the Nazis cannot “protest if they are used to justify another injustice: a regime [Israel] that has imposed discrimination and apartheid in law.”

Several of the historical claims made by Depoortere in the article did not stand up under scrutiny. For example, he protested “[T]hat a people [the Palestinians] who did not participate in the massacre of European Jews by the Nazis have to pay the price for that crime or are accused of antisemitism,” with no mention of the alliance forged by the wartime Palestinian Arab leader, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and the Nazi regime. […]  

Emmanuel Nahshon — Israel’s ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg — remarked on Twitter on Thursday that he had encountered the article while attending the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem.

“Shame on you @destandaard!” Nahshon declared.

The controversy over Depoortere’s piece comes only a few months after another Flemish newspaper, De Morgen, published a viciously antisemitic article by its columnist Dimitri Verhulst in which he commented that “being Jewish is not a religion, no God would give creatures such an ugly nose.”

About 35,000 Jews live in Belgium.

read more

Germany: Reporter blames Israel for misusing Holocaust remembrance

Via The Jerusalem Post:

A German journalist for the publically-funded broadcaster ARD is under fire for writing a commentary that will be welcomed by right-wing extremists, because it condemns the behavior of Israel and Russia as unworthy during the remembrance of the liberation of Auschwitz, a prominent German Jewish leader alleged.

The commentary of the journalist, Sabine Müller, on Thursday triggered outrage on social media. The German Green Party’s member of the European Parliament Sergey Lagodinsky wrote on Twitter: “Not serious… Incredible chutzpah. There is so much weirdness in this commentary.”[…]

The Bild journalist Filipp Piatov termed Müller’s commentary “bad style” and as someone who has forgotten her history.

Müller wrote that “What was unworthy, however, was how Israel and Russia partially seized this commemoration day. How they celebrated their own political and memorial private party before the official event – with new verbal attacks against Poland and demonstratively lengthy bilateral talks between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and [Russian] President Vladimir Putin.”

In contrast to her criticism of the “egoism” of Netanyahu and Putin, she wrote that Steinmeier “lived up to the expectations of the first speech by a German head of state in Yad Vashem and, as a representative of the country of the perpetrators, delivered an impressively sensitive and clear speech – in English, mind you. A speech about German guilt and responsibility.”

Müller omitted the criticism that Steinmeier has faced in the German media for contributing to making antisemitism respectable, according to the Bild paper. In February 2019, Steinmeier sent a congratulatory telegram to Iran's mullah regime in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Islamic revolution in the name of federal republic's citizens.

He wrote “Congratulations on the occasion of the national holiday, also in the name of my compatriots."

read more