Tag Archive for: Simon Wiesenthal Center

Hamas-Linked CAIR to be Named Among Wiesenthal Center’s Top Global Anti-Semites

At last, the truth about this sinister and destructive organization is coming out.

Report: CAIR to be Named Among Wiesenthal Center’s Top Global Anti-Semites

IPT News, December 27, 2021:

The Simon Wiesenthal Center plans to unveil its list of the world’s top 10 anti-Semites during a news conference Tuesday morning. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) will be named alongside the Hamas terrorist group and its patron, the Iranian government, The Algemeiner reported Monday afternoon.

The three share one overarching goal – the elimination of Israel.

Iranian regime officials have said it for years. Hamas put it in its anti-Semitic charter. And top CAIR officials repeatedly have said they do not believe the Jewish state has a right to exist. CAIR co-founder and Executive Director Nihad Awad called Tel Aviv “occupied” in a speech last month, praying that, “inshallah [God willing], it will be free later.”

CAIR officials also repeatedly equated Israel’s military, the IDF, to ISIS terrorists, vilified “Israel [and] its supporters” as the “enemies of God and humanity,” and pushed anti-Semitic conspiracies linking programs which take American police leaders to Israel lead to “deadly police shootings” of Black people in America.

Recent remarks by CAIR’s San Francisco chapter director Zahra Billoo cemented CAIR’s place on the Wiesenthal Center list, The Algemeiner reported. Billoo told an American Muslims for Palestine conference that “polite Zionists,” which she defined as everything from the Anti-Defamation League to campus Hillels and “Zionist synagogues,” are “enemies” who “we need to pay attention to.”

CAIR defended Billoo, who announced last week that she was taking a sabbatical, in the wake of resulting criticism of her comments. CAIR said it was proud of “the courage she demonstrates in her civil rights work” and condemned what it called an “online smear campaign against our sister and colleague, Zahra Billoo.”

CAIR claims to be a civil rights group, Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper told The Algemeiner, but a statement “made by a top official at CAIR is openly anti-Semitic and the support given to her by CAIR helps mainstream Jew-hatred in the US.”

“Billoo is but one of venomous professional Israel and Jew-haters who use non-existent dots to create phony links between Israel and US social crises,” the Wiesenthal Center told The Algemeiner. “They always wrap their bigotry in the mantle of social justice. The goal is demonizing the Jewish state and silencing Israel’s supporters on campus and Capitol Hill.”

Among its missions, the Wiesenthal Center “confronts anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism, promotes human rights and dignity, stands with Israel, defends the safety of Jews worldwide, and teaches the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations.”

The Wiesenthal Center designation comes as CAIR has tried to smear the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) as an “anti-Muslim hate group,” a phrase repeatedly parroted by mainstream news outlets including the Washington Post and Columbus Dispatch. CAIR also tries to smear IPT Executive Director Steven Emerson with an anti-Semitic “dual loyalty” accusation, falsely claiming he “collaborated with Israeli intelligence.”

In a statement given to news outlets, the IPT said that “Neither Mr. Emerson nor the IPT has ever worked at the direction of any government, foreign or domestic; and has never received any funding from any government, foreign or domestic. Nor have Emerson or IPT ever coordinated any activities whatsoever with any foreign government; any such allegations are false and defamatory.”…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

FLORIDA: Pensacola’s 101 Year Old Opera Maven and Holocaust Sleuth

A few weeks ago I received a phone call from a venerable Pensacola friend and B’nai Israel Synagogue member.  She is an independent 101 year old vibrant and well read woman. Last year, there was a wonderful celebration on her attainment of a hallmark as one of the community’s centenarians. She is revered by our congregation and the general community because of her leadership in helping to found a regional feeding program as well as enthusiastic supporter of the construction of a much needed new Public Library. She is also an opera maven and as we will shortly see, a holocaust sleuth. All of which figure in the premiere of a  holocaust theme opera, Out of Darkness by the Pensacola Opera to be performed at the Opera Center March 31st, April 1st to 3rd. A special performance of Out of Darkness is scheduled at Temple Beth El in Pensacola on April 17th.

The message she left bubbled over with compliments for the beautiful performance of a recent production of the Merry Widow by the Pensacola Opera that her visiting daughter and son in law took her to watch. They brought her the following  day to the Pensacola Library to listen to the Pensacola Opera Artists in Residence (AIRs) perform Jack and the Beanstalk before an audience of over 100 children. When one of the Opera staff found out that was her 101st birthday, the AIRs and the children saluted her with a rousing rendition of happy birthday.

There is a fascinating story relayed to me by the wife of a fellow Opera trustee who volunteers as head of the Library bookstore. It concerns the discovery in September 2008 of a Holocaust era onionskin Nazi era German Army telephone directory from occupied Paris in 1942.  My Opera colleague’s wife, then President of the West Florida Library Board, and library volunteers were sorting donations of books and magazines in September 2008 when a hand-bound 96 page booklet Nazi relic was discovered in a brown paper bag of women’s magazines contributed anonymously.  The original onionskin telephone directory was sent by the Friends of the Pensacola Library to the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) were it was authenticated.  The title to the Wehrmacht  directory in wartime Paris was officially transferred  by the Friends of the Pensacola Public Library to the SWC’s Archives at the Museum of Tolerance in January 2009 as a gift and given the Archives accession number #2008-065.  Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the SWC commented:

The Nazis occupied Europe through force of arms and there were many incidents of the Wehrmacht’s direct involvement in atrocities. The directory reflects how meticulously everything related to the Nazi Third Reich was organized and recorded.

Pictures of Cover and Sample page from 1942 Wehrmacht Paris Directory

Pictures of Cover and Sample page from 1942 Wehrmacht Paris Directory. Source: Friends of the Pensacola Public Library.

There was a Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Ha Shoah) special event held on April 21, 2009 at the Pensacola Library. The event was held to celebrate finding the Nazi era relic and remembering the more than 72,500 French Jews, out of a pre-war population of 350,000, who were deported and murdered in Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.  Copies of the German Army 1942 Paris telephone directory were displayed at the reception.

There was a missing page in the display copy. Enter my venerable friend then in her 90’s. She told the volunteer head of the Library bookstore that years earlier there was a article about a German family living in the vicinity. My venerable friend who had kept the article presented it to the library bookstore volunteer.

?

Source: Andy Marlette Pensacola News Journal 2009.

In commemoration of the discovery of the Nazi relic on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2009, Andy Marlette, editorial cartoonist at the Pensacola News Journal drew a cartoon depicting the Nazi relic against the backdrop of former Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei. They sponsored annual holocaust denial conferences in Tehran espousing “wiping the Zionist enterprise, meaning the Jewish nation of Israel, off the map of the world.”

The Pensacola Opera premiere of Out of Darkness is a work by acclaimed American contemporary composer Jake Heggie. The opera was composed in three separate movements; “Another Sunrise,” “Farewell Auschwitz” and “For a Look or a Touch.”

The first two movements are based on the poetry and writings of a remarkable Jewish woman survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Auschwitz, Sonia Landau, who took the nom de guerre Krystyna Zywulska as a member of Polish resistance. Landau/Zywulska was captured by the Nazis, imprisoned in Warsaw and then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  She wrote about her experiences in two books, I Survived Auschwitz (1946) and Empty Water (1966), the later about her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto. She and her family were displaced from Lodz to Warsaw in 1941, spending two years in the Ghetto before her escape to the ‘Aryan side’.   She remained in post war Poland, continued writing poetry and children stories. With the rise of anti-Semitism during the Communist Gomulka regime, post- the 1967 June War in Israel, she and other Jewish intellectuals found themselves deprived of state auspices.  Her writings were expunged from official bibliographies. She left for West Germany where she died in 1992 in Dusseldorf.

The premiere of Out of Darkness will be performed by the talented AIRs of the Pensacola Opera; soprano Allison Nicholas as “Krystyna”, mezzo soprano Amanda Fink, baritone Thaddeus Ennen, and tenor Nicholas DeMeo.

We hope that  our venerable  centenarian  opera maven and holocaust  sleuth will attend  Out of Darkness , as we know the Pensacola library volunteer and her husband, a fellow Opera trustee , and perhaps Andy Marlette the PNJ  cartoonist, will as well.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally  appeared in the New English Review. The author is a Member of B’nai Israel Synagogue and a Trustee of the Pensacola Opera.