Anti-Israel orgs plan to protest 125th anniversary of the first Zionist Congress
BDS Movement-affiliated organizations are planning a number of demonstrations at the end of the month in Basel, Switzerland, opposing a series of events commemorating 125 years since the first Zionist Congress.
The World Zionist Organization will be marking 125 years since the historic first Zionist Congress in Basel on August 28. The events will take place at different sites related to the 1897 congress.
“This commemorative political event, supported by the Basel government and secured by a massive police and military presence, affirms the supremacy of right-wing organizations over the importance and history of Zionism,” the official Swiss BDS Facebook page stated.“We once again urge the Basel government to withdraw from any involvement in the Zionism celebrations and to end any cooperation with official Israeli institutions and state representatives.”“Along with the WZO, this anniversary is also organized by an organization that plays an important role in illegal settlement building and systematic expropriation of Palestinian land,” the BDS group claimed, but didn’t specify which organization it was referring to. BDS Switzerland's post on Facebook regarding their upcoming demonstrations. Posted 9 August, 2022. (credit: Zvika Klein) BDS Switzerland's post on Facebook regarding their upcoming demonstrations. Posted 9 August, 2022. (credit: Zvika Klein)
Swiss BDS
“The history of violence of Zionism is denied at the celebration,” the Facebook post said, adding that “the colonial character of the Zionist occupation in Palestine is obscured and, in continuity with the Zionists of the time, the mere existence of Palestinians made their suffering invisible.”
Two major events are planned to take place as a demonstration against the Zionist events in Basel and the existence of Israel. The first event will take place on Saturday evening, where a “panel discussion on Palestine will relate to the critical contributions to the situation in Palestine,” the Swiss BDS site has disclosed.
In addition, a protest will take place on Sunday afternoon against the Zionist Congress events. Swiss BDS shared that “the route will be discussed with the authorities, any expression of antisemitism is prohibited; only flags of Palestine desired.”
Gil Troy: If you're being silenced, ask yourselves: What would Salman Rushdie do?
Iran’s ayatollahs, the countries that banned The Satanic Verses and the twitterdummies, who applauded Rushdie’s butchering, all want to create what the Soviet-born human rights activist Natan Sharansky calls fear-societies. Traditionally, fear-societies, like Iran, impose terror from the top down. Increasingly in Western democracies, fear-societies are springing from the bottom-up, as peer-censorship and self-censorship spread. Even if they defend basic liberties, democracies falter if their loudest and most influential citizens lose faith in the free marketplace of ideas.‘Different rules’ apply with Islam
Building trust combats such grassroots fear and bullying. We need to trust one another. We must remember the basic democratic lesson that those who come to different political conclusions are not evil, while fostering more faith in the democratic process. Vigorous, respectful debate among different political factions can keep us talking together, then building together.
In that spirit of candor, we also should acknowledge that we are in a civilizational war with brutal enemies. As hard as it is to imagine any 24-year-old attacking a 75-year-old author, it is even harder to imagine anyone stabbing a person again and again in the eye, the abdomen and the chest, as the blood spurts and people yell. What kind of incitement riles someone up like that and what kind of people cheer such evil?
Similarly, closer to home, it’s hard to conceive how a 26-year-old east Jerusalemite this Sunday morning could shoot a pregnant woman in the stomach, an older man in the neck and head, and five other Western Wall worshipers waiting to board a bus and a taxi also wins applause.
It’s not just Hamas and so many others who have called that terrorist heroic, the masquerading moderates of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) called this latest attack proof that “the resistance of our people continues in all forms and throughout the occupied Palestinian land.” Although their Western enablers don’t like noticing, these maximalists define “the occupied Palestinian land,” as every inch of territory they covet, leaving zero room for Jews or anyone else they detest.
Ultimately, we can only fight fear and cultivate trust by regaining confidence in ourselves and our Western democratic values. Confidence is not arrogance. It can include self-criticism. But today’s new nihilism, with unpatriotic patriots and illiberal liberals, with conservatives who don’t conserve institutions, progressives who don’t appreciate progress and uber-partisans who don’t respect their rivals’ democratic rights, reflects a crisis of democratic faith, a vacuum of trust and totalitarian culture of fear that spawned Rushdie’s attacker. Right now, only doctors can save his body, but all of us must preserve and expand Rushdie’s bold, freedom-fighting, democracy-affirming legacy.
Society has just agreed people can’t publish novels criticising Mohammed as “different rules apply” with Islam, says author Douglas Murray.
It follows the stabbing attack on novelist Sir Salman Rushdie in New York.
Mr Rushdie has had a fatwa calling for his death for his novel The Satanic Verses since 1989.
“This is of course intolerable,” he told Sky News Australia.
“It’s the demand of one fanatical sect of Islam to dictate not only what all Muslims will be able to say, but what everybody else is too.
“And that should be deemed totally intolerable with any sense of pride.”