March 15, 2018

Never Again: Fighting Hate in a Changing Germany With Tours of Nazi Camps

It was not the execution wall or the electric fence or even the description of the smell of human flesh burning day and night that made the teenagers stop cold.

It was the bunk beds.

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Teaching history is a pillar of national identity in postwar Germany. That is why Sawsan Chebli, a Berlin state legislator with Palestinian heritage, recently came up with an idea that is radical even by the standards of a country that has dissected the horrors of its past like no other: make visits to Nazi concentration camps mandatory — for everyone.

“This is about who we are as a country,” she said in a recent conversation in Berlin. “We need to make our history relevant for everyone: Germans who no longer feel a connection to the past and immigrants who feel excluded from the present.”

Ms. Chebli’s proposal comes at a time when Germany is grappling with the creeping rise of two kinds of anti-Semitism and as the Jewish community, now numbering about 200,000, is once again nervous.

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March 12, 2018

Grossman: Candidates must stand up to rising anti-Semitism

The numbers are startling.

According to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual “Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents,” the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose by 57 percent in the past year. That’s “the largest single-year increase on record,” the ADL notes.

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For years, anti-Semitic incidents declined in this country. Starting in 2016, though, they began to rise again — and rise precipitously.

“It had been trending in the right direction for a long time,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive of the ADL, said in an interview with The New York Times. “And then something changed.”


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The dates are telling: 2016 and 2017 are the years of Donald Trump’s ascendancy.

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March 10, 2018

(Jewish Group) Holocaust Deniers and Other Anti-Semites Making Inroads into Mainstream U.S. Politics

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites are making their presence felt in mainstream American politics. Whether they are running for high-profile offices themselves, or aligning themselves with candidates in races around the country, members of the extremist right – and their racist, anti-Semitic views – are experiencing more exposure today than at any time in recent history.

While extremists’ involvement in politics is not new, the country’s major political parties have historically kept fringe candidates and their ideologies at arm’s length.

In one case, the Holocaust denier himself is running for office. In Illinois, former American Nazi Party head Arthur Jones will be the Republican nominee for US Representative for the state’s 3rd Congressional District. The vocal white supremacist and Holocaust denier is running unopposed for the Republican nomination, and will face incumbent Representative Dan Lipinski or challenger Marie Newman in the general election.

Jones and his wife are founding (and possibly sole) members of the neo-Nazi America First Committee, which operates under the Nationalist Front umbrella. He often attends events organized by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM), including the April 2017 rally in Pikeville, Kentucky.

Jones has repeatedly run for office, always unsuccessfully, since the 1970s.

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This was written a MONTH ago and already needs to have several updates!!!!

March 10, 2018

Anti-Semitism is on the march across Europe

The Front National is about to depart the French political scene. When members of the far-right party gather in Lille for their annual congress today, they are expected to pass a motion to change the party’s name. It will be a personal victory for party leader Marine Le Pen, who has long argued that a facelift is vital if the party is to shed its toxic reputation and open itself up to political alliances.

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In this one aspect at least, the Front National is bucking a wider trend. Across Europe, the rise of populist right-wing parties has been accompanied by an alarming rise in anti-Semitism. When a new government is formed in Germany this month, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland will become leader of the opposition. It carries a legacy of anti-Semitism; last autumn one of its candidates said Germany should take pride in what its soldiers achieved in the second World War. Official figures show reported anti-Semitic crimes are rising, and almost 93 per cent of those are linked to far-right extremism.

In Poland, where the nationalist Law and Justice party recently enacted a law making it illegal to speak of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki last month found himself having to deny being a Holocaust denier after apparently suggesting that Jews were partly responsible for it. Jewish organisations in Poland have recently reported being flooded with hate mail.

As xenophobic parties have seen their support surge from Austria to the Czech Republic and Italy, so too has anti-Semitic demagoguery.

In Hungary, authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has proclaimed zero tolerance for anti-Semitism, but many see anti-Jewish messaging in the government’s campaign against George Soros – the elderly Hungarian Jew who emigrated to the US after the second World War, made a fortune and has long been involved in promoting liberal democratic values in eastern Europe.

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And today, what do I wake up and read in LBN here at DU? Putin says Jews with Russian citizenship could be behind U.S. election meddling (there is also now a thread in General Discussion.)

March 10, 2018

Poland marks 50 years since 1968 anti-Semitic purge

In 1968, the Polish Communist party declared thousands of Jews enemies of the state and forced them to leave Poland. Fifty years later, historians and witnesses warn of a revival of Polish anti-Semitism.

Jozef Lebenbaum was a reporter with the Workers' Voice newspaper in Lodz, Poland's second-largest city, when he was forced to leave the country in August 1968. The reason: He was Jewish. Anti-Semitism was ablaze back then in Poland, and the regime sought various, often absurd, excuses to get rid of the Jews.

He was 38 at the time, in the middle of his career, Lebenbaum tells DW. "Suddenly, my work was gone, my colleagues, my apartment, and the Polish culture I had grown up with," he remembers.

An anti-Semitic wave forced about 20,000 Jews from Poland to leave the country between 1968 through to the end of 1972. It peaked for the first time on March 8, 1968, when Warsaw police beat up students protesting state censorship and repression of critical fellow students. The student leaders were branded as Zionist and anti-Polish as state-controlled anti-Semitic agitation began to spread across the country.

The authorities organized mass demonstrations in which Jews who held prominent official positions were accused of everything that was wrong with the ailing Communist system. "Zionists to Zion," people yelled at party conventions, the aim being to send the country's Jews — regarded as anti-Polish — to Israel.

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March 9, 2018

Anti-LGBT First Amendment Defense Act Reintroduced in Senate

Republican senators have reintroduced the First Amendment Defense Act, which if it becomes law will give the federal government’s blessing to discrimination against LGBT people and others in the name of religious beliefs about marriage and sexuality.

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and 21 GOP colleagues today introduced a new version of the bill, The Hill reports. An earlier version was introduced in both the House and Senate in 2015 but never advanced out of committee.

Language in the bill states that its purpose is “to ensure that the Federal Government shall not take any discriminatory action against a person, wholly or partially on the basis that such person speaks, or acts, in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is or should be recognized as a union of one man and one woman, or two individuals as recognized under Federal law, or that sexual relations outside marriage are improper.”

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Examples of discrimination that would be allowed under the act, according to HRC, include denial of federally mandated family leave to care for a same-sex spouse, or turning away people in same-sex marriages from homeless shelters or domestic violence shelters that receive federal funding.

The American Civil Liberties Union likewise denounced the measure. “Families targeted by this bill could include same-sex married couples and their children, a single mother and her child, or an unmarried couple who are living together,” the ACLU tweeted.

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March 7, 2018

(Jewish Group) How many Jews live in the U.S.? That depends on how you define Jewish.

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Adolf Hitler wanted to eliminate the Jewish people, and his regime murdered 6 million in pursuit of that goal.

Thousands of Jews fled to the United States and Israel during and after the Holocaust, if they could manage to make it to these relative safe havens. Now, more than 80 percent of the world’s Jewish population lives in those two countries, and the American Jewish population has grown substantially in number since the end of World War II.

The Jewish People Policy Institute estimated that the global Jewish population was nearing pre-Holocaust numbers a couple of years ago, in part because of “changing patterns of Jewish identification.” But that finding was challenged because of the study’s broad definition of “Jewish.”

Like most things in Judaism, there’s disagreement. Here’s how two major scholars define Jewishness:

•Steven Cohen, a professor at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem, defines a Jew as “anybody who considers him or herself Jewish with some evidence of having Jewish familial ties or having affirmatively switched their identities by conversion or self-identification.” He says that being Jewish is not a religion but “a culture, an ancestry. Most practice Judaism, some don’t practice it at all and some practice other religions.”

•Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Sergio DellaPergola defines the more narrow “core Jewish population” as those who are Jewish only or Jewish by identity, even if they are not religiously Jewish, as long as they practice no other religions. But he also calculates estimates for a more expansive group: those with Jewish parents, those partially Jewish, those with Jewish backgrounds and those who qualify under the “Law of Return” — any person born to a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism without another Jewish identity.

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March 7, 2018

(Jewish Group) Womens March Renounces Farrakhans anti-Semitism, Supports Leader Who Embraced Him

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!

Organizers of the Women’s March renounced the anti-Semitic views of Louis Farrakhan, but they stood behind one of its co-presidents who attended a speech last month by the Nation of Islam leader and seemed unperturbed by his attacks on Jews.

Tamika Mallory, co-president of the Women’s March, sparked an outcry when she posted a photo of herself and Farrakhan on Instagram following his Saviours’ Day speech in Chicago on February 25.

In that speech, Farrakhan declared that “powerful Jews are my enemy” and that he had “pulled the cover off the eyes of the Satanic Jew.” Farrakhan, as he has done repeatedly in the past, also accused Jews of controlling the FBI and Hollywood, and plotting to synthesize marijuana in order to “feminize” black men.

Mallory subsequently deleted her post, but not before critics demanded to know why the leader of a broad-based civil rights movement would boast of her connections to Farrakhan.

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Let's see if people continue to hold their feet to the fire or are satiated by pathetic excuses.

March 1, 2018

The Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism in the US

The word “bizarre” does not begin to capture the everyday craziness of our politics in the Trump era. Here’s the opening paragraph of a column in National Review, titled “An Epidemic of Dishonesty on the Right,” by bona fide right-winger Kevin D. Williamson:

First it was the Holocaust, now Parkland—is there any act of depravity to which the less respectable right-wing media cannot imagine a connection for George Soros?

David Clarke, the sheriff of Fox News, insisted that the Florida students’ reaction to the shooting ‘has GEORGE SOROS’ FINGERPRINTS all over it,’ idiotic capitalization in the original and, one assumes, in his soul. The idiots at Gateway Pundit suggested that one of the student survivors was a fraud because—get this—he’d been interviewed on television before about an unrelated incident.

Had I written the above in The Nation, I would not change a word, except perhaps to add that, roughly simultaneously to all of the above, the head of the Missouri Republican Party was blaming Soros for the indictment of the state’s governor, Eric Greitens, who is accused of taking surreptitious nude photos of his mistress for the purpose of blackmail.

The desire to attach Soros’s name to virtually everything that Trumpists seek to denounce of late is inextricably tied to the fact that the liberal Jewish billionaire/philanthropist has been turned into a bogeyman for anti-Semites the world over. Soros is today’s stand-in for the time-honored anti-Jewish slanders sensationalized in Europe and elsewhere in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s why Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary practically turned Soros—whom he blames for “destroy[ing] the lives of millions of Europeans”—into his opposition party in that nation’s recent elections. It’s why, in Macedonia, a group called Stop Operation Soros, or SOS, emerged to try to defend that nation’s corrupt right-wing party. It’s why Poland’s ruling party leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, said he believes that Soros views cosmopolitan societies as “extremely easy to manipulate.” Right-wing idiots have been setting fire to effigies and portraits representing Soros in rallies from Warsaw to Tbilisi.

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March 1, 2018

The inescapable anti-Semitism of Western nationalists

Readers of Today's WorldView are well aware of how the far right has gone mainstream over the past year. They were brought there by a confluence of events: President Trump's rise to the White House on an ultranationalist platform, the electoral gains made by once-fringe parties in Western Europe and the deepening illiberalism of parties in power farther east. As a result, we've seen a rise in Islamophobia as well as widespread demonization of immigrants in various countries.

But this resurgent nativism also encompasses an old and dark tradition: a virulent hatred of Jews.

You could see it in last year's infamous white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, where hundreds — inspired in part by Trump's politics — chanted “Jews will not replace us.” (The president decries anti-Semitism, but had a notoriously tough time denouncing the neo-Nazi marchers.) You could see it in the sly game played by Poland's ruling party, which has moved to criminalize discussion of Poland's role in the Holocaust while looking the other way during a nationalist demonstration in November where supporters chanted “Pure Poland, Jew-Free Poland.” And you could even see it in the hideous slaughter of 17 high school students in Florida this month — the shooter's magazines were reportedly etched with swastikas.

Anti-Semitic incidents were up in 2017. If we expect law enforcement officials and community members to take these incidents seriously, we must take them seriously - report anti-Semitic incidents to the police and to ADL: https://t.co/pZrpwaRYei pic.twitter.com/3ufYXwnxFX

— ADL (@ADL_National) February 27, 2018

A new study by the Anti-Defamation League, a U.S.-based organization that tracks anti-Semitism and other bigotry, found an alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017. “The ADL’s 2017 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents identified 1,986 examples of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and assault in 2017, the largest single-year increase and the second-highest number since it started tracking the data in the 1970s,” my colleague Tara Bahrampour reported. “Vandalism was up by 86 percent, and incidents targeting Jewish schools, community centers, museums and synagogues had surged by 101 percent since 2016, the report found. The number of anti-Semitic incidents in K-12 schools has roughly doubled each year for the past two years, the report said.”

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