The Swiss Foreign Ministry and Zurich municipality’s decision to sponsor a traveling exhibition by Israeli nongovernmental organization Breaking the Silence has raised eyebrows in the local Jewish community, Israeli NRG news site reported Wednesday.
The event is set to be held in June at the “Culture Helferei” events center, and will feature testimonies from former Israeli soldiers claiming that the IDF carried out unnecessary killings of Palestinians, according to NRG.
The testimonies are expected to deal mainly with military operations against Palestinians, and alleged violations of human rights by IDF soldiers during the course of their service.
Community representatives in Zurich told NRG that Breaking the Silence originally sought out a local synagogue for its exhibition, but was rejected after the group refused to organize additional soldiers to tell “the other side of the story.”
Q: How did you perceive the political relationship between the GDR and Israel?
It was non-existent. The only relationship with Israel was one of absolute rejection, of hatred even. The way this was handled in the GDR was bizarre. We did an exhibition with the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, "Anti-Semitism in the GDR," and during research for that, we found out that the GDR provided shelter for terrorists. They were supported by the government and were trained there. It's egregious.
That was the relationship with Israel - they sided with people who wanted to destroy Israel. In the GDR, it was very clear whose side people were on during the 6-Day-War or the Yom-Kippur-War and how sad they were that Israel wasn't wiped off the map.
Q: When did that begin to change?
In the early or mid-80s, when the GDR was in terrible economic shape. GDR leader Erich Honecker wanted better trade conditions with the US and somebody told him: "You know, the US is ruled by Jews and that's why you need to play nice with Israel and with the Jews in the GDR and in the US, too. The Jews are the key to getting the money."
Suddenly, things worked out that never did before. Jewish congregations had property returned to them that had been taken away earlier. All of a sudden, cemeteries were kept up. And the government started to use a much friendlier tone with Israel. All of this was to get the trade conditions with the US improved. This didn't end up happening, but it was the original motivation.
Q: With anti-Semitism so prevalent, did your family ever consider moving to West Germany?
That was never an alternative for my family. My father would never have wanted to go to West Germany, where almost every higher-standing civil servant was a former Nazi. This really turned him off.
According to April Witt in The Washington Post, Duggan stood out because he was British and Jewish. Aglaja Beyes-Corleis told the BBC that Jewish members could be placed under particular pressure at meetings. A memo from the London Metropolitan Police submitted as evidence at Duggan's inquest said the Schiller Institute and LaRouche Youth Movement blamed the Jewish people for the Iraq war and other world problems; the memo said that "Jeremiah's lecture notes and bulletins showed the anti-Semitic nature of [the] ideology."Duggan's mother said Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, the Schiller Institute's scientific adviser, told her after his death that when Duggan heard the Jews being blamed for the war during a seminar, he had stood up and said, "But I'm a Jew!"One participant said the others put him "through the wringer" because of it.
Nothing in the western media covered what the Turkish Anadulu Agency released, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech this Friday with a strange message riddled with statements that were predicted in the Bible regarding Antichrist. From his desire to invade Jerusalem and to Muhammad’s claim to have ascended to heaven from there, Erdogan called on all Turks to refocus on the Ottoman goal to re-conquer Jerusalem for Islam:
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Turkish president called on citizens to “raise their hands in supplication for this blessed night towards Allah to restore the Al-Aqsa Mosque [Jerusalem] to be re-owned by Muslims, and to remove the mist from their eyes, to see Jerusalem in their hands at every moment and at every opportunity”.
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Such reflections were also made by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmed Davutoglu recently, that “Jerusalem belongs to the Muslims, not to the Jews,” while criticizing the leader of the co-party Peoples Democratic opposition, Salahuddin Dmirattash, in which he said in opposition to the Islamist rhetoric of Davutoglu:
“It is Taqsim Square in Istanbul which to the workers means what the city of Jerusalem means to the Jews, and what the Kaaba means to Muslims “.
Salahuddin was simply saying to each his own affairs. Let Jerusalem belong to the Jews, Mecca to the Muslims and let us be concerned about our own affairs. Salahuddin believes Turkey should focus on jobs, not a mission to reconquer Jerusalem.
Davutoglu responds affirming that Jerusalem belongs to Muslims and not the Jews, saying: “Jerusalem is our home and we are all Jerusalem.” more
Date: May 15, 2015
Location: Berlin
Speaker: Ahmed from “JugendtheaterBüro Berlin” (english: “Youth Theater Office Berlin”)
Source: Redebeitrag und Poetry Ahmed JTB
Minute: 3:47 min – 4:44 min
Now I will give an example on how German circumstances are. We just made a theater play about Anne Frank. The father of Anne Frank said he wants the story of Anne Frank to be a universal story. Anne Frank counts for everybody. A group of Muslims from Kosovo, Palestine, Afghanistan have met and looked into the story of Anne Frank and have gathered courage and inspiration from this, because they say we know what it means to be a minority in today’s Germany just like the Jews were back then. Anne Frank belongs to us. We made a play about it. And you know what they wrote? “Anti-semitic! Muslims are not able to refer to Anne Frank.” We say Anne Frank would have been on the streets today on our side against racism and Israel’s politics.
George Galloway had been referred to the police, the parliamentary standards watchdog has revealed, after he was reported by a former parliamentary assistant Aisha Ali Khan to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
The report, made earlier this year, claims that she spent more time running personal errands for him than on official work.
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In a press release by the former MP, he claimed that “This is mendacious attempt by an embittered former employee and criminal to smear me in an attempt to damage my future political plans.. won’t succeed and at the end of it I hope and trust that there will be legal consequences for all of those involved in this plot.”
The statement continued: “Her lawyers, based in Israel, have apparently now complained to the IPSA. These Tel Aviv lawyers are clearly acting for the bankrupt Khan pro bono. IPSA, without asking me a single question or informing me of the details of the complaint so that I could could answer them, have referred it to the police, with whom I will fully co-operate.“
He later tweeted: “It’s an outrage that a New York- Tel Aviv axis of evil can have parliament and media dancing to their tune. No paper will report these facts“ more
Robert Wistrich, widely considered one of the world’s leading experts on anti-Semitism, died of a sudden heart attack in Rome late Tuesday, Italian media is reporting. He was 70 years old.
According to a news bulletin posted on the website of the daily La Stampa, Wistrich was due to address the Italian Senate on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Wistrich, the Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, authored dozens of books and scholarly essays on anti-Semitism during his distinguished academic career. more
Giedrius Sakalauskas always thought there was something strange about the graffiti-sprayed, bunker-like structure in a leafy area outside the center of Vilnius.
Why build an electrical substation with granite blocks instead of regular bricks?
When he examined the building more carefully this month, he made a chilling discovery: Dozens of stones had inscriptions in Hebrew or Yiddish. "I touched the stones and I realized that they're really gravestones," Sakalauskas told The Associated Press.
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And he had strong hunch about where they came from: Across the street there used to be a Jewish cemetery that was demolished in the 1960s when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union. Sakalauskas posted pictures of his discovery on social media, setting off an emotional discussion about a dark chapter in Lithuania's history that didn't end when a Nazi occupation was replaced by a Soviet one in 1944.
Lithuania's once-vibrant Jewish community was nearly annihilated by the Nazis and the few who survived found little sympathy from their new communist rulers.
"Hitler wanted to destroy Jews physically," said Simonas Gurevicius, whose family escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to Russia and returned to Lithuania after the war. "Stalin came, and he wanted to destroy the whole memory of the Jewish people, making sure that nothing will stay."
The etchings on the substation are hard to spot unless you know what you are looking for. They're only visible in the gaps where the slabs overlay each other. more
A few weeks ago my son didn’t come home from school at four o’clock, as he always does. I tried his phone, with no answer. I would have tried his friends, but he’s been keeping to himself. The hours passed and just as I was about to call the police, he walks in, breaking down in tears before his bag even hits the floor. He tells me he had joined a few boys to play soccer after school, and everything had gone well until there was a dispute over the rules, and then the group had turned on him. The leader, a classmate of my son, had said, “This is why I don’t play with the cheating Jews.” My son had looked to the rest of them to protest, to stand by him in any way, but instead they had left him to make it back home alone.
Hearing my son speak I felt anger, yes, but also a deep sense of resignation. My great-grandparents came to this country as the Other, almost 200 years ago, and it seems as if not much has changed. The sound of rubber soles against linoleum echoes through each generation, and now they had come for my child.
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As I was comforting him, my son asked me if we could just stop being Jews. It’s too hard, he said, and I just want it to go away. With those words, I felt as if I had fallen through a black hole into history. We have had this talk before, I have cried these tears before, the hatred may be wearing a different outfit now but the death we are dying is no less dark. more
