Showing posts with label Baruch Goldstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baruch Goldstein. Show all posts

12 November 2024

If you want to be a football hooligan you should be an Israeli football hooligan – then Israel will give you compensation if you get injured

 The press & the world’s leaders ignored the racist attacks of Tel Aviv Maccabi Fans & concentrated on the Justified Reaction to these Fascist Thugs

When Lies & Disinformation Become the Norm It Means That We Have Entered an Era of Permanent War – What happened in Amsterdam was not a Pogrom but Israeli thugs getting a taste of their own medicine

Israeli hooligans provoke clashes in Amsterdam after chanting anti-Palestinian slogans

Truth they say is the first casualty of war and this has been particularly evident in the coverage of the fight back by Dutch citizens when attacked by Israel’s racist football fans.

Once again ‘anti-Semitism’ has proven to be the false anti-racism of the right. It is the only ‘racism’ that they are concerned about. Ursula von der Leyen, the far-right German President of the European Commission couldn’t restrain herself. It was all about ‘anti-Semitism’. Nothing about attacks on Arabs or Dutch citizens.

What von der Liar was saying that any amount of anti-Arab racism and attacks on Arabs was ok, but if the victims should fight back then that would be ‘anti-Semitism’.

90 years ago this plastic von Pappen figure would have been complaining about the Jews of Germany. The idea that von der Liar would have stood out to oppose Nazi anti-Semitism is wishful thinking. The Nazis were put in power by the German conservative Deutsche National Volks Party of which Liar’s Christian Democrats are the heir.

Another pip squeak to put his oar in was Dutch Prime Minister, Dick Schoof, who decried “antisemitic attacks on Israeli citizens.”

Excellent short Owen Jones podcast

It is one of the talents of our rulers that they can spout any amount of verbiage without actually saying anything. Even Holland’s King, Willem-Alexander got into the act which proves that there is no fool like a Royal Fool.

history has taught us how intimidation goes from bad to worse, with horrific consequences. Jewish people must feel safe in the Netherlands

What history has taught us is that any group of people can become racists and genocidaires, Jewish people included. Racism is not a biological inheritance. 

This is the senile fool who said he'd seen photos of the heads of severed babies after October 7 until it was 'walked back' by the White House  - Biden is a genocidal liar

What Schoof and Willem-Alexander forget is that they represent the Dutch State which bent over backwards to collaborate with the Nazi occupation, unlike Denmark nearby. The Blue Police, the predecessors of today’s Dutch Police thugs, took an active part, alongside the Gestapo, in winkling out Jews in hiding. I really don’t think we need lessons from the heirs of Nazi collaborators.

Anne Frank was not a Zionist but unfortunately Zionists have colonised all the holocaust memorial organisation. Anne considered Zionists as freaks. All the so-called holocaust organisations have echoed to the same lies

Instead of pointing out that Israel’s fans got a dose of their own medicine Schoof wittered on about anti-Semitism. As did Starmer and Lammy.

It would be too much to expect Lammy, the Black face of imperialism to come out for once with an original thought

Sky News Deletes Video and Substituted a Lying One Instead

ISRAËLISCHE HOOLIGANS ZETTEN AMSTERDAM OP ZIJN KOP (ENG SUB) 

As Jonathan Cook wrote:

We know that an early report from the scene by Sky News’ reporter was one of the only to correctly describe the video as showing Israeli hooliganism, not antisemitism.

But Sky quickly took down that report, saying it wasn't "balanced". The channel then heavily re-edited the segment and issued a new version that presented the footage – now wrongly – as evidence of Dutch locals attacking Israeli fans.

That was crucial to shoring up the false “antisemitism” and “pogrom” narratives spread by western politicians and the establishment media.

Here's where it gets even more disturbing. The Dutch photographer interviewed by Jones says she was interviewed by Sky News about her footage before the second, re-edited report was aired.

In other words, not only was Sky's reporter correct in her first account of the events in Amsterdam, but Sky's news editors back in London knew exactly what the footage showed too – because the Dutch woman who filmed it had told them.

And yet Sky's news team still edited a correct news report to make it incorrect.

The only conclusion one can draw is that they did so to mislead their audience. They didn't make a mistake. They didn’t act out of ignorance. They knowingly aired disinformation. They intentionally peddled fake news.

In other words Sky News deliberately lied to its viewers.

Britain’s prostitute press, almost unanimously led with the ‘anti-Semitic’ attacks on Israel’s racist hooligans rather than what sparked the counter attacks.  Former Revolutionary Communist Party member, now Spiked ‘journalist’ and the Koch Brothers prostitute, Brendan O’Neill, informed us in The Telegraph that 'pogroms have returned to Europe, yet the ‘anti-racist’ Left are silent.' Presumably attacks on Moroccans and Arabs don’t count as pogroms because they are O’Neill’s untermenschen.

War criminal Blinken has prevented the State Department confirming Israeli war crimes - this man deserves the same penalty as the Nazi war criminals experienced at Nuremberg. Anti-Arab violence and genocide doesn't bother him 'antisemitism' does


The BBC, the Voice of the British Establishment, for which it acts as a well paid harlot, naturally only focussed on the well-deserved kicking that Israel’s fans got. But even their occasional reference to the Israeli fans violence was too much for the far-right Spectator.

Only the Daily Mail, in its first headline mentioned the violence of the Israeli football fans.  However it soon fell in with the rest of the pack.

The Guardian did likewise. In its article on more than 60 arrests, none of them football hooligans, there were just 2 out of 34 paragraphs that explained that the cause of the violence was the Israeli fans.

Dutch man being beaten up by Israeli football hooligans - but if u mention it you are anti-Semitic

 

A social media video verified by Reuters showed Maccabi fans setting off flares and chanting “Olé, olé, let the IDF win, we will fuck the Arabs”, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. The police chief said a large crowd of Maccabi supporters had then gathered on Dam Square on Thursday lunchtime and there had been “fights on both sides”...

One Amsterdam resident, Barbara Weenink, said she had found the behaviour of Israeli fans threatening. Weenink, who has demonstrated at pro-Palestine events, said she was warned not to go out with a keffiyeh on that evening. She did not see the events after the match but had seen Israeli football fans before it. “I saw the Israeli fans walking here before the match – I found it very threatening,” she said.

16 year old Dutch Boy’s Fearless Reporting Puts the World Press to Shame

Dutch Police Chief statement about some of the violent Israeli football fascists

The only Jewish paper to have a more balanced coverage of what happened in Amsterdam was The Forward, America’s oldest Jewish paper and formally a Bundist paper. It’s article talked about the ‘weaponisation’ of Dutch Jews’ fear and how ‘Many in the country’s small Jewish community say the incident was stripped of context’.

Jelle Zijlstra, who is Jewish and works as a community organizer in Amsterdam, made a post that went viral on Instagram stating that “multiple truths can exist at the same time.” It highlighted both the assaults on Israelis and footage of the fans shouting “F— Palestine” the night before.

“There was definitely antisemitism involved in some of the events that took place,” Zijlstra said in an interview. “Were Jews attacked in the streets? Yes, but those Jews were also violent hooligans.”

https://youtu.be/_LsYMpuYh3s

Israeli football thugs tearing down a Palestinian flag in Amsterdam

The Forward observed that:

some Dutch Jews noted that roving bands of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights marauding through the city center chanting racist anti-Arab slogans, climbing a facade to rip a Palestinian flag off the second story of an apartment building and assaulting a Moroccan taxi driver.

Forward’s article at least made an attempt to speak to those on the ground even if it didn’t interview any of the Arab attackers. It wrote

Ami Shuman, a photographer for the right-wing Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, said he was trapped with his son while trying to escape the violence Thursday night, and that they eventually had to be escorted back to their hotel by the police.

“We saw violence, we saw people with black eyes, deep cuts under their eyes, we saw someone accidentally hit by a police officer, and a woman crying,” Shuman told The Times of Israel. “They came in masses, running through the alleys.”

Forced to answer for Israel

Waterman, who also works as a strategic adviser to a local nonprofit called Jewish Social Work, spent Friday helping Israeli fans who volunteers had ferried to a safe location provided by a Jewish sports club in Amsterdam.

He noted that the violence appeared to have been targeted only at the Israeli visitors, and not Dutch Jews or Jewish institutions. But Waterman said many in the community were nonetheless shaken, especially after a year in which they have faced a spike in antisemitic and anti-Israel activity in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel and the start of the war in Gaza.

Waterman said many Dutch Jews are treated like representatives of Israel, a special burden in a country of only 30,000 Jews. “You might be the only Jewish kid in your school and kids say, ‘Hey, what are you people doing in Israel? Why are you killing kids?’” he explained. “It can force you to defend things you don’t necessarily agree with.”

Local Amsterdam residents tell how they were assaulted and menaced

Israeli football thugs shouting 'we will rape your girls' - if u oppose this it makes u antisemitic

The answer is quite simple. Jewish bodies should dissociate themselves from Israel’s genocide and say that Zionists don’t speak in our name. It’s quite simple. When Jews defend Israel’s genocide, in the name of Jews, they can’t complain if there is a counter-reaction.

The article also mentioned

Antisemitic chants are also common at Dutch soccer stadiums. “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” used to be a popular cheer for fans of teams playing Ajax, because of its association with Jews. It has fallen out of favor in recent years, but other derogatory songs have taken its place.

“I’ll speak to fans who assure me that they are not antisemitic, they’re just doing it because of Ajax, but there’s definitely some other factors,” said Boaz Krone, a social worker in Amsterdam.

If there are anti-Semitic chants they should be condemned but they are not dissimilar to similar chants at Tottenham. But because Israel claims that it represents all world Jews it is incumbent upon Jews to dissociate themselves from the horror that Israel represents. If they don’t they can’t complain. You can’t have your cake and eat it.

Meanwhile, far-right Dutch politicians, who took control of the government in July, have positioned themselves as protectors of Holland’s Jews by seizing on antisemitism from Arab and Muslim residents of the country.

A mob of Israeli thugs (fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv) attack a Palestinian in ATHENS, GREECE!


84 years ago when the Nazis occupied The Netherlands, the NSB, the Dutch National Socialist Organisation, began attacks on the Jews. It was the working class in Amsterdam who repelled them and then went on General Strike. I have no doubt that if Wilders had been alive at the time, he would have been a prominent Dutch national socialist.

Ofer Casif, the only Jewish member of the Knesset who isn't a Zionist has been suspended for 6 months for opposing Israel's genocidal racism - this is Israeli democracy in action

But our lazy, lying press could not even be bothered to interview Dutch Jews about what they thought of the matter. They were content to take their cue from the stuffed dummy Starmer and his Black parrot Lammy, whose only concern is to keep in step with Senile Biden.

The Israeli fans were attacked, not because they were Jewish but because they were Israeli thugs. A small point but one lost of the mass media. If this had been an anti-Semitic attack then it’s strange that Amsterdam’s 14,000 Jews haven’t received similar treatment.

Maccabi fans thought they could behave in the same way as they do at home where racist chants and thuggery are dealt with by a Zionist police force that only ever arrests Palestinians. Hopefully they learnt a valuable lesson and will keep their bigotry to themselves next time they have an overseas outing.

But what does the coverage by the Lying Press tell us about their coverage overall?  This wasn’t a one-off mistake but a continuation of  their refusal to cover a year long genocide in Gaza.  Or when they do cover it they frame it as Hitler’s sorry Israel’s ‘right to self-defence.’

Imagine Vladimir Putin had declared that the Ukrainian resistance was ensconced in hospitals and proceeded to bomb them. It doesn’t take much imagination to forecast their outraged reaction.

The 'Green' Foreign Minister of Germany, Anna Baerbock, shows that she's no different from the other bourgeois  parties in her anti-Arab racism and support for Zionist genocide

Imagine that Putin declared half of Ukraine a free-fire zone like the North of Gaza and refused the entry of food, fuel and water we would rightly compare him to the Nazis. After all it was Hans Frank, the Governor-General of the General Gouvernment, Poland, who declared a policy of ‘death by hunger’.

Yet if you even dare mention a comparison between the Nazis and Israel you will, like me a month ago, be arrested for a ‘racially aggravated offence’.  You see Israel and Zionists are a race according to the thick, racist coppers of the Metropolitan Police.

If von der Leyen had been alive 90 years ago she would have been the first to justify Hitler’s actions. The German State has always loved holocausts – from that in Namibia, Ost Afrika and Armenia to the Nazi holocaust and now Israel’s holocaust. Indeed it is hard to think of a holocaust that the German state hasn’t smiled upon.

The fact that those who claim to inherit the memory of the holocaust victims are perpetrating a holocaust themselves normalises and trivialises what happened during the Final Solution. See my article in Al Jazeera ‘Why is Germany supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza?’

The Zionists, who did their best to obstruct the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust understand full well the motives of Olaf Scholz and von der Leyen. When Israelis chant, as the Maccabi fans did ‘death to the Arabs’ or ‘there is no school in Gaza because there are no children’ they demonstrate that the majority of Israelis can now be called Judeo-Nazis. ‘Death to the Jews’ was the favourite chant of German and Polish anti-Semites in the 1930s. The fact that the Dutch Police, acting in the best traditions of the Blue police, failed to arrest any Tel Aviv Maccabee fans testifies to their racism.

See Sana Saeed’s No, there were no ‘antisemitic pogroms’ in Amsterdam. Here’s what really happened.

“Olé, olé!

Olé, olé, olé!

Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs!

Olé, olé!

Olé, olé, olé!

Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!”

These are the sentiments that Starmer, Lammy Biden and all the ratpack who ‘lead us’ are happy to ignore. Only racism against Jews counts these days. Why? Because Jews are the moral alibi, the tame colonial pets, for the West’s military adventures in the Middle East. Unfortunately most Jews are too stupid to understand this.

As Mouin Rabbani noted

Not only do the Israeli club’s supporters have a reputation for genocidal racism (their motto is “Death to the Arabs”, supplemented with the chant, “May Your Village Burn”), but many of those who traveled to Amsterdam have during the past year served in the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip

But then ministers in the Israeli government, such as Ben Gvir and Smotrich, have demonstrated with and chanted ‘death to the Arabs’ themselves. Ben Gvir had a poster on his wall of Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire in the Ibrahimi Mosque killing 29 worshippers. This is the kind of racist slime that makes up Israel’s government.

Britain’s media, unlike Al Jazeera, has wilfully ignored the destruction of hospitals and schools, the murder of children, the bombing of tent encampments and all the other genocidal acts of Israel because they are propagandists for the imperialist axis of the USA, Britain and Germany. Never have our rulers stood so naked.

Our task is to build the Palestine solidarity movement but also to make clear what we stand for. We must say explicitly that Israel, like South Africa under Apartheid, is a failed state that cannot be reformed. It has to go. Unfortunately the past year of genocide has taught Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign absolutely nothing.

The forthcoming AGM in 2025 has a plan and ‘strategy’ document, if one can call it that, which simply repeats past failures. New thinking is not and will not be PSC’s forte as long as it remains in the hands of a tiny political clique.

What is clear, though not to Ben Jamal or PSC, is that the British state fully supports Israel come hell or high water. No amount of polite lobbying is going to change that.

Putting people like Starmer, (a human representation of the police state) and Lisa Nandy on your platform doesn’t advance the cause one iota. The minimum PSC can do is to adopt an anti-Zionist stance and jettison the 2 state solution as an illusion that acts as a smokescreen for continued Israeli colonisation and ethnic cleansing.

When Britain’s media do focus on Gaza they always take care to put it in the context of the October 7 break out from the world’s largest prison. The lives of Israelis are worth more than a hundred if not a thousand Palestinian lives. This is precisely what Ben Gvir’s spiritual mentor, Rabbi Dov Lior, Chair of the Settlement Rabbis, said.

A Jewish fingernail is worth a thousand non-Jewish lives

 If there is one takeaway from Gaza it is that Zionism and the Israeli state have a limited shelf life. Its main supporters are far-right politicians or neo-Nazis – Viktor Orban, Trump, Geert Wilders, Tommy Robinson, Richard Spencer. After all if you are a neo-Nazi what is there not to like about the Israeli ethno-religious state?

But all is not doom and gloom. Spare a thought for your average Tel Aviv Maccabi hooligan. Having been bested by those ‘dirty’ Arabs and terrorised for once, they are at least eligible, as victims of a ‘hostile action’ to compensation from Israel’s National Insurance.

'Victims' of 'anti-Semitism' arrive back in Israel 

Compensation for injured racist thugs

But dear readers please don’t fret or worry for Israel’s beat up hooligans.  Israel's National Insurance will ensure that they get ‘mental assistance for the victims of violent actions perpetrated in against Israelis in Holland.’ Eat your heart out you anti-Semites!  Only in Israel could it pay to be a racist football thug. 

Tony Greenstein

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15 February 2023

Israel’s neo-Nazi Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir Approves of the Attack on Issa Amro and the Attacks on Palestinian Red Crescent

Starmer & Reeves Also Approve of Israel’s Military Junta in the West Bank – Reeves is ‘Angry’ at Any Criticism of Israeli Apartheid

It is scarcely necessary to comment on these two videos. Unprovoked violence against Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist and pacifist living in Hebron, who has been under constant attack by the Israeli military who a few months ago declared his home a ‘Closed Military Zone’.

As he was giving an interview to Lawrence Wright, an American journalist from the New Yorker, Issam was subject to an unprovoked attack.  Wright however displayed all the bias and prejudice one has come to expect from the capitalist media. His focus was on the ‘dehumanisation’ of Israel’s soldiers not the dehumanisation of the Palestinians and their treatment.

What you might ask is wrong with these presstitutes? Is support and sympathy for Israel hardwired into their brains?

But let us not forget that it is imperialist politicians like Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves who are responsible for Israel being able to get away literally with murder. Indeed the despicable Reeves is ‘angry’ that people should even call Israel out for what it is.

If Issam had attacked and kicked an Israeli soldier he would have been killed. As it is the soldier received 10 days in prison, not for the attack, but because he did it in the full glare of the media. Next time he will know to do it in the dark, out of the way of cameras.

The attacks on Palestinian medical teams in the second video are equally despicable but once again our politicians stay silent. One expects approval of atrocities and war crimes from the Tories but not from the Labour Party. But today Labour is more concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ i.e. criticism of Israel’s actions than the Military Junta that rules in Palestine and the Apartheid society that they have created.

Israel’s neo-Nazi Police Minister Ben Gvir naturally approves of what happened to Issam.  Both Gvir and Defence/Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich approve of the expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Why shouldn’t they? Gvir was a member of Kach, a Jewish Nazi group that called for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and which applauded the murder of 29 Palestinians in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron by one of their members, Baruch Goldstein.

This is Israel’s government today but the protestors in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are unconcerned about the Junta that rules the West Bank. Their only concern is with ‘Jewish Democracy’ and the threat to Israel’s Supreme Court.

Tony Greenstein

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30 April 2018

Israel’s Fascist Right is on the march


The Mainstreaming of Israel's Alt-Right

This is an interesting article by Newsweek of all publications.  To listen to the nonsense coming out of racist Labour politicians like Emily Thornberry, Joan Ryan et al, you would think that Israel was the embodiment of western democratic values in the Middle East.  The 'villa in the jungle' to borrow the racist phrase of the last Labour Prime Minister, Ehud Barak.
Yair Lapid is leader of Yesh Atid, a centrist party tipped to be the second largest party in the next Knesset
The reality is that Israel is the most right-wing, racist society on the planet.  It is a society where hatred of Arabs, Africans and non-Jews is visceral.  What is worse is that this hatred is encouraged by a far-Right government which includes a 'Justice Minister' Ayelet Shaked who has advocated genocide.  

This is the consequence of Israel being an ethno-nationalist society, a society based on only part of its population.  A society obsessed with racial purity, because being Jewish in Israel is a national/racial not a religious category.  In Israel race is defined on the basis of religion, something which often confuses people.  To make matters worse the Israeli Jewish population is itself divided between those who define themselves as Israeli first or Jewish first with a majority saying Jewish first.  Not that this matters to Israel's Palestinians because they are excluded from the tent and confined to the margins.
Although the article is well worth reading on the growing influence of Israel’s neo-Nazi far Right although it doesn’t deal with the reason why Israel’s alt-Right is growing so fast.  When Lehava calls for preventing Arab-Jewish relationships they are going with the grain of society.  There is broad consensus in the whole of society that Jewish-Arab relationships are a danger to society, because a Jewish state cannot tolerate large numbers of mixed couples.  That is the nature of the racism of Israeli society.  Mixed relationships, mishlinge, were also a problem for the Nazi state and this one topic consumed most of the time at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 which was devoted to planning the Final Solution.

Lapid is a Zionist consensus, from 'left' to 'right'.  So Yair  Lapid, of the secular centrist Yesh Atid declared that “It bothers me, I admit. I say that if tomorrow my son came to me and said, ‘Dad, I want you to meet Rona, not Rina, and she’s Russian Orthodox or Catholic and we’re getting married and the kids won’t be Jewish’ — would that bother me? It would bother me greatly.'

Israel is a Jewish state, or more accurately a State of the Jews and the Jews are defined as a Jewish Nation.  What that means is that Israel consideres itself a state, not just of its own Jewish citizens but all Jews, wherever they live.  One of the central tasks of Zionism is the 'ingathering of the exiles'

What Israel is not is a state of all of its citizens.  That is why it’s an apartheid state.  Non-Jewish citizens do not have equal right with Jewish citizens.  That is why there is no Israeli nationality but a central Jewish nationality and over 130 other nationalities.

Because a Jewish state means a permanent Jewish majority, the idea of  mixed marriages and a dilution of the primary race is seen as a threat to the state itself.  That is why Lehava thugs patrol areas of Jerusalem unmolested by the Police attacking Arab males who are seen as likely to establish social or personal relations with Jewish women.
The suggestion that Israel can do nothing about Lehava, as the article states, is for the birds.  The article quotes Israeli authorities as saying that ‘there is little they can do to stop Gopstein—that he is protected by free speech.’  Utter nonsense. Israel's Palestinians are closely monitored on social media and any threats they make result in instant arrest.  Of course Jewish abuse is not punished.

For example Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian Israeli poet, was imprisoned and is now under house arrest, because she mentioned ‘resistance’ in an online poem.  The reason Gopstein has not been prosecuted and gaoled is because he is Jewish.  Even when he threatened to burn down churches and mosques he was not arrested. See for example VATICAN CALLS ON A-G TO INDICT EXTREMIST JEWISH LEADER FOLLOWING ENDORSEMENT OF BURNING CHURCHES

Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Muslim League, was convicted of racial hatred and gaoled for 9 months because it was held he made a comparison between Israel’s behaviour and the Jewish blood libel, a comparison which incidentally he disputed.

Nonetheless, despite its weaknesses this article should be read by people as it outlines very well where Israel is now heading.

I also attach an older article beneath it from the Jerusalem Post, when Tzipi Hotovely, who is now acting Foreign Minister of Israel, invited Benzi Gopstein into the Knesset to address a Committee on the 'problem' of combating inter-marriage.  Racism in Israel starts from the top down.

Tony Greenstein
 
Israel’s Alt-Right Is Now Mainstream—Are Lawmakers Doing Enough to Stop It?
By Yardena Schwartz On 3/7/18 at 9:50 AM
American-born rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, in Jerusalem, where he was known for his extreme views, such as expulsion of all Palestinians on the West Bank. He was assassinated in New York City. David H. Wells/Corbis via Getty
Updated | On November 5, 1990, at a Marriott Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side, Rabbi Meir Kahane had just taken his seat at a Zionist conference when El Sayyid Nosair, a 34-year-old Egyptian-American, shot him in the neck. Hours later, the Brooklyn-born rabbi—known as the most racist politician in Israeli history—was pronounced dead.

Most Israelis didn’t mourn. Two years before, the Israeli government had banned his political party, Kach, for its anti-Arab platform. Kahane had called for the forced expulsion of the millions of Arabs living in Israel, whom he often referred to as “dogs.” As the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi puts it, “Kahane turned his political agenda into a kind of Jewish jihad with an explicitly religious, apocalyptic message.”
Yet 27 years after Kahane’s murder, on another November evening, hundreds of Israelis gathered in West Jerusalem to commemorate the anniversary of his death. It was one of 25 such events held throughout Israel that week. At the podium, Jewish extremists took turns praising the rabbi, calling him a righteous prophet whose politics were ahead of his time.
Among those in attendance: Kahane’s prodigy and successor, Ben Zion “Bentzi” Gopstein. In 2005, he established Lehava, a nonprofit whose Hebrew name translates to “preventing assimilation in the Holy Land.” Gopstein’s group sends patrols of young men to “defend” Jewish women from Arabs. It also runs a hotline for people to report Jews having interfaith relationships, or renting or selling apartments to Israeli Arabs. Lehava has grown into the largest radical right-wing organization in Israel, with chapters in every city and more than 10,000 registered members—most of them young adults and teenagers. The group spreads its message and recruits members in schools, city streets and community centers.
Though Gopstein operates under the guise of fighting assimilation—a cause familiar to many American Jews—his critics argue that mission is just a front. Lehava, they say, is as dangerous as Kach. And like Kahane before him, Gopstein is rallying people around the goal of expelling Palestinians from Israel and the West Bank.
Benzi Gopstein, Israeli leader of the extreme right-wing movement Lehava, poses on August 11, 2015, in Jerusalem. Israel police had questioned him after he condoned torching churches amid an uproar over hate crimes, including the deadly firebombing of a Palestinian home. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty
But unlike Kahane’s views, which stood on the margins of Israeli society, Gopstein’s perspective has become mainstream—a shift, analysts say, that reflects Israelis’ dwindling faith in the prospect of peace with the Palestinians.
Critics argue that Israeli lawmakers have also enabled Lehava, even as they’ve demonized left-leaning human rights groups. Yet Israeli authorities say there is little they can do to stop Gopstein—that he is protected by free speech, and because his group is a nongovernmental organization, it has avoided the legal restrictions placed on Kahane’s political party. “Lehava is doing this very smartly,” says Tehilla Shwartz-Altshuler, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank.
But the group’s critics aren’t giving up. Last fall, the state attorney’s office announced its intention to indict Gopstein on charges of incitement to violence, racism and terrorism, along with obstruction of justice, pending a prehearing. (The charges all relate to statements he’s made in recent years. Among them: that Palestinian men who flirt with Jewish women deserve to be beaten.) Gopstein is still awaiting his prehearing. In the meantime, to the dismay of his distractors, he is a free man, with a large and growing following.
"The Israeli army, the Shin Bet and Mossad, they know how to deal with Muslim terror,” says Gadi Gvaryahu, the chairman of Tag Meir, one of the organizations battling Lehava. “Yet the state of Israel doesn’t know how to deal with right-wing extremists. People like Bentzi Gopstein are more dangerous to Israel than Muslim terror.”
 ‘You Can’t Coexist With Cancer’
Several months ago, I met Gopstein in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel, and he appeared giddy. A Jewish teenager had just left her Arab lover. Gopstein had been calling her for months, urging her to do so. Now, she finally had—because she was pregnant with his child. Gopstein says this was important because now the baby would be raised Jewish instead of Muslim.
Since founding Lehava, he says, he has “rescued” at least 1,000 girls like her. And in Jerusalem, Lehava activists are known for harassing—and sometimes beating—Palestinian men. Gopstein’s work has sometimes gotten him into trouble. Weeks earlier, police detained him, along with 14 members of Lehava, for threatening Arabs who were dating Jewish women. “Every time they arrest me, more people join my cause,” he says, smiling. In 2016, he was questioned by police after calling Christians bloodsucking vampires who should be expelled from the country. In 2014, he was detained after Lehava members set fire to a joint Jewish and Arab school in Jerusalem. The group also sprayed graffiti on the school’s walls. "You can't coexist with cancer,” it read.
In each of those cases, Gopstein was released the same day. He has never been indicted either. The last time Israeli authorities put him behind bars was in 1994, when the government banned Kahane’s political party. (The ban was in response to a massacre committed by another Kahane prodigy, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, killing 29 Muslim worshippers and wounding 125 others.)
The Justice Ministry refused to comment on Gopstein’s case while the investigation is underway. “He’s always been found not guilty because they have nothing,” says Gopstein’s attorney, Itamar Ben Gvir. “They don’t even have one example of Bentzi telling people to commit an attack. Praising Baruch Goldstein [which Gopstein has done] isn’t illegal. You can think it’s an awful thing to say. You can think it’s a wonderful thing to say. That’s a democracy.”
Yet Gopstein’s actions, critics say, speak to his real agenda: anti-Palestinian hatred. “Gopstein wants us to believe that he’s just worried about the future of the Jewish religion, but he’s not,” says Gvaryahu. “We never heard him fight against assimilation in the United States, and here the intermarriage rate is really insignificant.” Indeed, just 2 percent of Jewish Israelis have a non-Jewish spouse, compared with 44 percent in the U.S.
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, has a unit for Jewish terrorism, but a spokesman tells me it’s the police’s responsibility to deal with Lehava. Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld says the local cops have been trying to prevent and respond to violence committed by Gopstein’s activists, but there is only so much they can do. “Police operations take place all year round in connection with Lehava,” Rosenfeld says, speaking in October, shortly after Gopstein’s latest detention. “Those suspects were released after significant evidence was presented against them. The police recommendation was to continue holding them. But at the end of the day, the decision made by the court, unfortunately, is what it is.”
Gopstein’s critics argue that Israel should treat him the same way it treats his Palestinian counterparts. But Israel has a long history of handling Jewish radicals differently. In 1984, the authorities determined that a Jewish militant group was plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest shrines. A court convicted 25 Jewish settlers of waging an underground campaign of violence against Arabs in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. All were soon released, except for three who were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison—but they wound up serving less than seven years. Jewish settlers cheered their return home. And they weren’t the only ones. Many of the Jewish extremists arrested in the 1980s and 1990s quickly re-entered Israeli society, becoming settlement leaders and political activists.
Israeli supporters of Lehava chant slogans outside the wedding hall where an Arab-Israeli man and a Jewish woman got married on August 17, 2014, in the Israeli coastal city of Rishon Letzion. GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty
More recently, in 2005, a Jewish extremist went to prison for stabbing marchers at Jerusalem’s gay pride parade. In 2015, three weeks after his release, he stabbed a 16-year-old Israeli girl to death at the same event. Gopstein and Lehava activists protested against that parade, calling it an “abomination,” and have continued to protest it every year since. “Israel should put much more into fighting Bentzi,” argues Gvaryahu. “It’s about time.”
Yet Gopstein’s supporters believe the state has treated him too harshly, protecting free speech for Arabs and not for Jews. “What they’re accusing Bentzi of, you can say the same about the Arabs,” says Ben Gvir, Gopstein’s attorney. “Thousands of Arabs praise Palestinian terrorists, and no one is indicting them.”
Human rights groups call that argument absurd. Israel has imprisoned 470 Palestinians for social media incitement since 2015. Among them: the Arab-Israeli poet Dareen Tatour, who was arrested in October 2015, jailed for three months and remains under house arrest for publishing a poem and two Facebook status updates, which her attorneys claim Israeli authorities translated improperly. Tatour was indicted for incitement to violence and support of a terrorist organization.
Some, such as Shwartz-Altshuler, say this disparity is not caused by racism or bias but by outcomes: Because Arabs commit more terrorist attacks against Jews than the other way around, they’re more likely to be convicted of incitement. “The fear is that those incitements on Facebook in Arabic will make someone who sees them take a knife and go stab someone,” says the law professor. “On the other hand, Israeli authorities are well aware of the dangers that movements like Lehava pose to Israeli society”—and yet perhaps less concerned they’ll lead to deadly violence.
But are they doing enough to contain that danger? Jewish extremists have committed some of the most horrific crimes in Israeli history—from Goldstein’s massacre to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who championed peace with the Palestinians. His assassination—by Yigal Amir, a Jewish radical—came after months of right-wing Jewish incitement against Rabin and his peace efforts. It remains the only assassination of an Israeli head of state in the country’s history.
This poster is indicative of the racism in Israeli elections - a government party promises to campaign against inter-racial sex and relationships
“The fact that Kach was considered a terror organization means that any group stemming from it is essentially also a terrorist group,” argues Fady Khoury, an attorney at Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
Unlike the U.S., Israel has no constitution—and so no fundamental right to free speech. Instead, Israeli courts protect this freedom on a case-by-case basis. “The courts are very careful when it comes to pressing criminal charges against people over speech,” says Shwartz-Altshuler. And when it comes to people like Gopstein, the professor claims, “the Supreme Court is more afraid of government censorship than of what Lehava is saying to Israeli society.”
Ultimately, Israel may not have the power to stop Gopstein, since he is not a politician and has not committed any known attacks. “Kahane was not banned from speaking outside the Knesset,” notes Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a former member of Kahane’s Jewish Defense League in New York. “A democracy, especially a democracy under siege from constant war and terror, needs to walk a fine line between allowing freedom of speech and ensuring that freedom of speech doesn’t result in violence. Lehava needs to be reined in when it crosses the line. And it has repeatedly crossed the line. At the same time, Lehava’s ideas cannot be banned.”
Hard-Right Turn
In recent years, there have been political efforts to derail Gopstein, but they have largely failed. In 2015, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon tried to designate Lehava as a terrorist group. A year later, he was forced out of the government and replaced by Avigdor Lieberman, a hawkish figure who once said that disloyal Arab citizens of Israel should be beheaded. “Extremist and dangerous forces, Ya’alon warned as he resigned, “have taken over Israel.”
Since Kahane’s days, Israel has moved far to the right. Today, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 48 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that Israel should expel its Arab citizens, who constitute nearly 20 percent of its population. Twenty years ago, 32 percent of Israelis considered themselves left-wing. Today, that figure is 19 percent, according to the IDI, the Jerusalem-based think tank. A November report by IDI found that 51.5 percent of Jewish Israelis feel that to preserve Israel's Jewish identity, Arabs and Jews should live separately, and 58 percent say that people who aren’t willing to say Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people should have their citizenship revoked. Today, the government is even considering legislation that some observers say would make Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority state more important than its democratic values. This would be the first step, some observers claim, toward establishing the country Kahane envisioned.
Part of this hard-right shift, analysts say, has to do with the trauma of the violent second intifada, or uprising. Between 2000 and 2005, Israelis lived through a long series of almost daily suicide bombings in cities such as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It also reflects a loss of faith in the peace process. After Israel and the Palestinians signed the historic Oslo Accords in 1993, many had hoped the bloody, decades-long conflict would end. Instead, both sides are locked in a stalemate, and Israel has fought two wars with Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza.
Arab-Israeli Muslim groom, Mahmoud Mansour, and his Israeli bride Morel Malcha sit in Mansour's family home in Tel Aviv on August 17, 2014, ahead of their wedding ceremony. Their union was met with extreme protests from Lehava, which militates against the "Jewish assimilation and intermarriage." Daniel Bar-On/AFP/Getty

Gopstein says he’s merely expressing what most Israelis believe, which he insists isn’t racist. "Arabs who accept this state as a Jewish state can stay here. Those who don’t need to leave,” he tells me. “We don’t want to kill Arabs just because they’re Arabs. That’s racism. But Arabs who want to take our country from us? God gave Israel to the Jewish people, and people who don’t believe that shouldn’t be here. ”
A resident of Kiryat Arba, the radical Jewish settlement inside the mostly Palestinian city of Hebron, Gopstein rejects the claim that he encourages or even inspires his followers to commit violence. “I’m against doing illegal things,” he insists. “The solution is not to burn the Arab-Jewish schools; the solution is to close them.” And yet he doesn’t condemn those illegal acts and even defends Goldstein’s Hebron massacre. “I don’t think that what Goldstein did was bad. I just wouldn’t do it myself. He saw Arabs killing his friends and family, and he saw them being happy about their deaths. So he took revenge.”
Gopstein claims to have no interest in following Kahane’s footsteps into politics. Yet his influence is felt, even without him serving in the Israeli parliament. Members of the country’s ruling party have invited him multiple times to speak in the Knesset. The Jerusalem municipality allowed Lehava to post billboards in November, advertising the Kahane memorial and thanking Gopstein for his work. In 2015, the Education Ministry banned an award-winning novel about an Arab-Jewish romance from the national high school curriculum, after Gopstein launched a campaign against it.
Like Kahane, Gopstein’s ultimate dream is an Israel that operates according to Jewish law, or Halacha, where the only Arabs who live there are those loyal to a Jewish theocracy. “At this rate,” he says of Palestinian citizens of Israel, “it’s either us or them.”
This story has updated the titles of Tehilla Shwartz-Altshuler and Fady Khoury​

MKS TOLD MORE EDUCATION IS NEEDED TO COMBAT INTERMARRIAGE



Likud MK Hotovely hosts hearing on marriages between Jewish women, Arab men in honor of Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset

By Rebecca Anna Stoil


Jerusalem Post, February 11, 2011 01:31
Tzipi Hotovely 311. (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
Marriages between Jewish women and Arab men took center stage at a meeting of the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women this week, when committee chairwoman Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) hosted a hearing on the subject in honor of Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset.

“We must confront the fact that the country has not valued education, which is the only way to prevent Jewish women from forging life connections with non-Jews,” Hotovely said.

“The struggle against assimilation only reaches headlines through stories about Jewish women marrying Muslim men, but it is important to remember that the phenomenon is much wider – 92,000 mixed families live in the State of Israel. There is a need to create a curriculum for girls in high schools that deals with Jewish identity. The fact that girls reach a state of intermarriage testifies to the fact that the education system was absent.”

Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset on Tuesday was sponsored by the Tzohar organization and by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi), and featured a number of committee meetings, all focusing on aspects of Jewish identity in Israel. But not all the lawmakers thought that the subject was appropriate material for a committee hearing.

“There cannot be a hearing that seeks to determine with whom it is permissible to be married. It is a personal issue – there are things that the state should not be involved with,” complained MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List-Ta’al). “This hearing gives legitimacy to an anti-democratic and very dangerous situation in which the Knesset is expected to back up Halacha – the concept of Jewish identity does not need to make racism kosher.”

Sanaa elicited a chuckle from fellow MKs when he cited the Bible as proof of his argument.

“Ruth the Moabite wasn’t Jewish, but her descendant was King David,” he said. “I’d like to see what would happen if in France they held a hearing about what happens when Christians marry Jews.”

Yad L’Achim’s Zehava Drori said her organization took care of women who “are affiliated with all kinds of minorities.
“The scale of the problem is very wide – we feel that there is a constant silencing of the phenomenon,” she said.

Yad L’Achim representatives said there was a growing phenomenon of “girls who are converted to Islam without even being aware of the significance of what is happening to them. The sheikh comes to their house, and converts them.”

Under Israeli law, mixed-religion couples cannot be married in Israel, and thus the women are converted to Islam. But the women, said organization representatives, do not understand that their children, though Jews according to Halacha, will be registered as Muslim.

Yad L’Achim says it is currently working with approximately 1,000 women, while in 2008, it only had about 500. Most of the women, it says, came from backgrounds of severe economic or emotional distress.

“It is not racist to oppose intermarriage – marriages between Jewish women and Muslim men are like water and oil,” said Sarit, a Jewish woman who had been married to an Arab man. “It is not racist because they are not bad, but there are differences in mentalities that are impossible to deny.”

Ben-Zion Gopstein of the Lehava organization said that “there are a number of organizations that work with these girls after they ask for help, but we need to reach them before they get to the [Arab] villages.

“This is Lehava’s goal. We go to schools and to entertainment areas and explain to girls what it means to be a Jewish woman. There are those who date and marry Arabs – including those from religious schools, and haredi girls.”

Gopstein said that in one religious girls’ school he had visited in Bat Yam, 20 percent of the girls at the age of 14 were dating Arabs. “The problem is the legitimacy that is given today to intermarriage,” he said.

“The Jewish Agency invests millions in the war against assimilation overseas, but here in Israel, every girl wants to be Bar Refaeli,” he continued, referring to the Israeli supermodel who is dating non-Jewish film star Leonardo DiCaprio.

Gopstein noted that “in this very Knesset, there is an MK who is married to a German man,” a reference to Labor MK Einat Wilf. But, he complained, “it is not politically correct to speak out about it. We don’t discuss this as being unacceptable.”
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