RSS
Germany’s ‘Holocaust Guilt’ Is Shaken by Hamas Pogrom
A Jewish-owned business in Vienna in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938. Image: Screenshot.
JNS.org – In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel, Germany is finding it harder and harder to mask the extremist underbelly of its politics.
A neo-Nazi group plastered a Holocaust memorial last week with stickers urging Germans to “get rid” of their “Holocaust guilt,” as well as declaring—in a sly nod to the argument often articulated about the feeble international response to the Holocaust—that “Israel murders while the world watches.” In the city of Essen, an Islamist group staged a pro-Hamas march that required the segregation of male and female participants, but representatives of both genders brandished signs accusing Israel of perpetrating a “Holocaust” in Gaza. In Berlin, a synagogue has been the target of an arson attack, and Jewish-owned homes have been daubed with Stars of David in another ominous echo of the Nazi period.
Of course, it’s not just Germany. Neighboring France has registered more than 1,000 antisemitic outrages in the five weeks since the pogrom—a national record (and not the kind one boasts about). All over Europe and North America, Jewish communities increasingly feel like they are under siege. When it comes to antisemitism, this is truly a global moment, if only because no foreign-policy issue resonates as discordantly in domestic politics as does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But Germany—the land of the Holocaust—is different, or at least, it’s supposed to be. And there are visible differences between Germany and other democratic nations. On the German left, for example, anti-Zionism is comparatively muted, while large swathes are actually pro-Israel. For example, last week Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck released a video in which he slammed German Muslim organizations for their silence in the face of the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7 and warned non-resident antisemitic offenders that they faced deportation. Habeck is not a conservative but a representative of the left-wing Green Party—and if you can’t imagine a Green Party politician in another country saying something similar, you are not alone.
Yet it’s painfully clear that Germany’s well-meaning politicians are dealing with a genuine resurgence of antisemitism that they cannot control. On Nov. 9-10, Germans marked the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous Nazi pogrom of 1938 that saw hundreds of Jews murdered, thousands more deported to concentration camps, and the burning and looting of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores over a period of less than 48 hours. For Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the occasion was an opportunity to issue a reminder that antisemitism has no place in post-Holocaust Germany. But for others, like the thousands of mainly Muslim demonstrators who have taken to the streets in support of the Hamas rapists and murderers, it was an opportunity of a different sort—namely, to challenge the Germans to dispense with their guilt about the Holocaust in the name of a “free Palestine.”
As is normally the case with antisemitism, there’s a historical precedent for this. On the morning of Nov. 10, 1969—a year that marked the 31st anniversary of Kristallnacht—a cleaner was doing her chores at a Jewish community center in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg, one day after services commemorating Kristallnacht had been held there. While sweeping and polishing, she stumbled upon a package wrapped in a trench coat. Discovering an alarm clock inside, she called the police who, on arrival, determined that the package was a bomb. The explosion had been timed for 11:30 a.m. the previous day, during the commemoration service, but the bomb failed to go off because of a corroded wire.
Those responsible for planting it were not neo-Nazis but leftists. Attention quickly fell on a small group in Berlin that named itself after the Tupamaros, a left-wing guerilla army in Uruguay. The group’s leader, Dieter Kunzelmann, denied that they were responsible, and the culprits were never caught. Yet despite the lack of evidence tying him to the attempted bombing, those who knew Kunzelmann, including many of his comrades, deemed him perfectly capable of carrying out such an outrage. The question was why.
As Kunzelmann conceived it, Holocaust guilt was the main impediment to the German left embracing the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinians. “Palestine is to the Federal Republic [of Germany] and Europe what Vietnam is to the Americans,” he wrote in an article for a Socialist journal in Berlin. “The left hasn’t understood that yet. Why? The Jew’s boy.”
This descent into crude antisemitism, using insulting language to depict the European left as a tool of Zionist interests, was particularly shocking in Germany. But Kunzelmann was not alone. Later that same year, he and a group of comrades traveled to the Middle East for military training with Palestinian terrorist organizations, a path that many German leftists would beat in subsequent years. When, in the summer of 1976, terrorists hijacked an Air France jet in Athens that had originated in Tel Aviv, the group was composed of members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the German Red Army Fraction (RAF), better known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. After diverting the plane to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, the terrorists turned into uncomplicated Nazis, separating Jewish passengers from non-Jewish ones. Only a spectacular rescue operation mounted by the Israelis prevented a massacre of the Jewish hostages.
“Kunzelmann went as far as to suggest that his group could best combat Israeli ‘imperialism’ by attacking Jews in Germany, which, of course, is the culmination of antisemitic thought,” the historian Philipp Lenhard explained in an interview last week with the German publication Geo. As outlandish as it might seem to a sensible mind, five years after Kunzelmann’s death, his belief that German Jews are a legitimate target in the Palestinian war against Israel’s existence is more widespread than at any previous time—and its main adherents are not the long-haired New Leftists of yesteryear, but German Muslims, both those born there and recent immigrants as well.
German politicians are anxious about instituting measures to protect Jews that would erode their country’s much-vaunted status as a post-World War II beacon of ethnic and religious tolerance. But that won’t do. Postwar Germany has, of its own volition, made the protection of Jewish life a raison d’état of the democratic republic, and it is that stance that is caricatured as “Holocaust guilt.”
Right now, it is failing in that task. And if Germany can’t muster the determination to defeat antisemitism in the streets that spawned the Holocaust during the last century, then what chance is there that the rest of Europe will, or can, do so?
The post Germany’s ‘Holocaust Guilt’ Is Shaken by Hamas Pogrom first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Antisemitism Continues to Skyrocket in France, With Over 1,500 Incidents Recorded in 2024, New Report Finds
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a new bombshell report.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, on Wednesday released its annual report on antisemitism, which was compiled by the Jewish Community Protection Service using data jointly recorded with the Ministry of the Interior.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
One such incident occurred in late June, when an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”
In another egregious attack that garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.
Comme chaque année, le Crif publie le rapport annuel sur les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France établi par le Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (@SPCJFRANCE) sur la base des chiffres recensés conjointement entre le SPCJ et le ministère de l’Intérieur.
Pour la… pic.twitter.com/VuPwVXvq0f
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) January 22, 2025
Antisemitism skyrocketed in France following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. According to CRIF’s report, the surge continued unabated last year, with over 30 percent of antisemitic incidents, or 43 out of an average of 130 per month, making direct reference to “Palestine.”
In November, for example, a monument honoring victims of the Nazis located in eastern France was vandalized with graffiti reading “Nique Israël,” or “F—k Israel” in English.
On the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, three men brutally attacked a Jewish woman at the entrance to her home in Paris. The victim stated that the assailants threatened her with a box knife, made antisemitic threats, and mentioned the events of last Oct. 7.
In September, a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near the eastern city of Lyon, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”
CRIF’s latest data also showed that 192 antisemitic acts were committed in schools, which accounted for 12.2 percent of all such incidents recorded last year.
Synagogues were targeted as well. In August, for example, French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.
France is one of several countries that has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes and demonstrations since Hamas’s invasion of Israel.
According to a report from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel, there has been a staggering 340 percent increase in antisemitic acts worldwide in 2024 compared to 2022.
The report showed a sharp rise in antisemitic outrages in North America and Europe, with the US up 288 percent, Canada increasing by 562 percent, and Britain seeing a 450 percent spike, with nearly 2,000 incidents recorded in the first half of 2024 in the UK.
The post Antisemitism Continues to Skyrocket in France, With Over 1,500 Incidents Recorded in 2024, New Report Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Cornell University Statue Vandalized by Anti-Zionist Activists
Cornell University workers begin the work of cleaning anti-Zionist graffiti off a statue of the school’s co-founder on January 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Anti-Zionist agitators at Cornell University kicked off the spring semester with an act of vandalism which defamed Israel as an “occupier” and practitioner of “apartheid.”
“Divest from death,” the students, who have not yet been identified, graffitied on a statue of Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White that is located on the Arts Quad section of campus — as first reported by The Cornell Daily Sun on Tuesday. “Occupation=death.”
Speaking anonymously to The Sun, the university’s official campus newspaper, the students provided an account of their grievances, which addressed what in their view is the insufficiency of the recently negotiated ceasefire between Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, and Israel. In so doing, they put forth the view that all of Israel must be surrendered to the Palestinians, whose leaders have serially rejected viable two-state solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since the United Nations voted in 1947, via Resolution 181, to partition what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
“We demand that Cornell divests from the weapons manufacturers that make genocide possible,” they said. “A ceasefire will save lives, and we hope it will be permanent. But a ceasefire is not a free Palestine, and we will organize until we see a liberated Palestine free from genocide, occupation, and apartheid.”
Anonymous collectives of anti-Zionists have vandalized Cornell University property before, and the school as a whole has seen some of the most disturbing incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In August, a group vandalized the Day Hall administrative building, graffitiing “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” on it and shattering the glazings of its front doors. They justified their actions.
“We had to accept that the only way to make ourselves heard is by targeting the only thing the university administration really cares about: property,” the students told The Sun. “With the start of this new academic year, the Cornell administration is trying desperately to upkeep a facade of normalcy knowing that, since last semester, they have been working tirelessly to uphold Cornell’s function as a fascist, classist, imperial machine.”
Anti-Zionists convulsed Cornell University’s campus during the 2023-2024 academic year, engaging in activities that are without precedent in the school’s 159-year history. Three weeks after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel, now-former student Patrick Dai threatened to perpetrate heinous crimes against members of the school’s Jewish community, including mass murder and rape. Cornell students also occupied an administrative building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians.” Meanwhile, history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s barbarity on Oct. 7 “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally held on campus.
By the end of the year, Pollack announced her resignation as president of the university, which followed the installment of an illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus in which pro-Hamas students had lived and protested the university’s investments in companies linked to Israel.
Cornell now has a new interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, and his administration has vowed to punish and deter criminal behavior undertaken in the name of anti-Zionist activism.
“Acts of violence, extended occupations of buildings, or destruction of property (including graffiti), will not be tolerated and will be subject to immediate public safety response,” he said in August. “We will enforce these policies consistently, for every group or activity, on any issue or subject …We urge all members of the community to express their views in a manner that respects the rights of others. One voice may never stifle another. There is a time, place, and manner for all to speak and all to be heard.”
So far, Kotlikoff’s administration has executed its zero-tolerance policy, pursuing criminal investigations against protesters who break the law, as happened on Sept. 24 when a mass of students disrupted a career fair because it was attended by Boeing and L3Harris, an American defense contractor. The incident resulted in three arrests, and, later, severe disciplinary sanctions, including classifying five students as “persona non grata,” which, Cornell says, bans from campus “a person who has exhibited behavior which has been deemed detrimental to the university community.” However, the university did downgrade sanctions levied against a doctoral student after his supporters decried that dis-enrolling him as a student would lead inexorably to his deportation from the US.
Regarding this latest incident, Cornell has vowed to bring the vandals to justice.
“Vandalism violates our code of conduct and the law,” the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) told The Sun. “Graffiti is property damage, which is a crime. We are committed to identifying the perpetrators responsible.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Cornell University Statue Vandalized by Anti-Zionist Activists first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Trump Fires Head of Terrorist-Linked World Central Kitchen From President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, Nutrition
World Central Kitchen (WCK) barge loaded with food arrives off the Gaza coast, in this handout image released March 15, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the firing of celebrity chef Jose Andres, founder of the controversial World Central Kitchen (WCK), from the president’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, claiming that the restaurateur and humanitarian is “not aligned with” the current White House’s mission.
Trump shared the news of Andres’s departure in an “Official Notice of Dismissal” on social media. The statement explained that his administration is currently in the process of “identifying and removing over a thousand presidential appointees from the previous administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.”
Over the past year, Andres has found himself embroiled in controversy regarding the alleged conduct of WCK employees in Gaza. WCK, a US-based NGO founded by Andres to help feed needy people caught in disasters or conflict zones, has been operating with roughly 500 employees in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. The charity has often engaged in heated public disputes with the Jewish state, accusing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of purposefully targeting its workers with airstrikes — allegations that Jerusalem has adamantly rejected.
In April 2024, the IDF came under fire after it conducted airstrikes on a WCK vehicle convoy, killing seven employees of the charity. Israel acknowledged responsibility for the incident and insisted that the airstrikes violated internal protocol, subsequently dismissing two senior officers over the botched military operation.
Israel has accused WCK of insufficiently vetting its workforce and employing terrorist members within its ranks.
Last month, WCK fired at least 62 of its staff members in Gaza after Israel said they had “affiliations and direct connections” with terrorist groups. Israel conducted an investigation into the backgrounds of the charity’s employees after the Jewish state discovered that a WCK employee named Ahed Azmi Qdeih took part in the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Qdeih was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Nov. 30. At the time, WCK said it had no knowledge of an employee involved in the Oct. 7 onslaught, in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 hostages during their rampage in southern Israel.
Israel has long insisted that Hamas and similar terrorist groups have infiltrated humanitarian organizations in Gaza. In August 2024, the United Nations admitted that nine employees of UNRWA, the controversial United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, were fired over their alleged involvement in the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Andres responded to Trump’s statement on X/Twitter, claiming that he had already resigned.
“I submitted my resignation last week … my 2 year term was already up,” Andres wrote.
“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members — unpaid volunteers like me — were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day. I’m proud of what we accomplished on behalf of the American people,” he added.
The post Trump Fires Head of Terrorist-Linked World Central Kitchen From President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, Nutrition first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login