The first day of the festival had sessions on LGBTQ+, wind energy and Greek history. The second day featured the Palestinian envoy to Greece to give an anti-Israel speech.
The speech by Marwan Toubassi was filled with clear lies and incitement against Israel as well as pure antisemitism.
He said:
I come from a land where 100,000 Palestinians have been killed since 1948 and 1 million Palestinians have been imprisoned in Israel since 1967 and 1.5 million have been displaced from their homes and land. I come from a country where more than 60 organized massacres have taken place since the founding of the colonial state of Israel.I come from a country that suffers from an ongoing holocaust.
Literally every word is a lie, and the use of the word "holocaust" is by any definition antisemitic.
But the Jew-hatred doesn't end there.
On this occasion, I would also like to mention some excerpts from the book by the President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, entitled "The Zionist Movement in Lenin's Writings", the first edition of which was published in 1979 and the second in 2011."Lenin believed that the continued exploitation of the Jewish question was in the interest of colonialism and that it achieved the goals of the Zionist movement, which feeds on this issue, moves it and benefits from it."He goes on to say, "If world leaders had followed Lenin's example in their assessment and handling of the Jewish question, there would have been no Zionist movement and no colonial state of Israel, because, in short, Lenin believed that Jews they are not a nation and they do not have the components of a nation and they should live in the societies in which they existed hundreds or even thousands of years ago. "Lenin did not accept the declaration of separation between colonialism and imperialism on the one hand, and the Zionist movement on the other. "
Toubassi is quoting Mahmoud Abbas' book saying that the Jews aren't a people and they should not have a state.
Denying Jewish peoplehood is antisemitism, and in this case it is part of a demand that Jews in the Middle East always remain as second class citizens under Muslim rule.
The irony of a featured guest spreading antisemitism at an "anti-racist" festival was somehow lost on the organizers and attendees.
