Germany: Frankfurt Mayor urges cancellation of BDS 'Don't buy from Jews' event

Via The Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal):

Frankfurt Mayor Uwe Becker hammered a pro-Palestinian group on Monday and Wednesday for promoting a Nazi-style boycott against Israel and told a local center to cancel a June event with the organization.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state that the group – German Coordinating Circle Palestine/Israel, or Kopi – supports, pursues “deeply antisemitic propaganda,” Becker told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily. He added that BDS uses “the same language as the National Socialists... ‘Don’t Buy from Jews.’”

Becker announced on Wednesday that he plans to stage a protest against the Kopi event in front of its location in June, according to a report in the Rundschau. 

The anti-Israel event, titled “50 Years of Israeli Occupation,” is slated to take place at the Ka Eins Conference Center in Frankfurt on June 9 and 10. 

Becker is a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union Party. 

Co-organizer of the protest demonstration, Sacha Stawski told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday: “Frankfurt is a multicultural city with a strong connection to Israel. There is no place for one-sided Israel-hatred. An event which criticizes the core of Israel’s existence, which calls for a boycott of the Jewish state, which demonizes and delegitimizes Israel and which applies a double standard on the Jewish state – which it does not apply to any other state – has nothing to do with legitimate criticism and should not take place here.” 

Stawski, who is editor-in-chief of the Frankfurt-based media watchdog organization Honestly Concerned, added, “We are grateful to Mayor Uwe Becker for his outspoken criticism and we are still hopeful to be able to prevent this antisemitic hate-fest from taking place.” 

He called the participants “an assembly of Israel-haters and antisemites, who regularly propagate for the demise of the Jewish state, who speak of an ‘ethical cleansing’ of the Palestinian population and who compare Jews to Nazis.”

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