German commissioner says local BDS chapter incited against U.S. synagogue
The commissioner of the Hessian Federal State Government for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Antisemitism has filed a criminal complaint against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s chapter in the German city of Wiesbaden.Oxfam faces $160 million legal threat over Palestine aid project
Uwe Becker told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that he made such a move after the chapter posted several tweets that targeted the Jewish state and also led to anti-Jewish incitement.
“[The] Wiesbaden branch of the antisemitic BDS movement stoked incitement on social media that targeted an American synagogue with antisemitic insults” on September 12, Becker said. “Wiesbaden termed the State of Israel, in its statements on social media, as a ‘Zionist colony’ and the flag of the Jewish state as a symbol of a genocidal, colonialist ideology.”
The BDS group’s tweets were replies to a post by American philanthropist Adam Milstein. Milstein tweeted a video showing the Baba Sale Synagogue in Los Angeles, which was vandalized with “Free Palestine” graffiti on September 11.
Milstein condemned the graffiti, tweeting that “BDS is the 21st Century #Antisemitism, it radicalized all other extremist movements, promotes violence against Jews and resembles the Nazi methods to boycott The Jewish people.” Wiesbaden’s BDS chapter replied with several tweets.
The commissioner said he considers the group’s statements on social media “deeply antisemitic” and that the tweets exceed the threshold of incitement.
Oxfam faces a $160 million counter-terror claim in a New York court. The case, brought by a pro-Israel lawyer and activist, alleges that the NGO contravened US law during its work in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.Petra Marquardt-Bigman: Linda Sarsour — It’s You and Not Bari Weiss Who Is on the Wrong Side of History
The lawyer behind the case told The New Humanitarian he has filed five other similar cases, which remain under seal in the US courts.
David Abrams, who runs the Zionist Advocacy Center, alleges that Oxfam’s work on an agriculture policy project in Gaza constituted “material support” to Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
The seven-page filing claims that Oxfam should have acknowledged the Gaza project when signing other grants with USAID, the US federal government department that administers aid and development projects, amounting to $53 million.
The agriculture project was largely funded by the Swiss government and the USAID grants mentioned include projects in Iraq, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. Under the alleged offence, the other USAID contracts don’t need to be related to the alleged material support; what matters legally is that Oxfam signed agreements to receive US government monies.
In response to questions, Oxfam emailed TNH a statement saying, “Oxfam takes such matters extremely seriously. We are aware of the lawsuit and reject the allegation made in it."
If Linda Sarsour wanted to ponder which side of history her longstanding association with AMP puts her, she could check out AMP’s slideshow on “Jerusalem in the crosshairs.” The third slide is a good example of the vileness on display: it justifies the murderous violence incited by the notorious Haj Amin al-Husseini against the Jews of British Mandate Palestine exactly 90 years ago, in 1929.
Arabs murdered 133 Jews and wounded hundreds, but as far as AMP is concerned, the victims were to blame: “The uprising was sparked after Zionist groups came to the wall and planted Zionist flags, declaring that ‘This wall is ours.’” The wall in question is the Western Wall, which had been designated as a Jewish place of prayer for hundreds of years. Revealingly, AMP prefers the term “al-Buraq Wall” since this term is popular among those who want to erase Jewish history on the basis of the myth that one night, a flying horse named Buraq conveyed Islam’s founder to the Al-Aqsa mosque, which of course didn’t exist during Muhammad’s lifetime.
While Linda Sarsour presumably feels she and groups like AMP are on the right side of history, Bari Weiss can only be commended for being on the other side. What angers Sarsour so much is that Weiss doesn’t buy into the illusion promoted by many of today’s self-described “progressives,” who insist that the oldest hatred stopped evolving with the Nazis and, therefore, only right-wing Nazi-style antisemitism deserves to be considered dangerous. But as Bari Weiss points out, “Neo-Nazis, in a way, are straightforward. We know they wish us dead. Antisemites with PhDs, the ones who defend their bigotry as enlightened thinking, are harder to fight.”
Linda Sarsour may not have a PhD, but she’s still rather good at defending her hatred for the world’s only Jewish state and her whitewashing of murderous Islamist Jew-hatred as enlightened thinking. And she arguably deserves a dishonorary PhD in hypocrisy and cynicism for pretending to cheer Bernie Sanders’ candidacy as a historic Jewish milestone, while dismissing mainstream Jewish concerns about contemporary antisemitism as “being on the wrong side of history.”