Tag Archive for: Anti-Israelism is Anti-Semitism

VIDEO: Jew-haters disrupt New York City Council meeting — “Naked, blind antisemitism”

David Greenfield is right: this isn’t simply opposition to Israel, which all too often is born of Jew-hatred in any case. This is open anti-Semitism. The Council was discussing a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The protesters were identifying with the Auschwitz murderers.

Pro-Palestinians Disrupt Council Meeting With Anti-Israel Chants

Pro-Palestinians Escorted Out Of Council Chambers After Disrupting Meeting

David Greenfield Stands Up Against Anti-Israel Protesters During City Council Meeting

“VIDEOS: Pro-Palestinians Disrupt City Council Meeting Over Speaker’s Planned Visit To Israel,” by Jacob Kornbluh, JP Updates, January 23, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activists disrupted the City Council’s stated meeting on Thursday while members were voting on a resolution commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The protesters started yelling, “shame on you, Melissa”, “why are you supporting an apartheid” and “Palestinian lives matter.”

After five minutes of yelling and screaming, the some 40 protesters were ordered to leave and escorted out the balcony.

Council member Cory Johnson called it “incredibly disrespectful and offensive. Simply awful.” Councilman Mark Weprin added, “The State of Israel has never supported the killing of innocent people, and they want to love in peace.”

“I am still shaken, upset and angry,” Councilman David Greenfield. “While we were discussing a resolution regarding the murder of 1.1 million human beings – I will point out that 90 percent of them were Jewish, but the other 10 percent, they were political dissidents .. those were the people who were being killed together at Auschwitz-Birkenau. While we were discussing that, they had the chutzpah, the nerve, the temerity, to unfurl a Palestinian flag and yell at us.”

But I’m pleased, because we can stop pretending that this is about Israel. What we saw here was naked, blind antisemitism, good old fashioned antisemitism,” Greenfield roared. “That’s what you saw, and that’s what you watched, and that’s what you witnessed – people who were upset for one reason. Do you want to know why they’re upset, do you want to know why they’re angry, do you want to know why they unfurled that flag today? Because Hitler did not finish the job. He only wiped out half of my family.”

The trip to Israel is a message that “we will not be cowered by this fear and hatred,” he added.

Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito went over to Greenfield and shook his hand as an expression of support.

Republican Council member Eric Ulrich also took the mic to state that “to be pro Israel you don’t have to be Jewish.”

“Israel is a vibrant democracy and I’m proud to go back to Israel again. I will not be intimidated by the hecklers. I will not sit here and allow people to attack the Jews.” Ulrich said.

Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in an emailed statement, “At a time when the Council was voting on a resolution commemorating the 70thanniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, this outburst was offensive, outrageous and counter to the values of the City Council.”

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of Councilman David Greenfield is by William Alatriste/NYC Council.

Kristallnacht 76th Commemoration Marred by Antisemitism in Europe

Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” that erupted across Nazi Germany and Austria on November 9, 1938 was commemorated across the West and in Israel. There with ecumenical prayer gatherings, concerts of liturgical Jewish music, testimonials by Holocaust survivors, and candles lit in memoriam.  In a commemoration on the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht we chronicled the horrors that befell Jews that night:

Kristallnacht -“the night of broken glass” that occurred throughout Germany and Austria. Kristallnacht was Nazi retribution for the assassination an anti-Nazi German diplomat Ernest Vom Rath in the Paris by a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynzspan on November 7th, 1938. That event was seized upon by Herr Hitler and his Nazi SA and SS thugs to unleash a torrent of ‘spontaneous’ violence. That violence was graphically set against the lurid flames of more than 1,000 synagogues torched, several hundred of them destroyed, thousands of Jewish businesses and homes broken into, destroyed and vandalized.  91 Jewish men were killed, thousands beaten and more than 30,000 dragged off to concentration camps. Many of the later would never to return to their frightened families, many of whom were to disappear in the Holocaust. Kristallnacht was the prelude to the Final Solution that murdered six million European Jewish men, women and children.

Kristallnacht NYT 11-10-38

New York Times November 10, 1938.

This year Kristallnacht coincided with the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. Tens of thousands gathered  before Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.  Eight thousand balloons were released. German Chancellor Andrea Merkel speaking to the multitude at the celebration noted the ‘twinning” of these historic event:

That was the opening note for the murder of millions; I feel not just joy, but the responsibility that German history burdens us with.

Over at the Alexanderplatz, German Police were separating violent rival protests by left wing groups opposing the commemoration of the fall of  the Berlin Wall, while  so-called nationalist groups who  were commemorating the Nazi attacks on Jews during Kristallnacht. On the West Bank, Palestinians celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by symbolically breaking through Israel’s security barrier. In Norway, “Nye SOS Rasisme” , a so-called anti-racist group, demanded  that a Bergen community event bar Jews from attending a Kristallnacht commemoration.  The group held their own procession featuring banners that said “Zionism is Racism”.

The successor to the Communist party in Germany’s Bundestag, Die Linke, was caught in a moral quandary.  That  was the inclusion of the self-hating anti-Israel American Jew, Max Blumenthal, son of Hillary Clinton adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, in a Middle East panel at an avant garde theater in the former East Berlin. The Algemeiner noted:

In a letter to Frank Castorf and Thomas Walter – the directors of the famed Volksbühne Theater, the leading German center for avant-garde and experimental performances – Volker Beck of the Green Party and Petra Pau of Die Linke (“The Left”) pointed to Blumenthal’s frequent “anti-Semitic” comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel.

The letter, also signed by Reinhold Robbe, a prominent pro-Israel advocate in Germany, explicitly linked the commemoration of the Holocaust with contemporary anti-Semitism, observing that the date of the meeting scheduled for this Sunday, November 9, will mark the 76th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany. The letter asserted that the meeting would allow Blumenthal and his cohort David Sheen, an anti-Zionist activist, “to promote anti-Semitic prejudice by comparing the terror of the Nazis with Israeli policies.” They would do so on the anniversary of an episode “that is recognized as the beginning of the persecution, the deportation, and the killing of over six million European Jews.” The letter introduced itself with a quotation from famed Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw: “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

Gregor Gysi, the leader of Die Linke canceled a discussion with Blumenthal at the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, scheduled for Monday. Gysi reached his decision after Benjamin Weinthal, a Berlin-based journalist and political analyst, presented him with evidence of Blumenthal’s anti-Semitic activities and writings.

Blumenthal visited with some of those Norwegian ‘anti-racists’ in September 2014. Perhaps they were among those who sought to bar Jews attending the Bergen Kristallnacht commemoration. He and his anti-Semite hate colleagues equate Israel with ISIS.

 Our colleague, Nidra Poller chronicled  in a graphic series  of  “Gaza –Israel Dateline Paris Dispatches” posted on the Iconoclast this summer  the ‘lethal narratives’ of “death to the Jews” .   Protests reached the center of Paris  erupting in  fire-bombing attacks  on synagogues, and attacks on  Jews and Jewish owned businesses  in Parisian  suburbs.  All perpetrated  by  rampaging Palestinian supporters, French  Muslim citizens  and  allied leftist groups. They were   demonstrating against ‘genocide’ committed against civilians in Gaza under the draconian control of Muslim Brotherhood affiliate in Palestine, the terrorist group Hamas.

There were the  killings at the Brussels Municipal Jewish Museum of an Israeli couple, and non Jewish workers by a returning French citizen and veteran of ISIS jihad in Syria.   Retired  Professor Raphael Israeil of Hebrew University would call the perpetrator, Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French national of Algerian origin an Islamikaze, because he was motivated by Salafist doctrine to kill Jews.

Manfred Gerstenfeld, former Chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,  in our interview with him  spotlighted what is driving European  Antisemitism, “Anti-Israelism is Anti-Semitism.”  We noted:

Gerstenfled  developed an estimate based on several studies and polls that approximately “150 million Europeans have extreme negative views about Jews and the State of Israel.” In an email exchange, Bat Ye’or suggests that Palestianism is the root of “humanitarian racism.” Note how Bat Ye’or defined Palestinism in our interview with her:

Palestinism is a world policy initiated and imposed by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and its Western allies that aims to transfer to Palestinian Muslims the history, the cultural and religious heritage of the Jewish people. . . . Palestinism encompasses all Western-Muslim relationships.

What occurred in Europe today, the triumph of the fall of the Berlin Wall was marred by extremist riots reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. There were bizarre attempts in Norway to exclude Jews from participating in commemorations because they were “racists”.  The conceit of these anti-Semites, whether nativist or Islamic is moral inversion. Call it anti-Israelism or Palestinism, it depicts  IDF soldiers defending the sovereignty the Jewish nation  as the equivalent of  Nazi storm troopers.

The Nazis  murdered  of Six Million European Jewish , Men , Women and Children in  the Shoah, Hitler’s Final Solution. A final solution whose prelude was Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany 76 years ago today.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld: For every Jewish person in the world, there are 700 anti-Semites

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is the former Chairman of the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs. He is noted author and commentator on European and World anti-Semitism, most recently of  Demonizing Israel and the Jews.  See  our NER  review of Demonizing  and interview with Dr. Gerstenfeld, “Anti-Israelism is Anti-Semitism”.

For every Jewish person in the world, there are 700 anti-Semites. If we put all the anti-Semites together into one country, it would become the third largest nation after China and India. That is the essence of the findings of the new survey of worldwide anti-Semitism just published by the ADL.

The report provides much new information and the ADL should be praised for having undertaken it. The eleven questions asked however only deal with classic anti-Semitism. The newest mutation of anti-Semitism — anti-Israelism – is not included in these polls. This is likely to lead to inaccurate conclusions by the many people not familiar with the fact that anti-Israelism has the same core hate motifs as religious and nationalistic anti-Semitism. The questionnaire used is 50 years old and has been employed for that period by the ADL in the United States. Therefore it does not encompass any necessary questions concerning anti-Israeli attitudes some of which are extreme.

The one question asked which does touch upon Israel is whether people surveyed believe the anti-Semitic stereotype “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries they live in.” With 41%, it has the highest amount of answers that “this is probably true,” of any question asked.

The exclusion of the essential questions about anti-Israelism leads to a very misleading positive view of Europe. The 2011 survey by the University of Bielefeld asked whether people surveyed agree with the statement that Israel “is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” It was undertaken in 7 countries, of which its population accounts for more than half of the European Union’s citizens. Forty-three percent of those surveyed answered in the affirmative expressing an extreme anti-Semitic attitude concerning Israel.

In the near future, more detailed analyses of the ADL survey will be made. One finding which stands out is that in Middle Eastern and North African countries, 74% of people polled agree with a majority of the anti-Semitic stereotypes. This further confirms that the massive, non-selective immigration of Muslims into the European Union was the most negative post-war event for the Jewish communities there. I have described this phenomenon in the past as state anti-Semitism. European governments knowingly let in, in a non-selective way, a huge number of people who were raised in racist, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic Muslim countries.

Click here to read the ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review. The featured photo is by Hans Arne Vedlog of Dagbladet Nyheter.