faith, ethnicity, color, sexual orientation, language, etc. All such hate crimes should greatly concern everyone. I would equally condemn Marine Le Pen of the FN in France as well as Pamela Geller in the US for their hate speech and provocation.

Start another thread if that's what you want to talk about.

This ones about Antisemitism.

ALL discrimination is wrong.

Even as you keep kicking it up.

ref : " faith, ethnicity, color, sexual orientation, language, etc.... "

I give you : .........

Students on train protest hate crimes by speaking only Arabic

High schoolers riding Jerusalem's light rail speak only Arabic to focus attention on incidents in which people were attacked because of the language they spoke.

Dozens of high schools students from around Israel participated on Monday in a protest against racially-motivated attacks on Arab-speakers in Jerusalem. The students rode the light rail in the capital city, where they spoke only in Arabic.

Among the participants was Druze student Tommy Hassoun, 21, who was attacked by a gang of ten Jews in Jerusalem in January.

Hassoun, who completed IDF service, said the attackers – who fled but were later arrested – had heard him speaking Arabic.

He said Monday that "my goal is for people not to be afraid of everyone who speaks Arabic and to change the thinking of Jewish society. For them to look at Arabic-speakers the same way they look at Jews."

Ramzi, Hassoun's father, said that "the responses were, to my surprise, very positive. Usually people on trains withdraw into themselves, but here we saw lovely and supportive reactions. There's hope. The fact that people are participating and the fact that people are coming and care is important. We need to hear the silent majority."

The students handed out Arabic phrasebooks and sheets with a code leading to a website with different greetings in Arabic. After the ride, the students and teaching staff held a ceremony near Mount Herzl, at the end of which they sang Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem.

The event was spearheaded by Tag Meir – a coalition of organizations against hate crimes and violence – and the Center for Educational Technology.

Myriam Darmoni, the director of Civics and Shared Life Education at the CET, said that "education is the answer to the worrying and growing phenomenon of hate crimes. Ahead of Lag B'Omer, we decided to light the fire of hope on the Jerusalem light rail. Together with teachers and students, we'll help bring hearts together."

"We condemn all attempts to hurt innocents – on both sides," said Dr. Gadi Gvaryahu, the chairman of Tag Meir.

"The appropriate response to the rise of hate crimes, racism, and price tag attacks, is strengthening the study of Arabic language and culture and meetings between Jews and Arabs. It's not right to hurt the innocent just because they dared speak the Arabic language."

Moshe Tur-Paz, director of Jerusalem's Education Administration, was another participant. "It's enough to ride the Jerusalem light rail and see that tribal isolation in Israeli society is an illusion. We actually live entwined together, and if we don't learn how to do that, we will have a much harder time in this country. This is not an easy path, and there are many risks."

Source : http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4653796,00.html

But it's not the topic of this OP.

which is just another way of minimizing antisemitism. You can't possibly be surprised to see this.

Or minimize Antisemitism.

on many sites - including this one. But desperate is a good word for it.

I'm sure they have plenty of people who didn't see them take place that they can quote.

AFP). German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Sunday that society must “never close its eyes” to anti-Semitism as she joined Holocaust survivors to mark 70 years since the liberation of the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.



http://jpupdates.com/2015/05/03/merkel-in-anti-semitism-warning-as-marks-nazi-camps-liberation/

Not kidding - I read that here.

antisemitism. We saw it during Charlie Hebdo - some of the threads here were embarrassing in the attempts to claim the attack on the Jewish deli was a coincidence. Embarrassing for those twisting themselves into pretzels - disgustingly predictable for the rest of us.

Everybody assumes that anti-Semitism means opposition to Jews. But Jews are not the only Semites in the world and never have been.

is a pedantic lecture on the history of hatred. Some of us know about German racism.

A post about "the chosen people "

or "The USS Liberty" ?

There is no afterlife.

The fact that there are other peoples that are Semitic as well has nothing to do with it.

Please...

I read the chapter about Scandinavia by Dr. Mikael Shainkman, and I think he managed to cover most of the antisemitic incidents, at least all the ones I know about were included. At least that chapter was alright.

Now to the bad part. The definition of antisemitism used in the study is flawed, because it conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. It seems to be the former working definition of antisemitism of the EUMC, which was retracted. This definition is the darling of all those who try to accuse those who criticize Israel of being antisemites.

For example, the report contains several caricatures that are supposed to be antisemitic. The problem is that most of them are not even remotely antisemitic. This really shows how the definition leads to flawed conclusions.

It seems as if the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry is trying to append pro-Israel BS onto what should have been a serious study on anti-Semitism. Not good.

If there's anyone out there who disagrees with me, please look at the caricatures in the report before you respond.

Could you please stop trying to minimimize this?

There's 12 million Jews in the world and way more than a billion Muslims and yet it's important for EI and plenty of others to amplify hate against that huge group and minimize hate against that tiny minority?

I have no intention of minimizing anti-Semitism in any way, it's just that some people, like the trolls that compiled the report, just had to crap on a perfectly adequate scholarly work. If the crap from the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry is removed, then the rest is accurate. The chapter written by Dr. Mikael Shainkman is accurate, for example.

You should never let preconceived notions of how things ought to be come in the way of actual reality. Be skeptical, even when presented with things you agree with.

And I probably agree with Merkel more profoundly than you do.

You've actually ignored the vast majority of what is in the report and mischaracterized other parts of it because you are unable to acknowledge that sometimes people mingle antisemitism with criticism of Israel.

there are still those on DU that feel perfectly comfortable minimizing and deflecting from antisemitism. C'mon, it's like predicting the sun will rise in the east.

The definition of antisemitism does not, as you claim, conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Instead, the report highlights the phenomenon of people using criticism of Israel as a pretext for antisemitism. This is similar to the way people use criticism of President Obama as a pretext for racism.

One example from the report: a news website publishes an article about Israel destroying tunnels and receives this message:

"Congratulations, disgusting cowards, genocides, children killers. Now I see that Hitler was not so bad, he was a necessary evil and if he had succeeded he would have avoided an evil worse than the toilet paper called Israel. Dirty people, and you ask why the world hates you."

I would hope that you would acknowledge that this is an antisemitic comment even though it was presented in response to an article about the actions of Israel.

The cartoons you reference at the end of the report (which are pretty incidental to the actual findings contained therein) are similar in the way they highlight the Jewish character (what happened to "never again", a man with a beard holding a menora in one hand and strangling a young boy with the other, a swastika with a Star of David at its root, etc).

To reference my earlier example, if a group of people feel very strongly that Obama is a bad president and want to stage a protest against his policies, that would, of course, not be racist. If however, at that protest there were included exaggerated caricatures or slogans linking Obama's race to his policies, then one would be able to clearly identify such protest as including racism.

Should be pinned to top of IP page.

If you ever get the chance to talk to one, probe them about their attitudes towards Jews. IMHO, being supportive or critical of Israel isn’t even remotely a defining factor, and shouldn’t be in the definition of what anti-Semitism is. If it ain’t racism it’s not anti-Semitism.

You are trying to cherrypick stuff from the report that’s anti-Semitic, and well, yeah those examples are anti-Semitic. Equating a star of David with a swastika, is in general anti-Semitic. My problem with the report is that it includes stuff that’s not anti-Semitic, and calls it anti-Semitic. One funny example of this is the cartoon of the mouse and the scorpion.

The way I interpret the report, is that there are serious people who compile chapters about different regions, and that these chapters are factually correct and also use a reality based definition of what anti-Semitism is. Later when the report was compiled, the trolls at the Kantor Center appended some Hasbara BS to it.

The notion that anti-Israel rhetoric is possibly anti-Semitic, is a slippery slope argument that automatically leads to false positives when looking for anti-Semitism.

When I was a child, my mother used to tell me how when he was only 11 years old, my grandfather left his hometown of Danzig (now Gdansk, in Poland), and traveled alone on a boat to England. My grandfather is Jewish and the trip saved his life.

I listened to that story from the safety of the 1990s. It was a long time ago, I thought. It won’t happen again.

And yet, here we are, in 2015. Over the past few days and weeks, we have seen too much evidence that far from being a painful memory of the past, anti-Semitism is still very much alive in Europe. In January, four Jewish men were killed in a kosher supermarket in Paris, two days after the brutal attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people dead. Last week, a man attacked a synagogue in Copenhagen, killing a Jewish man as he guarded the building during a Bat Mitzvah celebration. Hours earlier, the same man attacked a cultural centre where a debate on blasphemy and freedom of expression was taking place, killing a man and injuring three police officers. Investigations are still underway, but the events are disturbingly similar to the attacks in Paris in January.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/02/18/2015-anti-semitism-should-no-longer-be-reality-europe