Poll: 'Anti-Semitic notions' on rise among French, other Europeans

The French have grown more likely to believe that Jews hold too much power in business or worldfinance, as well as other "classical anti-Semitic notions," according to a new survey from the Anti-Defamation League that compares attitudes in 2009 and 2012.

The poll, released Tuesday, found nearly half of the French people surveyed said they think it is "probably true" that Jews there are more loyal to Israel than France, an increase from years past. Asked if Jews "still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust," more than a third of the respondents agreed.

Bias against Jews is in the spotlight in France after a gunman killed a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday. The French interior minister said the alleged attacker, suspected to have links to a group associated with Al Qaeda, said he shot them in revenge for the killing of Palestinian children.

Attacks on French Jews fell last year, with 389 incidents ranging from violence to vandalism reported, but the aggressiveness of the attacks rose, said the Protection Service for the Jewish Community, which provides security for synagogues and Jewish celebrations, the Associated Press reported.

The new survey covered not only France but nine other countries across Europe. Nearly one third of the Europeans surveyed held "pernicious anti-Semitic beliefs," the Anti-Defamation League said. Five thousand telephone interviews were conducted across Europe for the poll, 500 in each country surveyed.

Though the killings at the Jewish school have focused attention on attitudes against Jews in France, the new poll indicated that such beliefs are markedly more common in Hungary, Poland and Spain than in France.

Anti-Semitism "infects many Europeans at a much higher level than we see here in the United States," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the league, which is based in New York City. "In Hungary, Spain and Poland the numbers for anti-Semitic attitudes are literally off the charts.”

For instance, 14% of French people surveyed said they agreed that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ; 38% of Hungarian respondents and 46% of Polish people surveyed said the same. While 45% of French people surveyed said Jews were more loyal to Israel, 72% of Spainards interviewed said so.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/03/france-jewish-school-shootings-anti-semitism-poll.html 

Par For The Leftist Course: Welsh Nationalists Elect A Pro-Palestinian Firebrand As Party Leader

Listen Wales.
Here was a people whom even you could afford to despise,
Growing nothing, making nothing, 

Belonging nowhere, a people 

Whose sweat glands had atrophied, 

Who lived by their wits.

Who lived by playing the violin. 

A lot better incidentally 

Than you ever played the harp. 

And because they were such people 

They went like lambs to the slaughter.

But some survived - yes,listen closer now,

And these are a different people,

They have switched off Mendelssohn

And tuned into Maccabaeus.

The mountains are red with their blood,

The deserts are green with their seed.

Listen, Wales!

So wrote the well-known Welsh poet Harri Webb (1920-94).

But Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, is hardly distinguished for sympathy for Jews and Israel.

Take, for example, the attitude of Jill Evans MEP, who chaired the party from 1994-96, and is vice-president of the Green/European Free Alliance (EFA), and deputises on the parliamentary delegation for relations with the Palestine Legislative Council.

Her espousal of the Palestinian cause will be apparent from a glance here

In 2002, for example, she told a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally in Cardiff:

"This demonstration is about justice: justice for Palestinian people. Their right to self-determination and to a Palestinian state. And justice for all those innocent people in the occupied territories who are killed and injured daily by brutal military oppression and aggression.

....There have been deliberate attacks on paramedics, emergency medicalstaff and patients in ambulances - in clear breach of the Geneva Conventions. Human Rights Watch has documented many breaches of international humanitarian law. There is such profound shock at the cruelty that Chris Patten, former Tory MP and current European Commissioner for External Relations [now Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, folks!], this week said that the Israeli policy of blockade & destruction was designed not to destroy terrorism but to destroy the Palestinian Authority....

We can't imagine the desperation of young men and women who turn themselves into human bombs because they see no other way of defending their families and communities....

Israel must withdraw immediately from the Palestinian territories as UN resolutions and many, many countries have called on them to do. Today, we in Wales call for this as well. They must be brought back to the negotiating table and work out a just and peaceful agreement and abide by it. I will continue to campaign for that as Plaid Cymru - The Party of Wales in the European Parliament, as we will in CND Cymru as part of an ever growing international network of movements working for peace, justice and human rights."

In 2006 she told a so-called Peace Vigil for the Middle East in Cardiff:

"In March this year I visited Lebanon with a delegation from CYTUN (the Christian churches in Wales).... 

The only hotel spaces taken up in Beirut now are by Lebanese families fleeing the Israeli onslaught in the south and foreigners awaiting evacuation.

The reaction of the international community has been shameful. Even Israel has been surprised by the lack of condemnation of their actions..... Deaths in Gaza continue, nearly unnoticed with four killed by an Israeli tank shell just this morning....

The Israeli actions have not just been 'disproportionate' or 'excessive'. They are getting away with murder. They are targeting innocent civilians and using the actions of a few in Hizbullah and Hamas as an excuse to punish the whole populations of Lebanon and Gaza. These are crimes against humanity. And the world is standing by." 

Earlier this month, Leanne Wood, who once served as Jill Evans's political researcher, was elected Leader of Plaid Cymru.  She's a radical firebrand who wants Wales to become a socialist republic, and in 2004 was expelled from the Commons chamber for referring to the Queen as Mrs. Windsor and refusing to withdraw the discourteous remark:

"I don't recognise the Queen.

It is consistent with the position that I have held for a very long time. Last time I boycotted her visit.

I don't think I was treated fairly, I don't think it was necessary.

I called her that because that's her name."

Her far leftist credentials include membership of feminist and anti-war groups and, inevitably, of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Elin Jones, a member of the Welsh Assembly whom she defeated in the leadership election, is also a supporter of the Palestinian cause.  It is par for the course in leftist circles in Wales.  And that goes for the Liberal Democrats too.

I've written about Wales before, in such posts as this.

Unfortunately, despite  a lingering streak of philosemitism of the kind evinced by Manchester-born Welshman David Lloyd George (pictured with Leopold Amery, framer of the Balfour Declaration) who famously said that he knew the names of the kings of Israel before he knew the names of the kings of his own country, and whose pro-Zionism was strengthened through his close friendship with his Welsh solicitor, Morris Wartski, there is a rampant anti-Zionist streak in Welsh political circles of the left, a rampant anti-Zionist streak to which the Anglican Church in Wales, as represented by its spiritual leader, Archbishop Dr Barry Morgan, is emphatically not immune.

Posted by Daphne Anson at 23:46
http://daphneanson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/par-for-leftist-course-welsh.html

The UNHRC keeps its obsession with Israel going

What else would you expect from the UN?

From UN Watch:

The 47-nation UN Human Rights Council today adopted five resolutions condemning Israel, including one that creates a new “fact-finding mission” into alleged Israeli violations relating to settlements, a mandate the UN estimates will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. For full texts and voting results click here.

“On the same day that the UN Human Rights Council severely watered-down a text allowing Sri Lanka to determine what advice it receives from the UN—and after the council ignored our own proposed resolutions for victims of abuses in China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe—the session directed half of all its condemnatory resolutions against one single state, Israel,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

“Sadly, the council remains partisan, selective and politicized, and is failing its founding mission to defend the world’s victims of human rights violations.”

“The council’s new fact-finding mission on settlements–whose co-sponsors include Syria and Iran–is a fraud, with the guilty verdict determined in advance. The egregiously one-sided resolution omits any mention of officially-sanctioned Palestinian terrorism, rocket fire targeting civilians and incitement to hatred, anti-Semitism and genocide.”

“The PA and the Arab and Islamic states sponsoring the text know full well that Israel will not legitimize this latest kangaroo court, and are therefore acting with the intent to subvert, rather than advance, any prospect of a bilateral negotiated peace agreement and mutual reconciliation.”

Yes, fully half of the resolutions passed were condemning only Israel. But hey - they finally did decide to pass a resolution condemning Syria, which has killed more Arabs in a year than Israel has in two decades through two wars and an intifada.

UN Report;

http://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/2012/03/22/uns-discredited-hrc-creates-goldstone-ii-new-investigation-against-israel/ 

UN’s discredited HRC creates “Goldstone II,” new investigation against Israel

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UN Watch

 - at March 22, 2012 in human rights council (unhrc).0 Comments

GENEVA, March 22 – The 47-nation UN Human Rights Council today adopted five resolutions condemning Israel, including one that creates a new “fact-finding mission” into alleged Israeli violations relating to settlements, a mandate the UN estimates will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. For full texts and voting results click here.

“On the same day that the UN Human Rights Council severely watered-down a text allowing Sri Lanka to determine what advice it receives from the UN—and after the council ignored our own proposed resolutions for victims of abuses in China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe—the session directed half of all its condemnatory resolutions against one single state, Israel,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

“Sadly, the council remains partisan, selective and politicized, and is failing its founding mission to defend the world’s victims of human rights violations.”

“The council’s new fact-finding mission on settlements–whose co-sponsors include Syria and Iran–is a fraud, with the guilty verdict determined in advance. The egregiously one-sided resolution omits any mention of officially-sanctioned Palestinian terrorism, rocket fire targeting civilians and incitement to hatred, anti-Semitism and genocide.”

“The PA and the Arab and Islamic states sponsoring the text know full well that Israel will not legitimize this latest kangaroo court, and are therefore acting with the intent to subvert, rather than advance, any prospect of a bilateral negotiated peace agreement and mutual reconciliation.”

 Responses to “UN’s discredited HRC creates “Goldstone II,” new investigation against Israel”

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"Anti-Zionism is a form of racism more dangerous than classical anti-Semitism": Judea Pearl

 
The lily-livered Jewish students at Leeds University who, like the apprentice "trembling Israelites" they appear to be, withdrew their invitation to pro-Israel activist Brooke Goldstein to address them last week, would do well to reflect on this article entitled "Anti-Zionism is Racism", which appeared as an op-ed in the New York Jewish Week.  It's by Professor Judea Pearl of UCLA, whose son Daniel, professional journalist and gifted violinist, was savagely murdered by judeophobic Islamic fanatics in Pakistan.

Writes Judea Pearl:

'In the past three months, I have visited four “troubled” campuses — Duke, York (Canada), Columbia and UC Irvine — where tensions between Jewish and anti-Zionist students and professors have attracted national attention. In these visits, I have spoken to students, faculty and administrators, and I have obtained a fairly gloomy picture of the situation on those and other campuses.

Jewish students are currently subjected to an unprecedented assault on their identity as Jews. And we, the Jewish faculty on campus, have let those students down. We have failed to equip them with effective tools to fight back this assault.

We can reverse this trend.

Many condemn anti-Zionism for being a flimsy cover for anti-Semitism. I disagree. The order is wrong. I condemn anti-Semitism for being an instrument for a worse form of racism: anti-Zionism. 

In other words, I submit that anti-Zionism is a form of racism more dangerous than classical anti-Semitism. Framing anti-Zionism as racism is precisely the weapon that our students need for survival on campus.

Anti-Zionism earns its racist character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives (e.g. Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination.

Are Jews a nation? A collective is entitled to nationhood when its members identify with a common history and wish to share a common destiny. Palestinians have earned nationhood status by virtue of thinking like a nation, not by residing where their ancestors did (many of them are only three or four generations in Palestine). Jews, likewise, are bonded by nationhood (i.e., common history and destiny) more than they are bonded by religion.

The appeal to Jewish nationhood is necessary when we consider Israel’s insistence on remaining a “Jewish state.” By “Jewish state” Israelis mean, of course, “national Jewish state,” not “religious Jewish state” — theocratic states (like Pakistan and Iran) are incompatible with modern standards of democracy and pluralism. Anti-Zionist racists use this anti-theocracy argument repeatedly to delegitimize Israel, and I have found our students unable to defend their position with conventional ideology that views Jewishness as a religion. 

Jewishness is more than just a religion. It is an intricate and intertwined mixture of ancestry, religion, history, country, culture, tradition, attitude, nationhood and ethnicity, and we need not apologize for not fitting neatly into the standard molds of textbook taxonomies — we did not choose our turbulent history.

As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. It targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it more bluntly, anti-Zionism condemns 5 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal statelessness, traumatized by historical images of persecution and genocide. 

Anti-Zionism also attacks the pivotal component of our identity, the glue that bonds us together — our nationhood, our history. And while people of conscience reject anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a mark of academic sophistication and social acceptance in Europe and in some U.S. campuses. 

Moreover, anti-Zionism disguises itself in the cloak of political debate, exempt from sensitivities and rules of civility that govern interreligious discourse. Religion is ferociously protected in our society — political views are not.

Just last month, a student organization on a UC campus hosted a meeting on “A World Without Israel.” Imagine the international furor that a meeting called, “A World Without Mecca,” would provoke. 

So, in the name of “open political debate,” administrators would not think twice about inviting MIT linguist Noam Chomsky to speak on campus, though his anti-Zionist utterances offend the fabric of my Jewish identity deeper than any of the ugly religious insults currently shocking the media. He should be labeled for what he is: a racist.

Strategically, while accusations of anti-Semitism are worn out and have lost their punch, charging someone with racism makes people ask why anyone would deny people the right of self-determination in a sliver of land in the birthplace of their history. It shifts the frame of discourse from debating Israel’s policies to the root cause of the conflict — denying Israelis their basic rights as a nation.

Charges of “racism” highlight the inherent asymmetry between the Zionist and anti-Zionist positions. The former grants both Israelis and Palestinians the right for statehood, the latter denies that right to one, and only one side. This asymmetry is the most effective weapon our students should use in campus debates, for it puts them back on the high moral grounds of “fair and balanced” and forces their opponents to defend an ideology of one-sidedness.

For example, I have found it effective, when confronting an anti-Zionist speaker, to ask: “Are you willing to go on record and state that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a conflict between two legitimate national movements?” Western audiences adore even-handedness and abhor bias. The question above forces the racist to unveil and defend his uneven treatment of the two sides.

America prides itself on academic freedom, and academic freedom entails freedom to teach hatred and racism — we graciously accept this fact of life. However, academic freedom also entails the freedom of students to expose racism, be it white-supremacy, women-inferiority, Islamophobia or Zionophobia wherever it is spotted. Not to censor, but to expose — racists stew in their own words.

In summary, I believe the formula “Anti-Zionism = Racism” should give Jewish students the courage to both defend their identity and expose those who abuse it.'

(Courtesy: Zionism and Israel on the Web (ZionismOnTheWeb.org) Hat tip: reader Shirlee)

Race to succeed Lord Sacks in 2013 hots up

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By Simon Rocker, March 22, 2012
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Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis

The United Synagogue president, Stephen Pack, has said that applications to be chief rabbi were still being accepted despite the March 5 deadline specified in an advertisement for the job.

Mr Pack, who is chairman of the Chief Rabbinate Trust, which is responsible for appointing Lord Sacks's successor, said it had received some "outstanding" applications, but added: "We are still expecting a number of applications to come in."

He said that the ultimate deadline was September 2013 when Lord Sacks intended to retire. "If we had to say we'd like him to stay on for six months, we'd do that. This is the most important decision affecting the community in a generation and we have to get it right."

But he predicted: "We won't have any dfficulty" in filling the post.

Rabbi Harvey Belovski

The first round of interviews is due to take place in May. Mr Pack would not disclose the number of applicants so far, while those involved in the recruitment process have had to sign confidentiality pledges to protect the identity of candidates. "There are some people who would not apply if they felt it was going to be sprayed all over the press," he said.

Israel's former Diaspora Affairs Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior, who has been widely tipped as a potential candidate, revealed this week: "I have not applied, formally or informally".

But he added: "As a politician, I learned that you never say never."

Within the UK rabbinate, a strong body of support is emerging for Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis of Finchley Synagogue to become the next Chief. Now 55, the former Chief Rabbi of Ireland might once have been considered too old for the post, but that is no longer such a factor with the lifting of the retirement age.

The other British rabbi thought to be in contention is Rabbi Harvey Belovski of Golders Green Synagogue. Oxford University and Gateshead Yeshivah-educated, he has a doctorate in Chasidic thought.

A number of modern Orthodox rabbis in America have also been the source of speculation among the rabbinate. They include: Rabbi Jacob Schachter, senior scholar at Yeshiva University's Centre for the Jewish Future; Rabbi Michael Broyde, a professor of law and religion at Emory University, Atlanta and dayan on the Beth Din of America; Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt of the Riverdale Jewish Centre, a large community in New York; and Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik, of another leading congregation, Kehillath Jeshurun in New York.

Also believed to be in the running is Rabbi Daniel Beller, formerly of Edgware, leader of an Orthodox congregation in Ra'anana, Israel, and involved in projects to bridge the religious-secular divide. But another British ex-pat, Rabbi Shaul Robinson, who moved from Barnet Synagogue to the prestigious Lincoln Square congregation in New York, has ruled himself out. "Our family is settled here and our new shul is opening before the Yomtovim," he said.

Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein – thought to be a favourite of the London Beth Din – has also said he has not applied, citing "responsibilities and commitments" at home.http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/65473/race-succeed-lord-sacks-2013-hots

Laying the groundwork for the Toulouse massacre

By Melanie Phillips. 

 

When the Toulouse school massacre happened, the media rushed to say that the perpetrator was a white far-right racist. The lone gunman had mown down at close range a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, wounding several others. He was thought to be the same killer who a few days earlier had murdered three black French paratroopers in two separate attacks. A killer who targeted Jews and blacks – must be a far-right white racist, right?

Wrong. The suspect who the French police have now cornered turns out to be a jihadi Islamic terrorist with self-declared links to al Qaeda, who has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past. Well, there’s a surprise.

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Islamists regularly declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can findthem. Hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most important target. There have been repeated Islamic terrorist attempts on Jewish targets around the world. Oh -- and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might have been a Muslim. So a range of likely perpetrators was canvassed – but they were all variations on white racists.

And even when the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic terrorist the media were still trying to spin it away, with Sky News stressing the deprivation of the killer and his family and interviewing a French female journalist living in London who claimed that this was ‘an attack against diversity’.  As blogger Edgar Davidson observed here:

‘She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.’

Not only are the media and ‘progressive’ commentators in the west desperate to sanitise Islamic terrorism and genocidal incitement; they also join in. The Toulouse jihadist said he was

‘seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.’

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which  it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.

Yet this deranged belief that the Israelis deliberately kill Palestinian children is not only pumped out daily by the Arab and Muslim world inciting their people to hate Jews and to murder them as a holy act; not only do western progressives ignore this incitement and pretend instead that Islamic terrorism arises from legitimate ‘grievances’; these same western progressives themselves pump out precisely the same lies and incitement -- and then suggest that the deliberate murder of Jewish innocents is the moral equivalent of attempts by Israel toprevent the slaughter of yet more innocents.

Thus the EU foreign affairs chief, the British Baroness Ashton, seemed to equate the murder of the French Jews in Toulouse with the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza in Israeli military operations there. Although the EU now claims she was misunderstood and that she was merely referring to all violence against children, that does not let her off the hook – indeed, by underscoring the fundamental amorality of the remark, it not only attaches Lady Ashton to that hook yet more firmly but also now attaches the EU itself. And now Hamas itself, no less, has sprung to her defence:

‘“Ashton’s declarations are worthy of appreciation and support due to Israel’s attempts to pressure her,” said a senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, on his Facebook page.’

As a fine article in The Commentator points out:

‘No-one will ever know whether the tragedy in Toulouse would not have taken place if the atmosphere were different. But we can say that history teaches that mass demonisation can all too easily lead to the dehumanisation of the group or people or nation that is being demonised. From there it is only one single step to the belief that murder itself can be justified.’

The terrorist who carried out the French killings may now have been caught. But those in the west who provide an echo chamber for the diabolical discourse that incubates genocide have yet to be brought to account.

http://melaniephillips.com/laying-the-groundwork-for-the-toulouse-massace