According to Lee Smith whose beat is the Mideast, Arabs are better at feuding than making war. This is why it was not only a terrible crime, but a tragic mistake when apparently Jewish extremists—outraged by the kidnap-murder of three teenage Jewish boys, Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrach and Gil-ad Shaar—invited an Arab-Jewish blood feud by kidnapping and killing an innocent Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem. Multiple arrests have been made in Israel with relative alacrity—in contrast to the Palestinian Authority which lacks the will or the ability or both to arrest those responsible for the triple murder. Whoever killed the Arab boy, Mohammed Hussein Abu Khdeir, should be prosecuted and punished to the maximum extent of the law for a terrorist crime that weakens the moral foundations of the Jewish state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said as much and virtually every other Israeli in publish life has said as much. “The abduction of the Arab teenager was carried out by extremists, acting on their own, who stand condemned by every sector of Israel’s democratic society. The kidnapping and murders of three Israeli teens, who have not been yet captured, was carried out by members of a terrorist group (Hamas) that is part of a Palestinian government,” declared Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The young men arrested for burning alive the Arab boy are being compared to European berserk “football hooligans.” No analogy is adequate to the depravity of the crime, but a better one is the kidnap-murder in Paris in 2006 of Jew of Moroccan descent, Ilan Halimi. There are those among left-wing Jewish commentators whose initial reflex was to demand that we place the kidnap-murder of three Israel teens “in political context.” “Providing this context may be taboo at a time when the entire country is focused on the fate of three kidnapped Israeli teens, wrote journalist Mairav Zonszein, “but it is part and parcel of the story here.” Gidean Levy in “Haaretz” went so as to declare: “Only Israel is permitted to carry out illegal, immoral operations. Only it is permitted to be sanctimonious, to be shocked and to shout from the rooftops when others do the same thing to Israel.” Zonszein, Levy, and other critics of the Jewish state in western newspapers as well as Israel should take more seriously the perverse reactions—and not only by Palestinians—to the kidnap-murder of three Jewish teens whose deaths should give us all pause. (more…)
In 2004, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) broke new ground by voting to “initiate a process of phased selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel.” Though the PCUSA voted against divestment in Israel in 2012 by the thinnest of margins, the General Assembly has now again revealed its true colors such as adherence to pro-Palestinian “replacement theology” delegitimating Judaism as well as the Jewish state. This is the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Statement denouncing the PCUSA Genral Assembly latest anti-Israel resolution including distancing the Church from the quest for a “two-state solution.” SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER: PRESBYTERIAN VOTE TO ‘RECONSIDER’ TWO-STATE SOLUTION ALIGNS CHURCH WITH THOSE SEEKING END OF ISRAEL PCUSA Divestment Resolution Bolsters Anti-Peace Extremists The Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced today’s votes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA) in Detroit to reconsider its long-standing support of a two-state solution in the Holy Land, and to divest from a number of American companies doing business with Israel. “We are shocked beyond words. With the crimes against humanity occurring in Syria and Iraq, with the Middle East in chaos, with African Christians regularly selected by terrorists for murder because of their faith, PCUSA chooses to flex its moral muscles by aiding and abetting those pledged to do away with the Jewish State,” said Rabbi Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center. (more…)
Gerald Scarfe cartoon, “Sunday Times” (London), January 27, 2013 Manfred Gerstenfeld, author the new book, “Demonizing Israel and the Jews,” and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Robert Wistrich, probably the world’s leading authority on the history of anti-Semitism, are like diagnosticians who agree on the grim prognosis for European Jewry, but disagree on the probable cause of death. Gerstenfeld has attracted a headline in “The Times of Israel” (July 10) by extrapolating from a 2012 study conducted by Germany’s University of Bielefeld for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation that asked 8,000 people across eight EU member states whether they agreed that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” Responses varied from 38 percent in Italy to 63 percent in Poland, but a continent-wide average 40 percent answered “yes.” The population sixteen years and older of EU countries is approximately 400 million. Gerstenfeld’s estimate of “well over 150 million” European anti-Semites comes from dividing 400 million by two fifths. Wistrich, on the other hand, retorts—to paraphrase slightly—that 150 million idiots do not necessarily equal 150 million anti-Semites! Remember that the term “idiot” among the ancient Greeks referred not to mental impairment but to complete political ignorance and ineptitude—a condition generally assumed by them to be beyond remedy. Looking more closely at the University of Bielefeld poll, one finds that the question asking about Israel’s waging genocidal war on the Palestinians was actually one of two outlier questions. The poll’s major analysis was based on answers to four questions. One was phrased positively—have the Jews “enriched our culture”—three negatively: to they have too much influence? do they play the Nazi victimization card? and do they only care about their own kind? The three negative questions again elicited varying responses—significantly higher in eastern than western Europe—but here the overall average (based on many more responses than to one question) was around thirty percent. Thirty percent of 400 million adult Europeans equals 120 million: still a hell of a lot of anti-Semites! (more…)
Shin Dong-hyuk, escapee from North Korean gulag According to North Korean defectors, President Kim Jong-un recently “issued an order for the Third Reich to be studied in depth” for “practical applications be drawn from it.” Another source reports him as saying that North Korea’s secret police should be restructured—“similar to the Gestapo.” Whether or not the twenty-something tyrant is really passing out as elite birthday presents “Mein Kampf,” translated into Korean, the rumors resonate. North Korea’s gulag—with an estimated 200,000 people in “reeducation” camps where the death rate from malnutrition is 40 percent—makes that country a throwback to the era of totalitarian dictators. Analogies with the Holocaust are problematic, but comparisons with Stalin’s forced labor camps are on point. Belatedly in the twenty-first century, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea is being recognized as the world’s worst—and still least-reported—human rights abuser. Credit for this belongs not only to such high-profile NGOs as Amnesty International, but to an unheralded alliance including North Korean expatriates, Korean American activists, and Christian and Jewish human rights groups. (more…)
Rioting in Stockholm The UK and U.S. Embassy have cautioned their nationals about visiting Stockholm and environs because of a of week of riots in ostensibly enlightened Sweden by predominantly Muslim immigrants and their children, attributed alternatively to “police brutality” or bad social conditions. In 2010, the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued its own “travel advisory” cautioning Jewish travelers from traveling to Sweden’s third largest city, Malmo for its failure to protect its Jewish citizens from serial intimidation and official indifference. A visit by Center Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Dr. Shimon Samuels with city fathers, as well as Sweden’s Justice Minister, confirmed their worst fears. In fact, other minorities they met with including Muslims and Roma echoed the concerns of the tiny Jewish community. The local Swedish authorities didn’t act then and apparently the malaise runs much deeper. The contrast between two men—diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who risked all to save Hungarian Jews during World War II, and contemporary Malmö Mayor Ilmar Reepalu—demonstrates Sweden’s descent from heroic martyrdom into hateful demagoguery. Social Democratic Mayor Reepalu made groundless charges that the extreme-right Swedish Democratic Party has infiltrated Malmö Jewish community to spread hatred of Muslims. Despite documented statistics that hate crimes against Jews doubled in his city during 2010 alone, Reepalu denies that there has been an increase. After a group of Swedish Muslims in Malmö shouted “Sieg Heil” and “Hitler, Hitler” and threw rocks at a small group of Jews peacefully demonstrating in support of Israel. Reepalu said that Sweden’s Jews were largely culpable for the violence inflicted on them because they didn’t “ distance” themselves from Israel during the Gaza War. “It is really to worry about in a democratic society like Sweden that 55 years after the war (Nazis) are showing their ugly faces again,” Posner- Korosi, head of Stockholm’s Jewish community, said in 2000, after a television program profiling young Swedes who volunteered to fight for Hitler during World War II, and a recent poll showing that almost a third of young Swedes doubt that the Holocaust occurred. Sweden is often criticized for its equivocal neutrality during World War II when it provided refuge to thousands of Danish Jews yet at the same time supplied Nazi Germany with iron ore and ball bearings while allowing the Wehrmacht to use the railway system to transport soldiers. Today, Sweden is worse than neutral in what is a new global war to delegitimate Israel and marginalize Jews everywhere. Despite some efforts at Holocaust education, and an unenforced law against Denial, the Swedish government remains unwilling to stand up for the victims of anti-Semitism at home and abroad. A European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) report—which the EU ordered suppressed—documented that cemetery desecrations, threatening phone calls, and violent attacks on Jews have been on the increase across Sweden. The Swedish government in 2002 joined five other EU members in voting for a UNHRC resolution accusing Israel of a long list of human rights violations, but making no mention of suicide bombings of Israeli civilians, and supporting “all available means, including armed struggle” to establish a Palestinian state. The realm of international sports a good example of the poisoning of Swedish public life by biases that update Nazi Europe’s anti-Semitism. In Malmö, where Muslims makes up a quarter of the city’s 250,000 population, the City Council voted 5 to 4 to hold the scheduled Davis Cup Match between Israel and Sweden behind closed doors. The spectacle of Israeli athletes forced to perform under what amounts to apartheid conditions and Jewish fans barred from attending events to root for them recalled the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Vilification of Israel and condemnation of European Jews for supporting it is no longer limited to the Neo-Nazi fringe and Muslim extremists. In 2004, a Swedish government conference on preventing genocide was coordinated with a Stockholm museum exhibit, entitled “Snow White and the Madness of Truth,” that glorified an Islamic Jihad homicide bomber who mass murdered 22 Israeli Jews and Arabs at a Haifa café. Echoing Sweden’s Ahmed Rami, proprietor of virulently anti-Semitic “Radio Islam,” is a large swathe of the Swedish political establishment. “Israel is an apartheid state. I think Gaza is comparable to the Warsaw ghetto . . . . I’m surprised that Israel . . . can do the exact same things the Nazis did,” said Ingalill Bjartén, the vice-Chair for the Social Democratic Women in southern Sweden. “I don’t think Israel is a democracy worthy of the name. It’s a racist apartheid state,” said the Left Party’s Hans Linde, calling for a boycott of Israel. On the right, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, after visiting Gaza blamed Israel for intentionally targeting economic infrastructure and called Israeli policies “neither morally nor politically defensible.” In 2012 on the hundredth anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s birth, Sweden’s largest newspaper, “Aftonbladet,” a revival of the age-old blood libel against the Jews. “They Plunder the Organs of Our Sons,” read the unsubstantiated quote from a Palestinian which served as the headline across a double spread in the Swedish equivalent of “the Style Section” of the “New York Times.” Regarding Sweden’s treatment of its own minorities, people—unlike pets—ultimately resent being patronized. This is proving true of Swedish Muslims who currently receive “multicultural” tokenism rather than real opportunity to enter society’s mainstream. A foreign policy of pandering to anti-Israel sentiment isn’t saving Sweden from a domestic reckoning.
The terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon may temporarily shift the national debate from the manufacture and sale of guns and ammo to bomb making cookbooks on the Internet available to aspiring terrorist chefs of all ages. “Once upon a time this kind of information was known only to large terrorist groups and maybe to operatives of intelligence organizations of three or four countries,” says Rabbi Abraham Cooper, head of the Digital Terrorism and Hate Project at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “Now it’s available to a 12-year-old.” Read the article by Lindsay Wise of McClatchy Newspapers:
President Harry S. Truman, a history buff, said: “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” As a professional historian, I confess to an occupational affliction, which might be called “the obsession with origins,” that is a more sophisticated version of Truman’s aphorism. This causes me, like many of my professional confreres, to believe instinctively that past is key to present, and the essence of a thing resides in its origins. Sometimes, this instinct is right—sometimes not. Allow me to speculate first about the remote origins of the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) Movement, critiqued in my Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) Against Israel: An Anti-Semitic, Anti-Peace Poison Pill (link: www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/REPORT_313.PDF). BDS was officially launched only on July 9, 2005, with “the Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS” in which over 100 named Palestinian organizations declared that “fifty-seven years after the state of Israel was built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners,” they were launching a movement “inspired by the struggles of South Africans against Apartheid.” Obviously, as we shall see, the movement gestated before 2005. Yet it can be argued that its roots go back, not only to the early twenty-first century, but to before the modern era. (more…)
Rabbi Abraham Cooper As the first night of Passover approaches, we are delighted that Rabbi Abraham Cooper has joined guest blogger Harold Brackman in appealing for solidarity with Mehmet Sahin, a young Muslim man who is now in hiding over death threats because he has take a stand against anti-Semitism. Rabbi Cooper, who serves as Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and who has been described as one of the most influential rabbis in America, joins this Blog for the first time in making this joint appeal. We are inspired by Mr. Sahin’s courage and thank Rabbi Cooper and Dr. Brackman for their important insights, which we are confident will be remembered and discussed at many seder tables tonight. (More about Rabbi Cooper appears after the “jump”). (more…)