Dear@TheProgressives: Has it now become acceptable to host speakers in the European Parliament who promote the total economic, academic & cultural boycott of#Israel & who oppose the 2-state-solution? We hope not.
A Belgian watchdog group on anti-Semitism said the near ramming of a Jewish father and son in Antwerp was a racist attack, but police said the suspect was inebriated and was charged merely with reckless driving.read more
In a statement Monday, the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, or LBCA, said its lawyers have initiated a criminal court case against the driver who on Saturday narrowly missed with his car the father and son while they were walking on the sidewalk. In Belgium, third parties in certain alleged offenses can sue defendants, who are then often exposed to criminal proceedings.
The father and son were dressed in Hasidic garb.
“The act appeared premeditated and the motivation, in the absence of any other explanation, should be seen as anti-Semitic,” the statement read, adding that the case “is immediately reminiscent of car-ramming terrorist attacks recorded in Barcelona, Berlin, Jerusalem, London, New York, Nice and Stockholm.” (...)
The incident in Antwerp is one of several recent cases in which Jewish groups and authorities in Western Europe disagreed on the role of anti-Semitism in the actions of alleged perpetrators of violence, including in Amsterdam and Paris.
Only days after the desecration with “Free Palestine” graffiti, the Thessaloniki Holocaust memorial was vandalized by Greek nazis with “Golden Dawn” graffiti (see photo of the new vandalism below).
Tens of thousands of Greeks protested today in Thessaloniki the use of the name “Macedonia” in a solution to a dispute between Greece and Republic of Macedonia.
...
Earlier today, Greek news outlet thestival.gr detected antisemitic leaflets at the White Tower square targeting the Mayor of Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris, and calling him “a slave of the Jews”.
Police are investigating allegations that Liverpool supporters directed antisemitic language towards Tottenham Hotspur players after the two sides’ heated Premier League match on Sunday.
Video footage appeared to show a Liverpool fan in the Main Stand section of Anfield using the term “Jewish c**ts” moments after Spurs forward Harry Kane converted a contentious penalty to draw the match level at 2-2.
“Three or four” fans in total were also heard calling Tottenham players “Yid c**ts”, according to a journalist covering the game.
He said: “There was about three or four people that passed me on the way out of Anfield who were engaged in it.
“One supporter spotted some Spurs fans celebrating Kane's penalty and started screaming ‘Yid c***s’ repeatedly as he left and was gesturing towards them.
“I'm sure (Liverpool’s) stadium cameras would pick him out if they provided it. Others just shouted about ‘Yids’.”
Georg Welker, the independent mayor of southern German town Herxheim am Berg, has promised that he will never again make statements that draw distinctions between Jewish and German victims of Nazi crimes.
During an appearance on the German public television show Kontraste, Welker spoke about a controversial Nazi-era church bell in Herxheim. Welker argued that the bell, which is emblazoned with the words, "Everything for the Fatherland – Adolf Hitler," should be kept as a monument to those who suffered under the Nazis. He said that when the bell rings: "I hear the victims, these were German citizens, not just Jews."
Welker was immediately sued by a city resident after making the statement, and was sharply criticized by Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Schuster accused the mayor of ridiculing victims with his words, saying that Welker was espousing Nazi ideology by drawing distinctions between Jews and Germans. Welker denied that he sought to make such a distinction, adding that he was simply thinking of all of the people that he had buried during his time as a pastor in Herxheim. Welker said many of those people had been the victims of Nazi crimes as well.
Ambassador to Warsaw Anna Azari said on Friday that there has been a wave of antisemitic verbal attacks in Poland in the days following the passage of a bill that would make it criminal to suggest that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.
“In the last few days we could not help but notice a wave of antisemitic statements, reaching the embassy through all channels of communication,” the embassy said, adding that Azari was personally targeted in many of the messages.
While Krzysztof Czabanski, head of the National Media Council, said that “there is no place for antisemitic statements on the public media,” the embassy said that the problem is on-going.
“We would like to use this opportunity to repeat that Israel stands with Poland in using the proper term for the death camps – ‘German Nazi camps,’” the embassy statement read. “We hope that over 30 years of work and dedication of wonderful people, both in Poland and in Israel, will not be in vain and that we will be able to cooperate in an atmosphere of dialogue and shared understanding.”
(..) But it’s France that remains the most dangerous European country for Jews. This week saw another violent attack, when an eight-year-old boy wearing a Jewish skullcap was beaten by two teenagers in a northern suburb of Paris, the same suburb that was ransacked during a pro-Palestine rally in 2014. In response to this latest outrage, president Emmanuel Macron tweeted that ‘every time a citizen is attacked because of their age, appearance or religion, the whole republic is attacked’. It was a facile tweet, one that will do nothing to assuage the growing fear among France’s diminishing Jewish population.
As I wrote after the Marseille attack, around 7,000 French Jews emigrated to Israel in 2014, while an estimated 8,000 took the same route in 2015, (more than four times the number who emigrated in 2011). That number had dropped to 5,000 in 2016, largely because of the reassuring security presence outside Jewish schools and synagogues following the Islamist terror attacks that included the killing of four people in a Kosher supermarket, but that still adds up to more than 20,000 Jews who fled France in three years. It is a statistic that has drawn little honest analysis from politicians. (...)
In the last couple of years the number of attacks may have diminished slightly, but the level of violence is on the increase. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe admitted as much to parliament on Wednesday, although he couldn’t bring himself to name those responsible, merely pointing to a ‘new brutal form of anti-Semitism’.read more
This means that for the past two years, every four months, the EU builds an illegal school building and Israel tears it down.read more
Does it sound like the EU really cares about educating the kids? They could arrange transportation to another school if they wanted, for example.
These games are clearly meant not to help Palestinians but to embarrass Israel, with photos of demolished buildings that they claim were schools that probably never had any classes.
Abu Nawar is located in the E1 section that connects Ma'ale Adumim with the rest of Jerusalem. That is really what this is all about - the international community is hell bent on stopping Israel from connecting the two.
Excerpts of secret diaries reportedly kept by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat published Sunday reveal a secret deal with Italy protecting it from attacks by Palestinian terrorists in exchange for freedom of movement in the country for Palestinian terror factions.read more
Excerpts of a 19-volume diary published by the Italian L’Expresso magazine confirmed the long-rumored non-aggression pact between Italy and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed for decades by Arafat.
“Italy is a Palestinian shore of the Mediterranean,” Arafat writes in one excerpt of the diaries, which were recently sold to a French foundation for studying.
In one of the most dramatic realizations of the agreement, authorities in Rome refused a US extradition request for the mastermind of the deadly 1985 hijacking of the Italian ship Achille Lauro, in which a wheelchair bound Jewish-American man was murdered, allowing the terrorists to escape Italy to Yugoslavia.
The deal between Rome and the Palestinians had been previously revealed in 2008 by former Italian president Francesco Cossiga, who wrote at the time that it was struck by former prime minister Aldo Mora.
Other reports have suggested the agreement dates back to 1973, when Giulio Andreotti who served as foreign minister at the time of the Achille Lauro standoff, was prime minister.
The PLO is said to have struck a similar deal with Switzerland during the 1970s, giving them free rein to move around the country provided they discontinue attacks on Swiss targets.
In the excerpts of the diaries published by L’Expresso, Arafat also reveals lying to Italian prosecutors in 1998 about receiving some 10 million lira (NIS 21.5 million) in aid money that actually went to the Italian Socialist Party in order to help former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi avoid fraud charges.
Police in Belgium arrested a man who is suspected of trying to ram with his car an Orthodox man and a child on a street in Antwerp.read more
The incident Saturday morning was filmed by security cameras. It shows a black Seat Ibiza car swerving sharply while speeding on Isabellalei, a central street in Antwerp, toward the alleged victim and a boy, who is the man’s son, according to the Antwerp-based Joods Actueel Jewish monthly.
The car is seen intersecting a bike path, apparently while speeding. The car then climbs the curb as the two alleged victims are walking toward it, prompting them to jump away from the curb and toward the safety of the building facades.
They jump behind a lamp post. The car swerves back wildly, returning to the road from its incursion into the sidewalk. The father ran after the car as it sped away.
Joods Actueel reported that witnesses said the driver had foreign origins.
The annual Holocaust remembrance events, whether in the UN or in individual countries, held on and around the official, international day of remembrance on January 27, have now passed, until next year.read more
The hollow and disingenuous lip-service payed by international leaders to the greatest tragedy that has befallen the Jewish people, has passed.
The annual “day in the sun” of professors, Holocaust researchers and experts, whether in research centers in Israeli universities or elsewhere, is over until next year.
Life must go on.
The international community can now get back to its routine and regular agenda of political correctness. It can get back to ignoring and sidestepping the most tragic violations of human rights in the centers of conflict in Syria, Africa and elsewhere. (...)
Europe can get back to ignoring its own serious and pressing immigration issues to concentrate on its fixation with blaming Israel and with allowing itself, through naiveté and political correctness, to be manipulated by a corrupt, divided and violent Palestinian leadership intent not on peace with, but on the boycotting of Israel.
So what, then, remains of the annual Holocaust remembrance events? What practical measures are the international community taking in order to prevent future Holocausts? Is the international community doing anything to stem the alarming resurgence and spread of antisemitism – especially in Europe – often under the guise of anti-Israel sentiments and actions?
Apart from arguing among themselves as to the best way to define antisemitism in today’s international realities, what are the leaders of the world’s Jewish organizations doing to encourage countries to act definitively to criminalize and prevent antisemitism?
The trepidation of the world’s Jewish leadership – whether out of political correctness or just pure fear – and their hesitation to come out and boldly present antisemitism to the world as an age-old phenomenon that stands on its own, that has existed from time immemorial and that cannot and should not be equated with other forms of racism and bigotry, is perceived by the world as indulgence, absolution and weakness.
Serie A side Lazio have been fined 50,000 euros (£43,520) after supporters displayed anti-Semitic Anne Frank stickers last October.
Fans posted images of the Holocaust victim in a Roma jersey alongside slogans such as "Roma fans are Jews".
Thirteen Lazio fans have received stadium bans of between five and eight years in connection with the incident.
Poland's Senate approved draft legislation Thursday penalizing suggestions of any complicity by the country in the Nazi Holocaust on its soil during the Second World War.
The move has the potential to strain relations with both Israel and the United States. Critics have raised concerns that the Polish state will decide itself what it considers to be facts. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has compared it to an effort to change history.
The bill calls for up to three years in prison for a mention of "Polish death camps," although scientific research into World War Two would not be constrained.
Poland has fought against the use of the phrase in some Western media for years, arguing it suggested the Polish state was at least partly responsible for the camps, where millions of people were killed by Nazi Germany.
Senators voted 57 to 23 in favor of the bill with two abstentions. To become law, the bill requires approval from President Andrzej Duda, who supports it.
A 93-year-old survivor of Auschwitz stunned the viewers of one of Germany’s most popular political talk shows on Sunday night when — asked to compare the Nazi era with the situation today — she asserted that the two periods had more in common than many people may care to admit.read more
“I think that Germany was always antisemitic, that has not changed much,” Esther Bejarano — who was enslaved in the infamous “women’s orchestra” of the Auschwitz death camp — told the ARD Network‘s flagship “Anne Will Show.”
Bejarano was one of several guests on an International Holocaust Remembrance Day edition of the show that asked the question, “How antisemitic is Germany today?” Other guests who participated in the candid and often emotional discussion included two government ministers, a prominent human rights advocate and a leading scholar of modern Jewish history.
Much of the show was dedicated to a harrowing interview with Bejarano about her incarceration in Auschwitz. She began by relating that her father had been a stalwart German patriot, convinced that the German people would reject Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. But after the Nazis came to power and prevented the family from emigrating to British Mandatory Palestine, Bejarano was imprisoned in a hard labor camp in Germany, before being deported to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland in April 1943. (...)
It was Bejarano’s status as a Holocaust survivor who has spent decades sharing her experiences with younger Germans that amplified the shocked response to her claim that Germany remains deeply antisemitic.
The Slovenian Parliament’s foreign affairs committee has suspended a debate on whether to recognize a "state of Palestine."read more
The committee was to vote on a draft resolution with the backing of Slovenia Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec before it passes to the parliament for a full vote.
According to officials, the foreign affairs committee suspended its session pending an official government position. The committee will then meet again on the government proposal before the final vote in the plenary, which is expected in March or April.
On Friday, Slovenia’s president Borut Pahor cast doubt on his country recognising Palestine.
