Belgium: Pro-Palestinian activists place 9,000 shoes on Brussels square

Interestingly, as CNN pointed out in 2013: The Roma, a thousand years of discrimination continues in Europe. The European Parliament lamented in 2015 that Roma remain Europe's 'most discriminated and vulnerable ethnic group'. But European, who are so interested in the Palestinians, show little or no compassion for the Roma...

Via JTA:

Pro-Palestinian activists placed 4,500 pairs of shoes outside the meeting place in Brussels of European Union foreign ministers to protest Palestinian deaths since 2008.

The protest action, organized by the Avaaz group, covered Jean Rey Square with shoes, donated by citizens across Europe over the last week ahead of the Council of the European Union meeting in Brussels Monday. The organizers placed a banner reading “Palestinian lives matter” along the middle section of a Palestinian flag.

Some 4,500 people, including many dozens of Israelis, died in hostilities between Israel and Palestinians since 2008. The Avaaz group said its initiative was a “growing call for EU governments to protect Palestinian lives by reining in Israel’s government violence.”

Critics of the initiative, including Nicole Seekles, a supporter of Israel from the Netherlands, wrote on Facebook that the display was inappropriately evocative of the heaps of shoes on display at the Nazi former death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

Others noted that the protest included no mention of the nearly 4,000 Palestinians who have died in the Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011, mostly at the hands of the forces of Bashar Assad in the government’s war on Sunni Muslims.

France: Macron says 2003 slaying of Jew was anti-Semitic

Via Artuz 7:

French President Emmanuel Macron said that anti-Semitism was the reason for the deadly stabbing in 2003 of a young Jew whose killer was found unfit to stand trial.

Macron said this in a letter dated May 20 to Meyer Habib, a French-Jewish lawmaker who last month wrote the president to request belated recognition for Sébastien Selam, a 23-year-old DJ who was killed by his Muslim neighbor, as a victim of anti-Semitic violence.

“Recalled because of the heinous killing of Mirelle Knoll, the memory of this young Frenchman who fell a victim to the darkest of fanaticism lives on,” Macron wrote. Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, was stabbed to death in her Paris apartment on March 23. Prosecutors said a neighbor and an accomplice killed her, partly because she was Jewish.

The memory of Selam, Macron wrote, is part of “our national community, which is profoundly affected by anti-Semitic crimes like the one perpetrated against Sébastien Selam,” Macron wrote. It was the first time that a French official recognized the slaying as anti-Semitic. However, this recognition is symbolic and will not be reflected in the judiciary’s records on the case.

A French court in 2010 ruled that Selam’s killer, Adel Amastaibou, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was unable to control his actions. He was released from a psychiatric institution earlier this year, in what Habib described in his letter to Macron as an “affront” to Selam’s relatives. Meyer wrote this on Facebook on Sunday.

read more

Greece: Thessaloniki mayor injured after far-right attack

Tsakalidis was called "slave of the Jews"

Via al-Jazeera (h/t glykosymoritis)

The mayor of Greece's second-largest city was admitted to hospital with injuries after he was set upon by a group of ultra-nationalist demonstrators.

The attack took place in the northern coastal city of Thessaloniki on Saturday during a commemoration marking the killing of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire during the tail end of the World War I.

(...)

Kostas Tsakalidis, a Thessaloniki-based photographer, witnessed the attack while covering the flag-lowering ceremony during Saturday's commemoration.

"A group of people started to shout at him for his opinion on the Macedonian dispute, the LBGTQI community, Turkey, and [nationalist] football clubs," he told Al Jazeera, adding that he had seen many of the assailants at "extreme right protests" in recent months.

"Some people were shouting about Jews because he has had [a] close relationship with the Jewish community over the years."

Tsakalidis explained that Boutaris fell to the ground after being hit, while attackers threw bottles "and other objects" at him. One assailant proceeded to kick the mayor as he lay on the pavement.

Although a group of police officers were located nearby, Tsakalidis said "none of them intervened" to stop the attack. 

read more

Hungary: The safest country for European Jews? Try Hungary

Via PJ Media (David P. Goldman):

Last Friday evening I put on a kippah and walked half an hour across Budapest to the Keren Or synagogue maintained by the Budapest Chabad. After violent attacks on Jews in German streets, the leaders of Germany’s Jewish community warned Jews last month not to wear a kippah or any other visible sign of Jewish identification in public. The French community issued such warnings years ago. Belgian TV could not find a single Jew in Brussels willing to wear a kippah in public. I walked across Budapest four times (for Friday evening and Saturday daytime services), and no-one looked at my kippah twice. At services I met Hasidim who had walked to synagogue with kaftan and shtreimel, the traditional round fur hat. Whatever residual anti-Semitism remains among Hungarians, it doesn’t interfere with the open embrace of Jewish life. There are no risks to Jews because there are very few Muslim migrants.

On any given Friday evening, the Keren Or synagogue—one of several Chabad houses in Budapest—hosts two hundred people for dinner. Jewish life isn’t just flourishing in Budapest. It’s roaring with ruach, and livened by a growing Israeli presence. About 100,000 Israelis have dual Hungarian citizenship; many own property in the country and vote in Hungarian elections.

Prime Minister Orban has been a close friend of Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu for twenty years. When Orban first was elected prime minister in 1998 in the thick of an economic crisis, he asked then-Finance Minister Netanyahu for help, and Netanyahu lent him some of his staff to shape Hungary’s economic program. I asked everyone at Keren Or who spoke English what they thought of Orban. In that gathering the prime minister would have polled 100%.

Orban, in turn, is one of Israel’s few staunch supporters overseas. Earlier this month Hungary, along with Rumania and the Czech Republic, vetoed a European Community resolution condemning the U.S. for moving its embassy to Jerusalem. Cynics dismiss this as an instance of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That isn't the case. Hungary is in the middle of a nasty fight with the European Community over migration, and stands to lose up to $4 billion in EC subsidies—roughly 3% of the country’s GDP. It doesn’t help Hungary to provoke Brussels by sabotaging its diplomatic efforts, as in the case of the Jerusalem embassy vote. On the contrary, Hungary is spending precious political capital in defense of the Jewish state, to its own possible disadvantage.

read more

UK: Jewish student center serving the University of Oxford was subject to two attacks this month

Via The Algemeiner:

A Jewish student center serving the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom was subject to two attacks this month, drawing condemnation from community leaders.

On May 19, the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, two unidentified offenders placed “antisemitic” notes and sparked a fire at the Chabad of Oxford, Thames Valley Police said.

“Thankfully the fire burned out within a couple of minutes, it didn’t cause significant damage and no-one was injured,” said Detective Sergeant George Atkinson of the incident, which was classified as a hate crime.

Four days later, a white powder and offensive notes — one reading “Jew House” — were found at the center. The substance was later identified as talcum powder.

read more

France: Posters show French president wearing Nazi uniform and Israeli flag

Via JTA:

Left-wing protesters against French President Emmanuel Macron paraded in Paris with a poster of him wearing a Nazi uniform and an Israeli flag — prompting legal action by a watchdog on anti-Semitism.

In the poster carried Friday by protesters against the centrist leader’s economic reform, he was wearing a black uniform emblazoned with his initials and two dollars signs instead of the SS symbol of the elite Nazi unit known by that acronym. The flag featured on the figure’s right-hand upper arm.

The National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, complained to police that the poster was incitement to hatred and violence.

“We consider this an unacceptable outrage against the head of state, the republic and all the victims of the Holocaust as well as to the State of Israel,” BNVCA wrote in a statement Monday about the complaint. The protest was organized by the French General Confederation of Labour trade union

and the far-left party of Jean-Luc Melenchon, a communist politician who has been accused of inciting hatred toward Jews.

CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, said it considers both Melenchon’s Insuppressible France party and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front “movement based on hatred” and has refused to meet with officials of either party.

read more

Belgium: Brussels chief rabbi declines to wear kippa publicly, citing security concerns

Via The Times of Israel:

Amid reports of widespread fear among Belgian Jews of being attacked by anti-Semites, the chief rabbi of Brussels and other Jews declined over security concerns a public broadcaster’s request to film them walking on the street while wearing a kippa. The RTBF broadcaster reported Thursday it wanted to film Chief Rabbi Albert Guigui, among other rabbis, wearing a kippa for a program about anti-Semitism.

But Guigui declined, telling the channel he has stopped visibly wearing a kippa in 2001 following an anti-Semitic assault on his person. In December of that year, Guigui was attacked by a group of Arabic speaking youths.

read more

Read also:
Brussels and Barcelona chief rabbis say there is no future for Jews in Europe

Germany: Distorted antisemitism statistics

Via The Algemeiner (Manfred Gerstenfeld):

The German Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer recently presented the country’s criminal statistics for 2017. These included 1,500 criminal antisemitic acts — about four per day. The minister claimed that 95% of these were motivated by right-wing attitudes. Another source reported that there were 947 antisemitic incidents in Berlin in 2017, an increase of 60% from the year before.

But if right-wing perpetrators of antisemitic acts were so dominant, why did several leading politicians come out in the last few months against Muslim antisemitism? The major public exposure of Muslim hate crimes against Jews in Germany started after the burning of a homemade Israeli flag in Berlin in December 2017. The video of this event went viral around the world.

For many years, Muslim antisemitism has been intentionally ignored and sometimes whitewashed in Germany. Severe criminal cases coming out of parts of this community were treated as “incidents” instead of as a structural problem.

Since last December this has suddenly changed. The Christian Democrat Jens Spahn — the current Minister of Health and former Deputy Minister of Finance — put it clearly. He said that antisemitism in some Muslim countries was omnipresent. He mentioned ongoing incitement in families and mosques. He furthermore stressed that Muslim immigration had brought additional antisemitism to Germany. Spahn called on German Muslim organizations to do their duty and condemn the antisemitic crimes committed by Muslims.

By April, even Chancellor Angela Merkel felt she could no longer remain silent. After yet another antisemitic attack in Berlin, she said that the authorities should act with extreme force against antisemitism — both by Germans and Arabs.

read more

France: 53% believe Zionism = Jewish Conspiracy

Via Europe 1/JDD (in French):

A poll commissioned by the UEJF (Union of French Jewish Students) on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the creation of Israel has revealed that 53% of the French believe that Zionism is the product of a Jewish conspiracy.

For them "Zionism is an international organization that aims to influence the world and society in favour of the Jews". 50% believe that Zionism is a racist ideology. And an amazing 69% that Zionism is an ideology used to justify Israel’s policy of occupation and colonization of Palestinian territories

 

Holland: Antisemitic cabaret program on Dutch socialist television channel

Via Bad News from the Netherlands blog:

A cabaret program on the Dutch Socialist VARA television by Sanne Wallis de Vries has used Israel's Eurovision winning song as a parody.  

Her text contains antisemitic motifs such as jokes about Jews and money.  

It also accuses Israel of using Buk rockets which Israel does not have. These rockets were used to bring down a plane of mainly Dutch passengers in the Ukraine. They all died.

read more in Dutch here

Europe: Treatment of Jews is a “seismograph” for society says EU coordinator on combatting anti-Semitism

Via Politico:

Katharina von Schnurbein is firmly in the political spotlight. As the European Commission’s coordinator on combatting anti-Semitism, von Schnurbein finds herself in the middle of questionable, difficult and downright nasty behavior.

Multiple reports show that anti-Semitism is rising across Europe, and at times the rhetoric comes from leading politicians.

For every show of inclusion from Europeans — such as last week’s victory by Netta, Israel’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest — discussion about anti-Semitism becomes complicated by political controversy, such as Israeli Defense Forces killing more than 50 people in Gaza during protests against the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.

Von Schnurbein feels the debate should look at not just extreme behavior but all of society. “To some extent the floodgates are open and anti-Semitism is expressed more openly [today]. Conspiracy theories are found in the middle of society. Teachers who have lost a compass as to what is anti-Semitism and therefore do not react properly in school when Jewish students are being harassed. Judges who think that throwing Molotov cocktails into a synagogue is a legitimate expression of a political opinion.”

Citing growing harassment of staff at the Auschwitz concentration camp museum, von Schnurbein said “it is not for nothing that in most EU countries it is necessary to have security in front of Jewish institutions”

What can people do in their everyday lives to combat anti-Semitism? “Fighting anti-Semitism in the end is a question of civic courage. It’s not easy to fight it in your own environment but this is where it starts. In your own party, with your own parents, your own sports club, to react when you hear something at a dinner party. It’s that kind of civic courage that we need and that will in the end change the situation.”

Von Schnurbein said treatment of Jews is a “seismograph” for society, citing the number of terror attacks against Jewish targets in Europe that included attacks in Paris, Brussels and Nice. Rising anti-Semitism “is a sign that something’s going wrong in society and therefore it needs to be tackled also by society at large.”

There is also “imported anti-Semitism,” often from migrants from Muslim-majority countries. Von Schnurbein said it’s important not to stigmatize a whole community but to recognize there is a problem. Criticism of Israeli policies is not anti-Semitic, she said, but questioning the right of Israel to exist and the right of Jewish people to self-determination is.

The ultimate aim of her work: “Normality for Jews in Europe” so they do not have to second-guess their movements and life choices in order to enjoy their basic freedoms and rights.

UK: Muslim group denounces anti-Semitism in full page newspaper ad

Via JTA:

Muslim leaders took out a full-page ad in a major British newspaper condemning anti-Semitism.

“We understand that many in our country empathize with the Palestinians and their right to a sovereign state,” said the ad Thursday in the Telegraph, a national broadsheet, and signed by a group called Muslims Against Anti-Semitism. “However, we must be ever vigilant against those who cynically use international issues to vilify Jews or promote anti-Semitic tropes.”

The ad was signed by the leaders of groups including Faith Matters, a Muslim anti-extremism group; the Association of British Muslims, and Tell MAMA, a clearinghouse for complaints about anti-Muslim attacks.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews praised the ad on Twitter. “Incredible solidarity – a full-page ad by Muslim sisters & brothers in today’s @Telegraph,” it said. “Thank you. Together we will defeat the twin evils of antisemitism & anti-Muslim hate.”

read more

Belgium: Academic equates Israel with a parasite infestation of Palestine

Via Philosémitisme blog:

Eric David is a professor at the Free University of Brussels (Université Libre de Bruxelles, ULB) - and needless to say a much respected academic, so much so that he received the Peace Prize awarded by the Belgian Auschwitz Foundation... You just couldn't make this up, could you? His long-standing hostility towards Israel is unfailing, a sentiment shared by others at the university. He wrote a long piece about Israel on a blog run by Pierre Piccinin da Prata, a Belgian teacher, who once complained about the Zionist mafia ("Once again I was cowardly attacked by the Zionist mafia, but I'm not afraid. One day fear will change sides and they will be brought to account").

This is what Eric David wrote (Google translation):

"The history of Palestine resembles the parasitic phenomenon in which an individual colonizes an animal or a plant and feeds on it at its expense. In the case of Palestine, the phenomenon begins with World War I and what is named the Sykes-Picot Accords, two diplomats who, on behalf of the UK and France respectively, divided their areas of influence in the Middle East on the remains of the Ottoman Empire which was then the ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The agreement was signed, in reality, on May 16th, 1916, by Paul Cambon, French Ambassador in London, and Sir Edward Gray, Secretary of State.  In this context, the first stage of parasitism in Palestine is the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, in which Lord Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild, acting on behalf of the Political Committee of the Zionist Organization: (...)  

The fifth stage of the parasitic enterprise is the construction by Israel from 2002 of a wall that separates the West Bank from Israel but which, by its route, includes parts of Palestinian territory, prevents Palestinians from circulating in their own country. territory, deprives them of land and impedes their access to fields, health services, schools, water, a situation condemned almost unanimously by the ICJ in its advisory opinion of 9 July 2004 (ICJ, loc cit., § 163).  

The 6th stage of the parasitic enterprise - which is less of a "phase" than a consequence of the pathology of the Israeli parasitosis - lies in the armed operations carried out by Israel against the Gaza Strip, particularly the operations "Cast Lead" in 2008-2009 and "Protective Edge" in 2014, operations in response to rocket fire from Gaza and totally disproportionate as they killed and injured hundreds of Palestinian civilians. (...)  

The Israeli parasite has thus settled in the Palestinian body and it is part of it just as the millions of yeasts, parasites and bacteria that occupy the human body! "

Read the full article (in French) by Eric David @ The Courrier du Maghreb et l'Orient

Belgium: Israel's ambassador turns table on Brussels' Gaza reprimand

Via Ynet News:

After being lashed by Belgium and Luxembourg over Israeli policies and its 'disproportionate' use of force during latest wave of unrest, Ambassador Simona Frenkel refuses ‘to listen with a bowed head', tells top diplomats, 'your one-sided positions don’t contribute to peace.'

Israel's Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg Simona Frenkel chastised representatives of the two countries’ foreign ministries Wednesday after being summoned to be reprimanded herself following Monday's deadly clashes between the IDF and some 40,000 Gazan protestors. “It seems that the Belgian Foreign Ministry belongs to a school of thought according to which when an ambassador is summoned for a conversation or a reprimand, he is supposed to behave like a child who has misbehaved, to listen with a bowed head and not to respond,” Frenkel wrote in a report sent to the Foreign Ministry.

“I responded and fired back against Belgium: Your one-sided positions do not contribute to peace.” Frenkel was first invited to a meeting with Deputy Director-General of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Anick Van Calster, who recently visited Israel.

Van Calster opened by saying that she had been instructed by Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders to invite Frenkel in order to clarify the Belgian position, to voice objections to events that occurred on Monday on the Gaza border and to protest against what was described as a “disproportionate” use of force.

Calster also expressed anger over statements made by Frenkel during an interview with the country’s RTBF radio station, in which she described those killed in Gaza during the wave of unrest as terrorists. “Regarding the independent investigation committee: There has never been an investigation committee that was independent when it comes to our affairs. All of them were political, where there is an automatic majority of people against Israel,” she replied. (...)

“Moreover, Belgium is the last to claim an independent investigation committee since its Prime Minister Charles Michel has determined even before the committee has been established that Israel had to be punished, You have already predetermined the outcome,” Frenkel argued.

She also defended her comments on the radio, drawing Van Calster’s attention to the fact that doubts had already been cast on whether a Gazan baby had in fact been killed by Israeli forces during the protests.

“You raised an outcry because I described them all as terrorists, but this morning we now know that regarding the 8 month old baby who was killed and allegedly hit by the IDF, even the journalists in Gaza are moderating their positions and are saying that she may have already been dying beforehand and was deliberately brought to the fence,” Frenkel noted, before offering what she described as “proof” that the Hamas terror group was responsible for the violent protests. 

read more

Germany: Jewish family refused service at Berlin restaurant

Via Tagesspiegel:

Last Friday a Jewish couple and their handicapped son came to a restaurant in Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt square.  The family wore a kippah, and the son wore a button saying "I love Israel".

Despite being the only guests, the waiters ignored them.  After ten minutes, when more guests came and were served, the family asked and were told they were at the 'wrong table'.  They weren't directed to a 'right' table, but rather told to leave.

When the father responded by saying that the restaurant doesn't cater to Jews, the waiter simply smiled.