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Halle Attack Highlights Germany’s Misplaced Terror Priorities and Hostility to BDS
Today, on Yom Kippur, a German anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, and neo-Nazi, Stephan Balliet, sought to kill Jews praying on the holiest day of the Jewish year. His self-declared goal was to “kill as many anti-whites as possible, Jews preferred,”
Despite there being no German police providing security for the Halle synagogue, the terrorist could not enter the building, which was locked. He then proceeded to murder a woman who passed by outside the shul. In total, he spent five minutes fruitlessly seeking entry to the synagogue without any police presence or engagement. Congregants inside watched the attack unfold on closed circuit monitors. They were confident enough of their safety to continue with the prayer service.
The gunman, in frustration, he turned away from his intended target to a kebab shop nearby and killed someone inside, who he presumably believed was an Arab immigrant.
An irony that should be lost on no one is that Balliet targeted both Jews and Muslim immigrants in this attack. As the Guardian notes:
Balliet “hoped his attack would inspire other white people to kill more Jewish people,” as well as others he considered “enemies of the white race, including Muslim people, black people, anti-fascists, and communists.”
In other words, we are all in this together. It is a fight against neo-Nazi hate (including Islamist terror) which targets us all.
The killer engaged in mayhem while filming and uploading the attack footage to Twitch, an Amazon video site. Despite the fact that his video was removed, 15,000 accounts retweeted it on Twitter.
There is a lesson here and its not the one some of you are thinking. Germany has been extorted by pro-Israel forces into demonizing BDS. A resolution passed in the federal legislature declared the non-violent movement akin to anti-Semitism. Palestinian artists have been denied awards for their alleged crimes. Activists, including Israelis, have been arrested for protesting the suppression of legitimate political speech. You would think a country which permitted a fascist regime to rule over it for 12 years and which murdered 6-million Jews, would understand the critical value of free political discourse; and the difference between criticism of Israel and real anti-Semitism. The anti-BDS campaign falsifies the concept of anti-Semitism, in service to the Israeli state. It is a contrived, bogus political project.
Amos Yadlin, former head of IDF intelligence, published a critique (in the Jerusalem Post, no less!) of a recent Strategic Affairs ministry report linking BDS to anti-Semitism. Yadlin, certainly a creature of the Israeli military-intelligence apparatus and no liberal, was surprisingly dismissive of many elements of the study. While Yadlin did offer some typical pro-Israel bromides, he was surprisingly candid and critical in addressing the report’s deficiencies:
…Many (probably most) of the campaign’s supporters…display solidarity with the Palestinian cause and with the campaign’s call for “freedom, justice and equality”. Indeed,…BDS supporters…believe that endorsing the campaign is the best way to voice criticism relating to Israel’s government policiesMany BDS supporters on college campuses…form their opinion and understanding of the conflict precisely through…digital means or through the linkage of the Palestinian cause to other issues they identify with (gender and LGBTQ struggles, or discrimination against African Americans for example). Paint-brushing these students as antisemitic because of their support for BDS is…wrong [and] counter-productive……We acknowledge the findings of academic research asserting that nowadays, most manifestations of antisemitism around the world are sourced in right-wing, white supremacist ideologies rather than in left-wing, liberal ideologies promoted by BDS.
Here is a typical example of falsely yoking the fight against neo-Nazi hate to allegiance to the Israeli state in the context of the Halle attack:
If you stand in solidarity with Jews when Nazis murder us in Europe and America.
But stand in solidarity with our killers when Jews are murdered by terrorists in Israel.
Then you are no friend of the Jewish people and we reject your self-serving solidarity.
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Bibi Netanyahu issued a typical milquetoast statement about the terror attack on German Jews. Certainly, nothing like the full geschrei he made after Islamist terror attacks on French Jews. When they happened, he hurried to France and told French Jews in their Grand Synagogue they had no future there and must make aliya if they wished to find a safe haven. The ploy was met with anger by the French government and communal leaders. And after a few months, aliya from France went back to previous levels.
So why when a neo-Nazi kills Jews do we hear barely a peep out of Bibi? But when Muslims kill Jews he declares a full anti-Semitism alert and becomes the Lord Protector of world Jewry? I’d wager that it has something to do with the fact that Europe’s far-right Islamophobic parties (the ones with some affinity for these sorts of attacks) are natural allies of Likud, while the European left tends to be most critical of Israel and most eager to protect Jewish communities in their midst from all attacks, whether far-right or Islamist.
If there is a national solidarity rally in Germany, I strongly urge German Jews and Chancellor Merkel to keep Netanyahu away. He has no interest in the victims or German Jewry in general. They are props for his own political grandstanding.
Some may argue that Islamist terror is no less a threat than far-right violence. Perhaps in France or Belgium this is so. While there have been no German terror attacks against Jews by Islamists, there have been scores of terror attacks by European right-wing extremists in the past few decades, a few targeting Jews. Of course, in the U.S. there have been even more attacks by white supremacists against Jews including, most recently, the Poway Chabad and Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life. That is due in no small part due to the incitement by Donald Trump, who is viewed by these terrorists as a tacit, if not outright supporter.
The toxic stew from which this neo-Nazi miasma emerges is fueled by far-right parties like AfD and racist politicians like Trump. Yet no one holds them to account as inciters of mass murder. Not even the ADL, which is supposed to be the premier defender against anti-Semitism. It often waffles when it comes to casting blame on powerful figures and parties like these.
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