Austria: Vienna police charge 3 men for waving Israeli flag at rally

Via Jerusalem Post:

The Vienna police are pursuing criminal charges against three pro-Israel activists for waving an Israeli flag in protest of antisemitic slogans at a demonstration against Jerusalem having been recognized by the US as the capital of the Jewish state.

The police are seeking a €100 fine or two days in jail for the display of Israel-support at the December 8 anti-Israel rally near the US Embassy in Austria’s capital.

The criminal notice, dated January 3, states that the activists “showed an Israeli flag at a rally in an extremely provocative way and manner that was visible for participants at the rally and thereby produced considerable offense and provocation among the Palestinian protesters.”

The German-language edition of the news site Vice first reported on Tuesday on the penalties against the three men and conducted an interview with one of the pro-Israel protesters.

“My mother is Israeli, her family [members] are refugees from Iraq and Libya,” the pro-Israel protester said. “An Arab-speaking friend from Israel was able to translate some of the slogans yelled [at the rally], for example, the Arab battle cry to massacre Jews: ‘Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning,’ and... ‘Death to Israel.’”

The Arabic cry references an ancient Muslim attack on Jews in the town of Khaybar in what is now Saudi Arabia, killing many and looting their homes. The provocative chant is frequently used when attacking Jews and Israelis, and was chanted on the Mavi Marmara Gaza flotilla ship in May 2010.

The activist, who was given the name Matthias  F. by Vice to ostensibly protect his privacy, said he heard other chants of “Intifada” and “Child-murder Israel” at the rally that was attended by hundreds of anti-Israel protesters.

He added that, “We were shocked by these slogans and did not want to leave the slogans unchallenged. Antisemitism and hate of Israel should not be tolerated.”

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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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Russia: Murmansk Jewish leader's car set aflame on Christmas

Via Barents Observer:

At midnight on the 7th of January, as Russia was celebrating the Orthodox Christmas, someone put the community leader’s car on fire. Ilya Raskin believes it was not coincidental.

«The Jewish community sees this not only as an act of vandalism and hooliganism, but also as a well-directed antisemitic and extremist act, aimed at stirring inter-ethnic and inter-religious strife,» he says on his Facebook page.

Next to the car, which was partly destroyed by the fire, was found a gasoline can, 7x7-journal reports. Raskin says to the online news magazine that he intends to address the FSB and the prosecutor’s office about the case.

He argues that the timing indicates that there was an antisemitic motive behind the fire.

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France: Kosher store target of suspected arson after being hit by anti-Semitic graffiti

Via I 24 News:

Fire comes on third anniversary of 2015 attack at a kosher supermarket by jihadist gunman

A suspected arson attack on a French kosher grocery store revived fears over anti-Semitism on Wednesday, three years to the day since an assault on a Jewish supermarket by an Islamist gunman.

Prosecutors said the store in the southern Paris suburb of Creteil had caught fire overnight, days after it was hit by anti-Semitic graffiti.

Investigators do not believe the blaze was accidental. The Promo & Destock store was one of two neighboring kosher shops in Creteil that were daubed with swastikas last Wednesday.

"The shop has been ravaged, devastated by the flames, there is nothing left,” the President of the Creteil Jewish community Albert Elharrar told i24NEWS on Tuesday, adding that the community is doing its best to “keep hope and to be vigilant.” The suspected arson sparked outrage on social media, with Israel’s Ambassador to France quickly condemning the attack as a "shameful provocation" which “proves the importance of continuing the fight against anti-Semitism.”

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Germany: Draft bill aims to allow deportation of migrants with anti-Semitic views

If they can't be outright anti-semites, they will say they are anti-Zionists or that they are only criticizing the "apartheid" regime of Israel...

Via I 24 News:

Study by American Jewish Committee in Berlin found wide-spread anti-Semitism among Syrian, Iraqi refugees

Germany plans to review a draft bill that would allow authorities to revoke the residency permits of migrants with anti-Semitic views. Chancellor Angela Merkel's party intends to introduce the draft legislation ahead of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.

“Who rejects Jewish life in Germany cannot have a place in our country,” reads the draft bill, according to the German daily newspaper Die Welt. It also defines “unrestricted acceptance of Jewish life” as the “benchmark for successful integration.”

The proposal by Merkel's party CDU and its Bavarian sister-party CSU urges the Bundestag to revise immigration law so as to give more weight “to the call for hatred against a part of the population.”

It also asks the parliament “to counter the danger to peaceful coexistence posed by intellectual arsonists early on by classifying this behavior as a particularly serious cause for expulsion”.

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UK: UKMW prompts correction to Indy claim that ‘Israel killed’ Mohammed al-Durah

Via UK Media Watch:

The Al-Durah Affair is an incident, in Sept. 2000, involving a 12-year-old Palestinian boy named Mohammed Al-Durah who, Palestinians alleged, was killed by IDF fire (during a firefight between Israeli and Palestinian forces) while crouched in front of a wall with his father at the Netzarim Junction in Gaza.

Despite the fact that claims the boy was killed by IDF fire that day – based on an entirely inconclusive 59 second video clip – have been discredited, Israel’s guilt was accepted blindly by the media, and al-Durah became an icon of Palestinian “martyrdom” in the Arab and Muslim world.

The framing of the incident also reinforced, some have persuasively argued, the lethal media narrative that Israel murders Palestinian kids.

However, despite the dearth of actual evidence, some in the media to this day persist in accepting, without question, these completely unsubstantiated Palestinian claims that Israeli soldiers killed the boy.

The latest example involves a Dec. 16th article in The Independent on the recent death of a disabled Palestinian man, Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, on the Gaza border during clashes with Israeli soldiers. The article included a passage suggesting that the death of Abu Thuraya (in highly disputed circumstances) on the Gaza border, during violent protests last month, evokes the death of Mohammed Al Durah.

As you can see from our tweet to the journalist, Rachel Roberts, the article suggested that Israel’s responsibility for the young boy’s death was an indisputable fact.

Though the journalist didn’t respond to our tweet, we contacted Indy editors who eventually upheld our complaint and placed the word “allegedly” before the word “killed” in the sentence we highlighted:

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Netherlands: Fans unfollow actress for vacationing in Israel

Not surprising: Results of a new poll commissioned by the European Commission show that Israel is believed by Europeans in 15 countries to be the greatest threat to world peace, greater than North Korea, Iran or Afghanistan.

Via JTA:

One of the Netherlands’ best-known actresses said hundreds of people unfollowed her on social media because she posted pictures from her visit to Israel.

Victoria Koblenko, an award-winning movie, television and theater actress and journalist with 151,000 followers on Instagram, invited others to unfollow her as well on the social network, saying in a Jan. 3 post from the Old City of Jerusalem that she has no interest in the attention of people who “assume something about my political inclination based on my holiday destination.”

Koblenko, 37, noted in the same post that the Middle East is her favorite vacation destination, and that she has visited all its countries with the exception of Iraq and Afghanistan. “#unfollowme if you disagree,” she wrote at the ended of her post. Those who unfollowed her did so after she posted pictures from her trip to Israel.

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UK: Student Union apologises after Judaism is again omitted from a survey

Happening all the time, followed by apologies...

Via Campaign against Antisemitism UK:

The President of the National Union of Students (NUS), Shakira Martin, has apologised to Jewish students for the release of an NUS survey which asked respondents to select their religion from a long list of religions that omitted Judaism. This is not the first time that NUS has missed out its Jewish members and that Ms Martin has apologies: in July 2017, in a different survey of students, Judaism was also notably absent.

However, Ms Martin acknowledged the omission immediately, directly communicating with aggrieved students on Twitter before tweeting a heartfelt apology video, accepting that she was “accountable” and recognising “Jewish students should be pissed”. She assured students that this “would not be happening again”, “actions speak louder than words, when I said I was gonna stamp out all forms of antisemitism I’m not giving no lip service.” She acknowledged that this was a repeated issue, stating that “The first time it happened, I could tweet and say sorry, But the second time, it’s unacceptable, and I just want to reassure the whole Jewish community that I will be dealing with this.”

Ms Martin went on to discuss the context of these incidents, which came following an extremely difficult time for Jewish students under Ms Martin’s predecessor, the widely-scorned Malia Bouattia. Ms Martin was direct, saying: “I totally understand after the years – but especially last year, before my presidency, that Jewish students had – that this type of thing is not acceptable.” You will not not see Judaism on an NUS form again. I will be making sure that we will be reviewing all our forms, and that this is on everyone’s form, and that this [situation] will not happen again.”

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Netherlands: Amsterdam kosher restaurant vandalized again

Via Bad News from the Netherlands:

The Jewish restaurant, HaCarmel, in Amsterdam was attacked last month by a Palestinian Syrian asylum seeker. It has now been vandalized again.  

The owner says that it is a target of vandalism more often. He wants to place cameras around the restaurant and has asked the authorities for permission. His lawyer, Herman Loonstien, says that the weak attitude of the authorities enables the vandalism.

Photo: Joods.nl

France: Jews protest reprint of anti-Semitic pamphlets from Holocaust era

This is a small sample of what Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote about Jews.  Via The New York Review of Books:

"Everything is mysterious about germs just as everything is mysterious about Jews. One germ so harmless, one Jew so admirable yesterday, tomorrow brings rage, damnation, infernal blight. No one can predict the future of a germ any more than the future of a Jew…. Waves of infection spread through space, as they wish, when they wish, and that’s that. Harmless bacteria, harmless Jews, semi-virulent germs become virulent tomorrow, epidemial. The same Jews, the same germs, just at different moments in life…. No one has the right to risk introducing a single germ, a single Jew said to be innocuous, into the operating theater. No one knows what will happen, what did happen, what will mutate the most benign-looking germ or Jew….  

What’s happening with the kikes in Italy and France is exactly what happened with pseudo-sterilization. It’s no mystery…. If you want to get rid of the rats in a ship, or the stink bugs in a house, do you de-rat by half, and exterminate on just the first floor? You’ll be reinvaded in a month by ten times the rats, by twenty times the bugs…. Two go out the door and 36,000 come back in through the window…. You have to know what you want. Do you want to be rid of the Jews or do you want them to stay? If you really want to get rid of the Jews, then don’t do it 36,000 ways, with 36,000 pretenses! Racism! The Jews aren’t afraid of anything except racism! They don’t care about anti-Semitism. They can always handle anti-Semitism…. Racism! Racism! Racism! And not just a little, not halfheartedly, but completely! absolutely! inexorably! like Pasteur’s perfect sterilization." 

"Beating up Jews (by Jew I mean anyone with a Jew for a grandparent, even one!) won’t help, I’m sure, that’s just going around in circles, it’s a joke, you’re only beating around the bush if you don’t grab them by the strings [tefillins], if you don’t strangle them with them."

JTA:

France’s best-known hunter of Nazis, Serge Klarsfeld, and the country’s main umbrella of Jewish groups protested a publisher’s plan to print anti-Semitic essays by the author Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, also known as Celine.

Klarsfeld, a historian and vice president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told Le Parisien that it would be “unbearable” to find at a French library the essays by the celebrated novelist, which he published under the pseudonym Louis-Ferdinand Celine between 1937 and 1941, the paper reported last week.

And CRIF, the umbrella group, said in a statement that it opposes the plan by Editions Gallimard to publish later this year the three “racist, anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler” essays titled “A bagatelle for a massacre,” “The school of corpses” and “Beautiful sheets.” (...)

In one of the 176 pages that comprise “Beautiful sheets,” Celine writes: “More Jews than ever before on the street, more Jews than ever before in the press, more Jews than ever before on the bar, more Jews than ever before at the Sorbonne, more Jews than ever before in medicine, more Jews than ever before in theater, in the opera, in industry, the banks. Paris, France more than ever before ceded to the masons and Jews, more insolent than ever before.”

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France: Anti-Semitic inscriptions at kosher shops in Paris

Via European Jewish Press:

Five swastikas were painted with red paint on the shuttered blinds of the Promo Stock and the local branch of the Hyper Casher kosher supermarket chain store in Creteil and on the door of the building. (...)

In January 2015, an Islamist terrorist killed four Jews at Hyper Cacher in the Porte de Vincennes branch in Paris. According to the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism (BNCVA), those anti-Semitic graffiti are linked to the upcoming commemoration of the anti-Jewish attack at the Hyper Casher three years ago.

CRIF, the umbrella representative group of French Jewish institutions, has called for a rally next Tuesday to honor the memory of the four people killed.

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Germany's dangerous foreign minister

Jerusalem Post editorial:

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel is the newly-crowned poster boy of Hamas. A picture of Gabriel was featured on Hamas’s Twitter page on December 31, accompanied by the following tweet: “German FM describes the Israeli occupation as an apartheid regime like the one was [sic] in South Africa.”

How did the foreign minister of one of Israel’s most important allies suddenly end up on the side of an Islamist terrorist organization that advocates targeting Israeli civilians and suicide bombings? Like many European progressives, Gabriel is capable of being hypercritical of his own Western culture – and of Israel – which is maliciously misrepresented in progressive circles as a colonialist power, while the many problematic aspects of non-white cultures, including radical Islam, are viewed as essentialist, racist or bigoted. For Gabriel, this might be due to feelings of guilt for his own country’s past crimes or might be an extension of his socialist ideology, which views Western, capitalist societies as inherently exploitative.

This worldview makes Gabriel and other like-minded progressives susceptible to anti-Israel propaganda. As reported by The Jerusalem Post European correspondent Benjamin Weinthal, Gabriel touted his hyper-critical attitude toward Israel during a panel discussion organized by – of all groups – the Kreuzberg Initiative Against Antisemitism.

The public event was held in Berlin in mid-December, as thousands of demonstrators – most of whom were migrants from Muslim countries – thronged the streets, burned Israeli flags and denounced US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

By the way, Gabriel is one of the architects – together with Chancellor Angela Merkel – of Germany’s self-destructive immigration policy that has resulted in the influx of more than a million immigrants from the Middle East and Africa since 2015. According to a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, many of these migrants bring with them anti-Jewish and anti-Israel prejudices.

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UK: BBC's new drama McMafia under fire for anti-Israel tropes

Via The Jewish Chronicle:

The BBC has been accused of resorting to “gratuitous slurs” in its new drama series, McMafia, over the portrayal of an Israeli character.

The influential UK Lawyers for Israel group issued a statement following the broadcast of the first episode on BBC1 on Monday evening, attacked the depiction of Semiyon Kleiman, a shady businessman and politician, played by actor David Strathairn.

The group also claimed that the much-hyped programme also made references to Israel which were not mentioned in the book by author Mischa Glenny, on which the drama was based.

In a further criticism, UKLFI also claimed that programme-makers had distorted the meaning of the motto of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.

In the statement, posted on UKLFI's Facebook page, the group wrote: "BBC 1 mini-series, McMafia, uses gratuitous slurs against Israeli businessmen and makes references to Israel which aren't mentioned in the original book, McMafia, by Mischa Glenny.

“Furthermore, the mini-series distorts the motto of Mossad which was quoted in the drama, as 'By deception we will do war'.

“The actual motto comes from Proverbs, 24.6 and says 'For by wise guidance you can wage your war'.  

“The use of the word 'deception' in substitute for the words 'wise guidance' attacks the integrity of Mossad and insinuates that Israel officially sanctions deception in its intelligence activities. (...)

Award-winning scriptwriters James Watkins and Hossein Amini are behind the series which and is co-produced by the BBC, AMC and Cuba Pictures, in association with Twickenham Studios.

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Europe: The NGO industry's terror trail

Via Gatestone Institute:

Gerald Steinberg (NGO Monitor): (...) On the other hand, you have cases like Germany and the European Union, where the officials involved in NGO funding avoid dealing with the evidence. Their first response to anybody providing them information on NGO terror links and antisemitism is to attack by saying, "Ah, that's a right-wing fiction." At the same time, the tight secrecy on all aspects of NGO funding in these countries continues, even in preventing members of parliament from examining the process. In Europe, the images of Palestinian suffering, and the overall sympathy for Muslim victims in general, are so strong that it is very hard to cut through the myths and slogans surrounding them. This is true across the board, even in the British Conservative Party. It is so deeply embedded in the culture that any criticism, including of NGOs with links to terrorists, immediately becomes labeled "Islamophobic." Any time you even look into where money is going, you get hit with political correctness. This is why it is crucial to create visibility and generate concern.

Gatestone: Why is your main focus Europe, with little emphasis on North America?

GS: In the case of the United States – Canada a little bit less, but still more than in Europe -- transparency in government funding is an extremely important policy and practice. Congress is pretty careful about making sure that budgets for NGO-funding frameworks are scrutinized before they are approved. Although some proposals for problematic organizations have slipped through, there is at least genuine openness and debate about the whole mechanism; discussion is routine. In Europe, on the other hand, the first time that a parliamentary debate was even held on such funding was after NGO Monitor published a report. (...)

Gatestone: To what do you attribute this difference?

GS: American culture is characterized by transparency and scrutiny. Also, in America, there is less naivety about NGOs than there is in Europe. After WWII and the Communist period, the concept of "civil society" – later called "NGOs" by the UN -- became holy in Europe. Civil society was supposed to be the antidote to manipulative democracy, like that of the Weimar Republic. But they forgot to ask what happens when civil society is itself the manipulating force. The answer is that there are no checks and balances imposed on it.

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Germany: Jews are increasingly under threat says Jewish leader

Via Breitbart:

Former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany Charlotte Knobloch claims that Jews are increasingly under threat in public and may require police protection to lead a normal life without harassment and violence.

Ms Knobloch, who is now the President of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, said that Jews are increasingly under threat, Die Welt reports. “Aggressive anti-Semitism, from verbal hostility on the Internet and in the analogue world to desecration and destruction to physical attacks are commonplace in Germany,” she said.

“Jewish life can only take place in public under police protection and the strictest security precautions, or it must be completely cancelled for security reasons,” Knobloch added.

The Jewish leader spoke about several recent anti-semitic cases including the vandalism of a Menorah in the city of Heilbronn, and the cancellation of a public Menorah lighting in Mülheim/Ruhr due to security issues.

“Anti-Semitism is strengthening on the right and the left, in the Muslim community and also in the middle of society. That’s why we need an anti-Semitism commissioner,” Knobloch said, requesting that the German Federal government appoint an official with “strong powers”.

Many have blamed the influx of Muslim migrants under Chancellor Angela Merkel for the growth in anti-Semitic incidents. Fashion mogul Karl Lagerfeld blamed Ms Merkel directly earlier this year, saying: “One cannot – even if there are decades between them – kill millions of Jews and then bring millions of their worst enemies in their place.”

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