Spanish journalist uses Yom HaShoah to criticize Israel.

Source: Spain, Israel and the Jews (Eugenio García Gascón uses Yom HaShoah to criticize Israel)

On Sunday, May 1, 2011, Israel commemorated the 6,000,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust through the Yom HaShoah, i.e., the Holocaust Day. The next day, Público published an article by Eugenio García Gascón titled Antisemitismo (Anti-Semitism). This journalist's double standard and lack of historical accuracy is more than evident in this article. Please pay attention to the first paragraph (translated as accurate as possible, between quotation marks):

"Yesterday night, during a ceremony held at the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu told that the world hasn't learnt the lesson derived from the Holocaust, and compared the Holocaust, that is the Second World War nazi actions against Europe's Jews with the current Iranian threat. It's something which seems to be disproportionate and out of place but all Israeli leaders talk endlessly about Iran, once they see a microphone within their reach, and Netanyahu is not an exception, although Iran is a country which never has attacked anybody, unlike Israel, and in exchange it had to endure aggressions."

So Eugenio García Gascón pretends to make his readers to believe that Iran never attacked anybody while Israel did, and that Iran suffered attacks. The truth is that Iran attacked others in the past and is currently doing so. Its victims include Iranians (real or alleged political dissidents, homosexuals, adulterous and raped women, and so on), Israelis (who suffer attacks by terrorists organizations supplied with weapons by Iran), Palestinians (who suffer repression by the aforementioned organizations) and the Red Crescent (whose ambulances were used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to smuggle weapons into Lebanon).

Meanwhile, aggressions against Israel are not mentioned by Eugenio García Gascón as the main cause of Israel's defense policies. It's not also told by the Spanish journalist how, while Iran was being attacked by Saddam Hussein-led Iraq between 1980 and 1988, the Persian State received Israel's help; in spite of this, Iran refused to re-establish ties with Israel.

Read the full article HERE

European parliament celebrating Hamas friend Vittorio Arrigoni

Vittorio Arrigoni was the Italian "pacifist" who was murdered by his Palestinian friends in the Gaza strip.  He loved Hamas and hated Zionists (or Jews?) and called them "rats".  Now the European parliament is celebrating the man and the "peace" flotillas.  No wonder Europeans are discontented with the EU.  See: The murder of a European 'pacifist' who hated Israel.

The Free Gaza movement is a human rights group that, since August 2008, has travelled nine times to Gaza by sea to break Israel's illegal stranglehold on the 1.5 million Palestinians that live there. On 31 May 2010, in a lethal attack against the Freedom Flotilla, nine people were killed and many more injured by Israeli commandos. The FREEDOM FLOTILLA – STAY HUMAN is the next  flotilla of boats that will be sail to Gaza to break the siege.

They are named in memory of Vittorio Arrigoni, Italian activist and volunteer who was murdered on 14 April 2011 in the Gaza Strip. HEARING

GUE/NGL press contact :
Gianfranco Battistini + 32 475646628

For more on Arrigoni click here (Elder of Ziyon):

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=004212307780651616265%3Ad87yif98dry&ie=UTF-8&q=arrigoni&sa=Search&siteurl=elderofziyon.blogspot.com%2F

(H/T C.F.)

Europe: yet another conference to discuss "assault on Israel’s legitimacy"

Stating and discussing the obvious.  But in the end nothing changes.

PARIS (EJP)----During a meeting in Jerusalem, European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor invited Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to a European conference of heads of state to discuss the assault on Israel’s legitimacy.

The conference will take place in the coming months. Netanyahu confirmed his participation, the EJC said.

"This conference will be a vital step in the battle against the ongoing assault on Israel’s legitimacy" Kantor said. "This will be a top level meeting where we can make real headway to meeting this challenge in Europe which appears to be the beachhead of the delegitimization campaign."

According to the EJC, Kantor is expected to call for the adoption of "clear boundaries" to criticism of Israel, modeled on the working definition of anti-Semitism produced in 2005 by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), an EU body which monitors racism and anti-Semitism in EU Member States.

The murder of a European 'pacifist' who hated Israel

"When you go to Gaza, or Afghanistan, you have to realise that our conception of life, is complitely different from any Islamic political conception of life. You can die because you are Jewish, because you are Italian, or Christian, because you are an apostate, or a corrupt Westerner... the extremist mentality, make no bones about it, cancels out friends and allies. No matter how much you have worked against the «Zionist power» or that you have called Zionists «rats» (and Arrigoni did this), nothing is of any worth if you break their rule, a rule which will remain unclear until the knife blade comes. Arrigoni was fan of political Islamism because he was an enemy of the Jews, but this did not save him from a cruel execution in front of the camera, just as the one of many others friends or enemies of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad, never mind."

Fiamma Nierenstein (excerpt) :

"Hamas is responsible for the captivity of Gilad Shalit; it was responsible for the armed destruction of the UN recreational camp for children, which did not abide by Islamic dictates; it was responsible for arresting 150 women under the accusation of witchcraft and the execution of several of them; it is Hamas that has introduced by law death penalty, whipping, cutting off hands and crucifixion, according to Sharia. Hamas killed the 32-year old Christian book salesman Rami Khader Ayyad, guilty of selling Bibles. Not all those who carry out these operations, or which Hamas gives orders to fire Qassam missiles against Israel, are members of the terrorist organization that rules Gaza; indeed at times it pretend to fight them. Hamas is a movement, a party, a fundamentalist State. Its statute stipulates that it wants to destroy the Jewish State, to exterminate Jews and impose an Islamic caliphate on the entire world. Salafite fringes and those linked more to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, those influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Iran or Al Qaeda and based in the Gaza Strip, join up and leave Hamas by turns. The fact that Hamas has now disowned the killers of Arrigoni [photo with Ismaïl Hanyeh] with is not of the slightest importance. In any case, they were still employed by Hamas as members of the Al Qassam Brigades.

To understand the death of this Italian activist, one important fact must be grasped: his death was triggered by the spurious way he mixed his humanitarian ideals with the cause of fundamentalist Gaza, by the fact that he mixed his life with that of his potential enemies, that he thought about as his best friends. But fundamentalists do not have stable affinities. Only their interpretation of Quran counts. Hamas Gaza, where Arrigoni has been killed, is for us a land ruled by awful and distant laws. Arrigoni loved the Palestinians, but he remained a total foreigner for them. It is for us unconcivable, even if you are a militant like Arrigoni, to live alongside those who fire missiles on civilians, wear belts packed with explosives and hand out sweets when an Israeli family is killed in Itamar, including a three months baby, a four years old child and another of nine.

Europe should follow Goldstone's lead, Daniel Schwammenthal

"The failure of the U.K. and France to oppose the report is particularly difficult to understand. Europe's two foremost military powers are themselves involved in asymmetrical conflicts against enemies that ignore the civilized world's rules of war. The Goldstone Report could have set a dangerous precedent, undermining their armies' ability to face off enemies hiding among civilian populations. And yet, then-Foreign Secretary David Miliband of the previous Labour government seemed to accept the moral equivalence the Goldstone report tried to draw between Hamas terrorists and democratic Israel: "We take seriously all substantive allegations of breaches of International Humanitarian Law by both sides during the Gaza conflict," he said at the time."


Source: EJP

After almost two years, Richard Goldstone finally retracted his war crimes accusations against Israel. "If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document," the head of the U.N. Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Friday. Mr. Goldstone has now confirmed that Israel did not intentionally target civilians, suggested that Israel's much lower estimates of Palestinian civilian casualties than those cited in his own report were probably correct and credited the Jewish state with conducting credible investigations into alleged wrongdoings by individual soldiers.

While this about-face is welcome, the report's many flaws were obvious from the start to any fair-minded observer. It's hardly surprising that Israel's enemies lapped up the Goldstone Report. But the responses of Israel's European friends were more disappointing. When the U.N. General Assembly voted on November 5, 2009 to endorse the report, many European Union countries failed to stand by their embattled partner. Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal, Malta, and Slovenia voted in favor of the U.N. resolution. Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom abstained.

Switzerland: Court sides with pro-Palestinian group

More of the same tedious anti-Israel bashing, but a amazing source of enjoyment and preoccupation for Europeans.

Source: YNet (Swiss court: Ban on anti-Israel signs violates free speech, by Daniel Bettini)

Swiss train service is ordered to allow signs that claim 'Israel was established with violence on Palestinian land'.
A Swiss court has ordered the state's national train service, the SBB, to allow a pro-Palestinian group to hang anti-Israeli posters in Zurich's central train station, the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger reported on Tuesday.

Members of the Palestine Solidarity Action first attempted to hang controversial posters in several locations within the station in 2009, but were ordered by the station's management to take them down after three days.

The posters appeared to argue against Israel's right to exist. "Sixty-one years of Israel, 61 years of injustice," the sign read.  "A country without a people did not exist in the Middle East for the people without a country," it claimed. "Israel was established with violence on Palestinian land. The injustice demands resistance!"

Brussels Mayor says Israeli ‘checkpoint’ staged in the center of city ‘exceeded limits’

But stops short of condemning (let alone apologising) and calls the organisers pacifists.

BRUSSELS (EJP) ---The Mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, said he “regretted” the proportions taken by a anti-Israel demonstration held last month in the heart of the Belgian capital by a group of pro-Palestinian associations who wanted to "denounce the apartheid regime in Israel and encourage people to boycott it."

The associations described as "pacifists" staged an Israeli checkpoint in the middle of Rue Neuve, the main commercial street in Brussels. The images were then filmed and broadcast on Facebook and YouTube.

This staging drew many angry reactions within the Belgian Jewish community especially since it had been authorized by the city and that it occurred one day after the brutal assassination by Palestinians of five members of an Israeli family in Itamar.

The staging ended with the murder of an Arab boy by an Israeli soldier. His mother then filed a Palestinian flag on the body of her child while the audience applauded and shouted "boycott Israel".

"I am ashamed of my city, ashamed of my country today. It is time to look at the reality and act. I invite you to visit a checkpoint at the border and you will forge your own opinion", wrote Julia Szerer, a young 19 year old girl in an email sent to the mayor.

Frederique Ries, a Brussels City Councillor and Euro MP, also wrote to the Mayor, denouncing a "false caricature whose only effect is to import the Middle East conflict in Belgium."

"Criticism is allowed, it is obvious. In Belgium as well as in Israel. But freedom of expression to which I am very attached has its moral and legal limits which have been exceeded. This amounted to incitement to hatred and violence", she stressed in her letter.

In response, the Mayor "regretted the proportions taken by the event" and said he was "sorry" that people have been shocked.

"Without commenting on the content of their message, it is clear that the organizers have exceeded the limits that were set" , Freddy Thielemans said.

"I asked police to be vigilant in the future regarding the authorization of such actions on public space. While preserving the right to freedom of expression, we will do our utmost to prevent such a scenario happening again."

In 2008, a similar staging was held in the town of Nivelles near Brussels.[Wiesenthal Centre denounces bogus 'Israeli' assault on Arabs subliminal Jew-hatred inculcation and Former Belgian Minister sparks ire of Jewish community with remarks on Israel]

Other anti Israel demonstrations staged in Brussels and authorised by the Mayor.