Skewed Focus in Study of German Anti-Semitism: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, Arutz Sheva, July 3, 2018 — Any realistic study on anti-Semitism in Germany should conclude that migrants from Muslim countries have more anti-Semitic attitudes and disproportionately to their size in the population commit more extreme anti-Semitic acts than native Germans.
Spain’s Anti-Israel Hypocrisy Boils Down to Antisemitism: Bradley Martin, JNS, June 29, 2018 — The Spanish state of Navarre recently voted to endorse the BDS movement against Israel, calling on the European Union to impose sanctions on Israel, while slamming the United States’ decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to “occupied Jerusalem.”
Claude Lanzmann, Epic Chronicler of the Holocaust, Dies at 92: Daniel Lewis, New York Times, July 5, 2018— Claude Lanzmann, the journalist and film director whose obsession with the Nazi genocide brought forth “Shoah,” a groundbreaking film that relived the annihilation of Jews through the memories of witnesses, died on Thursday in Paris. He was 92.
Sousa’s Jewish Connections: Saul Jay Singer, Jewish Press, June 28, 2018— Independence Day means patriotic displays, fireworks, barbecues, parades, carnivals, picnics, baseball games, concerts on the mall, political speeches…and John Philip Sousa.
On Topic Links
The Media Continues to Lie About Israeli Actions in Gaza: Adam Levick, Algemeiner, July 2, 2018
Stop Editorializing with Photographs: J. J. McCullough, National Review, June 27, 2018
Is There A Pattern of New York Times Bias Against Israel?: Bennett Ruda, Jewish Press, June 19, 2018
Isn’t it Ironic? Trump-Haters Have Become Even Nastier Than Him: Rex Murphy, National Post, June 29, 2018
SKEWED FOCUS IN STUDY OF GERMAN ANTI-SEMITISM
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
Arutz Sheva, July 3, 2018
Any realistic study on anti-Semitism in Germany should conclude that migrants from Muslim countries have more anti-Semitic attitudes and disproportionately to their size in the population commit more extreme anti-Semitic acts than native Germans. This is in line with the situation in the world, where by far the most extreme anti-Semitic incitement — some of it genocidal — stems from parts of the Muslim world.
The reputable Allensbach Institute has published a study whose findings can only be read behind the paywall of the important daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). It contains interesting data, but does not address the key issue mentioned before and is thus misleading. One of the study’s graphs shows that among supporters of the extreme right-wing party AfD, 55% are of the opinion that Jews have “too much influence in the world.” Regarding the other five parties represented in the German parliament, this figure varies between 16% and 20%.
However, right wing anti-Semitic prejudice does not explain the fact that some Jewish schoolchildren are severely harassed by Muslim children. The threats of a Muslim classmate against a Jewish girl in a second grade Berlin elementary school class is a case in point. He said that she should be killed because she does not believe in Allah. The firebombing of a synagogue in Wuppertal in 2014 was carried out by three Palestinians. The court said that this was not anti-Semitism but an act of protest against Israel. It condemned the arsonists to a fine and suspended sentences.
There are widespread stereotypes among native Germans about both Muslims and Jews. Jews are seen by 66% of the interviewed as ‘successful’, by 22% as ‘keen on money,’ by 20% as ‘politically radical’ and by 14% ‘as hungry for power.’ For Muslims the figures are 18% ‘successful in business,’ 12% ‘keen on money’, 46% ‘politically radical’ and 25% ‘hungry for power’. More important than stereotypes are criminal remarks and acts of violence. If all Jewish institutions require armed guards, this is mainly due to the threats coming out of parts of the immigrant Muslim community.
The president of the Jewish umbrella organization, Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, advises Jews not to wear kippot in public in major cities. The main reason for his advice is that hatred by Muslims sometimes results in violent acts. One recent case concerns an Israeli Arab, Adam Armush who didn’t believe this and purposely wore a kippah in public in Berlin’s Prenzauer Berg neighborhood. He and his companion were attacked by three youngsters, at least one of whom spoke Arabic. Armush filmed the attack for the police and for the German people and even the world “to see how terrible it is these days as a Jew to go through Berlin streets”…
The FAZ wrote that anti-Semitism has declined in Germany. This may be the case as far as attitudes and stereotypes are concerned. Far more relevant is the number of anti-Semitic acts, which last year averaged approximately four per day. The government did not appoint a Commissioner for anti-Semitism because of attitudes in the German population, but because of the large number of anti-Semitic acts.
The study also asked “is anti-Semitism and hostility toward Jews today a big problem? Or, are we dealing in your view with incidents?” The focus of this question is radically wrong. This demand should be directed toward the Jewish population and not asked of German non-Jews who receive their information from the media. Twenty-three percent of those polled answered that anti-Semitism was a big problem. Fifty eight percent considered that anti-Semitism is a matter of incidents. When the same question was asked about the specific attack on Armush and his companion the figures changed greatly. Only 27% of the interviewed said that it was an incident and 44% said that the attack was a sign of the widespread anti-Semitism amongst Arabs in Germany.
As far as the attitude toward Jews murdered in the Holocaust is concerned: Fifty four percent of those polled considered the so called ‘stumbling stones’ as an appropriate way to remember the Jewish victims of the Nazi era while 15% were opposed. Another question asked was whether Germany has a special responsibility toward Israel. Thirty one percent agreed with this while 41% denied it. The younger the interviewees, the less support there was for responsibility to Israel. In the 16 – 29 age group it was only 22%.
Observing this, one might mention that the demonization of Jews in Germany under the Nazi regime has been partly replaced by the demonization of Israel. A Bielefeld University study from 2014 found that 40% of Germans think that Israel conducts a war of extermination against the Palestinians. A 2015 study from the Bertelsmann Foundation found that 41% think that “Israel is acting toward the Palestinians like Nazis acted towards the Jews.”
The partially wrong focus of the Allensbach poll helps those who claim that Islamophobia is a bigger problem in Germany than anti-Semitism. The way the study is structured obfuscates a basic issue: Germans in the generation of our grandfathers murdered 6 million Jews. There are many remnants of the prejudices of that time which have largely mutated into demonic anti-Israelism. Germany is the last country which should have let massive numbers of immigrants in to the country without barring those who are anti-Semitic.
SPAIN’S ANTI-ISRAEL HYPOCRISY BOILS DOWN TO ANTISEMITISM
Bradley Martin
JNS, June 29, 2018
The Spanish state of Navarre recently voted to endorse the BDS movement against Israel, calling on the European Union to impose sanctions on Israel, while slamming the United States’ decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to “occupied Jerusalem.” More than 50 Spanish cities and regions have passed motions condemning Israel. Driven by the rise of the far-left in Spain, this proliferation of anti-Israel activism is establishing the kingdom as the most anti-Israel member state in the EU, reports the Gatestone Institute.
If Spain truly cared about Israel’s “occupation,” why does the kingdom continue to preserve its own colonialist legacy? Since 1815, Spain has occupied the Portuguese town of Olivenza, despite signing a treaty agreeing to return control to Portugal. Spain has also refused to acquiesce to demands of Basque separatists seeking to create an independent homeland in northern Spain, while also maintaining control over the plazas de soberanía, and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, despite both being claimed by Morocco as their sovereign land.
But Spain’s most flagrant violation of its neighbors’ sovereignty came last year, when it refused to respect the autonomy of Catalonia and its desire to secede from Spain. In a referendum in late 2017, an overwhelming 90% of Catalans voted in favor of independence. The Spanish government responded by arresting Catalan independence leader Jordi Sànchez; it has jailed him for the past eight months on charges of sedition. Ironically, Catalans often compare their situation to the Jewish people. As an oppressed nation, Jews survived for centuries without an independent state and fulfilled their national aspirations with the rebirth of the modern State of Israel. Catalans have yet to do so.
So why does the Spanish government pursue this hypocritical, anti-Israel foreign policy? In a poll commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 58.4% of Spaniards believe that “the Jews were powerful because they controlled the economy and the mass media.” This number reached 62.2% among university students and 70.5% among those who expressed interest in politics. More than 60% of Spanish university students said that they did not want Jewish classmates.
Among those with antipathy towards the Jewish people, nearly 30% surveyed said that their dislike of Jews had to do with the Jewish religion, customs, and way of life; while nearly 20% of Spaniards said that they didn’t know why they disliked Jews. Note that only 17% of respondents attributed their dislike of Jews to the “conflict in the Middle East.”
During the Spanish Inquisition begun in 1492, Jews were expelled from what is today Navarre as part of a bloody campaign of anti-Jewish persecution, wiping out one of history’s most illustrious and successful Jewish communities. Today, nearly half of all Spaniards view Jews negatively, according to the Pew Research Center — making Spain possibly the most antisemitic country in Europe.
Is it any wonder that over the last decade, historical anti-Jewish tropes have made a comeback in Spain’s media? Spanish newspapers and magazines regularly contain cartoons in which Jewish symbols are linked to the killing of children. The satirical magazine El Jueves displayed a front-page caricature of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a pig’s face, a Jewish skullcap, and a Nazi swastika. And Spain’s flagship newspaper El País has continuously portrayed Palestinian terrorists as innocent victims, while dehumanizing murdered Jewish children. The rampant anti-Israel sentiment in Spain is not about Middle East politics. Rather, it has everything to do with Spain’s endemic anti-Jewish bigotry.
CLAUDE LANZMANN, EPIC CHRONICLER OF THE HOLOCAUST, DIES AT 92
Daniel Lewis
New York Times, July 5, 2018
Claude Lanzmann, the journalist and film director whose obsession with the Nazi genocide brought forth “Shoah,” a groundbreaking film that relived the annihilation of Jews through the memories of witnesses, died on Thursday in Paris. He was 92. His publisher, Gallimard, confirmed his death, at the Saint-Antoine Hospital.
Mr. Lanzmann, a son of assimilated French Jews, took everything at full tilt. At 18, he led a Communist youth Resistance group, risking his life by smuggling small arms under the eyes of the Gestapo in Clermont-Ferrand, in central France. He became a figure of the intellectual Left, a protégé of Jean-Paul Sartre, the lover of Simone de Beauvoir for nine years, and a colleague of them both at the cultural review Les Temps Modernes, where he was editor in chief for many years.
With “Shoah” — Hebrew for catastrophe — Mr. Lanzmann upstaged everything he had done before. From its release in 1985, the film was internationally recognized as both an important historical record and an original, even beautiful, work of art — a nine-and-a-half-hour movie without a single frame of the by-then-familiar footage of the gas chambers or the living skeletons that Allied forces discovered in the Germans’ death camps.
Instead, Mr. Lanzmann tracked down and interviewed living witnesses: officers and bureaucrats who had run the camps; Jewish survivors, including veterans of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto; and Polish townspeople in Treblinka, Chelmno and Oswiecim, where the Auschwitz camp was located. A relentless interviewer, he used whatever it took — filming surreptitiously, posing as a French historian trying “to set the record straight” — to pry astonishing stories out of his subjects.
Franz Suchomel, a former SS functionary at Treblinka who had been convicted of war crimes and spent six years in prison, told Mr. Lanzmann (in confidence, or so he thought) that it was not true, as some Jews claimed, that 18,000 a day were gassed at Treblinka. It was 12,000 to 15,000, he said, and noted with some little pride that when things were going well, the operation would take about two hours, from the arrival of a trainload of Jews until their incineration in the ovens.
In the film’s opening segment, Simon Srebnik, who as a teenager was one of only two or three Jews to survive the final mass execution at Chelmno, comes back from Israel as a middle-aged man and is given a warm homecoming by a group of Polish villagers. They are standing on the steps of a Roman Catholic church where Jews had been held before being hauled away. “In the middle of this company of well-wishers,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review of the film in The New York Times, “Mr. Srebnik looks like someone who’s won a Lotto prize he doesn’t want, and doesn’t comprehend.”
“Shoah” was never intended as a straightforward documentary or oral history, but rather what Mr. Lanzmann called “a fiction of the real.” It was consciously artful, he said, so as to “make the unbearable bearable.” Thus, the film sometimes retraces scenes from the past with original participants as “actors.” It frequently breaks away from the face of a witness to scan a peaceful Polish countryside, where the horrors being spoken of once took place. Much of the impact of these devices was realized in the five years Mr. Lanzmann spent editing his footage. Before that, he had spent seven years shooting, partly because he was four years into the project when, on his first visit to Treblinka, he encountered things “that forced me to start again from scratch.”
In his autobiography, “The Patagonian Hare,” made available in English translation in 2012, Mr. Lanzmann wrote: “I had not wanted to come to Poland, I arrived full of arrogance, and convinced I was coming only to confirm that I had not needed to come.” But at the Treblinka train station, “the shift from myth to reality took place in a blinding flash, the encounter between a name and a place wiped out everything I had learned.” That very day he began working in a sustained fever of urgency, questioning townspeople about their memories of the death-camp years and gathering minute details about the arrival and unloading of boxcars crammed with doomed souls and the ever-present stench of charred flesh and of corpses rotting in mass graves. He realized at last that the true subject of his film: “Death itself.”
Mr. Lanzmann was a man of strong convictions. He rejected the word “Holocaust” — literally, “burnt offering” — as a description of the genocide. He railed against its “commodification” in films like “Schindler’s List.” He believed that Polish anti-Semitism was an “essential condition” of the genocide; indeed, the lack of anything in “Shoah” that would cast Poles in a better light led the Warsaw government to demand that the film be banned after its premiere in Paris…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
SOUSA’S JEWISH CONNECTIONS
Saul Jay Singer
Jewish Press, June 28, 2018
Independence Day means patriotic displays, fireworks, barbecues, parades, carnivals, picnics, baseball games, concerts on the mall, political speeches…and John Philip Sousa. Sousa (1854-1932), an American composer and conductor famous particularly for his American military and patriotic marches, is known as “The March King” because of his mastery of the march arrangement. His most famous pieces include “Stars and Stripes Forever” (1896), the official U.S. National March; “The Washington Post” (1889); “El Capitan” (1896); and “Semper Fidelis” (1888), the official march of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Appointed leader of the United States Marine Band in 1880, he molded the band into the finest military band in the world before resigning in 1892 to form his own civilian band, which soon became one of the finest symphony orchestras of the day and not merely a “marching band.” In addition to hundreds of marches, Sousa also wrote 15 operettas, and various suites, humoresques, fantasies, descriptive pieces, and dances. His band made more than 15,000 appearances – though in only eight of them is the band known to have actually marched while playing – and became the first large American ensemble to complete a world tour.
Sousa had a particularly interesting Jewish connection through his lyric soprano soloist diva, Estelle Liebling (1880-1970). A member of a renowned musical Jewish family, Liebling toured with Sousa and performed in over 1,600 concerts, never once missing a performance. A modern-day Cal Ripken, critics attributed her “consecutive games streak” to her inner strength, determination, dedication to her craft, and incredible vocal technique, and she was widely praised for the astonishing range, clarity, and purity of her voice.
Sousa’s respect and affection for Liebling may explain why, for his time, the fiercely patriotic bandleader had a rather enlightened view of Jewish immigrants to the United States: “We want no Jewish Ghettos. We want the comer to our shores to imbibe Americanism and only Americanism. The quicker we make an American out of him the better for him and for ourselves.”
It also may explain why religious intolerance was a particular abomination to him. He once called a musician into his office and asked if he had referred to another member of the band as “a dirty Jew” and, when the man confirmed that he had, Sousa promptly discharged him and ordered him to never again seek a position in his employ.
After successful operatic appearances across Europe, Liebling’s debut performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1902 came with only a few hours’ notice, when she was asked to substitute for a singer who had suddenly taken ill. She went on to become not only a beloved performer, but also one of the most influential American teachers of singing technique. She taught and coached vocalists for over 50 years, and her students included some 80 Metropolitan Opera singers including, notably, Beverly Sills.
Another fascinating Jewish connection of Sousa’s was First Lieutenant George Friedlander, a New York Jew who, while serving as an artillery officer with the 306th Field Artillery, 6th Battalion, 17th Regiment in World War I, prompted the official “Army Song”:
Over hill, over dale, we will hit the dusty trail,
as the caissons go rolling along.
Up and down, in and out, countermarch and right about,
and our caissons go rolling along.
For it’s hi-hi-hee in the Field Artillery,
shout out the number loud and strong.
Till our final ride, it will always be our pride,
to keep those caissons a rolling along.
In 1917, Sousa arranged a lunch with Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to complain about the poor quality of the instruments supplied to members of the military band. Daniels, known for his philo-Semitism, invited Friedlander to attend the luncheon. During the meal, Friedlander asked Sousa to create a march for the Field Artillery Corps. Sousa took the “Caisson Song” (“caissons” are ammunition containers), which had been written by Edmund L. Gruber in 1907, changed the key, harmony, and rhythm, and renamed it “U.S. Field Artillery.” The current official version, “The Army Goes Rolling Along,” which was adopted in 1956, is essentially the original Sousa version inspired by Friedlander…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
On Topic Links
The Media Continues to Lie About Israeli Actions in Gaza: Adam Levick, Algemeiner, July 2, 2018—A June 28 article at The Times of London once again demonstrates the media’s frequent failure to challenge incendiary and unsubstantiated accusations against Israel by Palestinians or pro-Palestinian campaigners.
Stop Editorializing with Photographs: J. J. McCullough, National Review, June 27, 2018—Long before the current trade spat between Justin Trudeau and President Trump, a striking photograph seemed to foreshadow a troubled relationship.
Is There A Pattern of New York Times Bias Against Israel?: Bennett Ruda, Jewish Press, June 19, 2018—Last week, The Algemeiner held a discussion about The New York Times and its coverage of both Israel and of Jews in general.
Isn’t it Ironic? Trump-Haters Have Become Even Nastier Than Him: Rex Murphy, National Post, June 29, 2018—It may now join the propositions of Euclid, as impregnable to rebuttal, that Donald Trump or any news that alludes to him, unhinges the minds of those who oppose him.
