The New Antisemite

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Norway: Debate about missionizing Jews

Recently, a debate started up in Dagen, a Christian paper, about missionizing Jews - is it a religious requirement or not?

John Skåland wrote that is it not a requirement to missionize Jews.

This opinion was slammed by Asbjørn Berland. Berland think that 'replacement theology' is misunderstood and cannot be blamed for the persecution of Jews throughout the centuries. After all, millions of Christians believe in it today, and they do not hate or dislike Jews. In fact, they want to missionize Jews because they love them so much. According to Berland, the most loving thing a Christian can do for a Jew, is to convince them to become Christian.

France, Sweden and Slovenia abstain on antisemitic UNESCO proposal

UNESCO's motto is "Building peace in the minds of men and women". Apparently, that does not include Jews.

Today UNESCO passed a resolution which denies the Jewish ties to Judaism's most holiest sites.

The countries which voted against the resolution: US, UK, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Germany

France, Sweden and Slovenia were going to support the measure, but in the end were conviced to abstain.

France and Sweden repeatedly claim they care about Jews. They have now proved once again that they couldn't care less.

Via i24 News:

24 UNESCO member states voted in favor of the resolution, 26 abstained, and only six countries voted against.

The proposal, put forth by the Palestinians, along with Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar and Sudan, condemns Israel on several issues related to Jerusalem and its holy sites.

The draft resolution, a copy of which was obtained by Ha'aretz, acknowledges that the city of Jerusalem is holy to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity but says the Temple Mount holy site is sacred only to Muslims and fails to mention its significance to Jews.

In fact, Ha'aretz writes , an entire section of the proposal dedicated specifically to the Temple Mount complex refers only to the site's Muslim names (Al-Aqsa Mosque and Haram al-Sharif) and fails to mention its Hebrew or English names (Har HaBayit or Temple Mount).

The resolution refers also to the Western Wall plaza by its Muslim name (al-Buraq plaza) and only mentions its Hebrew-Jewish name (Hakotel Hama'aravi) later in quotation marks.

The flashpoint complex is considered Judaism's holiest site, once the site of the first and second Temples, and is the third holiest to the Muslim faith.

Via Jerusalem Post:

A British Labour Party activist has posted an antisemitic meme on his Facebook page in the latest scandal to hit the party, which has been plagued by antisemitic incidents under the leader of Jeremy Corbyn.

The Labour Party member in question, Andy Slack, a councillor from Chesterfield, shared a graphic featuring a hook-nosed IDF soldier with a bloody mouth and reading "Israel was created by the Rothschilds, not God."

The UK political website Guido Fawkes brought Slack's September 30 post to light and it was subsequently deleted from his page.

"And what they are doing to the Palestinian people now is EXACTLY what they intend for the whole world," the post adds.

The post originally appeared on antisemitic website smoloko.com. It warns readers, "Today it is a Palestinian child, soon it will be your child."

Poland: Many ‘stolen’ Warsaw properties belonged to Jews murdered in WWII

Via Radio Poland:

Many properties “stolen” recently in Warsaw once belonged to Jews murdered in World War II, writer and columnist Bronisław Wildstein says in an article for the wPolityce.pl website.

The article refers to Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, who has faced calls for her to resign over a restitution controversy.

The controversy highlights the thorny problem of the restitution of property seized under the October 1945 Bierut Decree, named after former Polish communist leader Bolesław Bierut, which legalised the confiscation of plots of private land in the capital.

Wildstein wrote: “In recent years in Warsaw we can observe a procedure of taking possession of town house buildings of great value by organized groups from the elite of the [post-communist] Third Republic.

“This is happening under the protective umbrella and in cooperation with at least some officials in a City Hall led by the mayor of the capital, a professor of law and deputy head of the [Civic Platform] party which ruled Poland party for eight years, who supports the establishment and is one of its most important figures.

“There’s more. Taking part in the procedure was the mayor’s husband, who took over part of a building that was originally stolen from its Jewish owners [by people who blackmailed Jews who were in hiding, or blackmailed Poles who protected Jews, during the German Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II.] Their lawful heirs have so far recovered nothing.”

Wildstein added: “Many of the properties stolen recently in Warsaw are the former property of Jews who were murdered during the war.”

Gronkiewicz-Waltz, who has brushed off calls for her to resign, last month announced that City Hall was firing three staff over the restitution of a prime plot of land on Chmielna street in central Warsaw.

Gronkiewicz-Waltz said that the decision to transfer the plot was “hastily taken” and that the three officials involved did not consider “all of the circumstances of the case”.

UK: Hundreds of Nazis gather for party at Cambridge

Via Cambridge News:

Hundreds of 'skinhead' Nazis from around Europe gathered to camp for two days and held a rave in a marquee, singing about Jews and performing Nazi salutes in response to the call of “Sieg Heil" from the stage.

Blood and Honour organise a event every one or two months in the UK, but this was a major event at which approximately three quarters of attendees came from Europe.

The event required a permit from East Cambridgeshire District Council and during the application process Cambridgeshire Constabulary were asked whether they had objections. They said they had none and a force spokesman told the News that officers “were aware of a possible right wing element" but that there was no “crime committed".

But campaigners say that from the footage that has emerged of the event, it is “very clear that multiple criminal offences have been committed" and Cambridgeshire Constabulary must immediately investigate.

A spokesman for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “They (Cambridgeshire Constabulary) say they knew that Nazi salutes and antisemitic singing took place, but that no crime was committed.

“It is staggering that in 2016 in Britain a police force is allowing neo-Nazi from a group banned across Europe to enter our country, use it as a haven for fascism, rally against Jews and then claim that no part of that was unlawful. We are lodging a formal complaint and expect the conduct of the police officers concerned to be investigated, and the neo-Nazi perpetrators identifiable from the video footage to be prosecuted for their crimes."

read more

Other news reports said that the police was led to believe this was a charity event, though they were aware there was a possible right wing element involved.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Portugal: New UN boss António Guterres is sympathetic to Palestinians

It is worth noting a few facts about Portugal:

- Portugal was the only Western European country to vote in 1975 in favour of the infamous United Nations Resolution 3379 (revoked in 1991) which equated Zionism – the self-determination of the Jewish people - with racism. It is ironic that such malevolence came after the Holocaust and in the aftermath of the revolution which enabled the Portuguese people to shed four decades of a harsh dictatorial regime. Having regained freedom and dignity, the progressive regime in place riding on the anti-Zionist tide turned against Jews and their democratic State.

- On Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004, Socialist President and hero Mário Soares wrote an embarrassing article extolling the virtues of Arafat. He found Arafat moderate, bright, subtle and pleasant. Soares declared that Arafat had died as “a hero and a martyr”, and accused Israel of practising large-scale terrorism: “His opponents and enemies accuse him of being a terrorist. Israeli leader and former Prime Minister Menahem Begin also stands accused of having been a terrorist during the English [sic] occupation. Let’s not forget that the State of Israel practises terrorism on a large scale.” But the most astonishing revelation was that, as a Latin, he and his team had found in Palestinian Arafat, whom they met in Beirut in 1982, a kindred spirit: “The conversation lasted over three hours. Arafat, almost always gave double meaning replies to our questions so that the Soviet general, who was silent, would not understand. Curiously, this type of conversation unnerved my Nordic comrades. Whereas we, Latins, understood perfectly well the message that Arafat wanted to convey. And it was simple: he wanted to negotiate peace with Israel and was ready to make important concessions.” What seems to have totally escaped Dr. Soares was that Arafat was famous for his double meaning, or rather multi-meaning, talk, which so many like him were only too willing to take at face value.

- Portugal is ruled by a coalition headed by the Socialist party has recently cancelled police force training in Israel over human rights concerns.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Portugal’s former prime minister António Guterres seemed to have won on Wednesday, the Security Council’s backing to become the next UN secretary-general.

Until the end of December 2015, Guterres, who formerly headed the Socialist Party in his country, was the UN high commissioner for refugees.

It is difficult to determine from past statements and actions Guterres’s attitude toward Israel. It is clear that as a UN official who dealt intensively with the issue of refugees, Guterres is sympathetic to Palestinians.

In September 2014, in Cairo, in a speech before the Arab League, Guterres said that “the refugee situations under the UNHCR’s mandate pale in comparison to the desperate situation of the Palestinians.” He went on to say that Palestinian refugees in Syria suffered more than other Syrians because they were “forced to flee for the second time.”

Was he equating Israel’s War of Independence with the Assad regime’s murderous crackdown on opponents? He also said that in times of war between Hamas and Israel, Gazans suffered more than Syria’s refugees because they “could not even flee to seek safety.” Was Guterres exempting Palestinians from their responsibility for allowing Hamas to turn Gaza into an Islamist, terrorist state? It is too early to say. We would like to join Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon in welcoming Guterres’s nomination and hoping the UN under his leadership will “act in the spirit of its founding principles as a fair body able to differentiate between good and evil.”

The selection of a secretary-general presents an opportunity for a reevaluation of the UN’s treatment of Israel.

The incoming secretary-general should take steps to integrate Israel into the UN’s institutions; end the prejudiced approach of the Human Rights Council toward Israel’s purported human rights abuses; and take further steps to normalize relations between the UN and Israel. If Guterres is successful, the UN of the 21st century will more closely resemble the UN that brought the State of Israel into existence nearly 70 years ago.

Sweden: Sweden Democrats MP jokes about Jews being privileged minority

It's a regular antisemitic trope - Jews are a privileged minority protected by special laws.

Via the Local:

Sweden's prime minister Stefan Löfven has slammed the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats as a Nazi party after yet another senior MP was caught making a racist, antisemitic joke.

Sweden's Aftonbladet newspaper on Saturday published a private email sent by Carina Herrstedt, the party’s deputy vice chairman, in which she joked that a local football team should hire a roster of multicultural and sexually diverse players.

“First you get a couple of Jews, because under law it is forbidden to persecute them,” the joke began. “You strengthen the team with a negro, a Chinaman and and an Indian, because they’re more colourful. At the rear, you recruit two gays, to have more force from behind. As the goalie you deploy a 40-year-old nun, because she hasn’t let anything in for 40 years. As reserve goalie, you get a gypsy, because they take absolutely everything!”.

The latest scandal comes just two days after a recording was released of the party’s finance spokesman Oscar Sjöstedt laughing as he told an anecdote about working in an abattoir with Germans who kicked dead sheep, joking that they were “the Jews”.

It also comes after week when another MP, Anna Hagwall, called for a reduction in the influence of the family-owned media group Bonnier AB, whose owners are Jewish, writing in an email to Aftonbladet newspaper that "no family, ethnic group, or company should be allowed to control more than 5 percent of the media."

Germany: Teacher posed as a Jew to push anti-Israel agenda

Some antisemites in the British Labour Party claim to be Jewish. The same is apparently true in Germany as well.

Via Jerusalem Post:

A teacher in the German state of Lower Saxony who advocates a complete boycott of Israel posed as a Jew in order to sign a petition calling for all Palestinian refugees to be returned to the Jewish state.

The petition, titled “Jews for Palestinian Right of Return,” was located online by The Jerusalem Post on Saturday night. The 2013 anti-Israel document also said that “the Zionist regime officially denies the Nakba, the ethical equivalent of Holocaust denial.”

Speaking from Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, told the Post on Monday that the fact that the teacher, Christoph Glanz, posed as a Jew “shows he is fanatically dedicated to promoting his antisemitic agenda.”

Zuroff continued by saying “it is absolutely insidious” that Glanz falsified his identity to advance “hatred of Israel.”

(...)

The phenomenon of anti-Israel Germans who have posed as Jews to bash Israel has precedents.

In 2010, Edith Lutz, a non-Jewish German who tried to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza aboard the catamaran Irene, said she converted to Judaism. German media reports revealed she did not convert to Judaism, but the Irene was dubbed the “Jewish boat” and garnered widespread media attention because of the presence of a small number of Jews onboard.

In 2012, a non-Jewish German poet and anti-Israel activist acknowledged that she fabricated her supposed service in the IDF during the First Lebanon War.

Via Everyday Antisemitism:

RIAS have reported that a Holocaust memorial in Berlin-mitte has been defaced with graffiti referencing Jesus.

The words “Jesus, love, truth” were painted onto the memorial which commemorates the murdered memers of the Adass Jisroel Synagogue in Berlin.

A few days later, the same words were found on the memorial for Putlitz Bridge, which commemorates a deportation of Jews to Poland. Then a week later another memorial, at levetzowstraße, was found defaced with the same words.

UK: 'Visible' Jews frequently harassed

Via Hackney Gazette:

Children as young as eight are being targeted in anti-Semitic hate crimes according to a study released today, which reveals the everyday abuse suffered by Stamford Hill’s Jewish community.

The figures were compiled by the Charedi community’s volunteer neighbourhood watch group Shomrim – which patrols Stamford Hill – in the month leading up to this week’s National Hate Crime Awareness Week. All of the 38 victims who live in Stamford Hill area were “visibly Jewish”, according to Shomrim, and some even received death threats.

One eight-year-old boy is reported to have fled home crying after being assaulted near his home in Haringey by a man who called him a “stupid Jew”.

Another victim, a 55-year-old woman, was allegedly asked “if she covered her hair on her head because Hitler had shaved it off”, before the perpetrator made a Nazi salute.

She was in Stamford Hill and had been in the middle of saying a prayer called “Tashlich”, which is spoken near a stream of water to mark the Jewish New Year.

Another 11-year-old boy was surrounded in Clapton and told that if he didn’t remove his skull cap he would be beaten up if he didn’t comply – reported two weeks ago by the Gazette.

In a further incident, three “terrified” women were allegedly chased in Stamford Hill by perpetrators shouting: “The Jewish people are rich. Horrible Jewish people, give us your money.”

Official Met figures show on average 10 anti-Semitic hate crimes a month are reported to Hackney and Haringey police – much lower than the figures recorded by Shomrim.

Shomrim president Rabbi Herschel Gluck OBE said the “shocking” figures were “just the tip of the iceberg”, and urged the Home Office to work with Shomrim to improve the reporting of hate crime.

Hungary: "I don’t know what this Jewish thing is. It’s different."

Via BuzzFeed:

A graduate from Dublin’s Trinity College, Gyongyosi is a member of parliament for the radical right-wing party Jobbik. He also serves as the party’s deputy parliamentary leader and is vice chairman of parliament’s committee on foreign affairs.

(...)

The Jobbik MP has in the past called on the government to draw up a list of Jews.

Asked to explain this position, the MP tells BuzzFeed News that it is a matter of transparency and national security. He likens the discussion to the double citizenship and Turkish identity debate in “politically correct” Germany, or to Congress in the US asking representatives and senators to disclose personal information and conflicts of interest.

“We don’t know what being Jewish is,” he says. “Is it a religion? A culture? A social background? Sometimes it’s a genetic heritage. I don’t know what this Jewish thing is. It’s different. It’s not like Hungarian or Italian.

“Here, we have lots of Hungarian Jews. That is not a problem. But if a Zionist Jew lives in Hungary, the question arises for me whether they are loyal towards Hungary or Israel.”

Germany: New AfD Berlin senator is Nazi apologist

Via The Local:

The AfD party admitted this week that one of their newest elected politicians was once part of an extremist group. And his Facebook posts reveal more about his troubling thoughts on the Nazis.

One of the new members of Berlin’s state parliament from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party used to be a member of the German Defence League - an extremist right-wing, anti-Islam group - the party confirmed on Monday.

Kay Nerstheimer, who was elected to the parliament as a direct candidate for the eastern Lichtenberg district, had been a member of the group as recently as 2012, according to AfD regional chair Georg Pazderski.

(...)

But as the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) reported on Tuesday, Nerstheimer’s extremist views did not start nor end with the German Defence League.

Nerstheimer has repeatedly posted on Facebook in recent years messages glorifying the Nazi time, trivializing the acts of Nazi war criminals, and using certain phrases often espoused by the Third Reich.

The politician wrote a post in July 2013 which seemed to defend SS captain Erich Priebke on his 100th birthday. Priebke had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy in 1998 for his role in the 1944 massacre at the Ardeatine caves in Rome, in which 335 Italian civilians were killed, including 75 Jews.

In another post, Nerstheimer shared a photo of soldiers in Adolf Hitler’s army with the caption: “Each of them is a fine example to the people”.

And as recently as July, Nerstheimer shared a link to a video with the title “It’s all a LIE! The true cause of the war of 1939”.

The video showed a presentation by German author Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, who disputes Germany's guilt in the Second World War, in one book even blaming Poland.

The day before this he had shared a post that posited an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that said “the forces that caused the First World War also caused the second one”.

“Now they are on the edge of starting a third one and are always finding idiots that will obey them.”

Nerstheimer referred to the civilian victims of German aggression as “guerrilla fighters” and said such people were not under the protection of the laws of war, SZ reports.

“Therefore the shootings were legal,” Nerstheimer wrote.

Ukraine: Chabad rabbi brutally attacked at Zhitomir's central station

From Arutz Sheva:

Rabbi Mendel Deitsch, a longtime Chabad-Lubavitch emissary in France and more recently in Israel, was brutally attacked at Zhitomir’s central train station early Friday morning.

After the attack, Deitsch was found and transported to a local hospital.

The motive for the attack remains unknown. Violent anti-Semitic attacks in Ukraine are rare, and there is no indication at this time that it was anti-Semitic in nature.

Deitsch has been active in strengthening Jewish life in the former Soviet Union for many years, and is a central organizer of hospitality and programming at the burial site of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi.

UK: Jews fume as lawyer in ‘whitewash’ anti-Semitism report gets top Labour job

Via Times of Israel:

Britain’s Jewish community leadership on Friday criticized Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn for appointing Shami Chakrabarti, an MP who recently authored a much-criticized report on anti-Semitism within the party, as the opposition party’s top legal official.

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Chakrabarti, who was made a peer after completing the report in August, was appointed Labour’s shadow attorney-general in a reshuffle of top jobs by Corbyn on Friday.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which called Chakrabarti’s report a “whitewash,” said that the MP evidently wrote it as “a job application” for a top Labour post, according to a report in the Telegraph.

Chakrabarti, who joined the Labour party earlier this year, was tasked by Corbyn in the spring with investigating anti-Semitism within the party.

Board of Deputies Vice President Marie van der Zyl said in a statement: “We are disappointed, but sadly unsurprised, that once again Shami Chakrabarti and Jeremy Corbyn have spectacularly undermined her so-called ‘independent’ report.

“We hoped her report would be a potent weapon in the fight against anti-Semitism. It now looks increasingly like the whitewash was a job application.”

“She has sold out the Jewish community,” van der Zyl was further quoted by the Telegraph as saying.

Ukraine: Young man steals Israeli flag hanging outside restaurant

Via Online.ua (ht/ Izrus):

Vandals stole the Israeli flag hanging outside the Israeli-style restaurant "Jerusalem" in Kiev.

Video footage of the incident (available here) shows a young man taking down the flag and tearing it. He then runs off with it together with his friends.

The restaurant opened last week. The young man was later detained by the police.

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