The New Antisemite

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Holland: Amsterdam kosher eatery’s owner will close shop unless police curb vandalism

The owner of a frequently vandalized kosher eatery in the Dutch capital said he will close it down unless city officials install permanent security measures outside his business.

Sami Bar-On’s lawyer, Herman Loonstein, told the Het Parool daily Wednesday that his client feels it is “irresponsible to go on like this” at HaCarmel restaurant without permanent security measures.

In December, a 29-year-old Syrian asylum seeker smashed the restaurant’s window while holding a Palestinian flag. He then broke into the restaurant and grabbed an Israeli flag as two police officers watched before they arrested him. He has been charged with vandalism, but not a hate crime.

Since the incident, the restaurant’s windows were smashed once more and are repeatedly spat on and smeared with garbage, Bar-On said. Police beef up security after each incident but leave shortly after, he said.

Europeans said boycotting Foreign Ministry event celebrating new US embassy

Via The Times of Israel:

European diplomats will reportedly skip a Foreign Ministry event next week marking the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem in protest of US President Donald Trump’s recognition of the city as Israel’s capital.

Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inviting the entire foreign diplomatic corps to Sunday’s event, many European envoys, including those from the United Kingdom, France and Germany, will boycott the ceremony, Hadashot TV news reported Wednesday.

“It is a little strange to invite us to celebrate an event that we opposed and condemned. The Americans were more clever and knew in advance not to invite us to save themselves from embarrassment,” the network quoted a diplomatic source as saying.

Belgium: Antisemitic and jihad textbooks at the heart of imams training in Brussels

This has been known for many years, but somehow the numerous human rights NGOs operating in Belgium are not aware of this type of antisemitic activities going on quite openly - or maybe they are just not interested.

Via The European Jewish Press:

BRUSSELS - Antisemitic manuals advocating armed jihad are included in the curriculum of the training of future imams and teachers at the Grand Mosque in Brussels located a few hundred meters from the European Union headquarters, reveals a confidential report from OCAM, the governmental coordinating unit for threat analysis in Belgium.

According to the report, revealed by Belgian daily La Libre and RTL TV channel, many of these manuals are freely available in Brussels and elsewhere.

The OCAM document mentions the fact that "the teaching of the Muslim religion of the Arab section of the Islamic and Cultural Center of Belgium, the name of the Brussels Grand Mosque, "is in no way adapted to the Belgian or European reference framework. They contain Salafist ideas and doctrines that encourage the rejection of any different ideas and fundamental constitutional rights and freedoms".

Moreover, the OCAM insists on the fact that "many mosques and Islamic centers in Belgium still have in their libraries and as part of their training activities textbooks and other documents presenting a problematic content in terms of radicalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism."

Poland's Auschwitz Museum Staff Suffer Anti-Semitic Attacks After Holocaust Speech Law

Via Telesur:

In April, the brother of the museum’s director wrote a heartfelt message on Facebook decrying the “50 days of incessant hatred” directed at his brother, Piotr Cywiński.

"For 12 long years he’s worked in one of the most terrible places in the world, in an office with a view of gallows and a crematorium," Cywiński wrote. "Dozens of articles on dodgy websites, hundreds of Twitter accounts, thousands of similar tweets, profanities, memes, threats, slanders, denunciations. It’s enough to make you sick."

Paweł Sawicki, who runs the museum’s social media operation, told the Guardian, "The collateral damage of the dispute is that Auschwitz became a target. We’ve had people saying they were not allowed to have a Polish flag here, or saying that the memory of Poles is not represented here, that the museum is anti-Polish – all of this is untrue, and we had to respond."

The museum, however, continues with a stiff stance, as it continues to regularly interject in Twitter discussions and by publishing a long list of false claims that have been made about the museum, ranging from the issue of Polish flags to the accusation that former Polish prisoners being not invited to a ceremony in January to commemorate the camp’s liberation.

The hate campaign initiated by the Polish nationalists has raised concerns over the pressure exerted on the official guides at the site in southern Poland.

The Guardian reported that at least two tourist guides suffered abuse, in one episode a foreign guide was attacked while in another the supporters of a convicted antisemite filmed themselves repeatedly bullying their guide during a visit to the camp in April.

In February, the official responsible for schools in the region in which Auschwitz is located argued that only Poles should be allowed to work as guides at the site. And they should be licensed by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, a state body widely seen as a tool used by the government to impose its preferred historical narratives.

"Foreign, and not Polish narratives reign at Auschwitz. Time for it to stop," wrote Barbara Nowak, who until last year served as a local councilor for Law and Justice.

UK: Jewish boys assaulted in antisemitic attack in London

Via Jewish Chronicle:

An appeal has been made for witnesses to an antisemitic attack in which two young Jewish boys were “racially assaulted, verbally and physically”.

The incident took place on Sunday evening in Golders Green, North-West London, at the North Circular Road crossing between Golders Green Road and Brent Street.

Both the police and the North-West London branch of the Shomrim neighbourhood security group were called in the wake of the incident.

Shomrim said its volunteers “had detained the suspect, who was subsequently arrested by the police”.

Italy: Roberto Saviano, author of ‘Gomorrah,’ takes on Internet Nazis

Via Tablet:

Tired of internet conspiracy theories and vile anti-Semitism, the journalist turns his attention from Italy’s mafia to its white supremacists

Later this month, Roberto Saviano, the renowned Italian journalist, will testify at the first hearing of a trial against 39 Italian neo-Nazis who were accused, among other things, of participating in an online group that incited racial discrimination and violence. For years, between 2009 and 2012, the group held discussions that included white supremacist and anti-Semitic rhetoric on the American hate site Stormfront.

In one of the threads, members of the site posted lists of alleged influential Jews: entrepreneurs, artists, and journalists. Among the people listed, were Carlo De Benedetti, former president of the publishing group L’Espresso, TV host Gad Lerner, and Saviano himself, whose maternal grandparents had Jewish origins, although he identifies as atheist.

An investigation carried out by the Italian police revealed chilling conversations among the members of Stormfront Italy. “I still believe that the great Führer had found the right solution for those damn rats,” wrote Filippo Galbesi, one of the users, in one of the threads. Another member, Alessandro Pedroni, stated: “To build—this time FOR REAL—homicidal gas chambers, applying for real what they pretend happened to them, I believe that would be the REAL FINAL SOLUTION.” All members took part in the discussions under nicknames, but the police discovered and published their names. (...)

Another reason for the online attacks was his participation in a debate on Israel in 2010, despite his openly critical stance on many of Netanyahu’s policies. “In Italy,” Saviano explained, “you cannot have a critical and interlocutory opinion on Israel; either you ask for its immediate dissolution, or you are considered to be part of the conspiracy.”

Germany plans database to tackle rising anti-Semitism

Via Financial Times:

The German government plans to establish a new national database to register anti-Semitic crimes and incidents, amid rising concern over the safety of the Jewish community in the country.

Felix Klein, the government’s new anti-Semitism commissioner, said current criminal statistics did not capture the full extent of the problem, in part because they ignored verbal abuse and other incidents that fell short of criminal behaviour.

He also voiced doubt about whether the existing database accurately identified the background of many perpetrators.

“It shows that more than 90 per cent of all anti-Semitic crimes are committed by rightwing extremists. The victims, Jews living in Germany, tell us something completely different: they feel that Muslim-motivated anti-Semitism is much more dangerous than appears in the statistics,” Mr Klein told journalists late last week.

He also suggested a change to the German criminal code that would toughen penalties for physical assaults if the attack was motivated by racial, religious or ethnic hatred.

Netherlands: Cop requests removal of Holocaust memorial sign, cites Israeli actions / Jew attacked

Via Times of Israel:

A bookshop owner in the Dutch capital said that a police officer asked him to remove a sign commemorating Holocaust victims, citing Israel’s actions.

Gert-Jan Jimmink told the De Telegraaf daily in a video published online Friday that the request was over a sign that read “Open Jewish Homes, Houses of Resistance.” The sign is part of a grassroots initiative from 2011 in the Netherlands in which residents of homes that used to belong to Holocaust victims open them to the public on the week of May 4, the Netherlands’ day of Remembrance of the Dead for Dutch war casualties.

The officer asked Jimmink: “Would you mind taking that off, because Israel launched an attack,” he said. Jimmink did not say when the officer, who he did not name, requested this. He ignored the request, he said. “I will not bow to this,” he added.

Jimmink, who has commemorated Holocaust victims also by having memorial cobblestones installed outside their former homes, also said that he recently saw an anti-Semitic assault outside his shop. A man of about 40 wearing a kippah was waiting for a tram, when an older man spat on him and hit him, Jimmink said. The attacker had left by the time Jimmink rushed to intervene he said.

“But it happened right in front of my eyes,” he said.

Germany: Cartoon showing Israeli PM as puppet master in classical antisemitic theme

Via Watch Antisemitism in Europe:

The local newspaper Thüringische Landeszeitung - TLZ published a cartoon showing the Israeli prime minister as the "string master" behind the anticipated termination of the Nuclear deal with Iran by Donald Trump. Benjamin Netanjahu is seen saying "The president decides" while reaching a sign from the back of Trump's head through his open mouth saying "Iran is lying!". For those new to the topic of antisemitism: the image of Jews as puppet masters is an classical antisemitic theme. See for yourself:

Sunday, May 6, 2018

France: Anti-semitic placard at anti-Macron protest

Thousands of people demonstrated in central Paris on Saturday amid a heavy police presence to protest against President Emmanuel Macron's sweeping reforms, a year after he came to office. (The Local)

An old man was seen carrying a placard with the inscription "Mac Aaron, Zionist, Crook".

Photos via Laurent Bouvet

And this too. Look at the nose, the ears, the money, the crown, the gallows.

Friday, May 4, 2018

EU doesn't condemn Abbas' antisemitic remarks - it downplays them, and praises him as a peacemaker

Via The Elder of Ziyon:

From the European Union External Action:

The speech Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered on 30 April contained unacceptable remarks concerning the origins of the Holocaust and Israel's legitimacy. Such rhetoric will only play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated.

This is not a condemnation. This is merely saying that Abbas' statements are "unacceptable." And why are they unacceptable?

Not because they are antisemitic. Not because they deny history. Not because they blame Jews for causing the Holocaust.

No, the main problem with Abbas' speech is that it allows the Israeli right to point out that Abbas is an antisemite who does not deserve to be rewarded with a state!

The only direct characterization of Abbas' character in this statement is that he has "repeatedly advocated" a two state solution, meaning that a man who spouts Jew-hating conspiracy theories is better than the evil people who point out his antisemitism.

The EU then tries to obfuscate the issue by saying antisemitism is bad.

The Holocaust and World War Two have defined Europe's modern history like no other event. Holocaust education remains central to building up resilience against all forms of hatred in our societies. Antisemitism is not only a threat for Jews but a fundamental menace to our open and liberal societies. The European Union remains committed to combat any form of anti-Semitism and any attempt to condone, justify or grossly trivialise the Holocaust.
There is no wording that ties the second paragraph to what Abbas said. It sort of implies that Abbas might have trivialized or condoned the Holocaust, but the statement it so general that is could refer to anyone, anytime.

This EU statement does not say a single negative thing about Abbas, and it says one "positive" thing about him - that he supports a two state solution (on the way to destroying the Jewish state via "return.")

The statement also does not call on Abbas to walk back his statements or to apologize. He did something that is vaguely unfortunate and it must be forgotten as quickly as possible before those right wing Jews make a big deal over it.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

UK: Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary present at Abbas Jew hate speech

Question: How many other European delegates, among the 80 international observers, and journalists attended the meeting and said nothing?

Via Guido Fawkes:

Emily Thornberry attended the Mahmoud Abbas speech which made global headlines this week for its anti-Semitic content, Guido can reveal. Thornberry was representing Labour at the Palestinian National Council (PNC) meeting in Ramallah. The Shadow Foreign Secretary confirmed her attendance in a Facebook post published after Abbas’ speech. Her statement did not reference Abbas’ anti-Semitic comments…

Abbas delivered a rambling speech in which he claimed the Holocaust was not caused by anti-Semitism but by Jewish “social behaviour, [charging] interest, and financial matters.” In highly offensive comments, Abbas said:

“But why did this use to happen… They say, “It is because we are Jews”. I will bring you three Jews, with three books who say that enmity towards Jews was not because of their religious identity but because of their social function. This is a different issue. So the Jewish question that was widespread throughout Europe was not against their religion but against their social function which relates to usury [unscrupulous money-lending] and banking and such.”
Rather than reference the remarks or condemn Abbas in her initial statement, Thornberry instead said:

“While we of course want to see the resumption of meaningful peace talks, I said President Abbas had been quite right to argue that the Trump administration cannot act as a mediator for peace when they themselves are sowing the seeds of discord, and making a negotiated peace ever harder to achieve...”
Now Thornberry has put out another statement:

“It is deeply regrettable that, during a lengthy speech whose main and successful purpose was to urge the Palestinian National Council to remain committed to the Middle East peace process and the objective of a two-state solution, President Abbas made these anti-Semitic remarks about the history of the Jewish community in Europe which were not just grossly offensive, but utterly ignorant. His comments were out of keeping with the tone of the Council as a whole, and of my discussions with other delegates, and I hope President Abbas will immediately apologise for them, so that the message to come out of this important Council meeting can remain positive and progressive, and focused on re-establishing peaceful and constructive dialogue.”
Labour sources are concerned that the Shadow Foreign Secretary did not initially distance herself from the remarks or condemn them. It has been confirmed that she was in the room during the remarks, alongside 80 other international observers.

EU spokesperson: Abbas’s speech on the origins of the Holocaust ‘unacceptable’, EU ‘committed to combat any form of anti-Semitism and any attempt to condone, justify or grossly trivialise the Holocaust’

Via European Jewish Press (Yossi Lempkowicz):

"The speech Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered on 30 April contained unacceptable remarks concerning the origins of the Holocaust and Israel’s legitimacy," said Maja Kocijancic, EU spokesperson for foreign affairs in a statement.

"Such rhetoric will only play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution," she said.

The EU spokesperson was reacting to Abbas’ speech at a rare meeting of the Palestinian National Council, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) parliament in Ramallah on Monday, in, which he said that the Jewish "social function" in 20th century Europe, such as money lending, caused animosity towards them which led to the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of six million Jews.

He cited what he said were books by "Jewish Zionist authors" for the claim. Among others he quoted the controversial "The Thirteenth Tribe" by Arthur Koestler, which claims that Ashkenazi Jews, of European ancestry, are not real Jews, but descendants of the Khazars. He denied that Ashkenazi Jews count as a Semitic people.

He called Israel "a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism" and said "those who sought a Jewish state weren’t Jews."

He stated that the Holocaust was not a result of anti-Semitism, but the fault of Jewish "social behavior," and "charging interest and financial matters," and asserted that Adolf Hitler had actually facilitated the immigration of Jews to Israel.

The Holocaust has been a long time fascination for Abbas. His doctoral thesis, "The Connection Between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement 1933–1945," was completed in 1982 for the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, and published in 1984 as an Arabic book, "The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism". He asserted that Zionists had been complicit in the Holocaust, which Abbas said was far overblown in scope.

France: Can a Jew love France?

Via The New York Times (Alexander Aciman):

[...] But things are not so dreamy for Jews today in France. The country is struggling to maintain and protect its large Jewish population, the third largest in the world, which has been dwindling precipitously thanks to the wave of anti-Semitism that has gripped the country over the past decade. In 2015 — the year of the Charlie Hebdo attack — 8,000 Jews left France and headed for Israel.

My grandfather made a go at living in Paris in the 1960s, but found himself an outsider in a country still reeling from a war of roundups and deportations. This broke his heart, for he too felt that Paris was his real home.

France failed to make good for my grandfather on the promissory cultural note of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The organization’s purpose was to lift Jews out of their benighted surroundings and offer them the tools to make a go at life in Europe. It was the promise of a country that took pride in being more civilized than the ones that would eventually expel all of their Jewish populations.

Today such distinction feels more blurred and more difficult to defend than at any point since World War II.

What hurts most about this realization is that it directly contradicts what Jews like me feel must also necessarily be true: France is our home, as if somewhere in the universe there is a real France, and the one in Europe is just a facsimile that keeps falling off the anti-Semitism wagon.

French-speaking Jews may have celebrated this year when Emmanuel Macron’s party, La République En Marche!, defeated the frighteningly far-right and anti-Semitic National Front, but this supposedly new France has done nothing to curb its Jewish problem. Every year in France Jewish storefronts are vandalized, including arson in kosher supermarkets this past week.

The general feeling of unrest is not unlike the one felt over 100 years ago during the Dreyfus Affair, when it became clear to many that Jewish life in France was ultimately unsustainable. For many, the situation has started feeling untenable again today. Anti-Semitism, as it turns out, is a flat circle. And yet, despite all the betrayal and heartbreak, I cannot bring myself to renounce France, as if after more than a century of love for this country, the love itself has become part of my genome. Generations removed from the work of the Alliance, its effects continue to exist in me.

I feel as ridiculous admitting that I am not French as I do saying that I am. I know all the transfer points of the Paris Metro. Like my father, I studied French literature at university. My favorite days in New York are those when it rains, because on those days the city reminds me of Paris.

I cannot resolve the idea that the place where I feel that I belong wants nothing to do with me. I struggle to accept the terrible truth, which is that many of my fellow Jews in France are feeling today those early warning tremors of disaster felt by French Jews in the early 1900s and the 1930s. I tell myself that in 30 years I’ll be back home, and my kids will be sitting and chatting under the heat lamps at cafes and picking up terrible premature smoking habits, when really I know that in that time there will probably no longer be any Jews left in France at all. But like any good French person, I just shrug one of those inscrutable shrugs and say something like “C’est de la politique.” Politics, right? Suspended in a strange gray space of muddled allegiances, like my grandfather, I realize that though I may feel French and though I want my children to grow up speaking French, the France my family dreamed of no longer exists — and maybe never did.

German newspaper’s Israeli flag test yields ‘frightening results’

Via The Algemeiner:

As Germans continue to probe the connection between antisemitism and hostility to Israel in the wake of recent antisemitic incidents across the country, a leading newspaper on Monday carried out a live experiment to determine how long an Israeli flag could be displayed in major urban thoroughfares before being removed. Israeli flags hung in three locations by reporters from the Bild newspaper were removed within ninety minutes by individuals who happened to be passing by, video revealed.

“The results are frightening,” the newspaper reported. “At the Hermannplatz in Berlin-Neukölln, the Israel flag flew for 42 minutes, for 61 minutes in Munich’s Bahnhofsviertel, and for 81 minutes in the center of Frankfurt.”

Video shot in Munich caught two men walking past an Israeli flag draped over a bicycle railing. Moments later, the men returned and angrily tore the flag down. Meanwhile in Berlin, two youths were filmed at the entrance to a rail station ripping the flag and throwing it to the ground, before one of them tried – and failed – to set it on fire with a cigarette lighter.

German politicians from across the spectrum interviewed by Bild were unanimous in their condemnation of the flag removals.

“The tearing down of the Israeli flag is something we will not tolerate in Germany,” Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told the paper. “We will clearly stand against any form of antisemitism.” His colleague Horst Seehofer, the Interior Minister, pledged to show “zero tolerance” for antisemitic displays.

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