The Attack in France: Editorial, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 20, 2017 — Three days ahead of the first round of France’s presidential election, terrorism has intervened.
French Jews are Worried About Le Pen. Now Another Presidential Candidate Scares Them, Too.: Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA, Apr. 20, 2017 — Even before the communist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon emerged as a serious contender for the presidency in France, the elections were shaping up to be a fateful moment for the country’s 500,000 Jews.
Will Britain’s Labour Lose the Jews Again in 7 Weeks?: Robert Philpot, Times of Israel, Apr. 19, 2017 — With Holocaust Remembrance Day approaching a fundamental question that is frequently asked is how relevant will the Holocaust be in society once almost all of the remaining witnesses – nowadays mainly child survivors – have passed away?
A Broad Look at Survivors: Manfred Gerstenfeld, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 20, 2017— Ever since the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka “the Iran Deal”) was agreed to in the summer of 2015, Iran has become empowered both militarily and economically.
French Jews Fear Extremists on Right and Left, But Have No Favorite in Sunday’s First Round of Presidential Election: Barney Breen-Portnoy, Algemeiner, Apr. 19, 2017
Le Pen and the Rise of French Extremism: Max Boot, Commentary, Apr. 13, 2017
France's War to Delegitimize Israel: Yves Mamou, Gatestone Institute, Apr. 12, 2017
“Welcome to Europe’s 4 Capitals of Anti-Semitism": Giulio Meotti, Arutz Sheva, Apr. 18, 2017
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, Apr. 20, 2017
Three days ahead of the first round of France’s presidential election, terrorism has intervened. A gunman with an automatic rifle jumped from a car on the Champs-Élysée Thursday evening and poured bullets into a police car, killing one officer. Islamic State has claimed responsibility.
This event puts extraordinary pressure on a French electorate already trying to sort through difficult decisions about its vote on Sunday. Conventional political wisdom would hold that the assault will benefit far-right candidate Marine Le Pen because last-minute events of this magnitude can influence voter sentiment, and Ms. Le Pen is running hard on the idea that France is under assault from Arab immigrants. In recent debates she has proposed that France suspend all legal immigration into the country.
The shooting may well tip sentiment in Ms. Le Pen’s direction, but at least two of her three opponents—conservative François Fillon and center-left Emmanuel Macron —have run on strong antiterror platforms. They have also run hard on the widespread sense of economic torpor among the French people. As we saw in the U.K.’s Brexit vote and the U.S. election last year, the sense of dimming economic opportunity is a potent political force. Polls indicate that is French voters’ number one concern.
Whatever the immediate effect of Thursday’s shooting in the heart of Paris, there is no avoiding the blunt reality at the heart of France’s momentous election, which is the general sense among the population that the nation’s elites—in politics and the French media—have become disconnected from the realities of the nation’s problems. It will be a pity if one shooting tips Sunday’s results, but it would not be a surprise.
FRENCH JEWS ARE WORRIED ABOUT LE PEN.
NOW ANOTHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE SCARES THEM, TOO.
Cnaan Liphshiz
JTA, Apr. 20, 2017
Even before the communist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon emerged as a serious contender for the presidency in France, the elections were shaping up to be a fateful moment for the country’s 500,000 Jews. Many of them are deeply worried about the rise in the polls of Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front party, with its xenophobic policies and anti-Semitic roots. Some French Jews vowed to leave France should Le Pen win — she was leading the polls for weeks ahead of the first round of the elections on April 23 and the final one on May 7.
With the meteoric rise of Melenchon, an anti-Israel lawmaker with a record of statements deemed anti-Semitic, French Jews now feel caught in a vice between two extremes. Melenchon climbed to third place in the polls, with approximately 20 percent of the vote this month, from fifth with 9 percent in February. “I don’t see any significant difference between Melenchon and the National Front on many issues,” Joann Sfar, a well-known French-Jewish novelist and filmmaker who used to support communist causes, wrote last week on Facebook. Both are “surrounded by Germanophobes, nationalists and France firsters.” Sfar’s post triggered a torrent of anti-Semitic statements about him on social networks.
Le Pen, whose father, Jean-Marie — a Holocaust denier and inciter of racial hate against Jews who founded the party his daughter now leads — recently said France “was not responsible” for the murder of Jews whom French police helped round up for the Nazis. She has also vowed to ban kippahs and the right of French citizens to have an Israeli passport – prohibitions she said were necessary to enforce similar limitations on Muslims.
CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, has also equated Melenchon with Le Pen. “They both traffic in hatred, and they are both a danger to democracy,” CRIF President Francis Kalifat told JTA last month, adding that his group shuns all contact with both politicians. Melenchon, 65, a former Socialist deputy minister, was born to Spanish parents in what today is Morocco. He supports a blanket boycott of Israel. True to his populist oratory style, has said that allowing Israel to keep even some West Bank settlements “is like letting bank robbers keep the money.”
His fiery rhetoric in speeches and quick comebacks in recent television debates have helped the surge in Melenchon’s numbers following the establishment of his Unsubmissive France movement in February. So has his opposition to the increasingly unpopular European Union and to budget cuts designed to jump-start France’s stagnant economy. He is appealing to the poor with promises to increase welfare, promising the money will come from new markets that he seeks to open by improving relations with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and oil-rich socialist countries in South America.
These policies and his remarks have alienated many Jews, as did Melenchon’s assertion in 2013 that a Jewish Socialist politician, Pierre Moscovici, “thinks in international finances, not in French” – a statement critics said was anti-Semitic. (Melenchon denied the charge.) But it was only after a speech that Melenchon delivered in August 2014 that leaders of French Jewry flagged him as a public enemy.
Speaking in Grenoble less than a month after nine synagogues were attacked amid a wave of violent and unauthorized protests against Israel over its war with Hamas in Gaza that summer, Melenchon praised the protesters. He also condemned French Jews for expressing solidarity with Israel in a support rally in front of its embassy. “I want to congratulate the youth of my country who mobilized in defense of the miserable victims of war crimes in Gaza,” Melenchon said in the speech at a general assembly of his Left Party. “They did so with model discipline when they were pushed to extremes on all sides. They knew how to remain dignified and embodied better than anyone the founding values of the French republic.”
Melenchon did not mention the synagogue attacks and the wave of anti-Semitic assaults that followed the protests. But he did go on to criticize thousands of French Jews over their support for Israel. “If we have anything to condemn, then it is the actions of citizens who decided to rally in front of the embassy of a foreign country or serve its flag, weapon in hand,” he said.
Melenchon also said: “We do not believe that any people is superior to another” — a statement some of his critics took as an allusion to the Torah’s designation of Jews as the “chosen people.” He also accused CRIF of attempting to label him an anti-Semite in order to discredit his criticism of Israel. “We’ve had enough of CRIF,” Melenchon said, shouting. “France is the opposite of aggressive communities that lecture to the rest of country.”
Recalling these and other remarks, François Heilbronn, a well-known scholar of political science, recently wrote in an op-ed that he will vote neither for Le Pen, whom he called a successor of those who collaborated with the Nazis, “nor for those who encouraged the pogromists and anti-Semites” in 2014, referring to Melenchon. “Vote to keep out of power those two candidates of hatred for democrats, modernity and liberty.” Bernard-Henri Levy, a left-leaning French Jewish intellectual, also drew parallels between Le Pen and Melenchon, whom Levy said “unfortunately often [has the same] anti-democratic radicalism, anti-Zionist, pro-Assad and pro-Putin attitudes” as Le Pen, he wrote Sunday on Twitter.
Levy has endorsed Emmanuel Macron, a centrist candidate and former banker at the prestigious Rothschild investment house. Macron is leading in the polls ahead of the first round with approximately 23 percent of the vote, slightly ahead of Le Pen. The Republican candidate Francois Fillon, whose campaign has suffered because of his recent indictment on corruption charges, and Melenchon are each drawing 18-20 percent in the polls. Whoever wins the first round Sunday will run against the second-place candidate in the final round.
Surprisingly, it’s not just the Jews who are finding equivalence between Melenchon and Le Pen. The comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, who has multiple convictions for Holocaust denial and incitement against Jews, thinks the far-right and far-left politicians are both standing up against Jewish and outside influence. “Some say it’s a faceoff between the real right and the real left,” Dieudonne said about Le Pen and Melenchon in a video he posted Tuesday and which has been viewed more than 160,000 times. “I say it’s the real France that will fight the France of Rothschild and of Qatar that finances terrorism and war in the world.” Le Pen and Melenchon, he said, “are the candidates of peace.”
WILL BRITAIN’S LABOUR LOSE THE JEWS AGAIN IN 7 WEEKS?
Robert Philpot
Times of Israel, Apr. 19, 2017
For Britain’s battered Labour party, there will be a particularly cruel irony in the fact that the formal start to the country’s general election campaign in two weeks’ time will come almost 20 years to the day after Tony Blair’s historic victory on May 1, 1997.
Labour’s landslide win two decades ago turned the country’s political map red as scores of constituencies which had been solidly Conservative for decades fell into Blair’s lap. One of the most symbolic gains came in Finchley in northeast London — a seat which Margaret Thatcher had represented in parliament for over 30 years and where around 20 percent of voters — the highest concentration in the country — are Jewish. Blair’s victory in Finchley mirrored wins in a string of other seats with a comparatively sizeable Jewish presence, few of which are natural Labour territory. With the opinion polls suggesting that Prime Minister Theresa May will inflict a crushing defeat on Labour when the country votes on June 8, it is probably safe to predict that Finchley and Golders Green will remain in Conservative hands.
As in 1997, though, the “Jewish vote” will prove an excellent barometer as to which party has captured the center ground on which Britain’s general elections are won and lost. Moreover, while the Jewish community’s relatively small size limits its electoral potency, its voters are nonetheless clustered in a handful of marginal seats: Hove, Hendon, Brent Central, Harrow East, Harrow West, Ilford North, Hornsey and Wood Green, Hampstead and Kilburn. And, then there are of course, Finchley and Golders Green, which are traditionally on the general election front line.
American Jews have remained, alongside African-Americans, one of the Democratic party’s most loyal constituencies. This historic party loyalty prompted essayist Milton Himmelfarb to quip that “Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Britain’s Jews, however, have long since become detached from their traditional moorings on the political left.
Concentrated in the East End of London and similar inner-city parts of Leeds, Manchester and nearby Salford, Jewish immigrants to Britain in the early 20th century were, like other working-class voters, naturally drawn to the Labour party. When Labour won its first parliamentary majority under Clement Attlee in the 1945 general election, seats with large Jewish populations voted overwhelmingly for the party. But, beneath the surface, British Jewry was already undergoing significant demographic shifts. As they joined the ranks of the middle-classes, Jews moved out of the inner-cities to the Tory-voting suburbs and old political allegiances began to loosen.
These socioeconomic factors were overlaid and complicated by Britain’s relationship with Israel. The Attlee government’s betrayal of the Zionist cause which Labour had hitherto steadfastly advocated, coupled with Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s notorious hostility to the young Jewish state, angered and offended many British Jews. So, too, did the party’s stance during the Suez crisis in 1956 when Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell compared Britain’s actions to someone helping “the burglar [Israel] shoot the householder [Egypt].” But, in its greatest hour of need in October 1973, it was Labour who was to prove the Jewish state’s better friend, attacking Edward Heath’s government for imposing an arms embargo on both sides and urging solidarity with “democratic socialist” Israel.
A few months later, the country went to the polls. Where their votes counted, Jewish voters punished Conservative MPs who had backed the government’s stance and rewarded those who had rebelled against it. Indeed, Labour has provided three of Britain’s most pro-Israeli prime ministers of the past four decades: Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Nonetheless, Labour has too often forced Jews who might naturally vote for it to choose between their party and their support for Israel in a manner that the American Democratic party has never done. The US “kosher vote” has remained steadfastly loyal, in part, because the Democratic party has never succumbed to the virulent hostility to Israel which became fashionable in some sections of the European left during the 1970s. That tide of anti-Zionism swept over Labour in the early 1980s when, in the wake of Thatcher’s election in
Labour’s lurch to the left extended well beyond the arena of foreign policy in general and Israel in particular. Given the overwhelmingly middle-class nature of the Jewish electorate, the party’s newfound radicalism on economic and social policy would regardless have alienated many Jews who had previously voted for it it, as it did with millions of other Britons. But difficulties for Labour in the community were compounded by the fact that virulent opposition to Israel was one of the hallmarks of the hard left, while attacks on the Jewish state became a mainstay of debates in many local parties.
The principal beneficiary of these developments was Thatcher. As polling by Prof. Geoffrey Alderman indicates, in northeast and northwest London, Jewish electoral behavior was significantly different from that of other voters in these areas — almost always, Jews were more likely to vote Conservative and less likely to vote Labour. In 1987, as she headed towards a then-record three consecutive general election victories, Thatcher captured the votes of six out of 10 of Finchley’s Jews; a share six points higher than that of other middle-class professionals in the seat. When Britain swung back to Labour 10 years later, however, constituencies with large Jewish populations fell to the party with greater than average swings.
Of course, Jewish voters do not vote on the single issue of Israel. Blair may, as one former aide put it, have purged his party of its “anti-Israelism,” but his commitment to education, emphasis on the values of community and reciprocal responsibility, and desire to rid Labour of its knee-jerk hostility to entrepreneurialism, all resonated with many Jews…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link]
Manfred Gerstenfeld
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 20, 2017
With Holocaust Remembrance Day approaching a fundamental question that is frequently asked is how relevant will the Holocaust be in society once almost all of the remaining witnesses – nowadays mainly child survivors – have passed away? Elie Wiesel said that as the second generation listens to witness testimony, they become the witnesses. This raises another question: Are some memories of child survivors actually experiences they lived through, or rather things they heard? The issue of Holocaust testimonies becomes more relevant as the use of “Hitler” and “Nazi” in name calling becomes increasingly common. Such insults to draw attention are now mainstream and are even used by national leaders. Three Mexican presidents, including the current one, Enrique Peña Nieto, compared Trump to Hitler.
At the state level, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the prime producer of such insults. He asserted that he does not know whether Israel or Hitler is more barbarous. Erdogan also called the Netherlands “Nazi remnants.” His use of such false moral equivalence is so frequent that The Atlantic devoted an entire article to Erdogan’s statements of this kind.
Yet when discussing all aspects of what might be called “the survivor issue,” many more questions need to be asked. For instance, what additional relevant information can survivors still provide and in what areas? The answer includes memories of the reception survivors received upon returning to the societies they fled or were deported from. Much has been published about the most extreme negative events. The best known may be the 1946 Kielce Pogrom in Poland, where Polish soldiers and police officers killed 42 Jews and wounded 40. There is a great deal more, much of it negative, but also a substantial number of positive experiences.
Another important issue concerns post-war migration. The big questions for survivors included whether to try to return to where they lived before the persecutions or attempt to start anew elsewhere. The help of some US Army rabbis and others who assisted in illegal emigration to Palestine is an interesting aspect of postwar migration about which more may be told.
Another survivor-related issue of importance is the reestablishment of Jewish communities and various organizations in formerly occupied countries. This is often a story of incredible perseverance. Part of my research concerns a small field, namely, the establishment of post-war Jewish youth movements in the Netherlands. In recording their stories one gets a view of the resilience of youngsters coming out of hiding or even returning from the camps. In addition, the role played in the initial post-war months by soldiers of the Jewish Brigade is memorable. The first post-war circumcision in the Netherlands was carried out by an American rabbi. It has also been documented that in some French cities US Army rabbis assisted in reestablishing communities.
The efforts of survivors to recover their stolen assets is another important topic about which many more personal experiences need to be recorded. To some extent payments were made for suffering during the war. German payments play a dominant role but there are many other cases of restitution. In 2014, the French state railways agreed to pay $60 million to survivors who were transported to German concentration camps. More than 70 years after the war the restitution issue has yet to be concluded, primarily in Eastern Europe.
It has been suggested that the experiences of hidden children navigating between their foster and real parents after the war can be considered a precursor of experiences in contemporary society. The complex relations of children with divorced parents and step-parents has become a life experience for many. How Holocaust survivors coped with their wartime experiences can also serve those who have survived other genocides. A meeting 20 years ago with survivors from the Rwanda killings ago remains unforgettable. They were grappling with many questions that Holocaust survivors are familiar with. Some of the Rwanda survivors’ realities are even worse: They live in townships next door to the murderers of their families.
A very different set of issues concerns medical, psychological and social aspects. Certain illnesses appear more among Holocaust survivors than other groups. It is now known that they have a greater likelihood of osteoporosis, dental problems, impaired vision, and heart issues from prolonged malnutrition in childhood and early adulthood. There is a need for further research on the transmission of survivors’ Holocaust traumas to the next generation. In the field of epigenetics, there are claims that some children of survivors show marked changes in their chromosomes which are the result of the experiences and traumas of their parents. This issue of epigenetic transmission remains controversial.
There are many other potential research projects as well. One concerns the contribution of survivors to their post-war societies. Another should deal with the history and role of organizations that assisted survivors. In terms of the academic debate about what has the most effect on a person’s life, nature or nurture, i.e., genetics or life experiences, nurture has usually been the dominant factor for Holocaust survivors. All the above and much more indicates that a broad analysis of subjects relating to survivors should be undertaken, and this should be done well before they are no longer with us.
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French Jews Fear Extremists on Right and Left, But Have No Favorite in Sunday’s First Round of Presidential Election: Barney Breen-Portnoy, Algemeiner, Apr. 19, 2017—French Jews are apprehensive and have no favorite candidate among the 11 running in the first round of their country’s presidential election on Sunday, a number of community figures told The Algemeiner this week.
Le Pen and the Rise of French Extremism: Max Boot, Commentary, Apr. 13, 2017 — French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has tried hard to shed the anti-Semitic baggage of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front party, who once called the Holocaust a “detail of history.”
France's War to Delegitimize Israel: Yves Mamou, Gatestone Institute, Apr. 12, 2017—Officially, France prohibits any form of boycott against Israel. In 2015, the Court of Cassation confirmed a 2013 decision regarding the illegality of boycotts and the call for boycotts in France. Under the law, in 2013, BDS France was fined €28,000 (USD $30,000) by a local French court, after a call made in 2010 by 14 activists to boycott Israeli products in a supermarket. In addition, each of the 14 activists was fined €1,000.
“Welcome to Europe’s 4 Capitals of Anti-Semitism": Giulio Meotti, Arutz Sheva, Apr. 18, 2017—If I wrote from the point of view of my personal interest as a non Jew, I would tell Europe’s Jews: stay here, on our side, because your departure would bring irreparable harm. If I look at what better serves the interests of the Jews, it would not be so unthinkable to advise them to pack and leave for Israel, as thousands are doing every year.
