In first-ever review, UN racism panel presses Palestinians on anti-Semitism

Recently the City Council of Siena, Italy has taken a stand against antisemitism. Last Friday, thanks to the efforts of our Diplomatic Corps Member David Fiorentini, together with the Italian Union of Jewish Students – UGEI and the party Forza Italia, the IHRA working definition of antisemitism has been fully adopted. An important step towards a coherent and structured fight against the growing virus of antisemitism. We congratulate David and his partners for this excellent effort to help safeguard Jewish life in Europe.

(January 24, 2023 / JNS) Meeting at the European Jewish Association conference in Prague and the Theresienstadt Ghetto/Camp in the Czech Republic, legislators and senior European government officials declared war on antisemitic fake news and committed to encouraging educational programs against hatred.

During the conference, the EJA presented Adidas with the prestigious King David Award for its decision to cut all commercial ties with musician Ye, aka Kanye West, following his antisemitic remarks.

Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on Friday, more than 100 members of parliament, government officials, ambassadors and European Jewish leaders gathered to discuss how to deal with fake news and conspiracy theories against Jews in the media and social networks, and rising antisemitism in universities across the continent.

According to EJA Chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin: “Even today, fake news poses a tangible danger to the well-being of Jews throughout Europe, a tool of hatred that is unfortunately strengthened by social networks and mixes conspiracy theories against Jews.

“The dozens of European leaders who responded to our call to come to Terezin pledged to fight against fake news that encourages antisemitism and implement educational programs to eradicate it,” he said.

I stopped worrying about current anti-Semitism. Just fiveminutes I forgot about the anti-Israel propaganda which I see and hear daily around me. I was standing in a serene silence for those five minutes in front of the Children’s Monument, het Kindermonument, in former Dutch concentration camp Vught.
“One thousand two hundred and sixty-nine children were put on deportation trains with the Kindertransport on June 6 and 7 in 1943.  A few days later they arrived in extermination camp Sobibor. Upon arrival they were brutely removed from the cattle wagons, driven to the gas chambers via the Himmelstrasse, the Street to the Heaven, as the Nazi scum jokingly called this street. Were they aware of the atrocities which the Nazi’s had planned for them? When did they realize that from the showers heads no water would come out but a deadly killing gas would emerge? How long did they suffer before they souls were forced to leave their young bodies? Didthe SS men, who watched through a few skylights, enjoy the sadistic spectacle?
The names of all those children are engraved on the Children’s Monument in National Monument Kamp Vught. Only a very few photographs of a few children still exist. Most children are reduced by the industrial killing machine to a just name,without a face.
Why are we commemorating yearly the Children-Deportation, the Kindertransport? In order to prevent? Is this monument akind of educational project?
Yes, the Kindertransport is commemorated every year, but not to teach, not to warn, not even to prevent!
When I unveiled the monument in 1999, people came forward from the audience after the ceremony. They searched through the names, found and, full of tenderness, love and with tears in their eyes, I saw them putting their hands on the name of their sister, their brother, their child or their grandchild. But the names of most of the children stayed untouched, because thebrothers, sisters, nephews and nieces, fathers and mothers of those children had also been murdered.
One thousand, two hundred and sixty-nine names. Lonely names, letters without faces, without family, as if they never existed. Through the chimneys of the Sobibor crematoria they disappeared into an invisible darkness. Anonymous, completely unknown, no one to think of them anymore. Just letters, a very few damaged photographs, as if they never existed.
Let us close our eyes and think in absolute silence of thechildren of the Kindertransport, who stayed on this earth for such a short while, were so cruelly snatched, and of whom nothing, absolutely nothing, has remained.
No grave, no ashes, just a name. Names without meaning, because no one today is able to remember whose life and suffering is behind their names.”

Credit: Jan van de Ven

Journalist Dimitri Verhulst wrote in the Belgian daily, De Morgen, on July 27, that “Being Jewish is not a religion, no God would give creatures such an ugly nose.”

Belgian Jews have filed a police complaint after a Belgian journalist wrote in an opinion piece, “There is no promised land, only stolen land,” and commented on the stereotype of “Jewish noses.”
Journalist Dimitri Verhulst wrote in the Belgian daily, De Morgen, on July 27, that “Being Jewish is not a religion, no God would give creatures such an ugly nose.”
He misquoted French singer Serge Gainsbourg who said, “Being Jewish is not a religion. No religion makes you grow such a nose.” Gainsbourg was the child of Russian Jewish immigrants to France.
Verhulst also accused Israel of murdering 10,000 Palestinians since 2002.
De Morgen Editor-in-Chief, Bart Eeckhout, attempted to defend the actions of the paper, saying, “We clearly do not view the text as antisemitic. Otherwise we wouldn’t have published it. Neither did the author intend it as antisemitic,” JTA reported. “The op-ed surely is a harsh criticism on Israel’s politics toward the Palestinian people. It is written in a hard, sarcastic fashion and it foretells the current uproar, stating that any hard criticism on Israel will always be reinterpreted as antisemitism,” Eeckhout is quoted as saying.
Verhulst constantly uses sarcastic language during his article, questioning the Jews status as the “chosen” people and wrote “Because God has His favorites and they have their privileges, Palestinians were driven out of their homes in 1948 to make place for God’s favorites.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center responded to the article by writing a direct letter to Eeckhout. The letter stated that, “The article blames the whole of the Jewish people collectively, making no distinction between Israel and Jewish people who live elsewhere, and furthermore it mocks their religion and equates being a Jew with creatures with ‘ugly noses.'”
The letter continued, “Manipulating and misquoting Serge Gainsbourg in saying ‘being a Jew is not a religion; there is not a single God who would give His creatures such an ugly nose’ is misleading and wrong. In his article, Verhulst not only serves the stereotype of Jews’ nose, propagated by Goebbels and Streicher in “Der Stürmer”, he deliberately distorted the irony in Gainsbourg’s quote in order to justify his own anti-Semitism.”
Eeckhout is also reminded that to blame all of the Jewish people for “real or imaginary wrongdoings committed by individuals or the State of Israel falls within the IHRA working definition of antisemitism,” and he is asked to retract the article and apologize.
The letter was signed by Menachem Margolin, European Jewish Association and Shimon Samuels, Simon Wiesenthal Center among other signatories including B’nai B’rith Europe, Commissioner Against Antisemitism of Jewish Community of Berlin and the Chief Rabbi of the Netherlands.

The article was published on the JPost