Untitled (1975-1978)
31 de agosto de 2014
30 de agosto de 2014
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29 de agosto de 2014
Salónica
Yiannis Boutaris, re-elected mayor of Thessaloniki, wears a Jewish star at his swearing-in ceremony – in protest at the election of a member of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party to the council.
28 de agosto de 2014
Antisemitism on rise across Europe 'in worst times since the Nazis'
Experts say attacks go beyond Israel-Palestinian conflict as hate crimes strike fear into Jewish communities
The Guardian,
Mother of Miriam
Monsonego, seven, at funeral of her daughter and three other victims of
Toulouse school shooting. Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images
In the space of just one week last month, according to Crif, the
umbrella group for France's Jewish organisations, eight synagogues were
attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a
400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and
looted; the crowd's chants and banners included "Death to Jews" and
"Slit Jews' throats". That same weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of
the capital, stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: "Israhell",
read one banner.
In Germany
last month, molotov cocktails were lobbed into the Bergische synagogue
in Wuppertal – previously destroyed on Kristallnacht – and a Berlin
imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to "destroy the Zionist Jews …
Count them and kill them, to the very last one." Bottles were thrown
through the window of an antisemitism campaigner in Frankfurt; an
elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a pro-Israel
rally in Hamburg; an Orthodox Jewish teenager punched in the face in
Berlin. In several cities, chants at pro-Palestinian protests compared
Israel's actions to the Holocaust; other notable slogans included: "Jew,
coward pig, come out and fight alone," and "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."
Across Europe,
the conflict in Gaza is breathing new life into some very old, and very
ugly, demons. This is not unusual; police and Jewish civil rights
organisations have long observed a noticeable spike in antisemitic
incidents each time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares. During the
three weeks of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009,
France recorded 66 antisemitic incidents, including attacks on
Jewish-owned restaurants and synagogues and a sharp increase in
anti-Jewish graffiti. But according to academics and Jewish leaders, this
time it is different. More than simply a reaction to the conflict, they
say, the threats, hate speech and violent attacks feel like the
expression of a much deeper and more widespread antisemitism, fuelled by
a wide range of factors, that has been growing now for more than a
decade.
"These are the worst times since the Nazi era," Dieter
Graumann, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, told the
Guardian. "On the streets, you hear things like 'the Jews should be
gassed', 'the Jews should be burned' – we haven't had that in Germany
for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn't criticising Israeli
politics, it's just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else. And it's not
just a German phenomenon. It's an outbreak of hatred against Jews so
intense that it's very clear indeed."
Roger Cukierman, president
of France's Crif, said French Jews were "anguished" about an anti-Jewish
backlash that goes far beyond even strongly felt political and
humanitarian opposition to the current fighting: "They are not screaming
'Death to the Israelis' on the streets of Paris," Cukierman said last
month. "They are screaming 'Death to Jews'." Crif's vice-president
Yonathan Arfi said he "utterly rejected" the view that the latest
increase in antisemitic incidents was down to events in Gaza. "They have
laid bare something far more profound," he said.
Nor is it just
Europe's Jewish leaders who are alarmed. Germany's chancellor, Angela
Merkel, has called the recent incidents "an attack on freedom and
tolerance and our democratic state". The French prime minister, Manuel
Valls, has spoken of "intolerable" and clearly antisemitic acts: "To
attack a Jew because he is a Jew is to attack France. To attack a
synagogue and a kosher grocery store is quite simply antisemitism and
racism".
France, whose 500,000-strong Jewish community is one of Europe's
largest, and Germany, where the post-war exhortation of "Never Again" is
part of the fabric of modern society, are not alone. In Austria last
month, a pre-season friendly between Maccabi Haifa and German Bundesliga
team SC Paderborn had to be rescheduled after the Israeli side's
previous match was called off following an attempted assault on its
players.
The Netherlands'
main antisemitism watchdog, Cidi, had more than 70 calls from alarmed
Jewish citizens in one week last month; the average is normally three to
five. An Amsterdam rabbi, Binjamin Jacobs, had his front door stoned,
and two Jewish women were attacked – one beaten, the other the victim of
arson – after they hung Israeli flags from their balconies. In Belgium,
a woman was reportedly turned away from a shop with the words: "We
don't currently sell to Jews."
In Italy,
the Jewish owners of dozens of shops and other businesses in Rome
arrived to find swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans daubed on shutters and
windows. One slogan read: "Every Palestinian is like a comrade. Same
enemy. Same barricade"; another: "Jews, your end is near." Abd al-Barr
al-Rawdhi, an imam from the north eastern town of San Donà di Piave, is
to be deported after being video-recorded giving a sermon calling for
the extermination of the Jews.
There has been no violence in Spain,
but the country's small Jewish population of 35,000-40,000 fears the
situation is so tense that "if it continues for too long, bad things
will happen," the leader of Madrid's Jewish community, David Hatchwell,
said. The community is planning action against El Mundo after the daily
paper published a column by 83-year-old playwright Antonio Gala
questioning Jews' ability to live peacefully with others: "It's not
strange they have been so frequently expelled."
Studies suggest
antisemitism may indeed be mounting. A 2012 survey by the EU's by the
Fundamental Rights agency of some 6,000 Jews in eight European countries
– between them, home to 90% of Europe's Jewish population – found 66%
of respondents felt antisemitism in Europe was on the rise; 76% said
antisemitism had increased in their country over the past five years. In
the 12 months after the survey, nearly half said they worried about
being verbally insulted or attacked in public because they were Jewish.
Jewish
organisations that record antisemitic incidents say the trend is
inexorable: France's Society for the Protection of the Jewish Community
says annual totals of antisemitic acts in the 2000s are seven times
higher than in the 1990s. French Jews are leaving for Israel in greater
numbers, too, for reasons they say include antisemitism and the
electoral success of the hard-right Front National. The Jewish Agency
for Israel said 3,288 French Jews left for Israel in 2013, a 72% rise on
the previous year. Between January and May this year, 2,254 left,
against 580 in the same period last year.
In a study completed in
February, America's Anti-Defamation League surveyed 332,000 Europeans
using an index of 11 questions designed to reveal strength of
anti-Jewish stereotypes. It found that 24% of Europeans – 37% in France,
27% in Germany, 20% in Italy – harboured some kind of anti-Jewish
attitude.
So what is driving the phenomenon? Valls, the French
prime minister, has acknowledged a "new", "normalised" antisemitism that
he says blends "the Palestinian cause, jihadism, the devastation of
Israel, and hatred of France and its values".
Mark Gardner of the
Community Security Trust, a London-based charity that monitors
antisemitism both in Britain and on the continent, also identifies a
range of factors. Successive conflicts in the Middle East he said, have
served up "a crush of trigger events" that has prevented tempers from
cooling: the second intifada in 2000, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006,
and the three Israel–Hamas conflicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014 have "left
no time for the situation to return to normal." In such a climate, he
added, three brutal antisemitic murders in the past eight years – two in
France, one in Belgium, and none coinciding with Israeli military
action – have served "not to shock, but to encourage the antisemites",
leaving them "seeking more blood and intimidation, not less".
Experts said anti-Jewish attacks were not only down to Israel-Palestinian conflict.
In 2006, 23-year old Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured and left for
dead in Paris by a group calling itself the Barbarians Gang, who
subsequently admitted targeting him "because he was a Jew, so his family
would have money". Two years ago, in May 2012, Toulouse gunman Mohamed
Merah shot dead seven people, including three children and a young rabbi
outside their Jewish school. And in May this year Mehdi Nemmouche, a
Frenchman of Algerian descent thought to have recently returned to
France after a year in Syria fighting with radical Islamists, was
charged with shooting four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels.
If
the French establishment has harboured a deep vein of anti-Jewish
sentiment since long before the Dreyfus affair, the influence of radical
Islam, many Jewish community leaders say, is plainly a significant
contributing factor in the country's present-day antisemitism. But so
too, said Gardner, is a straightforward alienation that many young
Muslims feel from society. "Often it's more to do with that than with
Israel. Many would as soon burn down a police station as a synagogue.
Jews are simply identified as part of the establishment."
While he
stressed it would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of Muslims,
Peter Ulrich, a research fellow at the centre for antisemitism research
(ZfA) at Berlin's Technical University, agreed that some of the
"antisemitic elements" Germany has seen at recent protests could be "a
kind of rebellion of people who are themselves excluded on the basis of
racist structures."
Arfi said that in France antisemitism had
become "a portmanteau for a lot of angry people: radical Muslims,
alienated youths from immigrant families, the far right, the far left".
But he also blamed "a process of normalisation, whereby antisemitism is
being made somehow acceptable". One culprit, Arfi said, is the
controversial comedian Dieudonné: "He has legitimised it. He's made
acceptable what was unacceptable."
A similar normalisation may be
under way in Germany, according to a 2013 study by the Technical
University of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, emails and faxes sent
over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council
of Jews in Germany, Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel found that 60% were
written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors,
lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most,
too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses – something she
felt few Germans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.
Almost every
observer pointed to the unparalleled power of unfiltered social media to
inflame and to mobilise. A stream of shocking images and Twitter
hashtags, including #HitlerWasRight, amount, Arfi said, almost to
indoctrination. "The logical conclusion, in fact, is radicalisation: on
social media people self-select what they see, and what they see can be
pure, unchecked propaganda. They may never be confronted with opinions
that are not their own."
Additional reporting by Josie Le Blond in Berlin, Kim Willsher in Paris, John Hooper in Rome and Ashifa Kassam in Madrid
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/07/antisemitism-rise-europe-worst-since-nazis?CMP=twt_gu
27 de agosto de 2014
26 de agosto de 2014
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25 de agosto de 2014
23 de agosto de 2014
Yair Lapid
A fatal blind spot for sheer evil
Yair Lapid, August 24, 2014
The following is the text of a speech delivered Wednesday, August 20, 2014 at Platform 17, Holocaust Memorial Site, Berlin
The Holocaust causes us all to ask of ourselves the same question: What would I have done?
The Holocaust causes us all to ask of ourselves the same question: What would I have done?
What would I have done if I was a Jew in Berlin in 1933, when Hitler rose to power? Would I have run? Would I have sold my house, my business? Removed my children from school in the middle of the year? Or would I have said to myself: it will pass, it is just momentary madness, Hitler says all these things because he is a politician seeking election. Yes, he’s anti-Semitic, but who isn’t? We’ve been through worse than this. It’s better to wait, to keep my head down. It will pass.
What would I do if I was a German in Berlin on the 18th October 1941, when the first train left this platform, heading East and on it 1,013 Jews – children, women, the elderly — all destined for death.
I don’t ask what I would have done if I was a Nazi, but what would I have done if I was an honest German man, waiting for his train here? A German citizen the same age I am now, with three children like mine. A man who educated his children on the values of basic human decency and the right to life and respect? Would I have remained silent? Would I have protested? Would I have been one of the few Berliners to join the anti-Nazi underground, or one of the many Berliners who carried on with life and pretended that nothing was happening?
And what if I was one of the 1,013 Jews on that train? Would I have boarded the train? Would I have smuggled my 18-year-old daughter to the northern forests? Would I have told my two sons to fight until the end? Would I have dropped my suitcase and started to run? Or would I have attacked the guards in the black uniforms and died an honorable, quick death instead of dying slowly of hunger and torture?
I think I know the answer. I think you do too.
None of the 1,013 Jews departing for their deaths fought the guards. Not them and not the tens of thousands who followed them from this place. Neither did my grandfather, Bela Lampel, when a German soldier took him from his home late at night on the 18th March 1944. “Bitte,” said his mother — my great-grandmother Hermine — to the German soldier. She slowly got down on her knees and hugged the soldiers boots. “Bitte, don’t forget that you also have a mother.” The soldier didn’t say a word. He didn’t know that from the bed, hiding under the duvet, my father was looking at him. A Jewish boy of 13 who over night became a man.
Why didn’t they fight? That is the question that haunts me. That is the question that the Jewish people have struggled with since the last train left for Auschwitz. And the answer – the only answer – is that they didn’t believe in the totality of evil.
They knew, of course, that there were bad people in the world, but they didn’t believe in total evil, organized evil, without mercy or hesitation, cold evil that looked at them but didn’t see them, not even for a moment, as human.
According to their murderers, they weren’t people. They weren’t mothers or fathers, they weren’t somebody’s children. According to their murderers, they never celebrated the birth of a child, never fell in love, never took their old dog for a walk at two in the morning or laughed until they cried at the latest comedy by Max Ehrlich.
That’s what you need to kill another man. To be convinced that he isn’t a man at all. When the murderers looked upon the people who departed from this platform on their final journey they didn’t see Jewish parents, only Jews. They weren’t Jewish poets or Jewish musicians, only Jews. They weren’t Herr Braun or Frau Schwartz, only Jews.
Destruction starts with the destruction of identity. It is no surprise that the first thing done to them, when they arrived at Auschwitz, was to tattoo a number on their arm. It is hard to kill Rebecca Grunwald, a beautiful, fair-haired 18-year-old romantic, but Jew number 7762 A is easy to murder. Yet it remains the same person.
Seventy-five years later, do we know any more? Do we understand more?
The Holocaust placed before Israel a dual challenge:
On the one hand it taught us that we must survive at any price, and be able to defend ourselves at any price. Trainloads of Jews will never again depart from a platform anywhere in the world. The security of the State of Israel and its citizens must forever be in our hands alone. We have friends, and I stand here among friends. The new Germany has proven its friendship to Israel time and again, but we must not, and we cannot, rely on anyone but ourselves.
On the other hand, the Holocaust taught us that no matter the circumstances we must always remain moral people. Human morality is not judged when everything is ok, it is judged by our ability to see the suffering of the other, even when we have every reason to see only our own.
The Holocaust cannot be compared, and must not be compared, to any other event in human history. It was, in the words of the author K. Zetnik, a survivor of Auschwitz, “another planet.” We must not compare, but we must always remember what we learned.
A war like the one we fight today, which looks likely to continue and which the civilized world — whether it wants to or not — will be a part of, causes the two lessons we learned from the Holocaust to stand opposite one another.
The need to survive teaches us to strike hard to defend ourselves.
The need to remain moral, even when circumstances are immoral, teaches us to minimize human suffering as much as possible.
Our moral test is not taking place in a sterile laboratory or upon the philosopher’s page. In the past weeks, the moral test put before us has taken place during intense fighting. Thousands of rockets were fired at our citizens and armed terrorists dug tunnels next to kindergartens with the aim of killing or kidnapping our children. Anyone who criticizes us must ask themselves one question: “What would you do if someone came to your child’s school with a gun in their hand and started shooting?”
Hamas, as opposed to us, wants to kill Jews. Young or old, men or women, soldiers or civilians. They see no difference, because for them we are not people. We are Jews and that is reason enough to murder us.
Our moral test, even under these circumstances, is to continue to distinguish between enemies and innocents. Every time a child in Gaza dies it breaks my heart. They are not Hamas, they are not the enemy, they are just children.
Therefore Israel is the first country in military history that informs its enemy in advance where and when it will attack, so as to avoid civilian causalities. Israel is the only country that transfers food and medication to its enemy while the fighting continues. Israel is the only country where pilots abandon their mission because they see civilians on the ground. And despite it all, children die, and children are not supposed to die.
Here in Europe, and elsewhere in the world, people sit in their comfortable homes, watching the evening news, and tell us that we are failing the test. Why? Because in Gaza people suffer more. They don’t understand — or don’t want to understand — that the suffering of Gaza is the main tool of evil. When we explain to them, time after time, that Hamas uses the children of Gaza as human shields, that Hamas intentionally places them in the firing line, to ensure they die, that Hamas sacrifices the lives of the young to win its propaganda war, people refuse to believe it. Why? Because they cannot believe that human beings — human beings who look like them and sound like them — are capable of behaving that way. Because good people always refuse to recognize the totality of evil until it’s too late.
Time after time we ask ourselves why people in the world prefer to blame us when the facts so clearly indicate otherwise. Across the world, fanatic Muslims are massacring other Muslims. In Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Nigeria more children are killed in a week than die in Gaza in a decade. Every week, women are raped, homosexuals are hung and Christians are beheaded. The world watches, offers its polite condemnation, and returns obsessively to condemning Israel for fighting for our lives.
Some of the criticism stems from anti-Semitism. It has raised its ugly head once more. To those people we say: we will fight you everywhere. The days when Jews ran away from you are over. We will not be silent in the face of anti-Semitism and we expect every government, in every country, to stand shoulder to shoulder with us and fight this evil with us.
Other critics, perhaps more enlightened in their own eyes, prefer to blame only us for what happens in Gaza because they know we are the only ones who listen. They prefer to focus their anger upon us not in spite of but because we are committed to the same human values which Hamas rejects – compassion for the weak, rationality, protection of gay people, of women’s rights, of the freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Let us not fool ourselves. Evil is here. It is around us. It seeks to hurt us. Fundamentalist Islam is an ultimate evil, and like the evil which came before it, has learned how to use all our tools against us: Our TV cameras, our international organizations, our commissions of inquiry and our legal system. Just as terror uses rockets and suicide bombers, it uses our inability to accept that someone would sacrifice the children of their people just to get a supportive headline or an eye-catching photograph.
Standing here, in this place, I want to say clearly that the leaders of Hamas, an anti-western, anti-Semitic terrorist organization, cannot be safe while they continue to target innocent civilians. Just as every European leader would do, just as the United States did with Osama Bin Laden, so we will pursue every leader of Hamas.
This is the evil which we all face and Israel stands at the front. Europe must know, if we will fail to stop them, they will come for you. We must do everything to avoid suffering and the death of innocents but we stand in the right place from which to say to the entire world: We will not board the train again. We will protect ourselves from total evil.
Thank you.
22 de agosto de 2014
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
"Church Going", Philip Larkin
21 de agosto de 2014
20 de agosto de 2014
19 de agosto de 2014
18 de agosto de 2014
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