On the way to Iceland, I was told that many Icelanders were against Israel and that their media had been feeding them lies for years. I was also told that they had recently started a petition to boycott the Eurovision competition in Israel next year.
The sentencing in France of three men for an anti-Semitic rape-robbery in Paris in 2014 has revived concerns within the Jewish community. The men's defense lawyer claimed they were not anti-Semitic but ignorant.
The court gave the three men sentences of eight, 13 and 16 years for the crime they carried out in the Creteil suburb of Paris in 2014.
A 22-year-old who made comments including "for my brothers in Palestine," and suggesting they should "gas" their victims during the attack, before destroying all the Jewish images in the apartment, is still on the run. He was sentenced in absentia.
The 26-year-old and 23-year-old co-accused were in court for the sentencing. They have already been detained for four years.
Defense lawyer Marie Dose told the court in Val-de-Marne, southeast of the French capital on Friday: "They are not anti-Semitic, they are ignorant. They are swimming in gross stupidity."
Prosecutors said there was no doubt the victims had been chosen because the attackers believed them to be Jewish.
...
Prosecuting counsel commented during the hearing: "To say that 'Jews
have money' is a prejudice, but it is not criminal. You have to fight it
by going to schools. But racial prejudice, this human imbecility,
becomes a prejudiced act when it is used to target its victims."
German police arrested 10 people Sunday over an alleged anti-Semitic attack in a Berlin park.
The group, aged between 15 and 25, including three women, were detained following the assault in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Police did not give the names or nationalities of the suspects or the victim, but German daily Welt reported that all involved are Syrians.
Police said the victim had approached the group in a park to borrow a lighter, but his cigarette was snatched away.
The 25-year-old was wearing a chain with a Star of David, which police said was ripped from the victim’s neck by one of the men, while spewing “anti-Semitic insults.”
The attacker allegedly repeatedly punched the victim in the face, before fleeing.
The victim was treated in a hospital after suffering cuts to the head.
Claudia Webbe’s elevation to chair of the Labour party’s disputes panel is causing controversy. No wonder:
But she stood by her decision to write a letter to the Guardian in defence of the former London Mayor in 2006 after he was suspended from the party for four weeks over his encounter with Mr Finegold.
Ms Webbe worked as an adviser to Mr Livingstone in 2000 and 2004 and, in the Guardian letter, said his suspension “smacked in the face of true democracy”.
“His history of work in the anti-racist movement is unquestionable,” she wrote in the letter.
Oliver Finegold is the Jewish journalist Livingstone compared to a “concentration camp guard” in 2005.
What a fine anti-racist, eh. Keep in mind that Livingstone had already earned notoriety in 2004 by inviting Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the hate preacher extraordinaire, to London. Al-Qaradawi duly told BBC Newsnight that he fully supported suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians. Jewish community leaders protested about the visit at the time.
Webbe went on to become an Islington Labour councillor. For a revealing look at her weird Islington world, try a Gaza meeting she chaired at the Finsbury Park Mosque in August 2014.
A tape of the meeting is available on YouTube. Webbe praises and identifies with the crowd, opening the meeting with this line: “This is a true unity meeting. This is about all of us.”
The annual report of the BLEW advisory body for the security of the Dutch Jewish community says that the Dutch Jewish community remains an important target for terrorists. Jews get much attention in jihadi propaganda. The worldwide increase in antisemitism also proves that Jews are threatened. BLEW concludes that it is of great importance to maintain existing security measures. The organization is unhappy with the decision to remove a number of police posts from Jewish institutions.
The outer wall of a Jewish cemetery in Amsterdam was daubed with swastikas last Saturday. Dutch police reported that a suspect has been arrested.
In addition to the swastika, letters were found on the wall. For the time being, it is unknown what these should mean. As soon as the daubing was noticed, the graffiti was removed. Nothing is known yet about the motive of the perpetrator.
The Zeeburg cemetery is the final resting place where some 80 percent of the Amsterdam Jews were buried between 1714 and 1914. Some 100,000 people are believed to be buried, making it the largest Jewish cemetery in the Netherlands.
Israel on Wednesday slammed an Irish bill that would outlaw the sale and import of settlement-produced goods, saying it was “immoral” and encourages terrorism.
“The Embassy of Israel is concerned by bills that further the divisions between Israel and the Palestinians. Legislation, which promotes a boycott of any kind, should be rejected as it does nothing to achieve peace but rather empowers the Hamas terrorists as well as those Palestinians who refuse to come to the negotiating table,” Israel’s mission in Dublin said in a press release. (…)
The government in Dublin — known to be one of the most pro-Palestinian governments in Europe — is opposed to the law, arguing that it is not legally entitled to curtail trade with Israeli companies based in the settlements.
“The Irish Government has always condemned construction of illegal settlement,” Foreign Ministry Simon Coveney tweeted on Tuesday. “But this Bill asks Irish govt to do something it is not legally empowered to do — trade is an EU competence, not an Irish one. FF [Fianna Fáil — The Republican Party] knows this — so this move is both opportunist and irresponsible.”
Shortly following our complaint, the Daily Mail has made a shocking edit to Peter Oborne’s article, adding the words “according to a number of respectable sources” to justify the blatantly antisemitic allegation promoted by Oborne. The Daily Mail’s reaction is almost as sickening as Oborne’s original offense.
Original article:
The official visit of future British monarch, Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, to Israel has, so far, been a very positive event. It’s disappointing then to see British journalist and commentator Peter Oborne using this opportunity to write a nasty anti-Israel piece in the Daily Mail.
It’s disgusting, however to see Oborne spreading blatant antisemitism:
Yes, you read that correctly – Oborne is charging Israeli settlers with poisoning Palestinian wells, which he claims to have personally witnessed.
Jews poisoning the wells is a classic antisemitic canard that dates back to Medieval European times when Jews were accused of being responsible for spreading disease such as the Black Death. This in turn led to massacres of Jewish communities. (…)
One of Britain’s most vocal antisemites was handed a humiliating court defeat in London on Monday.
Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli-born jazz musician and conspiracy theorist who refers to himself as a “former Jew,” was forced to deliver an apology in the High Court to Gideon Falter, the chairman of the UK’s Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA).Atzmon will also have to pay undisclosed costs in legal fees and damages that the CAA described as “substantial.”
The CAA sued Atzmon for libel over an article he published in July 2017 entitled “Antisemitism is a Business Plan.” In the piece, Atzmon falsely claimed that “Falter and the CAA obviously fabricate antisemitic incidents” and that “Falter and the CAA need the Jews to be hated so they can collect more and more British taxpayer money.”
Unable to substantiate these and other charges against the CAA as summarized by High Court Justice Matthew Nicklin, Atzmon capitulated. Falter said afterward in a statement that he was “delighted” to have “been able to set the record straight and expose one such antisemitic liar for what he truly is.”
Vandals threw black paint on the Holocaust Memorial in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, on Wednesday night, bespoiling the bronze sculpture that depicts a menorah with human bodies intertwined into its flames.
Authorities believe that the vandals may have been participants in a rally held earlier outside the Macedonia-Thrace Ministry to protest the name deal signed between Athens and Skopje.
In an extensive interview with the Ukrainian news outlet Insider, Anatoliy Matios, Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor, espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which he implied that Jews want to drown ethnic Slavs in blood.
Referring to Alexander Parvus, a Belarussian-born Marxist theoretician who was active in Germany’s Social Democratic Party in the late 19th century, and who also happened to be Jewish, Matios claimed that Jews can be found financing all great conflicts.
“In each war, there is always a Parvus, who brought Lenin money for a revolution which flooded Slavs with blood for decades. Parvus was also Jewish. In this case, they want to do the same to Ukraine,” Matios told the Insider.
Just days after a Berlin court sentenced a man for an anti-Semitic attack, Berlin’s prestigious John F. Kennedy School acknowledged that a student had been the victim of months of anti-Semitic bullying.
School officials are still unclear of the scope of the bullying, but a newspaper report said students had put swastika stickers on the Jewish ninth-grader’s backpack, made remarks about trains to Auschwitz and blew smoke in his face, saying it should remind him of the fate of his forefathers.
“There wasn’t enough effort in the beginning to rectify the situation,” Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, told Tagesspiegel, a sister publication of Handelsblatt Global. Ms. Berger had been in touch with the school administration for weeks and said the complaints were originally dismissed as juvenile pranks. She first contacted the school by letter on June 12 but has yet to receive a reply.
Two-thirds of Hungarian Jews believe anti-Semitism is a serious problem in their country, according to a new survey, though fewer than half say they have experienced it firsthand.
The survey, which the prominent sociologists András Kovács and Ildikó Barna conducted in 2017 through face-to-face interviews with 1,879 Jewish adults, was published Thursday at a news conference in Budapest. It is a follow-up to a 1999 survey of Hungarian Jews that asked about perceptions on a range of topics.
On anti-Semitism, 48 percent of the respondents said they heard anti-Semitic rhetoric on the street in the year preceding the survey, down from 75% in 1999. The number of respondents who said they had experienced at least three instances of anti-Semitism was 6%, compared to 16% in 1999.
However, asked to quantify the extent of anti-Semitism in Hungary, 55% of the respondents said it was “great” and another 10% said it was “very great.”
“In 2017, the situation was perceived as much worse than it had been perceived in 1999,” the authors of the survey wrote.
Public prosecutors in the French city of Toulouse announced Friday they are opening an investigation into a senior Muslim cleric who recited anti-Semitic religious passages and predicted Israel’s destruction in a sermon.
Mohamed Tatai, the imam of the newly inaugurated Grand Mosque of Toulouse and the leader of an interfaith dialogue group, is to be investigated for “possible incitement to hatred.”
On December 15 Tatai recited a Muslim text, called a Hadith, stating that on Judgment Day, the Muslims will kill the Jews.
The Prophet Muhammad “told us about the final and decisive battle: ‘Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him – except for the Gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews,’” he said.
He added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “afraid that Israel would not live longer than 76 years – as is written in the prophecies.” He then said that an Israeli journalist, whom he did not name, said the 2016 funeral of the late president Shimon Peres was “the funeral of Israel.”
The video of the Arabic-language sermon was posted in December on the YouTube channel of the Grand Mosque of Toulouse. The Middle East Media Research Institute translated the video and posted it on its website.
As part of the French investigation, the translation will be checked for accuracy before prosecutors determine if a crime was committed.
A former staffer at a Muslim political party in the Netherlands sent an email to a newspaper that was attacked this week saying “May you get cancer, you filthy, far-right cancer Jews.”
Hussein Jamakovic, who worked for the Denk Muslim party, which Dutch Jews allege is anti-Semitic, wrote the message to Telegraaf, the country’s largest-circulation daily, as well as three other news organizations.
The message came amid elevated concern in the Netherlands for the safety of journalists following the attack Tuesday on Telegraaf, when a van drove into the newspaper’s entrance in Amsterdam. Police do not have any suspects in custody.
Telegraaf is seen to have a center-right editorial line. The pro-Israel publication features an activist and a hostile attitude toward radical Islam. It also covers organized crime regularly and thoroughly.
Jamakovic’s message was over reports of his alleged expressions of sympathy for the Islamic State terrorist group. He also sent the email to the DDS, WNL and GeenStijl news sites.
