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question everything

(47,271 posts)
Wed Dec 17, 2014, 04:40 PM Dec 2014

Rinsing Israel Out of Europe: The Zionistfrei Movement

In Nazi Germany, it was all the rage to make one’s town Judenfrei. Now a new fashion is sweeping Europe: to make one’s town or city what we might call “Zionistfrei”—free of the products and culture of the Jewish state. Across the Continent, cities and towns are declaring themselves “Israel-free zones,” insulating their citizens from Israeli produce and culture. It has ugly echoes of what happened 70 years ago.

Leicester City Council in England last month voted to boycott goods made in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. All services run by the council will be free of any product or technology made in any of the settlements. The motion “condemns the Government of Israel for its continuing illegal occupation of Palestine’s East Jerusalem and the West Bank” and resolves “to boycott any produce originating from illegal Israeli settlements.”

Leicester Mayor Peter Soulsby insists that there’s nothing anti-Semitic about this erection of an Israel-deflecting force field around the city, telling the local Leicester Mercury newspaper that it’s simply about expressing dismay with “the behavior of the Israeli state.” But Jeffrey Kaufman, former president of Leicester’s Progressive Jewish Congregation, isn’t convinced. He wants to know why, “of all the horrible things going on in the world,” the council singled out Israel for punitive treatment. “It’s blatant anti-Semitism,” he said.

(snip)

The Zionistfrei movement isn’t really about effecting any change in the Middle East. As Leicester Councillor Mohammed Dawood admits, Israel is hardly going to be “trembling in its shoes” over the city’s boycott. Rather, the movement is about making the chattering classes in Europe feel pure and righteous, unsullied by the poisonousness of the state it’s now so fashionable to hate. Where yesteryear’s creators of Judenfrei zones saw the Jewish people as a corrupting presence, today’s lobbyists for Zionistfrei territories see the Jewish state as corrupting, as a toxic entity whose fruit and technology and books must be shunned.

(snip)

BDS is one of the ugliest political movements of our time. It is shot through with double standards, treating Israel as more wicked than any other state. It is shrill and censorious, too. Its members boo and jeer and seek to expel from apparently civilized Europe not only Israeli military leaders and politicians but even Israeli violinists and actors. Now, the demand for Zionistfrei zones is taking BDS to its terrifying conclusion, that Israel and everyone associated with it (you know who) should be shunned by respectable communities everywhere.

Mr. O’Neill is editor of the online journal Spiked.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-goes-zionistfrei-1418070622

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Rinsing Israel Out of Europe: The Zionistfrei Movement (Original Post) question everything Dec 2014 OP
Not at all surprised. Behind the Aegis Dec 2014 #1
Unsurprising MosheFeingold Jan 2015 #2

Behind the Aegis

(53,833 posts)
1. Not at all surprised.
Mon Dec 22, 2014, 05:07 AM
Dec 2014

Anti-Semitism is a joke to many. There are even examples in this very group. funny how a minority group is treated as if it is actually a majority group.

MosheFeingold

(3,051 posts)
2. Unsurprising
Mon Jan 5, 2015, 11:54 AM
Jan 2015

Happens every generation.

Oddly enough, the recurring illogical antisemitism is, to me, some of the best evidence of G-d of AI&J being G-d.

After all, He promised exactly this.

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