Long tradition of disrupting Israeli speakers in German universities

"Beat Zionists dead, make the Near East red"

Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus, by Wolfgang Kraushaar, Hamburger Edition HIS Verlagsges, 300 pp., 2005. Reviewed by Manfred Gerstenfeld (October 1, 2006). Extract:

Left-Wing Anti-Semites at Universities

Contemporary commentators often think that the twenty-first-century efforts to prevent or disturb the appearances of Israeli speakers at universities are innovative.

Kraushaar devotes an entire chapter to the experiences of Asher Ben Nathan [photo], the first Israeli ambassador to Germany, at the country’s universities. He was shouted down in June 1969 at Frankfurt University by members of the leftist student group SDS, Palestinians, and leftist Israelis from the Matzpen group. Two days later, Ben Nathan was unable to finish his lecture at Hamburg University because of the many interruptions. When the ambassador wanted to speak in September that year in Berlin, he was told that the climate at both the Free and the Technical universities was such that he should not do so. He then spoke at a meeting organized by the young Christian Democrats. Before the meeting, a leftist publication attacked Ben Nathan in a way that Kraushaar interprets as an invitation to carry out an attempt on the Israeli ambassador’s life. Ben Nathan’s lecture at Munich University in December of that year was also severely disrupted. One poster in the auditorium carried the words: "Only when bombs explode in 50 supermarkets in Israel will there be peace".

There are also other examples besides those Kraushaar mentions of left-wing Germans pioneering extremist actions against Israelis. A case in point is that of Internationale Solidarität, an ad hoc group established to prevent the vice-chancellor of the Hebrew University from addressing a meeting at Kiel University. A leaflet distributed by Internationale Solidarität concluded with the slogan, "Schlagt die Zionisten tot, macht den Nahen Osten rot" (Beat Zionists dead, make the Near East red).[1]

After Ben Nathan ended his ambassadorship, he wrote a book on the letters he had received while in Germany. The German boulevard paper Bild-Zeitung thereupon asked for letters of solidarity with Israel and Ben Nathan. The latter on that occasion also received many anti-Semitic letters, both from the Left and the Right.

An important formative influence on the ideology of many left-wing students was that of the philosophers of the Frankfurt school. One of its prominent members, Theodor W. Adorno, a Jew, wrote a letter in 1969 to his former colleague, Herbert Marcuse, in whose works many of the student leaders of the Paris disturbances sought inspiration. Adorno said he was extremely depressed and afraid that the German student movement would become fascist. He added: "You only have to look into the maniacally frozen eyes of those who probably, basing themselves on us, turn their anger against us".  Kraushaar concludes that apparently Adorno at the time did not want to make this letter public.

What if the terrorists were Jews?, Douglas Murray

The Nazis and their acolytes exterminated 6 million European Jews, including 1.5 million children.  After the war surviving Jews did not carry out reprisal actions, no vengeance, no 'suicide bombings'.  Surviving Jews either left Europe or stayed and carried on with their lives.  Europeans know that and, sadly, knowing this many of them demonise Jews and Israelis in all impunity and with great pleasure.

Douglas Murray @ The Spectator

Yesterday another radical Muslim cell in the UK was found guilty of terrorism offences. Irfan Naseer, Irfan Khalid and Ashik Ali had hoped to carry out a wave of suicide bombings in Britain which would have exceeded 7/7 and rivalled 9/11 in terms of impact and casualties. They were radical Islamists, inspired by radical Islamist preachers and had travelled to Pakistan to receive training in bomb-making with the aim of blowing up British people. [...]

Let us imagine that the cell convicted of attempting to carry out mass murder on the streets of Britain were radical Jews rather than radical Muslims, inspired by Jewish preachers and trained by Jewish terrorist groups in the belief – mistaken or otherwise – that they were acting in the name of their Jewish religion.

Let us furthermore imagine that the recent cell of Jewish terrorists had not only been great admirers of Jewish terrorists who had carried out the largest terrorist attack in history on the United States, and Jewish terrorists who had blown up the London transport system a few years back, but had radical ideological Jewish allies who had done the same thing in Spain, America, India and many other countries around the world over recent years. Imagine, furthermore, that other extremist Jews had assassinated and attempted to assassinate film-makers, artists, writers, politicians and others across Europe over recent years for being critical of Judaism or doing things that they thought offensive to the Jewish faith. Imagine if someone who – because of all of this – had become a critic of some tenets of Judaism had just earlier this month narrowly survived an assassination attempt on him in his home.

Berlin Film Festival Peace Prize winner questions Israel's right of existence

Israeli Berlin correspondent Eldad Beck told EJP that he was disgusted with the “overtly anti-Israeli” undertone which Fleifel portrayed in his film because he knew that it would be seen as harmless by the average viewer. What disturbed him most, however, was the lack of sensitivity and judgment which the patrons of the film prize showed. [...] The film's title was inspired by the novel of Palestinian activist Ghassan Kanafani. Kanafani, a former spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was implicated in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre carried out by members of the Japanese Red Army. 26 people were killed in the attack.  (Amazingly the Festival is supported by the International Auschwitz Committee...)

Oliver Bradley @ BERLIN (EJP)--- Criticism against Danish-Palestinian film director Mahdi Fleifel is growing after he publicly questioned Israel's legitimacy, only days after receiving the Peace Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. The jury of the Peace Film Award (PFA) honored Fleifel's autobiographical documentary, 'A World Not Ours', for its “social-political and humanistic” background.

Jury-members were impressed with Fleifel's depictions of “hopelessness and isolation... free from the unusual patterns classifying the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians”. The jury recognized Fleifel's film as a “plea for a new peace process in the Middle East... at a time where more and more people around the world have to live in refugee camps”. But the jury members apparently did not listened to the public Q&A sessions which followed the public screenings. The simplified yet extenuated appraisals which Fleifel projects in his film - implicating Israel with sole responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem or lack of any kind of sympathy during his visit Yad Vashem memorial – is tempered through the documentary's tragic yet “heartwarming” humor that could easily win over the hearts of a non-critical moviegoer.

But the ensuing Q&A revealed Fleifel's true intentions of “creating a cliché-ridden narrative”, as one moviegoer put it, “with an overt anti-Israeli sentiment which would have disqualified the film from any sort of peace prize – had the judges remained put for several minutes after the film's screening”. At the public Q&A Fleifel did not recognize Jewish legitimacy to their biblical homeland. He also made a plea for the right of Palestinian refugees to be able to return within the 1967 borders of Israel.

58% rise in anti-Semitic attacks in France in 2012

France saw an increase of 58 percent in anti-Semitic incidents in 2012 compared to the previous year, according to a report by the French Jewish community. The report released Tuesday by the SPCJ, the security unit of France’s Jewish communities, showed that 614 anti-Semitic acts were documented in the republic last year compared to 389 in 2011.

"2012 has been a year of unprecedented violence against Jews in France", according to the report, which referenced the shooting murders of a rabbi and three Jewish children on March 19 by an Islamist radical at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Incidents in which the victims were accosted physically or verbally on the street witnessed an increase of 82 percent, to 315 last year from 177 cases in 2011, SPCJ said.

A fourth of the 96 physical anti-Semitic assaults involved a weapon. The SPCJ report reflects a near doubling in physical anti-Semitic assaults, of which 57 were documented in 2011. SPCJ notes two peaks in anti-Semitic attacks in 2012: following the Toulouse shooting, when 90 acts were recorded within 10 days, and after the October 6 bombing of a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles in which two people were lightly wounded, when 28 acts were recorded in the next eight days.

Anti Israel voculabury enrichment: sociocide, spaciocide, genocide of links, genocide of consciences

Elder of Ziyon: Newest pseudo-academic anti-Israel buzzword: "Spacio-cide"

If you need an example of how anti-Israel academics use the veneer of scholarship to target Israel, here's a good one by Sari Hanafi at the American University of Beirut: 

"This article argues that the Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio-cidal’ (as opposed to genocidal) in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live. The spacio-cide is a deliberate ideology with unified rational, albeit dynamic process because it is in constant interaction with the emerging context and the actions of the Palestinian resistance. By describing and questioning different aspects of the military-judicial-civil apparatuses, this article examines how the realization of the spacio-cidal project becomes possible through a regime that deploys three principles, namely: the principle of colonization, the principle of separation, and the state of exception that mediates between these two seemingly contradictory principles."

In summary, Israel is evil, and therefore we must find a way to define everything it does as inherently evil and then explain it afterwards. The author has to admit that Israel isn't engaging in genocide - even academics can only stretch the truth so much - so he has to come up with a new, similarly-evil sounding construct. [...]

In Brussels, the Russell kangaroo tribunal for Palestine will examine the Israel crime of "sociocide".  A Belgian psychiatrist Francis Martens devised a few years ago two new expressions to qualify Israel's supposed crimes: "the genocide of consciences" and the "genocide of links" (sociocide?).  

Romanian writer Paul Goma accused of anti-Semitism nominated for Nobel

Critics claim Romanian writer Paul Goma has practiced Holocaust denial. “Paul Goma’s claims to fame is only by denying the Holocaust, falsifying historical facts and anti-Semitic attacks,” Iosif Belous, vice president of the East European Association of Former Prisoners of Ghettos and Concentration Camps, is quoted as saying on Enews.md, a news site from Moldova.

Belous was reacting to the Union of Moldovan Authors’ nomination of Goma – a Romanian nationalist – to the Nobel Prize in Literature, according to Adevarul, a Bucharest-based daily. Marco Maximillian Katz, director of the Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania, has written that Goma expressed “ferocious and hateful anti-Semitism” that suggests “Jews are guilty of the Holocaust.” According to Katz’s analysis of writings by Goma, the Romanian author suggested in the publication Vatra Review in 2002 that the 1940 massacre in Dorohoi in which 53 people were murdered was a retaliation by Romanian troops against Jews and “an answer to aggression, an eye for an eye.” (JTA/Times of Israel)

"Goma’s writings have been branded antisemitic, not least because they identify Jews as the “real” oppressors; culpable for bringing communist rule to Romania. Indeed, the author of a report on the extent of antisemitism in the country published in 2002 commented: “I do not think that there exists, in the production of the cultural post-communist elite, any writings that could be compared with the tireless hate of this former dissident”. Despite such pronouncements Goma has been awarded several civic accolades including honorary citizenship of the town of Timisoara in the west of the country." (REWRITING HISTORY: Holocaust revisionism today, by David Williams)

Whether they meant to or not, Europe has put up a big 'not welcome' sign for Jews.

Esther, a young religious Israeli, explains why she is putting an end to Islam in Europe, a very successful blog and among the best (12 Aug. 2012):

I've been putting off writing this post, but I can't put this off forever: I'm closing down my blog. This blog has always been a hobby, and as happens in life, I've moved on to other things. I've also discovered that it's not really healthy for me to read thousands of news articles a day and to be aware of every tragedy and scandal across the continent. [...]

I've started this blog in November 2005. I've gotten interested in the subject of the Muslim community in Europe and had been reading other blogs dealing with the issue. At the same time I started learning Dutch with a Flemish friend. A whole new world of news and opinions opened up to me. But what really got me blogging was the realization that the Jewish community was being affected by this very debate, and that nobody else was blogging about that angle. This was brought home to me by the following story: A Dutch author published a thriller centering around a terrorism plot. To add a surprise twist, though Muslims were implicated, the terrorist turned out to be Jewish. That made me realize that Jews were no longer spectators in the game, they were being dragged in. 

Suddenly issues like kosher food, circumcision, head coverings, and religious practice were being questioned. The recent German court decision to ban circumcision, followed by similar decisions in Switzerland and Austria, comes as a final note to this blog. I agree with the commentator who wrote that "they've just made Judaism illegal".  [...]

1. As mentioned above, the Islam debate has serious implications for the Jewish community, which in my opinion will be worse than Muslim antisemitism. I've blogged about this in the past. But to emphasize the point: I'm a religious Jew. I cover my hair, I eat kosher food, I don't work on the Sabbath. I do a thousand and one things that I've seen Islam-critics rage against when done by Muslims. Although logically I understand the demand for assimilation, I also know it would means the end of European Judaism. Whether they meant to or not, Europe has put up a big 'not welcome' sign for Jews. 

2. Anybody who wants to understand current events, should learn history. The mantra 'Muslims are the new Jews' is usually repeated by people whose knowledge of history starts with the Holocaust. I've also seen Muslims being advised to learn from the Jews how to integrate and be politically active. My advice to European Muslims: pick up a book about Jewish-European history in the 18th-19th century. Jews were finally being recognized as equal citizens, but with the new rights came expectations and obligations. The debate on whether to assimilate, integrate or remain aloof raged within the Jewish community, and has not actually been decided to this day. It revolutionized Judaism, for good and bad. Every topic being discussed today was dealt with then, there's nothing new under the sun. Do people really think there's a quick fix for a problem which has been plaguing an ancient European minority for the past 200 years?