We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication.
UK Election Results: Another Term for Israel-Friendly Conservative Government: Alina Dain Sharon, Algemeiner, May 8, 2015 — U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party defeated its most formidable rival, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party, in the May 7 British election.
Will the EU’s Representative at the Global Forum on Combating Anti-Semitism Confess the Truth?: Manfred Gerstenfeld, CIJR, May 4, 2015— The fifth Global Forum on Combating Anti-Semitism will begin on May 12th in Jerusalem.
Taking Jihad to School – French Programs Emphasize Secularism: Abigail R. Esman, IPT, Apr. 22, 2015 — On a street in Paris's popular 6th Arrondissement, men in camouflage wielding Famas assault rifles patiently stand guard throughout the day.
From Buchenwald to Europe: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2015— In the early spring of 1944 a political prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp penned a letter to his wife, Käthe, in Hamburg.
George Galloway and the "Vile Zionist Hyenas": IPT News, May 8, 2015
European Antisemitism Driving Jews Away From Jewish Life, Says Leading Rabbi (INTERVIEW): Eliezer Sherman, Algemeiner, May 12, 2015
Study Exposes the Ugly Depth of European Muslim Anti-Semitism: Abigail R. Esman, IPT, May 12, 2015
Russia’s Secret Army in Ukraine: Globe & Mail, May 12, 2015
ANOTHER TERM FOR ISRAEL-FRIENDLY CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT
Alina Dain Sharon
Algemeiner, May 8, 2015
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party defeated its most formidable rival, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party, in the May 7 British election. The Conservative Party garnered 331 parliament seats, five more than what was needed for a majority in the House of Commons. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently established his own government coalition in the Jewish state, congratulated Cameron on his re-election, stating on Twitter that he looks forward to working with Cameron “on shared goals of peace & prosperity.”
Like the British electorate at large, British Jews likely overwhelmingly supported the Conservative Party, fulfilling the predictions of just one of many British election polls prior to May 7. The poll, conducted by London’s Jewish Chronicle newspaper last month, showed that 69 percent of Jewish voters planned to support the Conservative Party, compared to 22 percent for Labour.
While Miliband’s Jewish background might have created a sense of affinity for some Jewish voters, Miliband has also been heavily criticized for Labour’s stances on Israel, including introducing non-binding legislation last year calling on the U.K. to recognize Palestinian statehood. The British parliament then voted symbolically, 274-12, in favor of requesting that the U.K. recognize a unilaterally established Palestinian state. Miliband also said he would support the recognition of a Palestinian state. “Ed Miliband is not generally felt to be a reliable supporter of Israel by Jewish British voters we (the Anglo-Jewish Association) have spoken to. In contrast, the Conservatives have been solid supporters of Israel, though not blindly,” Jonathan Walker, president of the U.K.-based Anglo-Jewish Association, recently told JNS.org…
Since the results of the election have become known, Miliband resigned from his post as Labour leader, as did other party leaders, including the U.K. Independence Party’s (UKIP) Nigel Farage. UKIP, which advocates for the U.K. to leave the European Union and reduce immigration, and has been accused of racism, particularly against Muslims, has been left with only one seat in the parliament despite appearing to have support from 13 percent of U.K. voters, according to pre-election polls. UKIP also presents a conundrum for Jewish voters. A YouGov poll showed that UKIP voters were more likely to agree with antisemitic statements than Conservative and Labour voters, but UKIP voters also showed the highest proportion of pro-Israel views in a different YouGov survey that focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Many pundits predicted a major political upheaval in the U.K. given the growth in popularity of smaller political parties such as UKIP prior to the election. It has not turned out that way. Based on comments by Cameron, the prime minister and his party are likely to continue to be somewhat more supportive of Israel and more hostile to antisemitism in Britain than other parties and their leaders. The party is also likely to have a better relationship with Netanyahu’s right-leaning government coalition than Labour would have. One party that did receive a surge of seats in the parliament might express more opposition to Israel. The Scottish Independent Party (SNP) reportedly gained 50 seats. SNP is the third-largest party in the House of Commons. Its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, recently called for the next U.K. government “to pursue a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and to support the formal recognition of a Palestinian state.”
WILL THE EU’S REPRESENTATIVE AT THE GLOBAL FORUM ON
COMBATING ANTI-SEMITISM CONFESS THE TRUTH?
Manfred Gerstenfeld
CIJR, May 4, 2015
The fifth Global Forum on Combating Anti-Semitism will begin on May 12th in Jerusalem. The Israeli government ministries who have organized the event have invited the First Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans – a Dutchman – to speak at its opening session. In view of the discriminatory attitudes Timmermans, the Dutch Labor party he belongs to and the EU hold toward Israel, I suggest that he includes the following in his lecture, in order to clear things up.
“I am very glad to have been invited to this Global Forum. It is a unique occasion to finally confess and declare the truth about European discrimination against Israel and about European anti-Semitism. I would also like to mention the indirect support my own party, the Dutch Labor Party, gives to the Islamo-Nazis of Hamas, and apologize for my prejudice regarding Israel…Europe has a horrible, murderous past concerning the Jewish people, which goes back many centuries. I recently mentioned that on Dutch television. It boils down to the fact that anti-Semitism is part of Europe’s history as well as part of its culture. After the Second World War, many naïve people thought that Europe had learned its lesson from the Holocaust. They were fools.
“Various studies show that more than 40% of Europeans believe that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians. If so many Europeans have such extreme and hateful opinions about Israel, it means that a large part of the EU has a criminal mindset. When I speak here today, I represent the EU, and thus I also represent the EU’s many repulsive anti-Semites. In other words, I also speak here on behalf of at least 150 million Europeans, aged over 16 years, who hold criminal and anti-Semitic views, this time against Israel. This is so scandalous that it is hard to believe. I wonder how much the European Union, the politicians of our member countries, many media, trade unions, NGOs, churches and so on have contributed to the development of this criminal stereotyping.
“I have always prided myself in being more intelligent than most politicians. I am a suave diplomat and speak many languages. In order to maintain this image, I have often managed to manipulate the truth in such a manner that my motives aren’t too transparent. “That is why I admitted, during a recent interview, what many European politicians, who are not as smart, continue to deny. I said that behind anti-Zionism there is often anti-Semitism. I spoke also about Greek racism and mentioned that it comes from the extreme right. People did not notice that I purposely neglected to specify which part of the population generates a disproportionately large number of the worst anti-Semitic incidents in Europe. We all know who is responsible, but do not want to say it loudly: parts of the Muslim communities. The EU countries let in a vast number of immigrants without implementing much of a screening process, even though we knew that many came from the most anti-Semitic countries in the world.
“When I became an EU commissioner, I came across a letter from Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He had written to the President of the European Parliament, Mr. Martin Schulz, about Europe’s anti-Israelism. The latter’s answer did not suggest any concrete actions and contained nothing but rhetoric. Mrs. Nina Rosenwald, president of The Gatestone Institute, wrote on the same subject to the previous president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. The official who answered on his behalf the letter avoided addressing the issue, as well.
“Foreign ministers of eighteen EU countries want to label goods as originating from the West Bank to distinguish them from products originating within pre-1967 Israel. Among them is my successor as Dutch foreign minister, Bert Koenders, who is also a member of the Labor Party. The EU also says that it is forbidden for the EU to invest in occupied territories. We have never seriously debated with Israel why the West Bank is considered to be occupied, rather than disputed territory. One thing is sure, however: the EU invests in Turkish northern Cyprus, which is certainly occupied territory.
“That brings me to the notion of double standards, a manipulation which has been at the heart of anti-Semitism for centuries. In December 2013, I spoke at the University of Tel Aviv about Israeli-European relations. It is a touchy subject to handle, if you choose to speak truthfully about it. I thus preferred to speak at length about the grave of a Jewish soldier, lying in a military cemetery in the Netherlands, which my family has chosen to adopt. I also spoke for quite some time about Jews who had been hidden during the war in a house my family has acquired. It had nothing to do with Israeli-European relations, yet as long you focus sympathetically on dead Jews, you cannot go wrong with a Jewish audience.
“It would have been stupid to deny that Europe applies double standards with regard to Israel. According to the European definition of anti-Semitism, double standards are considered anti-Semitic. Therefore, we have now removed the European definition of anti-Semitism from our websites. We cannot afford to be anti-Semites as per our own definition.
“I admitted in that speech at Tel Aviv University that Europe does apply double standards against Israel. I tried to explain it away by claiming that we see Israelis as being like Europeans, and thus expect more from them than we do from the Palestinians and other Arabs. Them we don’t rate according to European standards. It might not have been the smartest thing to do, because afterwards people mentioned that I had spoken like the old colonialist racists, who claimed European superiority over other peoples. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights however, says that all people are endowed with reason and conscience. That means that they are equally responsible for their actions. Europe doesn’t believe this applies to the Palestinians, which is why we whitewash their criminality and genocidal intentions. I thus have to admit that my statement in Tel Aviv about double standards had a racist element.
“The aforementioned must be seen against the background of the policies held by my party, the Dutch Labor party. Our party program mentions the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We omit mentioning Hamas, however, and the fact that the Palestinians have preferred, as evident in their sole democratic parliamentary elections, these Islamo-Nazis above all others. Hamas wants to exterminate all Jews, as explicitly stated in its public charter, in order to please Allah. If you remain silent about a contemporary type of Nazism and attack the Israelis, you are an indirect supporter of these Nazis. That is exactly what my party does. We all know that one of the reasons we do so is because we are interested in obtaining more Muslim votes. Our party leader, Diederik Samsom, is a main inciter against Israel. ..
[To Read the Full Article With Footnotes Click the Following Link—Ed.]
FRENCH PROGRAMS EMPHASIZE SECULARISM
Abigail R. Esman
IPT, Apr. 22, 2015
On a street in Paris's popular 6th Arrondissement, men in camouflage wielding Famas assault rifles patiently stand guard throughout the day. It is an unexpected sight amidst the chic designer boutiques and crowded restaurants, but one a hotel attendant nearby explains with a knowing glance: the building they guard houses an organization for Jews. This is life now in Paris after the terrorist attacks that took 17 lives in January – including four Jews, massacred at the kosher Hyper Cacher market in the hours before the Sabbath. And it isn't only here: in the Marais, long known for its Jewish population, a heavily-armed military presence has become commonplace, as France's government struggles to protect its Jews – and the rest of its population – from the murderous violence of Islamic terrorism in its streets.
Fear of impending terrorist attacks has gripped most of Europe since the outbreak of war in Syria, and particularly since the rise of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS). Of the several thousand European Muslims who have joined the IS and other jihadist groups there, hundreds have died in battle. But hundreds more have returned home, and of these, dozens have been arrested for planning to wage domestic attacks in Europe. (Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman in the Hyper Cacher attacks, did not join the jihad in Syria, but did pledge his allegiance to the Islamic State before the killings.)
In response, European officials have wrestled to find solutions to the threat, both punitive and preventive – from immediate imprisonment of those who return from Syria and Iraq to confiscating the passports of those suspected of planning to join the IS and its jihad. But France is now instituting an additional approach, recognizing that the "war on terror" – and especially the war against Islamic terrorism – is not merely a traditional fight about nations and territory and power. It is a war about ideology. And so it cannot be fought, or won, simply with bombs and armies, with Kalashnikovs and beheadings and the capturing of combatants, but with ideas and propaganda and the capturing of minds.
Since 2012, for instance, the Catholic University of Lyon has offered classes on secularism for imams and other Muslims working in the civic sphere. In the wake of the January attacks, according to recent reports by Elisabeth Bryant, France plans to make such education mandatory across the country, enrolling "hundreds of imams," along with "chaplains working in prisons or the military." Prisons are known to be hotbeds for radical Islam and recruiting for jihad; Coulibaly converted to radical Islam while serving time in Fleury-Mérogis Prison, as did Cherif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who carried out the Jan. 7 Charlie Hebdo attacks. Even more significant, France now is taking its war against radical Islam and racism to the schools, from teacher training to the addition of courses in secularism and ethics to the standard school curriculum. It is an initiative the rest of Europe – and the United States – would be well-advised to consider as well.
Such measures mark a major departure from the policies that European governments followed in dealing with their Muslim populations since the arrival of Muslim guest workers from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1970s. For the first several decades, the Muslim communities of Europe operated in something of their own universe, often ignoring European secular traditions as they established and pursued highly religious traditions of their own. In turn, Europe cast a blind eye on their activities, the mixed result of residual guilt over religious discrimination during the Holocaust and the belief – long-since abandoned – that Muslim guest workers would eventually return to their home countries anyway.
But they didn't; and as the European Muslim community grew, makeshift prayer spaces in vacant storefronts and cafes became too small to house their congregations. Mosques needed to be built. Yet the communities themselves could not afford to build them, and secular governments refused to provide funds, leaving the way open for (largely) Saudi-sponsored mosques across Europe, where Saudi-sponsored imams preaching a strict, fundamentalist and often violent version of Islam gained influence over Europe's rapidly-growing population of Muslim youth. Even in the past four years, according to Bryant, who cites figures from Le Figaro, "the number of mosques controlled by fundamentalist Salafi preachers [in France] has doubled from 44 to 89."
The result: radicalization. Coupled with this has been a similar approach in public schools, where Muslim students have been able to alter curricula to suit their own religious demands. Muslim girls frequently have been permitted to miss co-ed school field trips, for instance, or skip mixed-sex gym classes; and teachers are often threatened so severely by Muslim students when attempting to teach classes about the Holocaust that some have given up the lessons altogether. In such an environment, the powerful reach of recruiters for radical Islam – and for jihadist groups like the Islamic State – find easy prey. Essentially, Europe's current system has opened all the doors for them already. They only have to step through.
France's new initiative could begin to change all of this. While some accuse France of trying to replace Islamic fundamentalism with "secular fundamentalism," defenders of the program like Prime Minister Manuel Valls argue rightly that, "Secularism must be applied everywhere, because that is how everyone will be able to live in peace with one another." Whether this will work in the face of the vicious Hydra of Islamic terrorism remains to be seen. Certainly, any change will take time – perhaps as long as a generation, or even more. But if it is idealistic in its aims, it is no less an ideal worth striving for; it was no less a warrior than Napoleon who once observed, "There are but two forces in the world: the sword and the spirit. In the long run, the sword is always vanquished by the spirit."
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2015
In the early spring of 1944 a political prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp penned a letter to his wife, Käthe, in Hamburg. “It looks like we have to count on a long separation, but we must hope strongly for a reunion,” wrote the prisoner, a doctor named Hermann da Fonseca-Wollheim. “Today is Palm Sunday, a sunny, wintry day on our mountain. Tonight at six I will listen to Furtwängler’s concert on the radio. Why don’t you, too, tune in to the radio on Sundays and then we can think about each other fervently.”
It was the last letter Käthe would receive from Hermann. Six weeks later, on May 13, she was notified of his death, supposedly of disease. Hermann had been arrested by the Gestapo the previous August and held on charges of Ausländerfreundlichkeit, or xenophilia. He was suspected of being friendly to foreign workers, mostly forced laborers from Ukraine, whom he treated in his practice. He had also been overheard saying that sooner or later everybody would have to learn Russian, and was learning some Russian himself. It smacked of defeatism. After the July 1943 firebombing of Hamburg, the Gestapo were keen to make examples of would-be dissenters.
In a sense, the Nazis knew their man. Hermann was fluent in English, Spanish, French and Farsi, the first three picked up as a ship’s doctor, the latter from a few years spent in the Persian city of Sultanabad (now known as Arak). His double-barreled surname—the “da Fonseca” being a Portuguese honorific acquired by an adventurous 19th-century ancestor, the “Wollheim” betraying more distant Jewish roots—suggested that xenophilia wasn’t just a political deviation. It ran in the family’s blood. Hermann and Käthe had two sons. Friedrich, the younger one, would grow up to become a doctor like his father. Hermann, the firstborn, would spend his career as a diplomat in the service of the European Commission. He is also my father-in-law. May 8, 1945, the day of the Third Reich’s downfall, was his 11th birthday.
At a distance of 70 years, living memories of Germany’s surrender are becoming rare and therefore valuable. Hermann remembers nights in air raid shelters, and the bombs that narrowly missed his house on the Bahrenfelder Marktplatz. He remembers the town-hall wedding of a relative in April 1945, just days before surrender, in which the couple were handed a copy of “Mein Kampf” and instructed to produce sons for the Führer. He remembers walking out of the hall and feeling grateful the spring foliage might provide some cover in the event of an aerial attack. He remembers the endless columns of British armor, and of seeing fliers, distributed by Allied troops, with reports and photos from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.
“The day after the capitulation,” he remembers, “the Hitler Youth organized a kind of farewell ceremony, with a ceremonial striking of the Reichsflagge. My mother said to me, ‘You are not going to that.’ But the mother of a friend said to me afterwards, ‘What a shame, Hermann, that you weren’t there; it was so beautiful.’ ” This was Germany in 1945. The great Wirtschaftswunder—the postwar economic miracle created by sound money, industrial genius and U.S. security—soon cleared out the material wreckage, at least in the West. But what about the moral wreckage?
The drama of postwar Germany has revolved around the effort to bury the Nazi corpse by constantly exhuming it for re-examination. The task haunts Germany at every turn, often to good effect but not always. Should Germany’s wartime sins be expiated by subsidizing the spendthrift habits of corrupt Greek governments? Should fear of being accused of xenophobia require Germans to turn a blind eye to Jew-hatred and violent misogyny when the source is Germany’s Muslim minority? It isn’t easy, or ultimately wise, to live life in a state of perpetual atonement.
For Hermann, atonement was not the issue: What was a 10-year-old boy, whose father had died at Nazi hands, supposed to atone for? The issue was what to do next. At the University of Hamburg in the 1950s he became a member of the Young European Federalists, just as the Treaty of Rome was ushering the European Economic Community into existence. The treaty ordained the free movement of persons, services and capital—the most xenophilic act in European history, and a posthumous vindication for a doctor who perished in Buchenwald.
Today, the EU is beset by massive problems, many of its own making. But not all of them. In France, Marine Le Pen inveighs against immigrants and “globalism” in all its sinister forms, including free trade, and speaks admiringly of Vladimir Putin. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban says his goal is to build an “illiberal new state based on national foundations,” citing China, Russia and Turkey as inspirations. This week’s election in Britain rests partly in the hands of the U.K. Independence Party, which imagines that cutting the country off from its largest trading partner is a good idea. Ausländerfreundlichkeit is becoming verboten again. Think of this column as a reminder of the distance Europe has traveled in 70 years, and why it must not slip back.
George Galloway and the "Vile Zionist Hyenas": IPT News, May 8, 2015—British MP George Galloway, friend to Hamas in Gaza, Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad and other dictators, lost his bid for re-election to Parliament representing Bradford West Thursday by a 2-1 margin.
European Antisemitism Driving Jews Away From Jewish Life, Says Leading Rabbi (INTERVIEW): Eliezer Sherman, Algemeiner, May 12, 2015—The recent string of attacks against Jews in Europe has driven many Jews away from an active Jewish life, said the president of one of Europe’s leading Orthodox Jewish networks on Tuesday.
Study Exposes the Ugly Depth of European Muslim Anti-Semitism: Abigail R. Esman, IPT, May 12, 2015—A new study published by the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP) confirms what many have long suspected: that the worst crimes against Jews in Europe are perpetrated by (European) Muslims, and that Muslims have been responsible for a "disproportionate" number of anti-Semitic attacks over the past 15 years.
Russia’s Secret Army in Ukraine: Globe & Mail, May 12, 2015 —‘Putin. War” is the bracing title of a report on the Russian military’s deep involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. The principal author is the late Russian dissident Boris Nemtsov, who was shot and killed in February, a short distance from the Kremlin.
