Diaspora Affairs Minister to virtually 'meet' with Swedish Jews

Source: article by Haviv Rettig Gur in TJP

Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein expects the diplomatic crisis over an incendiary Swedish newspaper report to take center stage next week when he meet s with Swedish Jewry in a video conference with community representative.

During the diplomatic crisis, which culminated with the cancellation of the upcoming visit to Israel of Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, many Swedish Jews said they felt trapped between the arguing parties.

"I'm sure no one in the community has any doubt that Israel is a free and democratic country that is not capable of doing the terrible things that have appeared [in the Swedish media] recently," Edelstein will tell the community leaders, referring to the Aftonbladet report alleging soldiers had harvested Palestinians' organs.

"Jews in Stockholm, and in every other community, should remember that IDF soldiers are not an abstract idea for us. They are our children, brothers, sisters, neighbors. They are not capable of doing the things unfortunately ascribed to them," he said.

But the meeting won't be an argument, he adds. "Any Jewish community should always remember Israel as a state is a partner and friend," he said.

The meeting is a joint initiative of Edelstein's ministry and the European Jewish Congress' leadel.NET project, an online initiative to foster European Jewish identity through online media. It is headed by Vladimir Kantor, son of EJC president Moshe Kantor.

Edelstein will hold an online conversation facilitated by leadel.NET's infrastructure with a different Jewish community each month. In October, he will speak with the community of Sofia, Bulgaria, and in October with Milan, Italy.

The "conversations" will focus not only on communal leaders, but will seek to attract young people to discuss Israel with Israeli public figures. Edelstein will invite such figures from academia, the media, government and the military to participate in the discussions.

"The congress is working hard to connect communities in Europe to Israel using modern technology. It's time to learn how to use the technology to build new bridges," said Tomer Marshall, managing director of leadel.NET, of the online gatherings.

- Aftonbladet: behind the banner 'freedom of press', by Lisa Abramowicz
- Sweden: Aftonbladet's accusations are anti-Semitic according to Council of Europe and OSCE classification

EU-Israel economic ties must not be utilized as bargaining chip

"There are unfortunately some discordant voices within the EU who use Israel’s economic development as a political bargaining chip in issues that have little to do with economics and trade." (Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish)

Source: article by Maureen Shamee at EJP

A European Jewish Congress (EJC) delegation called on Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov [photo] to use his influence to combat calls in the EU to suspend the process of upgrading relations with Israel.

"There are unfortunately some discordant voices within the EU who use Israel’s economic development as a political bargaining chip in issues that have little to do with economics and trade," said Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress, during a meeting Wednesday in Sofia.

In the wake of Israel’s operation in Gaza in January, the EU has suspended the planned upgrade of EU-Israel relations. It said the move will not go ahead until Israel halts settlement expansion and accepts a two-state solution.

The EJC said the meeting with the Bulgarian President and high-level members of the Bulgarian government is part of an ongoing effort to promote issues of importance to the European Jewish community with European leaders and to coordinate an organized effort regarding the Iranian nuclear threat. The EJC is a democratically elected representative body of Jewish communities across Europe. Kantor called for a consensus on Iran’s nuclear program: "It is time to act now against the Iranian regime. The European Union must adopt a strict and consistent policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."

"Now that parts of Europe are within Iranian missile range, it behooves European leaders to act quickly and drastically to prevent Iran from terrorizing Europe with these weapons."

Kantor said the recent declaration of Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt at the EU Foreign Ministers’ meeting, that "If they (Iran) decide to go for confrontation, then confrontation will happen. It is encouraging, but there needs to be action behind the words."

The EJC delegation also called on the Bulgarian government to be vigilant against anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance and racism, especially in politics.

"In Bulgaria, extremist parties should be monitored and legal action should be adopted if they incite xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of intolerance," Kantor said. He added: "There is a growing phenomenon of far-right extremist parties across Europe some whom have managed to gain a foot-hold in the European Parliament, and have used these intolerances, most notably anti-Semitism, as a platform to political power."

Kantor also noted that 70 years after the Second World War began, which destroyed whole European Jewish communities; there is a Jewish renaissance in some of these communities.
"It is especially symbolic for me to be in Bulgaria at this time, a country that, against all odds and against history itself, managed to save almost 50,000 Jewish Bulgarians from deportation and certain death," Kantor said at a dinner to honour President Parvanov.

"For this the Jewish people are extremely grateful to those Bulgarians, including parliamentarians, the intelligentsia, orthodox priests and ordinary citizens who took a stand against tyranny and refused to sacrifice their fellow Bulgarians. Of course we must not forget the fate of the Jews in Thrace and Macedonia, as well as elsewhere, who perished under the Nazis. They must not and will never be forgotten."

Because wars are either won or lost

"If a Palestinian falls over and twists his ankle within sight of Israeli soldiers El País is quick to talk of the thirst for blood inherent in the makeup of the only army in the world that has mostly Jewish members. In this case, however, it reports the story in the most matter-of-fact way and makes no attempt to call into question the Spanish army’s version of events."

Because Wars Are Either Won Or lost, by Eamonn McDonagh, Z Word

You remember all the fuss at the start of the year about Israel’s supposedly disproportionate use of force in Gaza, no? Well, unless you are a close student of Afghan affairs it may have escaped your attention that last Thursday Spanish forces killed 13 members of the Taliban without suffering so much as a scratch on their own side.

We know that they were members of the Taliban because there were independent NGO or ICRC people on the spot who checked and made sure that none of the dead were civilians who grabbed the family AK47 and stuck their heads outside when they heard the firefight start, don’t we? It’s inconceivable that the Spanish soldiers on the spot might have sought to avoid future embarrassing questions by making sure there was a weapon close to each dead Afghan, isn’t it? Even to hint at the possibility of such a thing would be to stain the honor of a noble army, wouldn’t it?

El País of Madrid is the newspaper that reports the story. If a Palestinian falls over and twists his ankle within sight of Israeli soldiers El País is quick to talk of the thirst for blood inherent in the makeup of the only army in the world that has mostly Jewish members. In this case, however, it reports the story in the most matter-of-fact way and makes no attempt to call into question the Spanish army’s version of events. Natalia Junquera and Miguel González, the authors of the report, even manage to give a humanitarian slant to the calling up of a Mangusta attack helicopter to assist the Spanish infantry by saying that it was called off when the Taliban took refuge in caves near to a village with civilian inhabitants. The Mangusta has a three barrel 20mm steerable cannon under its nose as well as a variety of other weapons mounted on pods. A 20mm cannon shell that doesn’t hit its intended target is quite capable of killing a person miles away. It can also penetrate light armor and the walls of domestic residences and kill anyone in the wrong place on the other side. How good that Junquera and Gonzaléz are so certain that nothing like this occurred in this case.

Gabriel Albiac has his say on the matter in ABC today. There follows an edited translation of his column.

Read the whole piece here

'The Spanish are not anti-Semitic', they don't know the facts ...

This statement is a bit rich. No other country is so obsessively and negatively covered by the Spanish media as Israel is and the President of the Socialist Spanish party talks of "lack of knowledge". Who does she think she is fooling ?

"There is a lack of knowledge in Spain regarding the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. There isn't a deep understanding of the problems facing the region, and because Spaniards don't know all of the facts, because they don't see that this conflict is not black and white, they can sometimes get into superficial arguments."

Source: article by Abe Selig in TJP

Spain's El Mundo daily should not have run its interview with Holocaust denier David Irving over the weekend, Delia Blanco Teran, president of the Spanish Socialist Party in the Madrid region, has told The Jerusalem Post.

Anyone who questioned the Holocaust was "crazy," and "it wasn't correct to write the article," Teran told the Post on Thursday, before the Irving interview ran. "Even in a democratic country, it's not correct to print something like that," she said.

El Mundo published the interview as part of a series with "experts" marking the start of World War II 70 years ago.

The conservative Spanish People's Party (Partido Popular), which is considered pro-Israel, led the country's government until 2004, when the March 11 train bombings in Madrid helped to bring the PSOE to power.

The PSOE's national leader, current Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriquez Zapatero, has been an outspoken critic of Israeli military operations and has made numerous public appearances sporting the Palestinian keffiyeh [photo].

And though her party has not traditionally been considered friendly toward Israel, Teran said that the Israeli public's impression of Spanish sentiment toward the Jewish state had not always been accurate.

"The Spanish people are not anti-Semitic," she said. "And I don't think that all journalism in Spain [covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] is directed against Israel. The Jews lived alongside the Spanish for such a long time, and I think that a lot of the problems with Spanish attitudes toward Israel are based in a lack of understanding."

"There is a lack of knowledge in Spain regarding the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians," she added. "There isn't a deep understanding of the problems facing the region, and because Spaniards don't know all of the facts, because they don't see that this conflict is not black and white, they can sometimes get into superficial arguments."

That lack of understanding, Teran said, was the reason for her visit to the region. With help from the the Madrid-based Association for the Solidarity of Israel-Spain, last week Blanco led a delegation of politicians from the Spanish Socialist Party to the region, where they met with Israeli and Palestinian officials and travelled around Israel and the West Bank.

While Teran said a large part of the visit was aimed at improving the delegation members' grasp of the problems facing the region before Spain assumes the revolving European Union presidency in January, another goal was to reconnect with Israel's Labor Party, which once had close relations with the PSOE.

"When the Labor Party was in power in Israel, we had better contact with them," Teran said. "But now that the Socialist Party is in power in Spain, we wanted to reestablish that connection." Still, Teran emphasized that her group had met with representatives of a number of parties, including the Likud, Kadima and Meretz. "We want to talk to the Israeli government no matter who is in charge, she said. "We also spoke with representatives from Fatah."

However, her party had no plans to speak with Hamas representatives.

"And while we want to arrive at a solution, and find the resolution to the conflict, our aim is not to tell anybody what to do. We're coming to help - in no way is the Spanish people anti-Semitic. We want to help advance the peace process process between Israel and the Palestinians, and help Spanish society to better understand the issues."

- Spain : a pacifist country but ... an arms exporter
- Spain helping to rebuild illegal homes in e. J'lem
- US members of Congress write to P.M. Zapatero about anti-semitism in Spain
- Anti-Semitism in Spain
- Spain's Jewish problem, by Michael Freund
- Spain to limit judges' jurisdiction; includes probe against Israelis
- EU-funded Palestinian NGO leading the 'Spanish inquisition'
- 46 per cent of Spanish have a negative/very negative view of Jews (52 percent in Spain have a negative view of Muslims)
- Catalunya government: a Palestinian holocaust is taking place
- Spanish and Basque NGOs Join Palestinians and AIC in Boycott conference
- Spanish unique expertise on Jewish bankers' genealogy
- Israel targets foreign gov't NGO funds (see section on Spain)

Israel basher replaces another at head of World Council of Churches

Ecumenical Blast Against Israel, Mark Tolley, FrontPage Magazine

The departing chief of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC) slammed Israel’s "sin against God" in his August 26 good-bye to the world’s largest ecumenical group.

"Occupation along with the concomitant humiliation of a whole people for over six decades constitutes not just economic and political crimes but, like anti-Semitism, it is a sin against God," declared Kenyan Methodist minister Samuel Kobia, during his farewell to the WCC’s governing central committee.

The WCC was founded after World War II and, in the wake of the Holocaust, robustly denounced anti-Semitism as a "sin against God." Evidently equating the Holocaust on some level with the Israeli presence in the West Bank, Kobia asked his international church audience: "Are we ready to say that occupation is also a sin against God?"

On paper, the WCC is important, with 349 denominations as members, representing over 500 million Christians, or about 25 percent of global Christianity. But in truth, the WCC never fully recovered from its 1970’s alliances with Marxist liberation movements. Catholics and most evangelicals do not belong to the WCC, which friends and foes alike view primarily as the voice of declining Western left-wing Protestantism.

Read the whole piece here
_______________
Now read this :

New Norwegian WCC general secretary supports extreme Palestinian demand
Published: Friday August 28th 2009
From Med Israel for Fred (MIFF)

Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary in Mellomkirkelig råd (MR), was on Thursday elected general secretary in the World Council of Churches.

"We can be proud over how a Norwegian is granted such an important post in the world’s largest ecumenical organization with more than half a billion members, says Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in a press release.

Views "right of return" as "fair"

For friends of Israel and the Jewish state there is reason to grieve. Fykse Tveit supports the Palestinian demand of right to move at least five million Palestinians into the state of Israel. He has over several years been a driving force for presenting this as a “just demand” for the church, both domestically and internationally.

Fykse Tveit is yet to find how the right of return is to be solved. “It is not thereby said that it is a solution that the jews leave their homes”, Tveit said to DagenMagazinet, April 28th 2008. "There are different ways in which to accomodate the demand”, he wrote in an op-ed two days later. Is Tveit at all willing to contemplate that Jews must leave their homes? [...]

If Fykse Tveit had been preoccupied with the right of return for all large groups of refugees, his support to the Palestinians would have been more credible. If it additionally had been correspondingly attentive to a complete vindication and reimbursement of the Jewish refugees from the Arab world, it might even had been fair. But when the demand for rights of return are furthered solely for the Palestinians, and an implementation of this would mean the end of the world’s only state with a majority of Jews, one needs to ask oneself what the driving force is. It is in any case extreme."

Read the whole piece here (Norway, Israel and the Jews blog)

Aftonbladet: behind the banner 'freedom of press', by Lisa Abramowicz

"Is there any other country in the world that has been as demonized and delegitimized as Israel in Aftonbladet during the last 30 years?"

Source: article by Lisa Abramowicz, Secretary General of the Swedish Israel Information Center in Stockholm, in EJP

On August 17 Sweden's largest-circulation newspaper, Aftonbladet published an article on a two-page spread on its culture pages which included a disturbing photo of, among other things, a person who had been the subject of an autopsy, Bilal Ahmed Ghanem.

In the article the Israeli army is accused of stealing organs from dead Palestinians for use in Israel. Indeed, the article even insinuates that the Israeli army is killing Palestinians for the very purpose of using their organs for Israeli patients.

Israeli officials have commented on the picture of the dead man, a wanted Palestinian resistance fighter. According to the IDF, the photo is of an ordinary autopsy. The photo was taken in 1992 (!). Ghanem was killed in a firefight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militia. The photograph is the same as the one found in Boström's book Insh'allah from 2001. No new evidence of organ theft has surfaced.

Donald Boström says that he doesn't know whether or not any organs where stolen, but that he was told by the family that they believe that to have been the case. According to Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh on August 25, the Ghanem family hadn't spoken to any foreign journalist of their suspicions at the time of their son's death, only that a foreign journalist was taking pictures during the funeral and then disappeared. (Palestinian family: We never told ‘Aftonbladet’ organs were taken)

This is a very important detail in the context, as Boström has pointed out in interviews that he is not the one suspecting organ theft, but the family he has been speaking to. He assumes the role of mouthpiece for the family. Clearly Boström is lying when he says that the Ghanem family has spoken to him about this. No further autopsies have been performed on Ghanem or any of the other Palestinians allegedly killed. There are no witnesses. Nothing at all to indicate that any crime of organ theft has taken place.

Then why was Ghanem autopsied by Israel when the cause of death was clear, Boström asks? Certainly to determine the cause of death and whether he had been killed by Israeli or Palestinian fire. Something which isn't always completely obvious. A lot of people are in fact killed by so-called "friendly fire" in the war between Israelis and Palestinians. (Most of the Israeli soldiers killed during the Gaza war this winter fell to friendly fire.)

The accusations are unreasonable for medical reasons since the organs of people who have been injured or killed by gunshots are unsuitable for transplantations. Per Gahrton, president of the Palestine Solidarity Association of Sweden, told Expressen that he chose not to include the rumors of organ theft in his book "Palestinas frihetskamp", which was released last year: "There isn't enough support? But if the Palestinians are to continue with spreading rumors of the Israelis gathering organs they'll have to show a body that is missing organs", Gahrton says.

The head of human rights organization Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, Bassem Eid, is one of the foremost human rights activists in Israel and the Palestinian territories. He, too learned of the rumors of organ theft. Eid could find nothing to support the information. "I have never seen an article like this in any Arab newspaper. No one has reported on this subject - because it is just a rumor", Bassem Eid says.

Boström writing and Aftonbladet publishing is certainly due to them their feeling that this is an opportune moment, after the Gaza war and with Israel’s new right-wing government.

A corruption scandal has erupted in New Jersey, in which, among many other things, an American rabbi is charged with being involved in the transporting of Israelis to the US in order to sell and donate their organs there. Ergo, it is likely that the state of Israel is party to this foul affair and that these matters are somehow interconnected. Hence the publication value, apparently.

Boström and Aftonbladet want a legal investigation into the matter of organ theft. But in a society where rule of law reigns, something both Israel and Sweden are, a prosecutor will only press charges if he/she has enough evidence to convict the accused. Anything else would be a waste of society resources. A court - including the International Criminal Court in The Hague - is not supposed to investigate rumors in a propaganda war. As for the cases invoked by Boström, it's not a matter of "insufficient evidence"; but of "absolutely no evidence".

Jesper Svartvik, president of the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism, comments that "the text is an example of criticism of Israel alluding to and mixing in ancient anti-Semitic myths, in this case the medieval myths of ritual murder. Shakespeare’s Shylock can also be sensed in the background, wanting his pound of flesh at any price." Therefore, it is not so strange that Jews in Sweden, Israel and all over the world have taken offence at the article in Aftonbladet.

Åsa Linderborg, chief cultural editor, admits that she has never heard of the historical anti-Semitic myths of ritual murder, despite holding a Ph. D. in history ! Now, editor-in-chief Jan Helin would prefer discussing the matter of freedom of speech and the press as well as the forceful Israeli reaction to discussing the veracity of the article or how appropriate it was to publish it. I can understand that, as it enables him to portray Aftonbladet as a victim of Israel's "aggression".

Ref. Aftonbladet August 28, with the war headline "Israel attackerar Aftonbladet (Israel attacks Aftonbladet)" at page 1 and references to pages 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Did anyone say "Exaggerated backlash"?

The freedom of information legislation is part of the constitution. No preliminary censoring is to be used. But if you publish a text that is of a dubious nature, you will have to suffer being criticized and questioned. Freedom of speech is not absolute. There is also a law against hate speech, and incitement, although judicial tolerance is extremely lenient. For chief cultural editors and editors-in-chief there is also something called press ethics and standards. The heads of Aftonbladet do not seem to take those very seriously.

It is worth studying the publication policy of Aftonbladet regarding Israel over a period of time, and that goes for all of its pages. Is there any other country in the world that has been as demonized and delegitimized as Israel in Aftonbladet during the last 30 years? It is clear that Aftonbladet’s policy regarding freedom of speech and of the press has been completely different concerning, for example, the Danish Muhammad cartoons or Lars Vilks' roundabout dogs (which weren't published in Aftonbladet) a few years ago. AB declined because they didn't want to offend Muslims. But offending Jews and Israelis is apparently fine.

I don't think that either Linderborg or Helin were unaware of the ruckus that would be caused by publishing this lousy and poorly substantiated article. I think that they were consciously attempting to push the boundaries of what can be written about Israel and Jews and hide behind the banner - freedom of the press.

Norway: divest in Israel, invest in Turkmenistan

While it is unethical to invest in Israeli compay Elbit Systems, it is ethical for State-owned Norwegian oil company StatoilHydro to invest in Turkmenistan (Norway suspects Israel unethical, invests in Turkmenistan) Nigeria, Angola and Azerbaijan. And feel good about it.

Source: article in TJP

Norway's finance minister on Thursday announced that the Israeli company Elbit Systems Ltd. has been dropped from the Nordic country's pension fund due to ethical concerns.

A major optics and electronics manufacturer,the company supplies surveillance equipment used to monitor the security barrier between Israel and the West Bank.

"We do not wish to fund companies that so directly contribute to violations of international humanitarian law," said Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen [see below]. She said the shares were sold secretly ahead of the announcement.

Halvorsen said the security barrier has unacceptably restricted the movements of Palestinians on the West Bank, so that an investment in any company involved in the project causes "unacceptable risk of contribution to particularly serious violations of fundamental ethical norms." [...]

Since 2004, a national Council of Ethics has routinely reviewed investments by the fund, and periodically recommends dropping some shares based on a range of ethical issues, including human rights, labor rights, environmental issues and production of nuclear weapons and cluster bombs.
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- Norwegian Minister of Finance marches with thugs
- Kristin Halvorsen and the demonstration on January 8th
- Minister of Finance sticks to her guns
- Norway: Israel is unethical but investments in Turkmenistan are fine
- Behind the Humanitarian Mask: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland