- Yakov Hadas-Handelsman has expressed fears over attacks on Jews
- Germany: pro-Palestinians are chanting race-hate slogans against them
- Recent Israeli military action in Gaza has killed hundreds of Palestinians
Jewish people are being attacked and abused on the streets of Germany as though the country were back in the Nazi era, political and religious leaders warned yesterday.
…
Murderous slogans dating back to the days of Hitler have been chanted at pro-Palestinian rallies in Germany. Jewish-owned shops were attacked and burned in riots in France at the weekend.
The Israeli ambassador to Germany, Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, said: ‘They pursue the Jews in the streets of Berlin… as if we were in 1938.’
…
In Germany, there have been reports of protesters chanting ‘Jews to the gas chambers’. Police in Berlin have banned race-hate slogans that reappeared after being originally used in the days of the Nazis.
Officers had to protect an Israeli tourist at the weekend after protesters spotted his yarmulke (a small, round cap) and reportedly charged towards him shouting ‘Jew! We’ll get you.’
Fourteen people were arrested in the western city of Essen on suspicion of planning an attack on a synagogue. The imam of a Berlin mosque is under investigation after allegedly calling on Muslims to murder ‘Zionist Jews’.
In Paris, hundreds of protesters have attacked synagogues and set fire to shops in the suburb of Sarcelles, nicknamed Little Jerusalem.
Posters urged anti-Israel demonstrators to join ‘a raid on the Jewish district’, saying: ‘Come equipped with hammers, fire extinguishers and batons.’
Witnesses said several hundred youths marched on a synagogue chanting ‘Death to Jews’ and were beaten back by riot police using tear gas. The protesters then targeted a shopping centre, a kosher grocery and a Jewish-owned chemist.
…
Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said the rise in attacks was a terrifying reminder of an era that was thought to be in the distant past.
He said: ‘We are currently experiencing in this country an explosion of evil and violent hatred of Jews, which shocks and dismays all of us.
‘We would never in our lives have thought it possible any more that anti-Semitic views of the nastiest and most primitive kind can be chanted on German streets.’
…
Roger Cukierman, of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, said Jews were living in fear.
He said: ‘They are not shouting “Death to the Israelis” on the streets of Paris. They are screaming “Death to the Jews”.’
One long-time resident of Sarcelles, called Laetitia, told the France 24 TV channel: ‘We called our town Little Jerusalem because we felt at home here. We were safe, there were never any problems. And I just wasn’t expecting anything like this. We are very shocked.’
…
The Jewish population of Germany has increased in the past two decades to around 250,000, most of them migrants from the former Soviet Union who came after German reunification.
Full article: It’s like 1938, says Israeli ambassador to Germany: Outbreaks of anti-Semitism on the rise across Europe (Daily Mail)
Global Geopolitics 