Germany: Hamburg University employs antisemitic South African Islamic theologian

Via Jerusalem Post (h/t Honestly Concerned):

Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ya’acov Hadas-Handelsman urged the University of Hamburg to dismiss South African Islamic theologian Farid Esack, who has been accused of antisemitism, promoting BDS and fund-raising for the PFLP terrorist group.

The Die Welt newspaper reported on Tuesday that Hadas-Handelsman met with Green Party Hamburg Sen. Katharina Fegebank, who is responsible for the publicly-funded University of Hamburg, and expressed his concerns.

A petition was launched by the group Christian Friends of Israel in North Germany calling on the Hamburg government to rescind Esack’s teaching assignment, the paper said, and the Christian Democratic Union Party in Hamburg is seeking to designate the BDS movement targeting Israel antisemitic.

Esack, who is chairman of the South African BDS movement, welcomed his “comrade” plane hijacker Leila Khaled, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, at a fund-raiser in 2015. The EU and the US have classified the PFLP as a terrorist organization.

“This is a man [Farid Esack] who expressed antisemitic statements, and who is sympathetic to Holocaust denial. A person with such views has no place as an educator in a university, in particular not in Germany; due to both professional as well as moral and probably also legal reasons,” Israel’s embassy in Berlin told The Jerusalem Post last week.

Carsten Ovens, scientific spokesman of the Christian Democratic Union party in Hamburg, told Die Welt: “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 on not to buy from Jews.”

Multiple Post press queries to university president Dieter Lenzen were not returned, and questions to the Green Party’s Fegebank on Tuesday went unanswered.

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