The New Antisemite

Friday, August 24, 2018

France: Jewish scholar Alain Finkielkraut is worried for France’s future

If Jews in France have long had a charged — at times painful — relationship with their country dating back centuries, they now face a new, particularly pernicious reality, says prominent French Jewish intellectual and writer Alain Finkielkraut.

“I’m extremely worried — as much for French Jews as I’m worried for the future of France,” says Finkielkraut, during a recent interview with The Times of Israel in his Paris apartment. “The anti-Semitism we’re now experiencing in France is the worst I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and I’m convinced it’s going to get worse.”

Sitting at a long table in his living room, whose walls are lined with tall shelves laden with books, Finkielkraut, 69, comes across as a serious, deep-thinking man. (…)

His commentary is often trenchant, especially concerning the plight of his 500,000 Jewish compatriots. Among the worrisome developments that preoccupy him is what some call “internal migration.”

“Due to the increased hostility Jews are facing, especially in certain suburbs of Paris, many feel the need to leave where they’ve lived for a long time,” says Finkielkraut, referring to a growing unease caused by virulent anti-Semitism in predominantly immigrant areas.

“In recent years, tens of thousands of Jews have moved, some to Israel, most to neighborhoods where they feel more secure. Such a situation would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. It’s without precedent in France and, what’s really terrible, it’s going to continue,” he says.

For Finkielkraut, the origin of this malaise is clear.

“It’s a terrible phenomenon linked to immigration,” he says. “And as immigration is increasing, so is the rise in this anti-Semitism. Not only does a big part of the left refuse to recognize this, but they explain to us that the immigrants are the new Jews and that it’s important to know how to welcome them as the country should have done for Jews during World War II.

“What’s crazy is the situation is going to get worse with the complicity of people who claim to have learned the lessons from the Holocaust. We are at an absolutely diabolical juncture,” Finkielkraut says.

Germany: Jewish leader slams “Antisemitic stereotypes” in school textbooks

Via Legal Insurrection:

The head of Germany’s leading Jewish organisation criticized the use of “antisemitic stereotypes” in the school textbooks.

Josef Schuster, president of The Central Council of Jews in Germany, slammed the Germany’s schools and textbook publishers for doing too little to root out the problem. Many textbook illustrations in German textbooks resemble the anti-Semitic depictions from the Nazi-era newspaper “Der Stürmer,” while at the same time failing to provide the appropriate historical context to the imagery, Schuster said.

Criticism aired by Schuster is based on a detailed study published by Germany’s Georg Eckert Institute. The study evaluated history textbooks being used in schools across the country. German weekly Der Spiegel reported the details:

“There are too many illustrations [in the textbooks] which have been shaped by antisemitic stereotypes and thus reminiscent of Der Stürmer, [and] don’t offer an objective representation,” Schuster said. Der Stürmer was an antisemitic Nazi propaganda newspaper.

“We have too many textbook that treat Judaism in a very rudimentary way,” criticized Schuster. “Judaism was not restricted to the period between 1933 an 1945. “There was Jewish life in Germany many centuries before that and fortunately we have it today. One, however, don’t see that in the textbooks.”

The content regarding the case in point deals with the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era and the Holocaust. School textbooks often show antisemitic imagery, confirmed Dirk Sadowski, researcher at the Georg-Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. (…)

Sadowski and his colleagues took three years to examining 84 history books of various grades and from several states and were surprised to find how simplistically the Jewish life has been depicted.

Josef Schuster refers to this study when he complains that “many school textbooks take the perspective of the perpetrators, particularly when it comes to the topics of National Socialism and Shoah.” The antisemitic depictions of the Nazi-propaganda “are hardly put in the context. The antisemitic stereotype are thus reproduced, but not dealt with critique.” [Translated by the author: Vijeta Uniyal]

Poland: Jewish cemetery vandalized for second time in a month

Via Times of Israel:

A Jewish cemetery near Krakow was vandalized for the second time in less than a month, resulting in damage to dozens of headstones.

At least 30 headstones were pushed over, some of them shattered, in the latest incident recorded at the cemetery in Mysłowice, a town located about 40 miles west of Krakow, the Jewish.pl news site reported Tuesday on its Facebook page.

UK: Shocking film shows attendees of far-left 'antisemitism' talk making antisemitic statements

Via Jewish Chronicle:

Attendees of a far-left event on the subject of “Corbyn, antisemitism and justice for Palestine” were filmed making comments such as “the Jewish people do not exist”, and “if you walk around expecting to be treated like Jewish ‘scum’, that’s what’s going to happen to you.”

The event, which was held on Tuesday night at London’s Conway Hall, featured speakers such as Tariq Ali, Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and Richard Kuper of Jewish Voice for Labour.

Ukraine: Jewish activist: Facebook banned me for posting antisemitic graffiti

Via Jerusalem Post:

Eduard Dolinksy, a prominent Ukrainian Jewish activist, was banned from posting on Facebook Monday night for a post about antisemitic graffiti in Odessa.

Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said he was blocked by the social media giant for posting a photo. “I had posted the photo which says in Ukrainian ‘kill the yid’ about a month ago,” he says. “I use my Facebook account for distributing information about antisemitic incidents and hate speech and hate crimes in Ukraine.”

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Now Dolinsky’s account has disabled him from posting for thirty days, which means media, law enforcement and the local community who rely on his social media posts will receive no updates.

(...)

Dolinksy says that he has been targeted in the past by nationalists and anti-semites who oppose his work. Facebook has banned him temporarily in the past also, but never for thirty days. “The last time I was blocked, the media also reported this and I felt some relief.

It was as if they stopped banning me. But now I don’t know – and this has again happened. They are banning the one who is trying to fight antisemitism. They are banning me for the very thing I do.”

Germany: When a Nazi comparison makes sense: the BDS movement against Israel

Via The Hill (Benjamin Weinthal and Asaf Romirowsky):

In a remarkable finding in their May report, intelligence officials of the German state of Baden Württemberg wrote that propaganda from the neo-Nazi party Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way) calling to boycott Israeli products “roughly recalls similar measures against German Jews by the National Socialists, for example, on April 1, 1933 (the slogan: 'Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!')"

The historical significance of the parallel between contemporary calls to boycott Israeli products and the Hitler movement’s economic warfare against German Jewish businesses should not be ignored.

The Nazi efforts to strangle Jewish companies in order to isolate and dehumanize German Jews was a nascent phase of the Holocaust. Hence the boycott campaign against Israel is just another dangerous recurrence of history in a new form.

Fast forward to 2005: According to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement’s declaration targeting the Jewish state, a key demand is the return of all “Palestinian refugees” to Israel. The “return” of the alleged millions of Palestinians refugees—based on a bogus definition of refugee status—would spell dissolution of the Jewish state. Anti-Semitism at its core is about discrimination against Jews.

The proliferation of pro-BDS activities in Germany prompted Felix Klein, the German government commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism, to write in the daily Die Welt in August that “the BDS movement is antisemitic in its methods and goals.” He added that BDS’s “Don’t buy!” stickers on products from the Jewish state are “methods from the Nazi period.”

According to the German intelligence report from May, boycotts of products from the Jewish state are a “new variation of anti-Semitism.” This is the first instance of a domestic intelligence agency labeling boycotts targeting Israeli products as anti-Semitic and a security threat.

The following month, in June, an intelligence report from the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate arrived at the same conclusion. “The Third Way’s slogan ‘Boycott Products from Israel’ and … betray significant parallels to the anti-Jewish agitation of the National Socialists,” the agency wrote.

The intelligence agency copied a graphic from The Third Way’s website featuring the slogan, “Boycott products from Israel: 729=Made in Israel.” The number 729 is used in barcodes to identify Israel-based companies, although not necessarily where a product was manufactured.

It is worth noting that the party platform of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union declared in 2016, “Who today under the flag of the BDS movement calls to boycott Israeli goods and services speaks the same language in which people were called to not buy from Jews. That is nothing other than coarse anti-Semitism.”

Germany: Merkel bows to Trump demand on Nazi guard

Via Politico:

The U.S. deported a New York man who served as a guard at a Nazi labor camp to Germany late Monday, resolving a more than decade-long dispute between Washington and Berlin over who should take responsibility for the suspected war criminal.

U.S. immigration authorities flew Jakiw Palij, who turned 95 last week, on a government jet from a New Jersey airport to Düsseldorf, where he arrived early Tuesday before being transferred by ambulance to a care facility near Münster.

Though the case received little attention in Germany over the years, it was often front page news in New York, where protestors regularly gathered in front of Palij’s home demanding he be deported. President Donald Trump, who grew up in the New York borough of Queens, where Palij has lived for nearly seven decades, instructed Richard Grenell, his ambassador to Germany, to make resolving the case a priority.

“I felt very strongly that the German government had a moral obligation and they accepted that,” Grenell said at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on Tuesday.

In recent years the U.S. failed to deport another eight suspected Nazi collaborators before they died because Germany refused to accept them, insisting it had no legal basis to do so.

UK: Corbyn’s secretary urged voters to avoid candidates who appeared in Jewish newspapers

A BBC documentary on antisemitism in France (2016) revealed that "Many French Jews are coming to London, and one synagogue has been transformed recently by French arrivals, with their congregation in a few years becoming 90 percent French."

Via JTA:

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s longtime secretary urged supporters to oppose candidates who appeared in the Jewish media, The Sun reported.

In a pamphlet published by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign in 2010, Nicolette Petersen recommended that Labour supporters “read the Jewish Chronicle online and look at websites that will show you who not to vote for,” asserting that it was better to divert support from Labour than to support anyone considering himself a “friend of Israel,” according to The Sun on Monday.

“This isn’t about helping Palestinians. It’s about attacking Jews,” Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard said. “The recommendation that activists who want to rid Parliament of Zionists use the Jewish Chronicle for a hit list of targets exposes the truth: that they use the word Zionist as a euphemism for Jew.”

Germany: Top German social democrat urges bank to end Israel boycott support

Via The Jersusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

Michaela Engelmeier, a member of the executive board of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, demanded that the Bank for Social Economy stop providing accounts to groups that support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign against the Jewish state.

“My opinion is that no one, no institution, no societal group, really no one should work together with BDS or hold accounts for these antisemitic groups,” Engelmeier wrote The Jerusalem Post on Thursday in connection with a query about the Bank for Social Economy’s enabling of BDS.

The Cologne-based Bank for Social Economy is engulfed in an ever-widening anti-Israel scandal because of its defense of BDS groups which use accounts with the bank to launch economic warfare against the Jewish state.

Engelmeier’s call for the bank to stop its BDS business is the first instance of a federal-level politician in Germany weighing in on the bank.

The increase of pro-BDS activities in Germany prompted Felix Klein, the German government commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism, to write in Die Welt last week that Frankfurt sent an important signal that it will not conduct business with banks that engage in BDS activities.

Klein wrote that “the BDS movement is antisemitic in its methods and goals.” He added that BDS’s “Don’t buy!” stickers on products from the Jewish state are “methods from the Nazi period.”

Europe: EU stops funding anti-Israel NGO, Netanyahu’s office says

Via EJP:

The European Union announced that it will immediately stop funding and contact with the "Freedom Protection Council", an NGO operating in Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said.

In a statement, the office said that the EU decision to stop funding the "Freedom Protection Council", is a result of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s "diplomatic efforts."

The NGO "undermines the State of Israel’s right to exist and seeks to defame it around the world," the statement said.

"This is only the beginning. We will continue to take determined action against organizations that seek to delegitimize the State of Israel and strive to defame the state and the IDF around the world," Netanyahu said.

When he meets European officials, Netanyahu prioritizes the cessation of funding for anti-Israel NGOs. Last Sunday, he reportedly rebuked visiting Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide for her country’s financial support of anti-Israel groups.

Monday, August 6, 2018

UK: Corbyn's antisemitism isn't a scandal, it's a strategy

Via The Weekly Standard (Tamara Berens):

[…] an old video recently resurfaced of Jeremy Corbyn linking a terror attack in Egypt to “the hand of Israel.” The 2012 interview on Iranian-owned Press TV saw him pedal anti-Israel conspiracy theories in a discussion of a bombing where 16 Egyptian policemen were killed in the Sinai desert. His comments from 2012 were defended last week by a Labour party spokesperson, who asserted that his “speculation” had been factually based on previous Israeli actions in Egypt.

Many focus on the question of whether Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite himself. He may or may not be. However, his deliberate actions to reject the Jewish community’s concerns, silence his moderate Labour detractors, and pedal anti-Zionism as central to his political image show that he is more than happy to utilize antisemitism for political purposes.

Anti-Zionism—and by extension, giving credence to antisemites—is fundamental to the worldview Corbyn has cultivated on his journey to political stardom. For most of his political career, Corbyn was a fringe socialist politician and supporter of the USSR, Syria’s Assad, the Iranian Ayatollahs and Maduro’s Venezuela. After becoming Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn toned down some of this support for radical anti-Western groups. Nonetheless, he has consistently maintained his support for anti-Zionist causes. What’s undoubtable is that throughout his career, his ultimate goal has remained the same; rejecting Western values and embracing the alliance between radical socialists and Islamists in a strategic bid to normalize and implement socialism in the UK.

Politically, Corbyn’s strategy is working: According to a recent YouGov poll, 61 percent of the party believes Corbyn is handling accusations of antisemitism well. And 80 percent of the party deems him a good leader overall. The events of the past few weeks indicate that the Labour leadership has been able to build on their apparent success to formally distance themselves from the overwhelmingly Zionist British-Jewish community. This perhaps became most apparent last Friday, when Jeremy Corbyn published another article in The Guardian disregarding his part in normalizing antisemitism in the party. The piece came out at 5pm, when the majority of Jews in the country were busy preparing for the Sabbath.

The reality is that support from the Jewish community is no longer an indispensable part of the Labour party. In fact, Corbyn’s foreign policy—a large aspect of his political differences to Blair’s Labour—rests on weakening UK-Israel relations. Corbyn has constructed a successful strategy for claiming the Labour party as his own socialist vehicle for disruption of the Western liberal order. Labeling recent events a “scandal” greatly underestimates the strategic nature of his leadership.

Holland: Extreme antisemitic tweet from municipal council member

Via Bad News from the Netherlands blog:

A member of the municipal council in the town of Heerenveen on behalf of the Frisian National Party [the FNP is a left-wing nationalist party] tweeted that Jews murder entire groups of populations.

read more @ De Dagelijkse Standaard (in Dutch)

Romania: Elie Wiesel’s childhood home vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti

Via JTA:

Unidentified individuals spray painted offensive graffiti on the external walls of a museum for Elie Wiesel in Romania, where he was also born, in what police said was an anti-Semitic incident.

The florescent pink graffiti that was painted on the Memorial House Elie Wiesel in Sighet in eastern Romania read “public toilet” and “Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler” as well as “Anti-Semite pedophile.”

Wiesel was one of the world’s most famous Holocaust survivors before he passed away in 2016 at the age of 87. A Nobel prize laureate for literature, he was honored last year by locals in his hometown. They marched from the museum, which was built where Wiesel was born and grew up, to the train station where in 1944 he boarded with his family a train to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.

Norway demands Israel explain seizure of Gaza-bound boat

Obviously, not a single Norwegian/European flotilla on its way to Yemen, to the Congo…

Via Ynet:

Norway has asked Israel to explain the legal grounds for detaining a Norwegian-flagged fishing boat seized while activists tried to sail with aid to the Gaza Strip, Norway's foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

The ministry said its diplomats in Israel had been providing consular assistance to five Norwegians who were among the 22 passengers and crew detained onboard the vessel Kaarstein on Sunday. Two Israelis on board were quickly released.

"We have asked the Israeli authorities to clarify the circumstances around the seizure of the vessel and the legal basis for the intervention," the spokesman for the Norwegian foreign affairs ministry in Oslo said. A spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry declined to comment.

Torstein Dahle, head of the group Ship to Gaza Norway which organized the shipment, said it was the first Norwegian aid vessel to attempt to breach the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Belgian funded PA school still named after terrorist mass murderer

Via Palestinian Media Watch:

PA ignores Belgian demands to change name, yet Belgian funding of the PA continues unabated By Maurice Hirsch, Adv. and Itamar Marcus

on The Palestinian school built with Belgian funding is still named after terrorist mass murderer, Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 bus hijacking and murder of 37 Israelis including 12 children.

On Sept. 27, 2017, Palestinian Media Watch released a report documenting 31 Palestinian Authority schools named after terrorists, one of which PMW is certain was built by the Belgium government.

Text on plaque: "Through a fund from the Government of the Kingdom of Belgium and through the Belgian Development Agency BTC, constructed and furnished, Beit Awaa Basic Girls School"[Facebook page of Dalal Mughrabi Elementary School, (accessed Sept. 18, 2017)

Shortly after PMW's original report was published, Belgian authorities condemned the naming of the school built with its funding after the terrorist and announced it "will not allow itself to be associated with the names of terrorists in any way." [The Algemeiner, Oct. 7, 2017]

PMW has now discovered that the PA has defied Belgium, and the school continues to be named Martyr Dalal Mughrabi Elementary School. PMW has confirmed this after the official PA daily published a story announcing the "launch of activities of the outstanding athletic clubs," hosted by none other than the Dalal Mughrabi School in Southern Hebron.

PMW examined the pictures from the event and noted that the same plaque thanking Belgium for funding the school named after the terrorist mass murderer can be seen in the pictures from the recent event.

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