Wednesday, May 1, 2019

THE MEDIA CHEERS GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP OF THE INTERNET

What the media’s response to Sri Lanka’s social media shutdown says about its real agenda.

April 30, 2019

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism

After Muslim terrorists murdered hundreds of Christians, the Sri Lankan government responded, as it had during clashes between Muslims and Buddhists last year, by shutting down social media.

The Sri Lankan government’s justification for the shutdown was that "false news reports" were being spread through social media. This excuse closely echoed the argument that the media in the United States had been making in its push for censoring Facebook after Trump’s victory to fight “fake news”.

If anyone thought that the media would react critically to a foreign government that ranks near the bottom in press freedom silencing social media, including citizen journalists, they were very wrong.

"Sri Lanka Shut Down Social Media. My First Thought Was ‘Good.’" the headline of a New York Times op-ed blared. “Sri Lanka social media shutdown reveals Facebook's Achilles' heel,” the Washington Post echoed. The theme of both major media pieces was that social media was dangerous and that government shutdowns of free expression might be necessary to keep people safe from “extremism”.

"Good, because it could save lives. Good, because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built. Good, because the toxic digital waste of misinformation that floods these platforms has overwhelmed what was once so very good about them," Kara Swisher of Recoderanted in her Times op-ed defending Sri Lankan government censorship.

Swisher’s Recode site also published its own post, “Sri Lanka blocks social media: shutdown shows Facebook can’t be trusted”. An actual journalist would have argued that a government shutdown of free expression shows that the government can’t be trusted. It wasn’t Facebook that failed in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government had received warnings about an incoming attack and had failed to act.

The shutdown of social media prevented the spread of information damaging to the government.

No lives were being saved by shutting down social media. Any Muslim terror plotters already had their orders. And would have been able to bypass the ban using VPN. Christians are a tiny minority and were not about to take to the streets. The shutdown prevented Sri Lankans in their own country and abroad from quickly getting in touch with their loved ones. And limited public criticism of the government.

The Sri Lankan defense ministry already announced why it was blocking social media. And it isn’t to save lives. “Currently, the security sections are conducting investigations in a broad manner on these incidents and the government has taken steps to temporarily block all the social media avenues until the investigations are concluded,” its statement reads.

The military is blocking people from expressing their opinions until it finalizes its story and presents it officially to the public. And this is what our own media supports and wants to see in America.

The issue isn’t whether Facebook can be trusted. It’s whether the media trusts the people.

“Social media has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check. These platforms give voice to everyone, but some of those voices are false or, worse, malevolent,” Swisher writes.

Giving voice to everyone is the essence of free speech. And that’s what the media opposes.

The media has tried to spin internet censorship, in this country or in Sri Lanka, as an urgent response to a crisis. The Sri Lankan government, Cat Zakrzewski at the Washington Post claimed, "made a unilateral decision: The risks from rampant misinformation and fake news on these platforms were greater than the communications benefits these channels could bring during a crisis."

The risks from “misinformation” and “fake news” are political. Censorship is a political solution.

Democracy does indeed die in darkness. And the darkness is the flow of black ink spilling from The Post.

There are occasional times when censorship can save lives, and those almost always involve revealing military secrets and law enforcement plans, behavior that our own media happily engages in.

If President Trump told the New York Times or the Washington Post that they couldn’t print leaked plans for destroying Iran’s nuclear program, they, and the rest of the media would wrap their thousand-dollar suits and power suits in the First Amendment and cry that they are being censored by a tyrant. But they cheer a government shutdown of social media as an urgent response to the crisis of free speech.

"A few years ago we'd view the blocking of social media sites after an attack as outrageous censorship; now we think of it as essential duty of care, to protect ourselves from threat," Ivan Sigal, the executive director of Global Voices, tweeted.

Who are ‘we’ and ‘ourselves’?

Who needs to undertake this “essential duty of care” to protect “ourselves” from the threat of speech?

Global Voices got its start as an alliance of bloggers fighting for free speech. These days, Sigal sits on a board of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Despite their misleading names, Soros organizations have been leading the fight against freedom of speech in this country and around the world.

Why do George Soros and his associates believe that freedom of speech is a threat to them? The threat is a world where everyone, not just the media and Soros groups, can have a voice and reach people.

The tech activists cheering internet censorship were some of the loudest voices calling for net neutrality. Without net neutrality, they howled, the internet would no longer be free. But their idea of a free internet is a place that’s free for billion-dollar platforms to sell, but not for individuals to speak. It’s a world where Netflix can push its garbage original content at the expense of all internet users, but those users had better watch what they say or the plug on their speech will be pulled.

Was that anyone’s vision of a free internet? Did its pioneers envision the world wide web as a space where you can watch Fuller House or where people from around the world can share and debate ideas?

The internet can be little more than a content delivery system. An echo chamber in which Google and its rivals use AI to push content meant to manipulate you into buying, thinking and voting their way. Or it can be the public marketplace of ideas that is open to all voices, the good and the bad, as was intended.

Sri Lanka social media support and the media’s enthusiastic support for it are warning signs on the road. Their vision is of an internet controlled from the top down by oligarchies and governments.

A world where, as the Washington Post likes to say, democracy truly does die in darkness.

Anti-speech activists have made Facebook into the public enemy of their campaign. But their problem with Facebook and other social media platforms, as Swisher put it in the New York Times, is that they “give voice to everyone”. The real villain of the media isn’t Mark Zuckerberg. It’s you. Facebook is being attacked for insufficiently censoring speech. The dot com is collateral damage in a censorship campaign.

Social media is another term for speech. The anti-speech campaigners don’t like to use the word. They talk about “fake news”, “misinformation”, “extremism”, “threats” and “harmful content”. Censorship likewise undergoes an Orwellian renaming to “filtering”, “managing”, “reining in” and a dozen others.

But underneath all the euphemisms, there are only two words. Censorship and speech.

What might Sri Lankans have posted if they hadn’t been censored. We’ll never know. Neither will they. If the enemies of free speech win this war, no one will ever know what the rest of our country has to say.

The cheers for the actions of the Sri Lankan government by media activists, who couldn’t find Sri Lanka on a map and couldn’t name its government, is a trial balloon for censorship in the United States. The false claims that Russian bots and fake accounts on Facebook had altered the election with ‘fake news’ were used to pressure social media platforms into censoring and deplatforming political opponents.

But they aren’t going to stop there.

Now we know that their ideal vision is a world in which the government can just block social media and erase the voices of millions of people with a command, some keys and the flick of a switch.

ABOUT DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

A courageous freedom fighter announces his candidacy for the European Parliament -- and the Left flies into apoplectic rage.

April 30, 2019

Bruce Bawer

Tommy Robinson’s announcement on April 25 of his candidacy for the European Parliament met with precisely the kind of media response you would expect. In the Guardian, Josh Halliday gave the term “far-right” a workout. He described the For Britain party, whose founder Anne Marie Waters introduced Tommy at his campaign kickoff event in Wythenshawe, a largely working-class Manchester neighborhood, as “far-right.” Halliday made sure to point out that Tommy had “founded the far-right English Defence League” – but omitted to mention that Tommy had left the EDL precisely because it had become “far-right.” And Halliday noted that local MP Mike Kane had “signed a joint letter with Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith leaders saying Tommy’s ‘far-right political views are not welcome in our town.’”

In the same letter, Kane, a Labourite who serves as Shadow Minister for Education, and the “faith leaders” – a Baptist preacher, a Roman Catholic priest, an Anglican rector, a Muslim imam, and a Jewish rabbi – explained that they would not welcome Tommy because Wythenshawe is a “welcoming” place. Neither the signatories nor Halliday seemed to be aware of the blatant self-contradiction. The letter further noted that Wythenshawe contains “thriving Chagossian and Keralan communities, among others, living and working here. If we were to welcome this man we’d be dismissing the valued contribution these people have made to the area.” In fact Chagossians, an Indian Ocean people, are Christians, and most people from Kerala, a state in the south of India, are Hindus. Tommy’s problem, of course, is with the ideology of Islam, in accordance with which jihadists have murdered countless Christians and Hindus.

There was more. The letter condemned Tommy as a figure of “division and hate,” while a separate statement by local politicians condemned him as a figure of “hate and division.” Of course the widespread image of Tommy as a figure of hate, like the widespread image of Islam as a religion of peace, is a product of systematic disinformation by media organs such as the Guardian. Halliday spoke to a local Methodist minister who “led a prayer walk,” apparently seeking divine protection from the diabolical visitor from Luton, and “said he had also bought supplies of pasta, bread and chocolate cake to provide food and a safe place ‘for those who don’t feel safe in their homes this evening.‘” You would think that Tommy and his supporters were in the habit of breaking into people’s homes.

Among the “faith leaders” who signed the letter opposing Tommy’s visit was Rabbi Fabian Sborovsky, a reform Jewish rabbi who heads the Menorah Synagogue and belongs to something called the European Union for Progressive Judaism. In recent years, Sborovsky has protested the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, urged Britain to admit more refugees, and called for a hike in Britain’s minimum wage. A Google search shows that he has been quite active in public affairs, speaking out on various issues and signing petitions aplenty; but I could not find any record of him criticizing Palestinians or any other Muslims for their treatment of Jews, something that Tommy Robinson has done regularly and forcefully.

Another signatory was Imam Salim Astewani of the Cheadle Mosque, where in 2015 a speaker criticized a well-known Muslim group for associating with Jews and gays – a story covered at the time in, of all places, the Guardian. It is interesting that Sborovsky is willing to align himself with such an institution against Tommy Robinson, who knows, even if Sborovsky does not, that the Koran itself calls for death to Jews and homosexuals, and who has ardently criticized Islam on that account.

In his Guardian article, Halliday repeated the charge that Tommy is a racist and emphasized the claim that his candidacy had “been met with near-universal condemnation in Manchester.” Yet videos posted after Tommy’s arrival in Wythenshawe showed him being approached by several non-caucasian locals who were eager to shake his hand or take selfies with him. Apparently these deplorables did not get the message from their betters that Tommy is bigoted against them and therefore persona non grata in their community.

At the Independent, the Tommy-bashing was done by one Mike Stuchbery, who was last seen in the Guardian on February 5 describing Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist” – a website where college students can report ideological discrimination by their leftist professors – as authoritarian, rather than as what is it: a response to authoritarianism. In his piece about Tommy’s campaign event in Wythenshawe, Stuchbery described Tommy, too, as an authoritarian: “Turning up to a ‘forgotten’ neighbourhood, bringing food [Tommy handed out burgers] and promising to tackle supposed threats, is a classic tactic of wannabe authoritarians.” In fact Tommy is a champion of individual freedom who has dedicated his life to opposing a genuinely authoritarian – no, totalitarian – religious ideology and who is running for MEP only because he opposes the increasingly authoritarian nature of EU rule.

Tommy-smearing was also the order of the day at the Daily Mail, which also quoted remarks made by Mike Kane in the House of Commons (which also can be viewed on YouTube): “I want to make it clear, and I'm sure the whole House would agree,” he said, “this individual is not welcome to spread his xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, racist vitriol in my community or in any other community.” The Mail reported that “MPs from both sides of the House murmured in agreement when Mr Kane finished his remarks….Schools minister Nick Gibb said he shared the sentiments expressed his opposite number, adding: 'I'm sure it's a sentiment shared right across this House.'”

How many of those House members, one wonders, are so ignorant of Tommy Robinson’s actual views, which he has expressed in hours and hours of interviews that can be readily viewed online, that they actually believe him to be xenophobic, homophobic, and racist? How many, by contrast, are fully aware that these charges are absolute lies but are willing and eager to spread them as part of the effort by both the Tory and Labour establishment to stifle honest criticism of Islam? Then there is the most important question of all: how long will the British electorate continue to return these pusillanimous snobs to office? If Tommy can actually get himself elected to the European Parliament, it will be a real sign that the Westminster elite’s days are numbers.

ABOUT BRUCE BAWER

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender,” "The Victims' Revolution," and "The Alhambra." "Islam," a collection of his essays on Islam, has just been published.

The venomous imagery and language that targets America, Israel, Jews and Trump supporters.

April 30, 2019

Dawn Perlmutter

The April 25th international edition of the New York Times published an anti-Semitic cartoon that portrayed a blind President Trump being led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted as a dog with a Star of David collar around its neck. After widespread criticism for perpetuating anti-Semitic tropes the New York Times apologized and deleted the cartoon. Which only brought more attention to it.

Cartoons, words, images, symbols and gestures that individually seem trivial, collectively reveal a pattern of stealth anti-Semitism. These continual incidents are casually explained as anti-Semitic tropes. The use of the word trope minimizes the threat, sounds like an unintended blunder and sugarcoats the covert agenda. These are not simply anti-Semitic tropes they are symbolic warfare tactics used in global information operations that target America, Israel, Jews and Trump supporters. These tactics were successfully used by Hitler and subsequently adopted by Islamists. Symbolic language that evokes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are skillfully being used by Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and sanctioned by democrat apologists to incite hatred against Jews, Israel and President Trump.

Islamist anti-Semitism adopted many Nazi themes and symbols in their propaganda including the strategy of depicting Jews as dirty, filthy, impure life-threatening agents of disease and corruption. Both Nazi ideology and Islam are based on doctrines of purity resulting in the use of specific language, symbols and fears to perpetuate anti-Semitic hatred. Stigmatizing Jews as filthy impure dogs is effective because Islamic purity rules inculcate a particularly potent version of a moral revulsion against the unclean other.

Islamic purification rules function to protect true believers from both physical and spiritual contamination by designating specific things as taboo and impure. These impure taboo things are referred to as najis. There are two kinds of najis: inherent, which cannot be cleansed, and acquired, which become unclean through contact with an inherently impure thing. Things that are inherently najis and cannot be purified include: alcohol, dogs, swine, dead animals that were not ritually slaughtered, blood, urine, semen, feces, milk of animals whose meat is forbidden, dead bodies and unbelievers. Anti-Semitic images depicting politicians as dogs or pigs are chosen to evoke visceral emotions of disgust, impurity and uncleanness.

Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib understand the fear of impurity and have weaponized it. For this reason, symbols of Islamic impurity and the symbolism of contagion are found throughout anti-Semitic propaganda in both overt and subliminal images and language. Images of blood, pigs and dogs, all inherently impure unclean things, are often used by Islamists and frequently misinterpreted and perpetuated by Western Newspapers like the New York Times. Numerous political cartoons in which enemies are depicted or referred to as a dog, ape or pig are symbolic warfare tactics designed to evoke subliminal disgust emotions that evoke fear and incite violence.

This visceral reaction appeals to the unusual and accepted Islamic idea that Jews are descended from apes and pigs. For many this is not just symbolic or figurative derogatory speech but based on beliefs that Allah turned disobedient Jews into apes and pigs and that modern Jews are literally descended from them. Depicting Jews as the descendants of apes and pigs is extremely widespread in public discourse in the Arab and Islamic worlds which is why the New York Times cartoon depicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog, symbolizing inherent unclean evil.

Symbolic warfare is most successful when evoking deep-seated feelings of disgust and arousing fears of contagious impurity. This is evident in the use of shoes in Muslim protests. Shoes are one of the quintessential symbols of Islamist impurity and are often used to insult politicians. Throughout the Muslim world shoes are considered ritually impure, they protect the person from coming in direct contact with feces, urine and other designated najis. They are dirty in more than the material sense of the word; they are the embodiment of spiritual impurity. Shoes are often used in Islamist protests; held in the air, attached to, thrown at and standing on images of politicians. Images of President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with shoe prints and protesters standing on their faces is a very common form of protest. Throwing shoes at someone is the epitome of humiliation, the Western equivalent of having feces or urine thrown at you. Shoes spread spiritual disease; hence the intended target signifies infection by coming in contact with the unclean footwear, he is the epitome of impurity, the personification of defilement, and the embodiment of evil contamination. The target is viewed as dirtier and more impure than the shoes. This was epitomized in December 2008 when an Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a news conference in Baghdad, Iraq and shouted "This is a farewell kiss, you dog…" President Bush was quick enough to duck and was not hit by the shoes but symbolically the incident was a successful strike and achieved its goal of insulting the President of the United States. In fact, it was a double insult because calling the President a dog also references impurity and uncleanness.

For Islamists, words are often meant as curse words in the traditional meaning of the term, specifically the belief that cursing someone will bring actual harms. Referring to non-believers as dirty filthy dogs and other derogatory unclean words is more than just an insult. It is a form of word magic that transforms the person into a lower status of less than human, an impurity that must be eradicated. If it were simply an insult, the name-calling could take the form of more mundane expressions such as stupid or ignorant infidel. In magical thinking words have power, and the anti-Semitic use of specific words marks the unbeliever as the polluted other.

Anti-Semitism goes beyond perpetuating tropes when it equates Jews with impurity. Impurity is symbolically contagious in many cultural contexts, including that of Nazism and Islam. Impurity signifies the other and is experienced both physically and spiritually as a mysterious and harmful substance of the outside world that keeps attacking, contaminating, defiling and desacralizing the sacred world of true believers. True believers have to protect themselves and their communities against this threat of defilement and to get rid of it once the contamination has taken place. Individuals have to cleanse themselves by means of various purification rites and cathartic practices, while communities cleanse themselves by excluding, expelling, or proscribing the things and people whose presence defiles the community. Those unclean things are Jews, Christians, Trump and Israel supporters.

Combined with the fundamental belief that impurity must be cleansed, relegating the other to dirt and disease makes it easier to commit violence. Symbolically, instead of harming a person you are just removing dirt, taking out the garbage. Name-calling prior to and during attacks symbolically functions as a method of transforming violence into a sacred cleansing ritual. There have been many incidents of anti-Semitic violence where the offender used phrases like dirty Jew to demonize the victims and legitimize the cruelty. This form of cursing transforms any potential feelings of remorse into righteousness.

The symbolism of blood in anti-Semitic media often appears in political cartoons, posters and in television programs as part of the classic blood libel myth that alleges that Jews murder and drink the blood of children for ritual purposes. Since human blood is intrinsically najis, blood libel represents the epitome of impurity. Dogs, pigs and blood are overt symbols of the impure other. A more insidious form of propaganda involves stigmatizing the other as infectious disease. It is a calculated tactic to evoke fears of contagion, death and annihilation. Contemporary infection libels are found in anti-Semitic and Palestinian television, cartoons and news reports that characterize Jews and Israel as a disease and a cancer. The symbolic warfare campaign to stigmatize Jews as infectious disease intensified in 2009 when Muslim and Arab media exploited the swine flu epidemic. Symbolically the swine flu was the perfect disease, a combination of an inherently impure animal and an infectious illness. Anti-Israel swine flu cartoons appeared in Arab and Muslim newspapers in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. A prominent theme of the cartoons was depicting Israeli leaders with faces of pigs. The incident was characterized by the media as classic anti-Semitic insults, but the subliminal message evoked fear of impurity from diseased others.

The fear of infectious impurity corresponds with several full-blown Muslim conspiracy theories claiming that the West infected Muslims with diseases. Allegations include Jews deliberately infecting Palestinians with AIDS and drug addictions, Americans lacing polio vaccines with anti-fertility agents to sterilize Muslims, that Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel resulted in increased instances of hepatitis, cancer and kidney infections and that America infected Africans with AIDS through Christian missionary groups by putting the virus in medicine used to inoculate people. The conspiracy theory that Americans were lacing polio vaccines to sterilize Muslims resulted in an epidemic of polio in sixteen Muslim countries in Africa and Asia where polio had been eradicated.

Anti-Semitic symbolic warfare is flourishing. Once the trope, cartoon, image or conspiracy theory is injected into the internet, apologies only serve to spread the propaganda further. Anti-Semitism is the real highly contagious virus and U.S. Congresswomen, their democrat apologists and propaganda arms like the New York Times are all carriers of the disease.

ABOUT DAWN PERLMUTTER

Dawn Perlmutter is the Director of the Symbol Intelligence Group and one of the leading subject matter experts (SME) in symbols, symbolic methodologies, unfamiliar customs and ritualistic crimes. She designed and developed Jihad-ID, a symbolic database of the signs, symbols and identifiers of global jihad.

Israelis might want to consider whether today’s Germany is a friend or foe.

May 1, 2019

Joseph Puder

On May 2, 2019, Israel will observe Holocaust Remembrance Day. It would be a good time to re-examine the Jewish state’s relations with the Federal Republic of Germany, formerly Nazi Germany, a nation that perpetrated the greatest crime in history against Europe’s Jews, known as the Holocaust. Naturally, many Germans wish the memory of the Holocaust and its German perpetrators to go away and be forgotten. Young Germans do not wish to carry the burden of guilt for the most heinous crime in modern history.

Monetary reparation paid by the Germans to Holocaust survivors for the stolen properties of European Jews notwithstanding, reality today is that Berlin has not done more than lip service to “solidarity with Israel” and its claims of “Israel’s security being Germany’s raison d’état.” Germany has been a major contributor to anti-Israel resolutions at the UN General Assembly and other UN agencies. Germany moreover, has aided and abetted the genocidal Islamic Republic of Iran in evading U.S. sanctions. Germany’s non-governmental agencies (NGO’s) supported by the German government fund various anti-Israel groups in the Palestinian Authority and in Israel itself.

According to the Gatestone Institute, Chancellor Angela Merkel has pressured other European Union states to refrain from moving their embassies from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital - Jerusalem. Merkel not only rejected the Trump administration's move to relocate the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, she has authorized the allotment of $100 million to the Palestinian Authority’s allocated budget of $300 million, for payment to Palestinian terrorists to kill Jews.

As the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs put it: “The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) legislation and allocation of monthly salaries and benefits rewarding imprisoned and released terrorists, and the families of “martyrs,” amount to $300 million annually. This financial reward clearly demonstrates the PA’s institutional commitment to sponsoring terror against Israel.”

The Jerusalem Post reported (September 6, 2016) that, “Germany’s Foreign Ministry told the head of the German-Israel parliamentary group that the PA likely uses funds (including German funds) to pay terrorists and their family members...The acknowledgment by the German government is believed to be the first Federal Republic’s statement that the PA aids terrorists and their families.”

Frank Muller-Rosentritt, a member of the German Bundestag (parliament) committee on foreign relations, representing the opposition Free Democratic Party (FDP) declared, “We must no longer let Israel down at the UN. It is madness that we are constantly on the side of countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen, against Israel.”

It is not only with UN resolutions that Germany sides with Israel’s enemies. Berlin funds anti-Israel Non-Governmental Agencies (NGO’s). The +972 Magazine of the Heinrich Boll foundation, a think-tank associated with the German Green Party, regularly accuses Israel of “Apartheid.” According to NGO-Monitor, the German government funding is one of the least transparent in Europe. Still, the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development funds Al-Haq through its program, the Civil Peace Service. Al-Haq, a Palestinian NGO, is the leader in the anti-Israel BDS (Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions) movement. It engages in legal warfare against Israel. Israel’s Supreme Court identified Al-Haq’s Director General Shawan Jabarin to be a senior activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist group. The PFLP was designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union (EU).

Germany has increased its funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which serves as an incubator for Palestinian terrorism. Moreover, Germany is undermining the Trump administration, which recently cut its support for UNRWA because it incites violence against Israel and harbors terrorists and their weapons. UNRWA is nurturing the notion of Palestinian “right of return,” which is incompatible with the idea of the Two-State solution that Germany allegedly supports.

The German police issued a report last August claiming that most of the anti-Semitic attacks in Germany were perpetrated by neo-Nazis. This report was undoubtedly directed by the German Federal government that seeks to hide the increasing jihadist terror attacks committed by many of the one million Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Africa that Angela Merkel invited into Germany. This report was disputed by leaders of the German Jewish community who blamed the police for ignoring the vastly numerous anti-Semitic attacks by Muslims.

Another issue that reflects Germany’s hypocrisy is in dealing with Iran. Germany supports the Iranian regime in contravention with the U.S. efforts to isolate the murderous theocratic and oppressive regime. A regime that vows repeatedly to destroy the Jewish state. Merkel supports the EU created “special purpose vehicle” mechanism to maintain its financial transactions with the Iranian regime, while deliberately undermining the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran. Last September at the UN, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out that, “Europe and others are appeasing Iran by trying to help it bypass those new (U.S.) sanctions. He had Germany on his mind.

Merkel has vowed time after time that “Israel’s security is not negotiable,” and yet, her government supports a regime that not only perpetrates terror worldwide, including Europe and Germany, but is also brutal toward its own people. Under the so-called “2015 nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)” Iran is continuing to develop its military nuclear program as well as long range ballistic missiles that threatens Europe, and naturally Israel. Greed, rather than concern for global security, not to mention Israel’s security, motivates the German government.

In the meantime, anti-Semitism in Germany is raging. The Catholic daily La Croix headline (February 18, 2019) read, “Alarming rise of anti-Semitism in Germany.” The sub-heading stated that the “Arrival of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East evoked fears of a new anti-Semitism.” The paper went on to report that “New figures confirm the increase of anti-Semitic acts in Germany… According to provisional statistics, German police recorded 1,646 instances of anti-Semitism last year; that is 10 percent more than the previous year. Acts of violence against Jews rose by around two-thirds, from 37 to 62, with 43 people being physically attacked.” The La Croix article also quoted the president of Germany’s Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble as saying that it is “Shameful, the fact that German Jews are considering emigrating because they do not feel safe in our country.”

In their efforts to assuage their guilt and shake off the “stain on humanity” Nazi Germany committed, some of the younger generation Germans employ these days a shameful moral-equivalency. They are comparing Nazi-Germany’s treatment of Jews with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Such a comparison is not only outrageous, it is immoral. Israel has never gassed or murdered innocent Palestinians, as the Nazis did with Jews. Israeli hospitals do not discriminate against Palestinian-Muslim patients, nor are Palestinians required to wear Yellow Star bands as the Germans forced Jews to do. Israel never had nor will have concentration camps, labor camps, and certainly not death camps as the Nazi Germans did. Furthermore, Israel has been sensitive to Palestinian poverty, and seeks to elevate Palestinian quality of life. The Israeli government has pursued ways to provide employment for Palestinians. Unfortunately, Palestinian terrorism has undermined this effort to a large extent. It has required Israel to use check-points and a separation wall to save lives. This sort of German moral-equivalency is an insult to Jewish Holocaust survivors in Israel, and to the truth.

On the upcoming Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israelis might want to consider whether today’s Germany is a friend or foe. One thing is clear, it is time to unmask Germany’s hypocrisy vis-à-vis Israel.

The New Under Ground Church-THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

THE MEDIA CHEERS GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP OF THE INTERNET