The Berlin-based Center for the Research of Antisemitism faced a flurry of criticism this week from Israeli and German experts for employing a researcher who worked for a British organization that promotes the London version of the al-Quds Day rally. The rally calls for the destruction of the Jewish state each year.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Jerusalem office for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Jerusalem Post, “You would imagine something like this would be done in Iran. Set up an institute to study antisemitism and invite antisemites to work there.”
The center, which is part of the Technical University of Berlin, hired Luis Hernandez Aguilar, who was previously listed as a research officer of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a main organizer of the Iranian regime-sponsored al-Quds Day march.
According to a June report in the London-based The Jewish Chronicle, Hezbollah flags were on display at the march in London, where one speaker said Israel should be “wiped from the map.” Shaykh Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour claimed Zionists’ “days are numbered,” wrote the paper. Speakers at the al-Quds march have also spread wild anti-Jewish conspiracy theories over the years.
A Jewish woman whose family has endured months of anti-Semitic intimidation in Belgium said a man pointed a gun at her outside her home.
The woman, identified in the Belgian media only as Nicole, told the SudPresse media group that the incident happened on Oct. 9 outside their home in Marchienne-au-Pont, a suburb of Charleroi, 30 miles south of Brussels, the media group’s report from Friday said.
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Recounting the firearm incident, Nicole told SudPresse: “We stopped at a red light in front of a hair salon near our street. There was a bearded individual there whom I recognised because he verbally assaulted me two weeks ago. He turned to us. He first looked at my husband and then at me, saying: ‘I’m going to put a bullet in your head’.” Then he took out a gun and pointed it in her direction, Nicole said.
Earlier this year, the La Meuse regional daily published an article about the multiple cases of harassment directed at the couple. They had been living for over two years in Marchienne-au-Pont without incident, according to the report.
But this summer, the report said, she and her family have been targeted in a campaign of harassment that has featured written death threats stuffed into their mailbox and the scrawling of anti-Semitic graffiti on their front door.
“We are too afraid to leave our home since this started,” Nicole, a native of Chile, told the newspaper. “Several people discovered we’re Jewish and ever since we’ve been getting death threats.” One letter addressed to Nicole called her a “dirty whore” and other insults.
A new Antisemitism Monitoring Centre set up by the Jewish Labour Movement to record and process complaints relating to Jew-hate within Jeremy Corbyn’s party has received nearly 500 submissions just a week after it was launched.
An email sent by JLM to its 2,000 members suggested there was a urgent need for the service because the Labour Party had allowed complaints of antisemitism to be “dismissed when reported, obfuscated when they entered the national press, and dragged on because that was politically easier”.
The launch of the centre – which is accessible to all Labour members regardless of whether or not they subscribe to JLM – will allow the organisation to build up a clear picture of what is happening across all areas of Mr Corbyn’s party.
The move comes amid fears that Labour’s own compliance unit, which is meant to investigate allegations of inappropriate conduct, is now operating on threadbare staffing levels following several departures in recent months.
The request to hear experiences of antisemitism in Labour is directed at either “victim or third-party observer” according to the email and JLM website. The group is also keen to learn of alleged instances of antisemitism from both Jewish and non-Jewish members of the Labour Party.
French police have arrested four men suspected of assaulting four Jewish youths in an anti-Semitic assault in Nice, apparently triggered by the assailants spotting a Star of David pendant one of the victims was wearing.
The incident in the southern French city occurred in the city center at about 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, according to a report by the France3 television station.
The four suspects and a fifth teenager, who was not immediately apprehended, assaulted the alleged victims, beating them and causing minor injuries. At least one of the perpetrators also stole a golden chain from one of the victims, the municipality said.
A
Jewish rights group has said that a fire affecting a politician's house
in southern Sweden was likely a deliberate "anti-Semitic attack" and
followed threats and harassment of local public figures with a Jewish
background.
Police were called to a fire at a private property in
Lund, owned by a local politician, shortly after 2am on Tuesday
morning. Police later said that several people in the same row of
terraced homes had been evacuated but no one had been injured in the
fire.
The Jewish Community of Malmö chairman Fredrik Sieradzki
told The Local that the property owner had previously received
anti-Semitic threats.
"This person has been threatened and
harassed earlier this year, and been given messages that were clearly
anti-Semitic. We had already been helping her with these threats, and
our suspicion is very strong that it's an anti-Semitic attack. Police
also see this as an arson," Sieradzki said.
The organization
called the fire "an attack on Swedish democracy" and said that it had a
"strong suspicion" that there was an anti-Semitic motive in a statement
released on Wednesday.
Prosecutors in France have launched an investigation for incitement against a senior Muslim cleric from Toulouse who recited anti-Semitic religious passages and predicted Israel’s destruction.
On Tuesday, the Toulouse Prosecutor’s Office opened the probe against Mohamed Tatai, the imam of the newly inaugurated Grand Mosque of Toulouse and the leader of an interfaith dialogue group, the Sud Ouest daily reported.
In a sermon delivered on December 15, 2017, Tatai recited a Muslim text, called a Hadith, stating that on Judgment Day, the Muslims will kill the Jews.
Poland’s prime minister was heard making allegedly anti-Semitic remarks in secret recordings from 2013, before he rose to power.
The recordings of Mateusz Morawiecki complaining to friends about “greedy” and rich “Americans, Jews, Germans, Englishmen, and Swiss” that run hedge funds were published Tuesday by the news site Onet.
Part of a corruption scandal, the remarks appeared in a 3-hour recording of Morawiecki, who was then a senior banker, discussing politics and finance with his friends at a prestigious Warsaw restaurant.
An attack on ‘Schalom’, a kosher restaurant in Chemnitz, took place almost two weeks ago, on August 27th, 2018. The information surfaced only now. The incident was considered serious. Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein said “the most terrible memories from the 1930-s are being awoken.”
On August 27th, Nazis in Chemnitz hunted foreigners in the city center, after a young German man was killed in a stabbing attack. At the same time, about a dozen men dressed in black attacked ‘Schalom’, the German-language ‘Freie Presse Chemnitz’ reported.
At 9:45 p.m., when most guests had already left the restaurant, its owner Uwe Dziuballa heard noises outside, so he left ‘Schalom’ through the main door. He was now confronted with those Nazis, who were holding iron bars and stones and shouted “Jewish pig, get out of Germany!”, in German. Dziuballa was injured on his shoulder, when one of the stones hit him.
A municipally organized street show in Prague celebrating Czech nationhood featured a skit apparently mocking an Orthodox Jew.
In the skit, police characters remove a man dressed like an Orthodox Jew for demanding money from the event’s host, who wears traditional Czech attire.
Sunday’s event was organized by the 3rd District of Prague.
The Jewish character was named Rozenkrants. “I will get this money from you one way or another,” the actor said, before another actor dressed as a police officer escorted him away. Hundreds of onlookers laughed.
Two unidentified men in Berlin hit a Dutch national and then kicked him after asking him if he is Jewish, a German newspaper reported.
The incident happened Saturday morning in the Spandauer Vorstadt area in Berlin, Der Tagesspiegel reported.
The 31-year-old alleged victim, who is not Jewish and living in Berlin, asked the two men why they wanted to know if he was Jewish. They then assaulted him, the report said.
The two alleged perpetrators left the scene of the incident in a taxi.