Free Republic

A speech in Knesset Wednesday given by the head of the European Union Parliament caused outrage, and ultimately sparked a walk-out. Several MKs expressed upset as EU parliament president Martin Schulz, who spoke in German, repeated as fact Palestinian Authority claims of Israeli discrimination regarding allocation of water in Judea and Samaria, and of a “blockade” on Gaza. Schulz condemned Israeli “settlements” east of the 1949 armistice line as “an obstacle to peace,” and claimed, “The blockade of Gaza creates despair and extremism.” …

Thousands of hareidim protested Thursday at the entrance to Jerusalem and in Bnei Brak over the sudden freezing of funding for all yeshivas, which was ordered retroactively by Finance Minister Yair Lapid on Wednesday. […] Hareidi MKs have responded with fury to the ruling and freeze; MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) accused the High Court Wednesday of “declaring war” on the hareidim, while MK Nissim Ze’ev (Shas) decried the “ongoing campaign of persecution. The government is attacking everything connected to religion or to the Torah world.” …

A high-ranking official in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bureau met with representatives of the radical, anti-Zionist Neturei Karta haredi group on International Holocaust Day last week. The official met with four members of the group in Berlin when they were protesting the existence of the State of Israel and the Zionist exploitation of the Holocaust for political reasons. Ynet revealed that the official is a department head in the chancellor’s bureau, and against convention met with them openly. Members of Neturei Karta confirmed that the purpose of the meeting was to make it clear to the Germans that Zionism doesn’t...

US Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday threatened Israel that a failure in the peace talks would lead to global boycotts and delegitimization of the Jewish state. The warning comes as no surprise to those familiar with reports earlier in the month, which revealed that Kerry is orchestrating the European boycotts against Israel. Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon responded to Kerry’s threats of boycotts, saying “we respect Secretary of State Kerry, but will not hold talks with a gun to our head. Friends don’t put ultimatums on the security of the state of Israel.” …

When the White House scribblers were putting the finishing touches on the State of the Union address, President Obama took a moment to commemorate memory. Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the most notorious of Hitler's death camps. "Each year on this day," he said, "the world comes together to commemorate a barbaric crime unique in human history." But not quite the whole world. Anti-Semitism thrives in the Middle East, where certain politicians vie to see who can say the ugliest things about Jews, and such sentiment is surging in Europe. Bloody...

Palestinians would kill Jewish Israelis left under their rule, Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett said on Tuesday, continuing a campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ostensible willingness to leave Israeli settlers under Palestinian rule under a future peace agreement. Bennett also outlined his own plan for the West Bank — which he has largely been mum about since joining Netanyahu’s government — under which Israel would annex most of the territories. “Do you know why? Why Jews cannot live under Palestinian rule? Do you know why? Why Palestinians can’t rule over Jews?” Bennett said in an address at the...

Minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) is presenting to the government Sunday new statistics on anti-Semitism in Europe—and the results are revealing. […] An online survey conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights revealed that in 2013, 23% of respondents refrained from attending Jewish events or religious services for fear of being attacked on their way there; 38% are afraid to wear religious symbols, like the yarmulke or kippah, in public; and 66% view anti-Semitism as having a major and constant impact on their lives. Worse, European Jews believe that their governments view anti-Semitism...

Italian police say they are searching for the sender of pig heads to Rome’s main synagogue, the Israeli Embassy and a city museum hosting an exhibit on the Holocaust. […] The deliveries were made Friday, three days before an international memorial day for Holocaust victims. …

For years, Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria have been accusing Arab and leftist activists of falsely blaming them for “price tag” revenge attacks that they never carried out. Now, one determined resident of Samaria appears to have found a “smoking gun”, documenting how local Arabs have been damaging olive trees and then reporting the incidents to authorities and the media as “price tag” attacks carried out by local Jews. “Price tagging” is a phenomenon associated with fringe elements of the Israeli Right, in which assailants vandalize Arab-owned property in revenge for terrorist attacks or military demolitions of Jewish homes...

The heads of the bipartisan Congressional Israel Allies Caucus have strongly condemned an American organization of professors for their newly endorsed boycott of Israeli academic institutions, saying the move smacks of double standards. The American Studies Association members voted last week in favor of an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities, in protest of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin slammed the organization as a “radical leftist group”, but expressed concern that the embargo could be adopted by other academic institutions. …

The United States and Germany have issued an ultimatum to the IDF, a report Thursday said: No American or German army officers will work with IDF training academies if the army goes ahead with plans to relocate them to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. The ultimatum could explain why Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced earlier this week that the plan to move them was to be delayed. Sources said that the IDF has begun looking for other sites for its military program as a result. …

European taxpayers are supporting a massive fraud. The European Union (EU) has become embroiled in a financial scandal of massive proportions in relation to the financial assistance given by it to the Palestinian Authority (PA) since 1994. This appears very clear from the comprehensive European Court of Auditors Report dated 22 October 2013 which was only made public this week. The Report reveals the following: .....

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela had close friendships and alliances with many Jews, but his relationship with the Jewish state was complicated. While always courteous and never hate-filled, the South African icon’s dealings with Israel were overshadowed by Jerusalem’s staunch support for his tormentors and, even more so, his ironclad loyalty to the Palestinian cause. In the name of reconciliation, he made no ongoing issue of Jerusalem’s strong long-term partnership with the apartheid regime after he was released from a lengthy prison sentence and became South Africa’s first black president in 1994. He professed the legitimacy of Zionism as Jewish nationalism and,...

Anti-Zionism, as Jonathan noted, is acquiring “an undeserved veneer of respectability in Barack Obama’s Washington”: The latest anti-Zionist screed to hit the bookstores will receive a prominent platform at an event organized by the New America Foundation, a prestigious Washington think tank headed by a former senior Obama administration official. But frankly, I don’t see why anyone should be surprised. After all, anti-Zionism is merely an offshoot of a much older evil, anti-Semitism. And since the original has become perfectly respectable in Barack Obama’s Washington over the last month, why be surprised that the offshoot is as well? Exhibit A...

The European Union (EU) is apparently fed up with the lack of progress in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and is threatening to take action against both sides if the talks fail. A senior EU official said Tuesday that the bloc was considering cutting its annual aid to the PA if the current round of talks fails to end in an agreement. The EU provides the PA with about 300 million Euros in aid per year. As well, the official was quoted by Israeli media as having said, the 28-nation bloc was considering reviving its plan...

J’accuse, of course, is the title of the most famous open letter ever published, in which Emile Zola, the most celebrated French author of his time, charged the French government, in January 1898, with illegally sentencing Captain Alfred Dreyfus to life in prison. Dreyfus, who was Jewish, had been charged with spying and convicted of treason, and Zola charged that Dreyfus had been framed precisely because he was Jewish. The Italian writer Giulio Meotti’s decision to give his new book the title The Vatican against Israel: J’accuse is no coincidence. His topic, like Zola’s, is institutional anti-Semitism – the institutions,...

Seeking to create an analogy with the deal the United States negotiated with Iran to supposedly limit further production of its centrifuges, Secretary of State John Kerry chose to recall disarmament agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union. A better analogy would be the 1938 Munich Pact, which gave Hitler part of Czechoslovakia in the vain hope that war could be avoided. It is worth noting that several of the nations that were signatories in Munich, namely Germany, France and Britain, are also part of the current deal with Iran. There is another flaw in Kerry's analysis. Deal...

On Thursday, a United Nations interpreter expressed on a “hot mic” the thoughts of many UN observers: that the incessant emphasis on condemning Israel—for crimes real or alleged—is uncalled for and excessive. In the video, a Spanish-English translator appears to stop her simultaneous translation to note the oddity to a colleague. “I mean, I think when you have five statements, not five, like a total of ten resolutions on Israel and Palestine, there’s gotta be something, c’est un peu trop, non? [It’s a bit much, no?] I mean, I know… There’s other really bad stuff happening [around the world], but...

On Friday, the Vienna-based European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) released a report titled “Discrimination and Hate Crime against Jews in EU Member States: experiences and perceptions of antisemitism.” The online survey polled 5,847 self-selected individuals who identified as Jewish in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Sweden and the UK, states in which an estimated 90 percent of European Jews live. … In Germany, the KPMD, a service for registering crimes, has recorded a decline in anti-Semitic crimes since 2009. However, by itself, that says nothing about the perceptions of Jews living in Germany. According to the FRA...

MK Shimon Ohayon (Likud-Beytenu) has urged European diplomats to prevent anti-Semites from taking over the discourse over anti-Semitism, urging them to push for the implementation of the “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” adopted in 2004 by the European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). … Citing a soon to be publicized study by the EU’s own Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA)—which replaced the EUMC in 2007—which will show a significant rise in anti-Semitism over the past five years, Ohayon noted that “Anti-Semitism in Europe is at its greatest peak since the end of the Second World War.” Insisting that “Europe...