Canary In The Coal Mine

The United Nations: The Devil's Jury

by David P Goldman  |  Hudson-NY.org  |  November 24, 2011

 

In Stephen Vincent Benét's story "The Devil and Daniel Webster," Satan called a jury of the damned composed of turncoats, traitors, and Blackbeard the Pirate, "with the stench of hell still upon them." At the United Nations Human Rights Council, accusations against the Dutch political leader Geert Wilders will be heard by Chinese and Russian lawyers who spent the 1970s and 1980s running the "human rights" entities of their respective countries, an Egyptian-educated diplomat from Morocco, and a "human rights" specialist from Cuba, according to the UNHRC website. The Cuban died last year, but in the spirit of Benét's story, he still might be serving on the UN working group hearing Mr. Wilders's case.

Last week, three Dutch Moroccans filed a complaint against their country's government with the UNHRC, an entity that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in 2007 accused of a "pathological obsession with Israel," echoing similar complaints by the United States, Canada and the European Union. Under the Bush administration the United States boycotted the Council, but President Obama sent American diplomats back to it. On Oct. 1, the State Department released a statement claiming that "U.S. engagement thus far has resulted in significant improvements to the Human Rights Council as a multilateral forum for promoting and protecting human rights. Accomplishments include groundbreaking resolutions on freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, preventing discrimination against women, LGBT human rights, (and) religious tolerance."

As leader of the Party for Freedom, Holland's third-largest political party, Wilders has fought to limit Muslim immigration to his country, and demanded a hard line against "street terror" by Muslims in European cities. The former parliamentary assistant to the leading Dutch conservative politician Fritz Bolkestein, Wilders is a traditional liberal and a strong supporter of Israel. In January 2009, Dutch prosecutors accused him of "hate speech" against Islam; he was acquitted of all charges in March 2011. Wilders lives under continuous threat of murder by Islamists; he is guarded at all times and sleeps in a different location every night.

The Dutch-Moroccan complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Council claims that the Netherlands violated their human rights by failing to convict Wilders. Their complaint states:

Systematic incitement to hatred and discrimination against Muslims and other migrants has been committed over years – in different forms – by the Member of Parliament Geert Wilders. The complainants – who are Muslims and belong to the Dutch-Moroccan community in the Netherlands – feel discriminated against, humiliated and threatened by Mr. Wilders and the members and adherents of his party, resulting in discrimination and an increasingly negative attitude by considerable parts of the population. They are of the opinion that Mr. Wilders by his continued hate speech has poisoned the social climate in the Netherlands, that has become more and more anti-migrant and anti-Muslim.

The document contains no allegations about murder, torture, massacres, or imprisonment, the sort of human rights violations that routinely occur in countries that the Human Rights Council has specifically declined to consider, for example, Cuba and Belarus. The complainants state that their feelings were hurt.

Because "the District Court of Amsterdam acquitted Mr. Wilders…and subsequently dismissed the claims of the complainants," that is, followed due process, "no appeal is open to them" except to haul the Netherlands before the United Nations Human Rights Council.

This is made possible by a complaints procedure established by the U.N. General Assembly, which allows individuals to bring alleged human rights violations before the Council. Such complaints are referred to a "Working Group on Communications" composed of "independent experts." The members of the Working Group are listed on the UNHRC web site, and prove that a lifetime of promoting human rights abuses is no obstacle to a new career passing judgment on the human rights violations of others.

The Working Group members include one Vladimir Kartashkin, who was employed by the Moscow Institute of State and Law with brief interruptions between 1961 and 1992, that is, during a period when the KGB routine committed dissidents to psychiatric hospitals, and tortured and murdered political prisoners. Another member is Chen Shiqiu, the Vice-Chairman of the People's Republic of China Society for Human Rights Studies. His other affiliations show a special sort of attachment to human rights issues, including the China Association for Preservation and Development of Tibetan Culture, and the China Family Planning Association -- that is, the entities responsible for erasing Tibetan culture and forcing Chinese mothers to abort prospective second children. Stephen Vincent Benét could not have made this sort of thing up.

Also listed on the Working Group for Communications is Alfonso Martinez, a Cuban diplomat who served as the spokesman for his Foreign Ministry between 1994 and 1997. "As an expert in Human Rights he represented the Government of Cuba in numerous meetings and conferences, mainly within the UN system," according to a Taino News dispatch last year. Dr. Martinez helped persuade the United Nations Human Rights Council to take Cuba off its agenda, to the consternation of Secretary General Moon. Dr. Martinez died in 2010, but under the circumstances, that may not disqualify him from serving on the Working Group that will decide whether the Netherlands violated human rights by acquitting Geert Wilders.

Messrs. Kartashkin and Shiqiu (and perhaps the late Dr. Martine) are joined in the Working Group by Halima Warzazi, a Moroccan diplomat educated at the University of Cairo. To her credit, Warzazi has directed United Nations studies on female genital mutilation. How she will respond to the hurt feelings of the Dutch-Moroccan complainants remains to be seen. Americans became aware of Morocco's pattern of human rights abuse when Malika Oufkir's book Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail became a best-seller in 2001.

If the complaint is taken seriously, the Obama administration will have to explain more clearly why it praises American participation in a forum which hires thugs with decades of service to some of the world's worst human rights violators, and empowers them to judge anyone who makes Muslims "feel discriminated against," as the complaint maintains. In theory, the UNHRC might refer the Netherlands for prosecution by the International Criminal Court, although it seems unlikely that matters might go that far. The Netherlands defending itself before Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Moroccan hacks is offensive enough.

David P. Goldman writes the Spengler column for Asia Times Online. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery in September 2011.

 

Source:  http://www.hudson-ny.org/2607/united-nations-devil-jury

 

Anti-Semitic ‘Jingle Bells’ Song Heard at Oxford

by Renee Ghert-Zand  |  Blogs.Forward.com  |  November 10, 2011

 

Anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head again at Oxford University in England. Disillusioned officers of the university’s Conservative Association recently leaked documents to the campus newspaper The Oxford Student, showing evidence of anti-Semitic behavior among its members.

The paper found one video to be particularly offensive. It is of a student leading others in a drunken chant of “Dashing through the Reich / in a black Mercedes Benz / killing lots of kike / ra ta ta ta ta. ” It was evidently recorded toward the end of the Michaelmas term in 2010. That would have been in December, which would explain why — at least to The Shmooze’s ear — these lyrics sound as though they go to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” The song has reportedly been enthusiastically sung by OUCA members in other seasons, as well.

Jennifer Lipman wrote in the Jewish Chronicle that several of the association’s members have resigned in protest of this and other unacceptable behavior in the OUCA. Lipman reported that a student named Joe Cooke, a former president of the association, said he was resigning because the OUCA had “come to represent everything we’re supposed to stand against.”

The association’s current president, James Lawson, said that he is investigating the incident and that the person leading the song in the video will be expelled from OUCA if he turns out to actually be a member of the association.

A director of the Union of Jewish Students, Dan Sheldon, said that the union supported Cooke and any others who decide to resign from the OUCA. “It was a deeply disturbing incident, and one which should be strongly reprimanded. UJS fully supports the university’s investigation into it and any disciplinary action then taken,” Sheldon said.

At this point, however, Oxford authorities have not yet taken any action, with a spokesman saying, “It is not clear at this stage whether or not these allegations are accurate.”

Many prominent British politicians, including former prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath, are alumni of the OUCA. The association has been implicated in the past in racist and anti-Semitic behavior. Lipman reported that some of its students were expelled in 2000 for making Nazi salutes, and that the association was banned temporarily by the university a couple of years ago for racist activities of its members.

 

Source: http://blogs.forward.com/the-shmooze/146060/

New Lyrics to the Old Tunes of Antisemitism

by Denis MacShane  |  TheJC.com  |  November 10, 2011

 

At Oxford University, a member of the Conservative Association sings a charming ditty to the tune of Jingle Bells: "Dashing through the Third Reich… In a black Mercedes Benz… Killing all the kikes…"

In the 1980s, Thatcherite students knew all the words of Tomorrow Belongs to Me - the Nazi song from the musical, Cabaret. Now the singing is more sinister. Did our clever young Tory lift up his hands and swivel as he sprayed the machine gun "Ra ta ta" like the SS at Babi Yar? "They are only drunken adolescents", will be the excuse. After all, if the old Etonian Prince Harry thought it was just fine to turn up dressed as a Nazi officer, why should the products of minor public schools think there is anything wrong with a sing-song celebrating the Holocaust?

An exceptional example? Not quite. Take Prince William's alma mater, the equally elite University of St Andrews. Earlier this year, a 21-year-old American student on exchange from a New York university found his room invaded by two fellow students. Chanan Reitblat is proud of being Jewish. He was studying chemistry. Paul Donnachie (Pictured Above), 19, and Sam Colchester, 20, decided to teach him a lesson.

Donnachie was active in the campus Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Reitblat, whose family had fled Lithuania because of antisemitic prejudice, had hung an Israeli flag on his wall. His fellow students came in to his room and urinated in his sink. Donnachie ripped the flag down and rubbed his genitals with it. They called Reitblat a "Nazi, fascist and terrorist". Instead of condemning this grotesque anti-Jewish assault the Scottish PSC demonstrated in support of Donnachie, arguing that it was a free-speech case.

At north American campuses, there are hate-filled "Israel Apartheid" weeks, often backed by professors, the message of which is essentially that Israel should not exist. That's quite a moral hit on young Jewish students who have an affinity for Israel. But for the Islamist ideologues of the Middle East who are serious about doing away with Israel and Jews in the region, references to apartheid and Nazis from professors are nectar to nourish their hate.

Meanwhile, the TUC voted in September to boycott Israeli workers just at a time when unions and progressive forces in Israel were launching mass protests against the rising inequality in the once proudly egalitarian Jewish state.

As Islamist fanatics firebomb the offices of a French magazine to protest against its Voltaire-style satire of religion, Europe's journalists avert their eyes. The National Union of Journalists prefers to cut links with Jewish journalists in Israel than tackle the overtly racist antisemitism of much Islamist and Arab media discourse.

European and British antisemitism is now viral. It spreads fast and invades minds, especially those of students. The great causes of 20th-century, left-liberal activism have disappeared. Fascism, military juntas, Stalinism, apartheid, homophobia, denial of rights to women and other evils have been more or less conquered. The professors, unions and student activists need a new cause, and one offers itself - solidarity with the Palestinians. There is nothing wrong with support for a people who suffer dreadfully, as much from the failings and feuds of their leadership as from the Israeli government's actions.

But too often such support becomes unreflective criticism of Israel. Too easily it crosses the line into contempt for Jews and their heritage. Canadians and Australians are proud of having settled a land where others dwelt and building their nations. But Zionism, an assertion of the same right to nationhood that other nations, old and new, proclaim, remains a dirty word on the campuses of western democracies.

Contemporary antisemitism is growing as a nationalist populist force in eastern Europe. In November 1933, a Yes vote at a referendum allowed Hitler to withdraw from the League of Nations and move further and faster into anti-Jewish laws, no longer required to pay even lip service to international or multilateral obligations. Britain's university lecturers' union has repudiated the EU's definition of antisemitism because it wants no external check on the filling of young minds with anti-Israel hate.

Those higher political points were far from the thoughts of the Oxford and St Andrews students who seemingly revealed that the post-1945 taboo against antisemitic acts no longer exists. What was unsayable when I was at Oxford is now singable, as a coarsening of discourse about Jews and Israel infects the minds of the next generation. Singing Holocaust songs and calling for the elimination of Israel are the twin faces of the new antisemitism, and antisemitism is now a major British and European problem.

Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former Europe minister. He is the author of 'Globalising Hatred. The New Antisemitism' (Weidenfeld 2008)

 

Source: http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/58015/new-lyrics-old-tunes-antisemitism

One Day in the Life of a Jew in France

by Brenda H Mitchell  |  FrontPageMag.com  |  November 9, 2011

 

 

I received this post from a friend in NY. One of his friends is living in France and posted this to him with the request that he distribute it to his American friends. He prefaces with:

Once again, the real news in France is conveniently not being reported as it should. To give you an idea of what’s going on in France where there are now between 5 and 6 million Muslims and about 600,000 Jews, here is an email that came from a Jew living in France. Will the world say nothing – again – as it did in Hitler’s time? He writes:

“I am a Jew — therefore I am forwarding this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do nothing. Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France: In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil – all recently. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words ‘Dirty Jew’ were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.

According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming ‘Jews to the gas chambers’ and ‘Death to the Jews.’ A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher’s shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20′s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France The woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France . This was just in the past week.

So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:

First, care enough to stay informed. Don’t ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight. I remind you of what Pastor Neimoller said in World War II: ‘First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.’

Second, boycott France and French products. Only the Arab countries are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more than just oil and hatred. So boycott their wines and their perfumes. Boycott their clothes and their foodstuffs. Boycott their movies. Definitely boycott their shores. If we are resolved we can exert amazing pressure and, whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are like a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well-directed pressure.

Third, send this along to your family, your friends, and your co-workers. Think of all of the people of good conscience that you know and let them know that you and the people that you care about need their help.

The number one bestselling book in France is….’September 11: The Frightening Fraud,’ which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon.

Please pass this on. Let’s not let history repeat itself, thank-you for your time and consideration.”

 

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/09/one-day-in-the-life-of-a-jew-in-france/

55 Jewish Partisans Honored for ‘Extraordinary Measures’ in Resisting Nazis

by Hillel Kuttler  |  JTA.org  |  November 9, 2011

 

NEW YORK -- Allen Small, 83, and Leon Bakst, 86, hugged each other so tight, Small said, “I couldn’t let go.”

Their embrace at a synagogue on Manhattan's Upper East Side was 65 years in the making.

Small and Bakst grew up a few houses apart in Ivye, Belarus, attending the same school and synagogue before reality turned black, back when their names were Avraham Schmulewitz and Leibel Bakst, and Ivye belonged to Poland and the Nazis had not yet invaded. They last saw each another in 1946 at a displaced persons camp in Munich.

During the two years preceding their liberation by the Red Army in 1944, the then teenagers fought the Nazis in separate brigades in the vast Nalibotskaya Pushcha forest. For their daring, Small, now living in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and Bakst, of Dallas, along with 53 other Jewish partisans from across the United States, were honored here at a synagogue reception Nov. 6 and a gala dinner the next evening.

Like many partisans interviewed, Bakst downplayed his role, saying that sheer survival was the great motivator. Some had carried rifles, sabotaged German supply trains and attacked the enemy. Others served as scouts, guides and cooks. Bakst and his older brother, Yehoshua, were deployed to secure bread, butter, cheese, potatoes and meat from neighboring farmers; anything not given was taken. The boys were intimately familiar with the region from traversing the woods every year to visit their grandmother, Bakst explained.

“Even if we saved a few lives and shortened the war, we made a contribution,” he said.

Photo below: Partisans posing at a reception at Manhattan's Park East Synagogue launching a 24-hour celebration of their World War II heroism, Nov. 6, 2011. Photo courtesy of Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation

The nearly 350 relatives, friends and admirers who gathered in a converted theater for the dinner were lauding the 55 partisans and their absent or deceased comrades for being “ordinary men and women taking extraordinary measures to protect Jewish lives,” said local newscaster Dana Tyler, the dinner’s mistress of ceremonies.

The event marked a high point for the San Francisco-based Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, the sponsoring organization whose executive director, Mitch Braff, admitted knowing nothing about partisans until meeting a fighter from Lithuania and founding JPEF 11 years ago.

The Nov. 7 dinner combined strong elements of reunion, tribute, historical preservation and education. Both the partisans and JPEF’s U.S.-born officials emphasized the importance of adjusting World War II’s record to account for Jewish heroism amid the Shoah’s slaughter.

“Tonight we honor your bravery and your courage," said television actor Edward Asner, representing his cousin Abe, a 95-year-old partisan from Eishyshok, Belarus, who lives in Windsor, Ontario. "Thank you for putting the lie to the (claim) that Jews didn’t fight back. For inspiring all of us to stand up against tyranny, I salute you and I applaud you. We all applaud you.”

Attendees ignored Asner’s request to stifle clapping while portraits of each partisan appeared on-screen. When the lights returned, Asner uttered somberly, “The list is too short. I’m sorry that there aren’t more with us.”

With central roles assigned to partisans’ descendants -- Matthew Bielski, grandson of the late Zus Bielski, leader of the eponymous brigade featured in the 2008 film "Defiance," recited the HaMotzi prayer, and Shira Ginsburg, a Manhattan cantor whose paternal grandparents were partisans, sang “Hymn of the Partisans” in the original Yiddish -- the dinner underscored a central theme of transmitting the resistance’s history to subsequent generations.

Some 5,000 American educators utilize JPEF-developed curricula and programs in their classes, said Braff, who reported being pleasantly surprised at a 2010 conference for social studies teachers at which 450 teachers signed up with JPEF. Board president Elliott Felson said that JPEF over the next decade hopes to reach 100,000 educators and 2 million students with the lessons of the partisans’ heroism.

Family members of honorees concurred in being thrilled to witness the evening’s tribute to their loved ones.

Helene Gradow Kingston, who accompanied her 86-year-old father, Jeff Gradow, a Los Angeles resident, said the event “makes me very proud.” Gazing at her son Elliott, 17, she added of her father, “He was [a partisan] at my son’s age. These were amazing feats of courage.”

Paula Berger, 77, of Denver, as a young girl from Novogrudek, Belarus, was sheltered in the Bielski brigade.

“If there’s anything any of us ever wanted, it’s that someone would tell our story because we didn’t think we’d survive. It was such a horrific time,” said Berger, whose two daughters, son and granddaughter accompanied her to the dinner.

“The people who are putting in the time and money to keep the story alive and retold -- I think it’s wonderful. It’s another Chanukah 'nes' [miracle] or Purim nes because Purim was about saving Jews’ lives and Chanukah was about saving our spirit,” she said. “This was both.”

 

Source: http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/11/09/3090216/55-jewish-partisans-honored-for-extraordinary-measures-in-resisting-nazis

UC Davis [UCD] Jewish Studies Program Sponsors Lecture by Anti-Semitic Writer

 

A War of Narratives at UC Davis Jewish Studies Program

 

by Gail Rubin, J.D, November 6, 2011

 

Some UC Jewish Studies programs seem to be part of the growing problem of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist bias on UC campuses. Consider the lecture sponsored by the UC Davis [UCD] Jewish Studies Program on October 21^st.

The lecturer was University of London professor Gilbert Achcar, author of the controversial book, “The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.” He was introduced by Diane Wolf, current chair of the UCD program, Professor Susan Miller, and founding chair, David Biale. Professor Miller praised Achcar and called his scholarship “courageous.”

Achcar may have been courageous in acknowledging the Holocaust was a uniquely horrifying event directed at Jews and that Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini's anti-Semitism and collaboration with Hitler were deplorable. But after these observations, he careened into anti-Zionist, anti-Israel charges and distortions. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he argued that the Mufti’s Jew-hatred had little influence on Palestinian and Arab hostility to Israel. He dismissed evidence about the cross-fertilization of Muslim anti-Semitism and Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism as hyperbole and charged that Israel exploits the Holocaust and exaggerates the Mufti’s influence only for propaganda purposes.

More disturbingly, he has argued that the rise of Zionism in 1920, not prejudice, spawned Arab Jew-hatred, essentially accusing Jews of causing anti-Semitism. Indeed, in his book, he excuses the current popularity of the Czarist anti-Semitic forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," in the Arab world, arguing it must be read from an anti-Zionist, not an anti-Semitic, perspective.

Achcar minimized pogroms against and expulsions of the Jews in the Arab world after World War II and after Israel’s reestablishment, equating their expulsion with the American internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He repeated anti-Israel clichés, denying Israel’s right to exist and referring to it as a “settler colonial project” built on “Arab land,” accusing Zionists of "ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians", and downplaying any suggestion of Pan-Arab racism toward the Jewish people.

Despite these tendentious charges, challenging questions were not welcomed during the Q & A.  I was abruptly censored while attempting to establish facts to challenge Mr. Achcar’s skewed conclusion that the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism had only a minimal impact on both Jews and Arabs. Professors Miller and Biale angrily told me the questions were insulting and to either stop or leave the room. So much for free speech and scholarly discourse in academia.

Unfortunately, this lecture was not an anomaly. It is symptomatic of attitudes in the UC Davis Jewish Studies Program and elsewhere in the UC system. Approximately 30 Jewish Studies faculty members signed a March 3 letter to the Orange County District Attorney, opposing legal action against the “Irvine 11.” The “Irvine 11” were the Muslim Student Union students who had orchestrated a disruption of a lecture by Israel Ambassador Michael Oren on the UC Irvine campus, in violation of both campus guidelines and the law. The six UCD faculty connected to Jewish/Middle Eastern scholarship who signed that letter are: David Biale; Ari Kelman; Ze’ev Maoz; Susan Miller; Brenda Deen Schildgen; and Diane Wolf.

Yet, these same academics turn a blind eye to campus anti-Semitism. Open letters were submitted to UC President Mark Yudof in June of 2010, highlighting the rise of anti-Semitism throughout the UC system. Some of the signatories included the Simon Wiesenthal Center, CAMERA, StandWithUs, and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. More than 700 students signed an on-line petition. In September , 2011, more than 5,200 supporters sent another letter to Mr.Yudof, urging him to investigate and take action. Thus far, not one of the UCD professors referenced above has signed on to the letters, nor have they taken action to protect Jewish students from harassment and fear on their own campus. In fact, Emanuel Ringelblum Professor David Biale criticized the decision by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights to extend Title VI protection to Jewish students as “bizarre” because “the Jews are a group with power”.

Blind allegiance to any ideology is dangerous for the free exchange of ideas that is supposed to be the hallmark of a university. It is even more dangerous in the current climate where professors and academic departments encourage anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti- Jewish views and behaviors. Too often, students who express favorable views about Israel are ridiculed and verbally abused. Surely Jewish Studies Departments should ensure that the distortions and misinformation that propel anti-Israel dogmas are exposed and critiqued. People committed to intellectual integrity and the future of Israel and the Jewish people should be concerned about these trends in Jewish Studies Programs.

Source: http://standwithus.com/app/iNews/view_n.asp?ID=2089

An Ominous Reckoning

by Robert S Wistrich  |  JPost.com  |  November 7, 2011

 

The anniversary of Kristallnacht should serve as an opportunity for the West to wake up to the rampant anti-Semitism engulfing the Arab world.

Seventy-three years ago, on November 9, 1938, the murderous Nazi onslaught against the German Jews began with a nation-wide pogrom that smashed the fabric of their existence. Known euphemistically as Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”), this state-organized orgy of violence happened in peacetime. It involved the systematic burning of hundreds of synagogues, the destruction of approximately 7,500 Jewish businesses, the murder of nearly 100 Jews, and the deportation of another 30,000 male Jews to German concentration camps.

It was a crucial turning-point in Hitler’s “war against the Jews,” a major signpost on the road leading to World War II, which Nazi Germany would initiate less than a year later.

Nazi propaganda, already then, openly warned about the imminent annihilation of Jewry through “fire and sword,” though few in the West took these threats too seriously.

Today, there is no immediate danger of a new Kristallnacht in the Western world, although levels of anti-Semitism (hiding under the more acceptable mask of hostility towards Israel) have reached levels unprecedented since 1945. But in the Middle East, the hatred of Jews burns much more fiercely – both in Iran and in the Arab world.

Islamist anti-Semitism, in particular, is soaked in some of the most inflammatory motifs that made the Kristallnacht atrocities possible in Nazi Germany and only three years later provided the rationale for the mass murder of European Jewry.

For example, there is the pervasive exploitation in Arabic of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its insistence on the reality of the “Jewish conspiracy for world domination”; there is a revival of the medieval Christian blood-libel against Jews, transplanted from Europe to the contemporary Arab-Muslim Middle East; and the mass diffusion of stereotypes about the Jews as cruel, treacherous and bloodthirsty colonialists seeking to destroy the identity and beliefs of the Muslim peoples.

To this, one must add the slanderous but widely popular identification of Zionism with Nazism and apartheid and the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians – a Goebbels-like propaganda lie that has also found a growing audience in the West.

However contradictory it may appear to some, the Zionismis- Nazism fabrication co-exists in the Middle East today with Holocaust denial on a broad scale. Indeed, in Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Holocaust denial has become a state-sponsored weapon in the regime’s efforts to win over the Arab street and indoctrinate its own people with anti-Jewish toxins.

THE INCREASINGLY entrenched anti-Semitism in the Arab world has not, unfortunately, been diminished by the “Arab Spring.” Earlier this year, Sheikh Yusuf al- Qaradawi, one of the most authoritative religious leaders of the Sunni Arab world (and especially esteemed by the Muslim Brotherhood), told a million Egyptians assembled in Tahrir Square that he hoped their mission would be to complete Hitler’s work. Al- Qaradawi, an immensely popular cleric, publicly insisted that the esteemed German Führer had been sent by Allah as a “divine punishment for the Jews.” Not long before, CBS’s foreign correspondent Lara Logan had been sexually assaulted and brutalized in the heart of Cairo by a mob of Egyptian men screaming “Jew, Jew, Jew.” Logan is not, in fact, Jewish. But this aspect of her ordeal was, typically enough, very much downplayed by both the American and European media.

There has indeed been very little appetite in the West for reporting on the Jew-hatred that saturates the Arab world. Arab nations (not least, the Palestinians) are never held to the standard expected of the rest of the world when it comes to racism, sexism or Judeophobia.

Hence, precious little reference is made to the genocidal anti-Semitism that runs through the “Sacred Covenant” of the Palestinian Hamas, any more than the West was unduly concerned with Haj Amin al-Husseini’s role in the Holocaust of European Jewry. Haj Amin, a Hitlerian anti-Semite if ever there was one, dominated the Palestinian Arab national movement for nearly forty years, leaving a legacy of hatred that would poison the Middle East for decades.

The Arab demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state has continued uninterruptedly since 1948. It has yet to be challenged by the Arab revolutions of 2011. The leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, did nothing to improve the atmosphere by his recent denial at the UN that the Jews are a people with a profound historic connection to the land of Israel. His negation of Israel’s most basic rights and Jewish identity is of a piece with his brazenly racist insistence that the new PalestinianState should be “Jew-free.”

Nothing that has happened thus far in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia – where the Islamic movements have emerged greatly strengthened – leads me to believe that Arab anti- Semitism has been significantly weakened. The bogeyman of the “world Zionist conspiracy” is, unfortunately, still with us. Arab tyrants (as in Syria) continue to use it as an “opium for the masses,” but it also has powerful roots in popular Arab culture as well as in political Islam.

Even more sobering is the fact that the sickening anti- Jewish racism in Iran and the Arab world is nourished by so many Arab theologians, intellectuals, journalists, artists (See Image), deans of university faculties and so-called academic “experts.” In other words, the raw, primitive, street-hatred of the Jews has cultural and intellectual legitimacy among the educated elites, as it once did in Nazi Germany.

Over seven decades ago, Kristallnacht was an unmistakable warning to the rest of Europe as to where “eliminationist anti-Semitism” would lead. It went largely unheeded. Millions of non-Jews as well as twothirds of European Jewry would pay the ultimate price for this blindness. As Iran moves towards acquiring nuclear weapons and vows to annihilate Israel, will history repeat itself? Will the West remain silent? For Israel, the moment of reckoning comes closer by the day.

The writer is the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, 2010).

 

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=244737

Thirty-five Million Americans Harbor a Hatred for Jews and Number Growing as Economy Continues to Stall

by Corky Siemaszko, New York Daily News  |  NYDailyNews.com  |  November 3, 2011

 

A new Anti-Defamation League survey found 15% of Americans hold deeply anti-Semitic views. Comstock/Getty Images

Millions of Americans harbor an ugly secret — they’re suspicious of the Jews.

A nationwide survey released Thursday by the Anti-Defamation League found that 15% of the country holds deeply anti-Semitic views — and as the economy worsens that number appears to be growing.

“It is disturbing that with all of the strides we have made in becoming a more tolerant society, anti-Semitic beliefs continue to hold a vise-grip on a small but not insubstantial segment of the American public,” the ADL’s Abraham Foxman said.

Old stereotypes about Jews being pushy and controlling the economy are festering — especially among the least-educated Americans, the survey found.

Among other things:

n 19% answered “probably true” to the statement “Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street,” a five percentage point increase since 2009.

n 14% agreed with the statement that "Jews have too much power in the U.S. today," an increase from 13% in 2009.

n 15% agreed Jews are "more willing to use shady practices."

n 16% agreed that Jewish "business people are so shrewd, others don't have a chance."

Other anti-Jewish canards continue to be believed by millions of Americans.

Some 31% believe the Jews were responsible for crucifying Christ. And 30% — a percentage that has stayed steady since 1964 — insist Jews are “more loyal to Israel than to America.”

Nearly half of all respondents agreed with the statement that Jews "stick together more than other Americans.” And a quarter of the country says Jews “still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.”

The survey found that the most-educated Americans were the least prejudiced and foreign-born Hispanics were more likely to hate Jews than U.S. born Hispanics.

Some 29% of the African-Americans surveyed expressed strong anti-Semitic views.

On the plus side, even the anti-Semites gave Jews credit for their strong faith in God (79%), being big on family (84%), and for contributing to American cultural (64%).

The telephone survey of 1,754 adults was done in October.

[email protected]

 

Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/thirty-five-million-americans-harbor-a-hatred-jews-number-growing-economy-continues-stall-article-1.971918

Anger as Muslims Demonstrate With Yellow Star of David

From: Ynet  |  Ynetnews.com  |  November 2, 2011

 

Using yellow star - Bad taste? Photo: Reuters

Muslim protest against discrimination in Switzerland uses Holocaust symbol; move condemned by Jewish groups as well as some Muslim groups. With one newspaper claiming move was 'simply idiotic'.

Jewish leaders from around the world were enraged when Muslims protesting in Switzerland last weekend used the yellow Star of David symbol as part of their demonstration against discrimination. 

The JTA reported Saturday that 2,000 people showed up for the October 29 demonstration in Bern initiated by the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland, a conservative Islamic organization, to protest anti-Muslim discrimination.

Protesters wore a yellow star sticker printed with the word "Muslim" reminiscent of the one that the Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Third Reich. Some protesters constructed a plastic model of a mosque with minarets, which are banned in Switzerland.

Edith Bino, president of the Jewish community in Bern, told the Basler Times that she found the use of the yellow star "so obviously wrong that it could not be taken seriously." And Yves Kugelmann, editor in chief of the Jewish newspaper Tachles, said he found the choice of symbols "simply idiotic."

"It is regrettable when legitimate concerns are raised using false comparisons," Kugelmann told the Basler Times. He said that discrimination against Muslims is a theme that must be taken seriously in Switzerland, "but not in this cheap way."

The choice of symbolism irked Muslim groups as well: Two mainstream Muslim organizations reportedly stayed away from the demonstration as a result.

Nicolas Blancho, head of the Islamic Central Council, defended his choice of symbols, telling the Tages Anzeiger newspaper that "Muslims are treated as second-class citizens and are discriminated against, for example because they wear a headscarf or because of their name when they look for an apprenticeship or are looking for an apartment."

Among the speakers were British journalist Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Booth, who has converted to Islam and wears a veil, told demonstrators she sensed that Bern citizens had glared at her as she passed them on the street.

 

Source:  http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4142799,00.html

Video: Erick Stakelbeck on Why Christians Should Support Israel

by Erick Stakelbeck, CBN News Terrorism Analyst  |  Blogs.CBN.com  |  November 2, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

"HAMAS IS THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD"

 

Stakelbeck Speech at Values Voter Summit

I recently took part in an excellent and timely panel at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. titled "Why Christians Should Support Israel." It was a great event and I was privileged to share the stage with my good friends Victor Styrsky of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and Bishop Harry Jackson, Senior Pastor of Hope Christian Church in Washington, D.C. 

Each of us had 7 minutes to speak. You can click on the viewer below to watch my comments. As I like to say, this is no time to mince words. I hope my sense of urgency and passion for this issue translates as you watch.

 

 

 

Source:  http://blogs.cbn.com/stakelbeckonterror/Default.aspx