Opposition politicians heavily criticized the conditions in Dortmund that led to neo-Nazi groups spontaneously marching uninhibited through the streets of the city.
The Social Democrats (SPD) on Sunday slammed both the Dortmund police and the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia, which is controlled by Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU).
"What has the state government done to distance itself from the ugly scenes of that evening, to stop them, and to protect our constitution?" the SPD wrote in its letter to state Interior Minister Herbert Reul, according to the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung daily.
The lawmakers were especially flabbergasted because the far-right scene in Dortmund is so well known to police and has been surveilled by authorities for years.
However, on Friday, two different neo-Nazi rallies took place. Footage showed about 100 extremists who paraded through the streets holding flags of the pre-World War I German empire. They used pyrotechnics and shouted slogans like "Whoever loves Germany is an anti-Semite," and "National Socialism now!"
Anti-semitic graffiti reading "Jewish scum live here", that was scrawled on the door of a Paris apartment building has caused shock and anger in the French capital and led to the police launching an investigation.
French police said Thursday they had launched an investigation after anti-semitic graffiti was scrawled on the door of a Paris apartment building.
"Jewish scum live here," read the graffiti, on a building in the 18th arrondissement in the north of the capital. "Notably on the third floor," it added on the other side of the door, above a drawing of a target.
A photo of the graffiti was circulating on Twitter Thursday, and a woman living in the building filed a formal complaint with the police.
Gaston-Armand "Guy" Amaudruz (21 December 1920 – 7 September 2018) was a Swiss neo-fascist political philosopher and Holocaust denier.
Initially a supporter of the Swiss fascist movement of Arthur Fonjallaz, he came to wider attention in 1949 when he published Ubu Justicier au Premier Procès de Nuremberg, one of the first works to question the veracity of the Holocaust. Increasingly active in neo-fascism, he organized conferences in Malmö in 1951 which led to the formation of a pan-European nationalist group known as the European Social Movement and then led the more radical splinter group known as the New European Order later that year. This group sought the creation of a new Rome–Berlin axis to unite Europe against capitalism and communism and in January 1953 set up a European Liaison Office under Amaudruz in Lausanne to co-ordinate the work of affiliated groups. He also came an early member of the Volkspartei der Schweiz but left the party over the issue of South Tyrol (where he was opposed to irredentism). […]
In 2000 Amaudruz was sentenced to a year in a Swiss jail for Holocaust denial and returned to prison in 2003 on similar charges. However, as of 2005 he was continuing to publish a far right journal, Courrier du continent.
Pope Francis loves to reference the Pharisees and hypocrites in his sermons. Whether it is corruption in the priesthood or the European attitude towards refugees, it has become one of his things. Last Sunday, the Pope again used his address at the Angelus to return to this well worn theme. Admittedly, the gospel reading from Mark was all about Jesus’s reaction to the “scribes and Pharisees” who challenge Jesus’s followers for not following the Jewish law. But it was classic Francis: “The hypocrite is a liar, he’s not authentic,” he told his audience. “A man or woman who lives in vanity, in greed, in arrogance and at the same time believes and pretends to be religious and goes as far as condemning others, is a hypocrite.” Many took this to be a reference to the abuse scandals that have rocked the Church in places such as Ireland, from where he has recently returned.
There are multiple examples of Francis using ‘Pharisee’ as a term of abuse. Let one more example stand for many. Last October, at Mass in Casa Santa Marta (St Martha’s guesthouse) where he lives, he said: “Three months ago, in a country, in a city, a mother wanted to baptise her newly born son, but she was married civilly to a divorced man. The priest said, ‘Yes, yes. Baptise the baby. But your husband is divorced, so he cannot be present at the ceremony.’ This is happening today. The Pharisees, or Doctors of the Law, are not people of the past, even today there are many of them.”
Now, I don’t dissent from the general sentiment of these pronouncements. Francis is a good man, wanting to shift the Roman Church in the right direction. And nor do I think Francis is unique in laying so much emphasis on his condemnation of Pharisees and their hypocrisy – Christians have been attacking the Pharisees since the earliest days of the Christian proclamation. Hence ‘Pharisee’ long ago became a code work for religious hypocrisy in general.
But there has always been something basically racist about this association: Pharisees are Jews, and Jews are shifty, untrustworthy, hypocrites. Given the long and violent Christian persecution of Jews, today’s Christians should be far more circumspect in referencing the Pharisees as Francis regularly does.
So who were the Pharisees, and what did they stand for?
The barn burning revelations in the British newspaper Daily Mail in August that Jeremy Corbyn – head of the UK’s Labour Party – laid a wreath at the graves of the Black September terrorists who executed 11 Israeli athletes and a German police officer 46 years ago today (September 5) raise unsettling questions about Germany’s reaction to the events of Munich in 1972.
Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel and her social democratic Foreign Minister Heiko Maas have remained silent about Corbyn’s 2014 visit to Tunisia to commemorate the Black September Palestinian terrorists. Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Jerusalem Post that Germany’s government “should have said something” because Black September murdered German police officer Anton Fliegerbauer.
“It was out-and-out terrorism in the heart of Europe, in Munich,” said Zuroff, of the Munich massacre. “This is something you would assume would get universal condemnation,” he added. […]
The German political scientist Dr. Wolfgang Kraushaar has described the Munich massacre “as a joint work of German Left radicals and Palestinian terrorists.”
Wilfried Böse, a leftist student in Frankfurt in 1969 who helped create the terrorist organization Revolutionary Cells, worked closely with Palestinian terrorists.
“There is serious information that Böse also supported the terrorists of the Black September in the Olympic attacks,” Kraushaar said. Böse was involved in the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 in 1976 that caused Israel to deploy commandos to free the hostages in Entebbe, Uganda.
Böse, who played a role in separating Jewish from non-Jewish passengers, was killed during the rescue operation.
The German left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction leader Ulrike Meinhof cheered the 1972 murders of Israeli athletes as an expression of “anti-imperialism.”
When this reporter in 2002 asked the former head of the East German foreign intelligence section of the Stasi, Markus Wolf, if the Stasi played a role in the Munich Massacre, he declined to answer.
One could argue that Germany’s silence about Corbyn’s praise for the Black September terrorists is part and parcel of a long history of soggy appeasement toward secular and Islamic terrorism from the Middle East. West Germany’s government failed to pursue the Black September terrorists after the attack, helping to trigger Israel’s operation to hunt down the terrorists. […]
Germany allows 950 Hezbollah members to operate within its territory to fund raise and recruit new members, according to German intelligence reports released in 2018.
The Corbyn affair regarding the Black September terrorists is another litmus test on whether the German government’s counter-terrorism strategy takes the business of anti-terrorism seriously. The optics of Germany’s posture toward combating Palestinian, Hezbollah and Iranian terrorism don’t look good within the field of counter-terrorism.
Regional politicians from the far-right Sweden Democrats party were caught making anti-Semitic statements online, including using a picture of Anne Frank to mock Holocaust victims.
Per Olsson, who represents the party on the city council of Oskarshamn, a coastal Swedish city, posted earlier this year a picture of Frank captioned “coolest Jew in the shower room” on the Russian social network VKontakt, the Expressen daily reported Friday.
The Expressen report was part of a project in which journalists for that daily and the Expo magazine looked into the digital footprint of many politicians from various parties ahead of the country’s September 9 general and local elections.
Sweden Democrats is currently in third place according to various polls, with 18.7 percent of the vote. Its share was just under 13 percent in the 2014 elections.
The journalists also found anti-Semitic material on the social media accounts of Raghu Jacobsen, who represents the party on the city council of Stenungsund, located in western Sweden.
“As long as Rothschild controls the economy and with the modern slavery on this planet, there will be anti-Semitism. #Jews #israel,” he wrote in English in February on Twitter.
