The New Antisemite

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Russia: Israeli man beaten to death in suspected anti-Semitic attack

A Russian-born Israeli man died Monday night of severe injuries he sustained after being attacked on a St. Petersburg street several days ago in what authorities are investigating as a suspected anti-Semitic attack.

The Russian-language outlet Fontanka reported Tuesday that Mikhail Verevskoy, 27, had suffered traumatic brain injuries and fractured ribs and facial bones, as well as internal injuries.

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs said a suspect, Ahmed Kharsha, 36, was arrested and released on bail. Kharsha was forbidden from leaving the city. Russian authorities investigating the attack have not ruled out an anti-Semitic motive, the report said.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories
Free Sign Up

Verevskoy is survived by his wife, who is in a local maternity ward where she is due to give birth.

UK: Labour Party scandal 'emboldened' antisemitic attackers, report finds

Via Telegraph:

Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party is partly to blame for a rise in antisemitic attacks in the UK, a report has said.

The Kantor Center, based at Tel Aviv University, said that the "unprecendented publicity regarding controversies about alleged and actual antisemitism in the Labour Party" is likely to have "emboldened offenders".

There was a three per cent rise in antisemitic incidents of all types recorded by the Community Security Trust, from 1,346 to 1,382.

While abuse on social media fell by 15 per cent the number of antisemitic assaults recorded by the CST rose by 34 per cent to 145.

Alongside hard-right antisemitic activity there has also been a "rise in leftist antisemitism" which "supports radical Muslim anti-Israeli attitudes expressed in antisemitic terms such as in the BDS and Antifa movements, and certainly in the UK Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn," it said.

"The recent strengthening of the extreme right in a number of European countries was accompanied by slogans and symbols which remind, not only the Jewish population, of the 1930s, despite the significant differences between the two periods," the report added.

It said British Jews were "losing their traditional political home, because of the change the Labour party has undergone, to which they feel they cannot be partners".

"Jews regard the present stances of the Labour Party as no less than betrayal," it added.

In eastern Europe, when Nazis killed Jews, a ‘carnival atmosphere’ prevailed

Via Times of Israel:

In contrast to the relatively secretive death camps, the Einsatzgruppen massacres were “an attraction” for many communities, according to Desbois. In some localities, the Holocaust unfolded with “carnival” or quasi-religious undertones, such as the organizing of bloody, Passion-like marches through town, or forcing Jews to perform on the edge of mass graves.

“The Germans in the Eastern territories could not be unaware that the gawkers who rushed to see the Jews murdered, sometimes up to the graves’ edge, crossed themselves over and over,” wrote Desbois. “Consciously or not, they organized a tableau vivant, a living picture, of an inverted representation of the Stations of the Cross.”

(...)

In a chapter called “The Sanitizer,” Desbois explained how the SS murder squads engaged local communities in “cleaning up” after each massacre. Before Jewish homes and belongings could be pillaged, efforts were made to erase evidence that thousands of people had been murdered.

“The personal bathtubs ripped out of Jewish houses became anonymous tubs for transporting the lime to the mass graves where the Jews had been murdered,” wrote Desbois. “For a few days, the entire village seems to have been transformed into a human slaughterhouse. A slaughterhouse needing to be sanitized after a crime.”

According to Desbois, his investigations yielded many “grave fillers,” but few people who admit to transporting Jews to execution sites in trucks or wagons. For those in town who did not witness the massacres for themselves, evidence of what took place was visible on the streets for days.

“It took a village-wide effort to get the Jewish furniture out of the houses and into the schoolyard where it was sold,” wrote Desbois. “Not only was the sale of Jewish goods not hidden or discreet, camouflaged, but it took place in broad daylight at the center of Soviet life. …In the place where everyone went to make daily purchases, the possessions of murdered Jews were sold shamelessly at auction.”

Hungary: Armed guards protect Jewish restaurants in France and Belgium but not in Budapest

Frank Furedi @ Spiked:

[...] If you listened only to Western media, you would think Hungary had become the heartland of fascism. In numerous media outlets it was darkly suggested that the re-election of Orban would constitute a threat akin to Hitler gaining power in the 1930s. Lurid headlines warned of the imminent collapse of Hungary into authoritarian rule. Canadian Michael Ignatieff, the president and rector of Budapest’s Western-financed Central European University (CEU), warned that the election would determine whether ‘Hungary consolidates itself as a democracy or whether it aligns with Putin and the ascendant authoritarians of the 21st century’.

When I talk to a couple of Western students from the CEU, it is clear that they believe Ignatieff’s warning. They warn me about the unprecedented prevalence of anti-Jewish sentiment in Budapest. They don’t believe me when I point out that if you understand Hungarian, you will find that such sentiments are probably weaker in Budapest than they are in Paris or many other Western European cities. When I tell them that I have seen armed guards protecting Jewish restaurants in France and Belgium but not in Budapest, they look uncomfortable and change the subject.

Austria: Holocaust denier Gerd Honsik has died

Via The Times of Israel:

Gerd Honsik, an Austrian author who was considered a leading ideologue in Europe’s neo-Nazi movement, has died at 76.

The Austria Press Agency reported Honsik died Saturday at his home in Hungary. APA cited “multiple independent sources” in its report Monday. (...)

He published a book titled “Hitler Innocent?” in which he attempted to justify some of the Third Reich’s crimes during World War II. He evaded most of his prison sentences over the years by fleeing Austria and living in other European countries, including Spain. He was arrested in 2007 in Malaga and extradited to Austria for a 1992 conviction, after Madrid had refused to hand him in for 15 years because Holocaust denial wasn’t illegal in that country.

During trial, Honsik claimed he merely “rejected the textbook wisdom that demonizes National Socialism” and said he denies the existence of the gas chambers only when he “didn’t verify” the facts himself. Honsik, who sometimes used the pseudonym Endsik — alluding to the Nazi quest for final victory or “Endsieg”— was last released in 2011 having served a prison term in Spain for claiming that the Holocaust was a fabrication.

Poland: Senior Politician in Antisemitic Rant: ‘The Jews Are Not Humans, They Are Animals!’

Via Algemeiner:

The growing trend of antisemitic outbursts among leading Polish politicians and public figures reached new heights this week, when a close ally of the country’s deputy prime minister took to social media to denounce Jews as “animals.”

“Żydzi to nie ludzie to zwierzęta!” – “The Jews are not humans, they are animals!” – an enraged Kazimierz Plotkowski posted on Twitter on Wednesday. The tweet was later deleted, after being captured by several screenshots shared online.

Plotkowski, a successful businessman, is a co-founder and former regional leader of the Polska Razem (“Poland Together”) Party of deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Gowin, and an adviser to the Polish government on energy and mining. The party was founded by Gowin, an outspoken social conservative, in 2013 after he was dismissed from the post of Justice Minister in the previous government.

Following his Twitter outburst, Plotkowski told Polish news outlet NaTemat that he was responding to an unspecified “article” in which Poles were depicted as “pigs who robbed Jews in the ghetto.” However, his original tweet was posted after the museum at the Auschwitz concentration camp announced that it was replacing a small exhibition about a group of Poles executed by the Nazis in 1943 with another about resistance in the camp. Several influential Poles, including historian Adam Cyra, have protested that the decision demeans the suffering of Poles under the Nazis. A spokesperson for the museum told the PAP Polish news agency this week that the new exhibit would show the central role played by Polish inmates in building a resistance movement inside Auschwitz.

Lithuania: A Holocaust exposé angered nationalists. Now lawmakers want to ban critical scholarship

Via JTA:

The Lithuanian parliament is preparing to vote on a government-sponsored bill that would ban selling material that “distorts historical facts” about the nation.

The bill, which Economy Minister Virginijus Sinkevičius submitted Monday, is widely seen as a response to the controversy in Lithuania around the publication of a 2016 book about the Holocaust titled “Our People.” Viewed by some nationalists as an insult to the Lithuanian nation, it is also credited with breaking some taboos in Lithuanian society about collaboration during World War II.

The bill, which according to the Delfi news agency is an amendment to the Law on Consumer Protection, provoked passionate condemnations in Lithuania and beyond by critics who said it curtails freedom of speech and debate about the genocide, in which 90 percent of Lithuanian Jews were killed, mostly by other Lithuanians.

Whereas several Eastern European countries have laws that limit free speech about the Holocaust, including Poland, Ukraine and Latvia, the bill targeting the sale of critical books “would be, if passed into law, one of the most blatant and harshest of them all,” said Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff, who co-authored “Our People” with Rūta Vanagaite, a best-selling novelist.

France: Primary school tagged with swastika in Paris

Via I 24 News:

"Stinking Jew" and swastika

An antisemitic tag was painted on a Jewish primary school located in the affluent 16th arrondissement of Paris.

France: Jewish Student Group Hit With Vandalism: 'Death to Israel', 'Vive La Palestine'

Via Haaretz:

Vandals have scrawled anti-Israel graffiti and ransacked the offices of a Jewish student group at a Paris university, on the same day that marches are being held around France to protest anti-Semitism.

Sacha Ghozlan, president of the French Jewish Students Union, told Le Monde that that the damage was inflicted Wednesday at the group's facilities at the University of Paris' Pantheon-Sorbonne campus.

“A cabinet was thrown on the ground and there were inscriptions such as ‘Death to Israel,’ ‘Viva Arafat’ on the wall,” Gozlan told the French paper. A tweet from the scene also showed "Zionist local racist anti-goy" and "Palestine will win" were written as well.

He said it came as far-left student protesters were blocking parts of the campus in a protest movement, but said it is unclear who was behind the incident.

Belgium: Brussels University to honor British filmmaker Ken Loach despite protest from Jewish groups

Via European Jewish Press:

The Brussels Free University (ULB) has decided to honor British film director Ken Loach despite protests by Belgian Jewish organisations citing his “obsessive hatred of Israel.”

The Jewish organisations, which include the David Susskind Jewish Community Center (CCLJ), the Union of Belgian Jewish Deportees and the Union of Jewish Students, accuse Loach of being unable to denounce anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. They point to an ambiguous response he gave in an interview last September on the Holocaust.

Asked in a BBC interview if Holocaust denial was acceptable, Loach said: “History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyze. The founding of the State of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing, is there for us to discuss.”

He later clarified his comments saying that the Holocaust was “as real a historical event as World War II itself and not to be challenged.”

German diplomats defend Kuwait Airways’ 'no Israelis allowed' policy

Via The Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

German diplomats have said accusations of antisemitism against Kuwait Airways for its practice of refusing Israeli passengers are exaggerated, triggering sharp criticism from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a German lawyer who sued the airline.

The statement defending state-owned Kuwait Airways was first reported by the Düsseldorf-based business daily Handelsblatt on Monday.

A court in Frankfurt ruled in November that Kuwait Airways was within its rights to refuse service to an Israeli citizen. The Israeli in the lawsuit had booked a flight on Kuwait Airways from Frankfurt to Bangkok.

Katharina Ziegler, a German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, declined to comment on the record in response to a query from The Jerusalem Post addressed to Heiko Maas, the new foreign minister. Maas has promised improved German-Israel relations after the anti-Israel policies of his predecessor, Sigmar Gabriel. Germany’s Foreign Ministry is widely viewed as one of the harshest critics of the Jewish state within Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration. The US- and EU-designated terrorist entity Hamas praised Gabriel in January for terming Israel an “apartheid regime.”

German-Jewish teen says fleeing Berlin for Israel over schoolyard antisemitism

Via The Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

15-year-old German-Jewish student Liam Rückert told the BZ daily on Friday that he plans to relocate to Israel to continue his education due to what he said was rampant Muslim-animated hatred of Jews in the Berlin public school system.

"I want to go to a boarding school like my brother in Israel. I already visited him and he is doing well there," Rückert said. His mother Billy is from Israel and taught her sons Hebrew.

In 2016, a student of Arab origin said during a discussion of the Middle East conflict in Rückert's class: "If there is a Jewish student in the class, I would kill him." According to the BZ article, students of Polish and Arab descent have targeted Liam with insults such as "shitty Israeli" and "shitty Jew." The Berlin school barred Liam from changing classes at the school named Jungfernheide. The school has the highest number of migrants in the city, with 62.1 % of the students having an immigrant background.

"I could previously trust my Arab friend Hussein," said Rückert, adding that the two boys "both had a secret: that I am a Jew and that he is gay." Rückert said he has anxiety to return to the school and declines to attend a required meeting every Friday because of the psychological pressure, the BZ wrote. Rückert is currently involved in an internship outside of the school.

Billy said the teachers sought to play down the antisemitic attacks. "We received no support from the school," said Billy on a German TV talk show.

The BZ wrote that antisemitic attacks in Berlin schools are a daily occurrence. Last week, the father of a German Jewish girl said his daughter was "accosted by Muslim students because she does not believe in Allah."

Josef Schuster, the president of the roughly-100,000 member Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in late March that "if Jewish students can no longer go to school without fear of antisemitic abuse, there's something wrong in this country." It is unclear if the rise of antisemitism in Germany, where 40% of the population hold modern antisemitic views - according to a government-commissioned study last year - will lead to a wave of aliyah.

French historian: 60 000 Jews have left France in last ten years and Europe will empty itself of its Jews

Le Monde has interviewed Marc Knobel, CRIF's historian and director of studies, in the wake of the murder of Mireille Knoll, 85 (Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris. Again.):

"How do you see the future?

I do not know what to think anymore. I will stay in this country anyway, but I feel that many people will be leaving. In fact, 60,000 have left France in the space of ten years out of a community of around 500,000. I think the trend will not stop. People are afraid for their children and now for their parents too. All the conditions are right, once the bewilderment subsides, for them to say to themselves that they have nothing to do here. The number of people leaving France will grow. In other European countries too, where the situation is also tense, even if there have been no killings [of Jews] - and that's not a small difference. Europe will empty itself of its Jews."

(Google translation)

read more in French

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Germany: Israeli author David Ranan spent a year speaking to Muslims about anti-Semitism

Via Spiegel:

Israeli author David Ranan spent a year speaking to Muslims in Germany about anti-Semitism, with the goal of understanding prejudices and their root causes. He has transformed his findings into a book that draws surprising conclusions about the extent of the problem. (...)

In practically every conversation, he had to listen to descriptions of stereotypes and conspiracy theories about Jews. And yet the book Ranan has written is anything but an alarmist tome on Muslim anti-Semitism. (...)

Organ Theft and Other Conspiracy Theories

Ranan conducted lengthy conversations with his interview partners. About half were women, and most had completed high school or studied at college. "I didn't want to interview any hormonal 15-year-old boys who had seen the previous night how Israel is bombing Gaza and were repeating mindless slogans."

But that didn't stop him from hearing some disturbing opinions. Two 21-year-old students, for instance, were obsessed with figuring out where they could shop in good conscience.

"But many brands belong to you! I have heard that Aldi belongs to a Jew -- … but it's only something I heard -- I don't know for sure."

"Starbucks, I heard,… but that doesn't keep me from going to Starbucks and getting a coffee or from going to Aldi." "But there are surely people who don't go shopping there anymore! Rossmann, the drugstore DM, that's also supposed to be Jewish:…"

"Where do I know that from? It's same way that people say there are German nationalists. We don't know any, but we know they exist."

There are a number of patterns to be found in the transcripts. For example, most had read something about a supposed Jewish global conspiracy or heard about it from friends or family. A female engineer who grew up in a Turkish family in Germany said, "People talk about it, that the world is governed by some families, about 120 families. They are Jewish and that they control the government, more or less. All these diseases, bacteria, that are being spread everywhere in the world here, supposedly also come from there, that means the whole system in the world! I do think that Jews very, very much manipulate the world and also control it."

The people he spoke with seldom referred to the Koran or religious questions. For most of them, the Middle East was much more important.

One of the stories they told Ranan mirrored the plot of the Iranian TV show "Zahra's Blue Eyes," in which a leading Israeli politician has a Palestinian girl kidnapped to have her blue eyes transplanted into his blind son. The Palestinian territories' ambassador to the United States, Riyad Mansour, made a similar claim in 2015. He wrote to the UN secretary-general that Israel was organ-harvesting Palestinians who had been killed and that "bodies were returned with missing corneas and other organs."

One of Ranan's interview subjects was firmly convinced that organ theft was really happening. He said he had received reports from his own family. "Do you really think that my parents, my aunt and uncle, who experienced this, my mother-in-law, all of my relatives, do you really think they are lying to me?" he asked. He even claimed to have personally seen people who had had "their innards cut out."

France: "I have no idea how we’re going to fight this cancer of anti-Semitism" says French Jewish intellectual

Via The Atlantic:

(...) Last Friday, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was stabbed 11 times and set alight by a neighbor and a homeless man. This time, authorities immediately, perhaps even prematurely, called it an anti-Semitic attack. Gérard Collomb, France’s interior minister, said this week that before killing Knoll, one of the two men arrested for the murder had told the other, “She is a Jew, she must have money.”

Last week, before Knoll’s death, I had met with Elisabeth Badinter, one of France’s most influential intellectuals and old-school feminists, and had asked her what she thought could be done to stop anti-Semitism, radicalization, terrorist attacks, everything we’re seeing in France today. “To be very frank with you, I don’t know, and I’m worried,” she told me. Her blue eyes were piercing, her composure formidable. She weighs in on French public life only selectively, and had given an interview last September decrying what she saw as a media silence around Sarah Halimi’s death.

“I think that the more immigrants who arrive in Europe from Muslim countries, the more difficult it will be,” Badinter continued. Integration will be difficult, and they’ll be unhappy, she said. “And who does one immediately point the finger at? Americans and Israelis, with this radical conflation between Israeli citizens and diaspora Jews, which they see as the same. So I have to confess that one, I have no idea how we’re going to fight this cancer of anti-Semitism. And two, I’m worried.”

She’s not alone.

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )