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Post by Admin on Aug 19, 2014 0:14:41 GMT
FRANCE’S leaders are increasingly worried about the apparent rise of anti-Semitism in their country. Yesterday afternoon François Hollande, the president, called an urgent meeting of Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Buddhist leaders to discuss the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence over the weekend when demonstrators against Israel’s actions in Gaza ran wild. On a hot Saturday in the predominantly Muslim neighbourhood of Barbès, not far from the Gare du Nord, a big railway station in Paris, a crowd that swelled to around 3,000 ignored an official ban on demonstrating. They set fire to an Israeli flag, bashed in shops and threw stones at serried ranks of riot police, 15 of whom retired wounded. On Sunday afternoon the violence spilled over into Sarcelles, a suburb with a large Sephardic Jewish population. A Molotov cocktail was launched at the main synagogue and a kosher shop was burnt down. Shop windows were smashed; several stores were looted; flames flared fitfully. Tear gas hung heavy in the air as riot police scattered the thugs, firing rubber bullets. Four policemen ended up in hospital. Permitted pro-Palestinian demonstrations elsewhere passed off peacefully, prompting some to say that banning the demonstrations in Paris was provocative as well as contravening the right to free speech. But a week earlier several Paris synagogues had been targeted by protesters shouting “Death to the Jews”. After the meeting with the president yesterday, Joël Mergui, president of the Jewish Central Consistory of France, paused for a moment on the steps of the Elysée palace to shake hands with Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris. But fixing the toxic mix of economic marginalisaton and growing radicalisation among many Muslims that provides the backdrop to such episodes will take more than a handshake. In March 2012 a shooting spree in the south of France targeting French soldiers and Jewish students left seven people dead, including three schoolchildren and a young rabbi. The perpetrator, Mohammed Merah, a French criminal of Algerian descent, claimed connections with al-Qaeda. On May 24th of this year, four people were shot dead in the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman of Algerian origin who is believed to have fought with Islamist rebels in Syria, was arrested for the crime, which he denies committing. Later that evening, two Jews in traditional dress coming out of the synagogue in Créteil, near Paris, were attacked by thugs. “Anti-Semitic acts and threats are getting worse every day,” said CRIF (the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) in a statement, calling it an offshoot of terrorism that should be treated as such. Though there were far fewer anti-Jewish acts and threats in 2013 than in 2012, according to the Society for the Protection of the Jewish Community (SPCJ), since 2000 anti-Jewish violence is running at an average annual rate seven times higher than in the 1990s. Two-fifths of racist violence in France in 2013 was focused on Jews, the SPCJ says, though they constitute less than 1% of the population. The past weekend’s incidents come at a time when France is increasingly anguished over issues of national identity and values. Muslims, roughly estimated at 10% of the population, are more inclined to test the country’s determined secularism to its limits. A number of young jihadists are finding their way into conflict zones such as Syria, and helping others do the same. Trading partly on anti-immigrant sentiment, the far-right Front National received almost a quarter of all votes in the recent European elections in May. France’s war-time history of occupation and collaboration with the Nazis remains a sensitive topic. Before the Molotov cocktails started flying in Sarcelles on Sunday, Manuel Valls, the prime minister, was speaking in commemoration of the Jewish victims of “Vel d’Hiv”, where French Jews were rounded up and sent off to concentration camps, calling complicity in it “le déshonneur de la France”. Earlier this year Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a notorious French Cameroonian comedian of pronounced anti-Semitic views who favours a reverse-Nazi salute, was forced to cancel a tour on the grounds that it would threaten public order. Both Mr Hollande and Mr Valls have effectively called this weekend’s events “intolerable”. Unexpectedly, it was Bernard Cazeneuve, Mr Valls’s uncharismatic successor as interior minister, who brought a hint of philosophy, even poetry, to the matter. Speaking on the radio yesterday, he said that France had chosen the path of reason to fight irrational passions such as racism, and that the same energy it puts into defending its Jews now it would put tomorrow into defending mosques, churches and temples—“C’est cela la République.”
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Post by Admin on Aug 24, 2014 21:13:35 GMT
In France and Germany, synagogues and Jewish community centres have been firebombed. In Britain, a rabbi was attacked near a Jewish boarding school. And in Australia, a bus carrying Jewish schoolchildren was targeted by teenagers shouting "Heil Hitler" and threatening to slit the children's throats. As a result, newspapers have reported a "rising tide of anti-Semitism in Britain", that Europe is facing the "worst times since the Nazis'' and that we're witnessing a "dramatic rise in global anti-Semitism". In Britain, the Jewish organisation the Community Security Trust (CST) monitors anti-Semitic incidents. These include violent attacks on people or property, threats, anti-Semitic graffiti and online expressions of anti-Semitism. The CST says it received around 240 reports of anti-Semitic incidents in July, which it describes as five times the monthly average. The UK Association of Chief Police Officers, which has released statistics on hate crime since 2009, has talked of a "significant rise" in anti-Semitism since the latest fighting began in Gaza in early July. Over the longer term, 2013 saw the lowest annual number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain since 2005. During the past decade the levels have fluctuated making it difficult to identify a long term trend - although the number of incidents has declined steadily from a peak in 2009 to the end of 2013, it is higher than it was 10 years ago. What about Europe? The European Union Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) publishes a report every year summarising data on anti-Semitic incidents supplied by governments and NGOs. The problem is that only around half the EU states collect this data, and the quality varies hugely. In the countries with better data, the picture is mixed. In Germany anti-Semitic acts declined in the decade to 2011, before rising slightly in 2012. In Sweden the trend has been upwards, although the overall number of incidents is low. In France, concerns about anti-Semitism have been raised by a number of high profile incidents including the killing of a teacher and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. There, the official data also shows the number of incidents has fluctuated up and down, trending downward in the decade to 2012 before rising that year. Several commentators have referred to a poll from earlier this year by the US Jewish organisation the ADL. The poll surveyed people in 101 countries, and suggests that a quarter of the world's population harbour anti-Semitic attitudes. But critics have a number of concerns with the way the survey was constructed. The ADL presented 11 statements about Jewish people, ranging from "Jews are responsible for most of the world's wars" to "Jews have too much control over the United States government". People who answered "probably true" to six or more of the statements were classified as anti-Semitic by the ADL. That's one of the biggest issues of all when trying to measure attitudes - there are some things that are clearly anti-Semitic, but there are also a number of areas and issues, such as criticism of Israeli government policy, where there's debate. More reliable data on attitudes in Europe comes from long term academic studies of public opinion. Nonna Mayer runs one such study which is used for the official annual report on human rights and hate crime in France. The Pew survey also reports lower levels of anti-Semitic sentiment than suggested by the ADL survey. For France, the Pew survey suggests 10% of people have unfavourable attitudes towards Jewish people, which contrasts with the ADL poll's suggestion that 37% of people in France are anti-Semitic. While it's difficult to see clear evidence of a broad upward trend in anti-Semitism, there's still fear in some parts of the Jewish community. A poll published last week by the Jewish Chronicle website suggested that "almost two-thirds of British Jews have questioned their future in the UK amid rising anti-Semitism".
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Post by Admin on Sept 6, 2014 23:58:59 GMT
A list naming 13,732 Jewish refugees who took safe haven in China during World War II carved into a 34-meter-long copper wall was unveiled in Shanghai on Tuesday. Constructed in the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum at the former site of Ohel Moshe Synagogue, the monument was opened to the public the day before the 69th anniversary of China's victory in the anti-Japanese war. "The list is particularly meaningful. All of [the refugees] survived harsh days in the war and sheltered in Shanghai," said Sonja Muehlberger, 75, a German activist who was born into a Jewish family in Shanghai in 1939. Names of her family were also on the list, which originated from the appendix of Exile in Shanghai: 1938-1947, a German book exploring the time period. Sonja contributed to the book and proofread the list, which was initially compiled by three Jewish girls during the war."Shanghai was the only place in the world open to Jewish refugees. We will never forget the city," said Sonja. Shanghai gained fame as a refuge for those fleeing Germany in World War II, accommodating about 20,000 Jewish refugees at the height of the war, said Pan Guang, a researcher at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Shanghai was a haven for European Jews fleeing the Nazis between 1937 and 1945, when the Japanese army-occupied city was the only destination in the world that would accept refugees without visas. Nearly 20,000 Jews, from countries including Germany, Austria, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Latvia, crammed in the city, mostly in Hongkou district, in an area called the "Shanghai ghetto." Most of those who found shelter in the city lived to see the end of World War II and the defeat of Nazism. The recently unveiled wall, which is 34 meters long and 2.5 meters tall, is composed of 26 copper plates and features a sculpture depicting Jewish refugees at one end. Most of the names inscribed on the wall came from a "foreigners' list" compiled by the local police department in 1944. The list was stolen by an Austrian, who took it to Vienna in 1947. Muehlberger discovered the list while doing research for her book, Exil Shanghai 1938-1947, which she coauthored in 2000. Muehlberger said that the list was typed by three Jewish girls, aged 14, 15 and 16, employed by occupying Japanese forces in Shanghai for a census project. Bernie and Lisa Deutsch, a Jewish couple from Boston, US, found the name of a deceased uncle on the wall when visiting the museum as part of their tour of Shanghai. "We came here because we're Jewish - my parents and their siblings were all from Germany, and my uncle escaped to Shanghai when he was young. I consider us very lucky to come here and see this," Bernie Deutsch told the Global Times.
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Post by Admin on Sept 17, 2014 22:02:16 GMT
As Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in World War II, General Eisenhower had been given information about the Nazi concentration camp system well before he led the invasion to liberate Western Europe (June, 1944). Reports on the massive genocide inflicted on Jews, Gypsies, political prisoners, homosexuals, dissidents, and other groups by the Schutzstaffel (SS) had been circulated among all the Allied leaders. Very few of the Allied commanders, however, had an accurate conception of what is now known to the world as the Holocaust until their troops began to encounter the death camps as they marched into Western Germany. On April 4, 1945, elements of the United States Army’s 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division captured the Ohrdruf concentration camp outside the town of Gotha in south central Germany. Although the Americans didn’t know it at the time, Ohrdruf was one of several sub-camps serving the Buchenwald extermination camp, which was close to the city of Weimar several miles north of Gotha. Ohrdruf was a holding facility for over 11,000 prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and crematoria at Buchenwald. A few days before the Americans arrived to liberate Ohrdruf, the SS guards had assembled all of the inmates who could walk and marched them off to Buchenwald. They left in the sub-camp more than a thousand bodies of prisoners who had died of bullet wounds, starvation, abuse, and disease. The scene was an indescribable horror even to the combat-hardened troops who captured the camp. Bodies were piled throughout the camp. There was evidence everywhere of systematic butchery. Many of the mounds of dead bodies were still smoldering from failed attempts by the departing SS guards to burn them. The stench was horrible. When General Eisenhower learned about the camp, he immediately arranged to meet Generals Bradley and Patton at Ohrdruf on the morning of April 12th. By that time, Buchenwald itself had been captured. Consequently, Ike decided to extend the group’s visit to include a tour of the Buchenwald extermination camp the next day. Eisenhower also ordered every American soldier in the area who was not on the front lines to visit Ohrdruf and Buchenwald. He wanted them to see for themselves what they were fighting against. During the camp inspections with his top commanders Eisenhower said that the atrocities were “beyond the American mind to comprehend.” He ordered that every citizen of the town of Gotha personally tour the camp and, after having done so, the mayor and his wife went home and hanged themselves. Later on Ike wrote to Mamie, “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world.” He cabled General Marshall to suggest that he come to Germany and see these camps for himself. He encouraged Marshall to bring Congressmen and journalists with him. It would be many months before the world would know the full scope of the Holocaust — many months before they knew that the Nazi murder apparatus that was being discovered at Buchenwald and dozens of other death camps had slaughtered millions of innocent people. General Eisenhower understood that many people would be unable to comprehend the full scope of this horror. He also understood that any human deeds that were so utterly evil might eventually be challenged or even denied as being literally unbelievable. For these reasons he ordered that all the civilian news media and military combat camera units be required to visit the camps and record their observations in print, pictures and film. As he explained to General Marshall, “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” His prediction proved correct. When some groups, even today, attempt to deny that the Holocaust ever happened they must confront the massive official record, including both written evidence and thousands of pictures, that Eisenhower ordered to be assembled when he saw what the Nazis had done.
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Post by Admin on Sept 21, 2014 21:15:23 GMT
A few years ago, I attended a discussion at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan about Franklin Roosevelt and the Holocaust. The featured speakers, historians Deborah Lipstadt and Richard Breitman, gave sensitive and nuanced accounts of the period that were steeped in their own research and a deep knowledge of a time that has become one of the most closely examined ever. They discussed Roosevelt’s strengths and weaknesses as he confronted demands that he rescue Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany while preparing America for war in the face of fierce isolationism, nativism and anti-Semitism at home. After an hour, the session was opened to questions. An elderly woman stood up and identified herself as a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who had been a prisoner at Auschwitz. She recalled seeing Allied planes in the sky over the camp (“little silver birds, maybe thousands of them”). But the bombs never fell. Lipstadt and Breitman had explained earlier that the planes were not able to reach Auschwitz until late in the war and that, in any case, bombing the camp would probably not have stopped the killing. But that did not satisfy the woman. “If they would have bombed the crematoria, they could have at least stopped them from murdering the Jews,” she said, her voice rising in indignation. “That’s why I blame the Allies for it, including the United States. My parents died there—my whole family died over there, OK? And I was 16, so it’s not like you said that Roosevelt couldn’t do nothing.” The audience of several hundred, which had been largely subdued during the talk, suddenly erupted in applause and shouts of encouragement. It’s a scene that I have seen play out with minor variations many times over the last decade at similar public events about the Holocaust. No matter the evidence to the contrary, it has become received wisdom among many American Jews that Roosevelt deliberately and coldly abandoned Europe’s Jews in their hour of need. This marks a dramatic reversal in the image of a president who won more than 80 percent of the Jewish vote in all four of his successful campaigns, who surrounded himself with Jewish advisers and was portrayed by Hitler’s propagandists as Jewish (and not in a good way). Roosevelt brought thousands of Jewish professionals into government, prevented Hitler from overrunning Britain and Palestine (thus saving their large Jewish populations), chose to fight Germany first after the United States was attacked by Japan, and paved the way for New York’s first Jewish governor and senator. Presidential scholars have consistently ranked Roosevelt as the best chief executive in the nation’s history for his handling of the Great Depression and World War II. But even among liberal Jews who still hold him in high regard for those achievements, his reputation has been tarnished as he has been viewed increasingly through the prism of the Holocaust. What started out in the late 1960s as legitimate historical revisionism—looking critically at what the Roosevelt administration and American Jewry did during the Holocaust—has morphed into caricature, with FDR often depicted as an unfeeling anti-Semite. This historical debate has a significant contemporary subtext, one that helps explain the intensity of the passions it still arouses. That subtext is today’s debate among American Jews about Israel. In recent years, the distorted view of FDR has been promoted by a small group of Israel supporters who cherry-pick the historical record to portray his handling of the Holocaust in the most negative light possible. These scholar-activists deploy similar sleight of hand to paint a picture of most American Jews as having been disengaged and apathetic about the fate of their European counterparts at the hands of the Nazis, and to cast as heroes a small group of right-wing Zionists who mounted an aggressive public relations campaign to pressure Roosevelt to act. In this narrative, the complexities of history are erased and the passage of time is unimportant. The not-so-subtle message: like the Jews of Europe in 1939, Israel is under an existential threat and cannot count on anyone for help—even the United States, even liberals, even Jews in the United States, most of whom are insufficiently committed to Zionism. Betrayal happened before, and no matter how friendly a president or a country may appear to be, it can happen again. This article appeared in the August 5-12, 2013 edition of The Nation.
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