UN vote tops list of top 10 antisemitic, anti-Israel cases
Wiesenthal Center releases 2016 ranking
The US abstention from a recent vote against Israeli settlements at the UN Security Council topped the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s annual list released Tuesday of the 10 worst outbreaks of Jew-hatred and anti-Israel incidents.
The Jewish human rights organization ranked the Obama administration’s move as the top case, charging that it erased Jewish history.
“The most stunning 2016 UN attack on Israel was facilitated by President [Barack] Obama when the US abstained on a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for settlement construction. It reversed decades-long US policy of vetoing such diplomatic moves against the Jewish State,” wrote the center.
The organization added: “It also urges UN members ‘to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967,’ effectively endorsing BDS.”
UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn along with former British politician Baroness Jenny Tonge ranked second.
According to the ranking, “antisemitism in the [Labour] party has greatly escalated. Corbyn, who previously called Hamas and Hezbollah his ‘friends,’ also promoted his strategy adviser Seumas Milne, a Hamas proponent.”
France earned the third spot for “singling out Israel. Amid a backdrop of devastating and murderous Islamist terrorist attacks, continued targeting of French Jewry and reports of the refusal of some Muslim police officers to guard synagogues, the French government became the first member of the European Union to implement the requirement of labels on all Israeli goods produced beyond the Jewish state’s 1967 borders.”
Fourth place included a list of BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) actions targeting Israel.
“Leaders of the German Teacher’s Union (GEW) local in Oldenburg have called for a total boycott of Israel. In September, the Oldenburg GEW local published a pro-BDS article by Christoph Glanz, a public school teacher and fanatic opponent of the Jewish state. Glanz, who has tried posing as a Jew to avoid charges of anti-Semitism, recently called for the eradication of the State of Israel and relocation of its Jews to southwestern Germany,” notes the list.
Also included in spot four were the United Church of Christ, which overwhelmingly voted to endorse BDS, as well Ryerson University in Toronto, where the student union voted to endorse the BDS movement.
The head of the far-right US-based National Policy Institute, Richard Spencer, garnered the fifth spot for being “America’s 21st century Nazi.”
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas ranked sixth.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center cited past comments later retracted by Abbas in which he referred to false claims that Israeli rabbis had called for the poisoning of Palestinian wells.
“Just a week ago, a group of rabbis in Israel announced, in a clear announcement, demanding their government, to poison, to poison, the water of the Palestinians. Is this not incitement? Is this not clear incitement, to the mass murder of the Palestinian people?” Abbas had initially said.
The list also pointed to a Hamas TV program that aired a play in which Palestinian children dressed in military fatigues and armed with guns and knives “kill” those acting as Israelis.
The explosion of antisemitic attacks in the Netherlands catapulted the country to the seventh slot. At a high school “some of the graduates broke out in song with the lyrics, ‘Together we’ll burn Jews, because Jews burn the best’- a chant sometimes heard in the country’s soccer stadiums,” wrote the center.
Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom was ranked eighth for worrying about terrorists and not their victims
“Commenting on the violence in Israel of knife-wielding Palestinian terrorists, and measures taken by Israeli police in their wake during the so-called ‘Knifing Intifada’, Wallstrom, called for an investigation into what she called ‘extra-judicial killings’ by Israeli police,” she was quoted as saying.
The ninth slot covered antisemitism in the sports arena. Outbreaks of antisemitism were cited in the US, the Netherlands, Croatia, Italy, the United Kingdom and Poland.
The last spot went to Poland for its persecution of “prominent historian Jan Tomasz Gross, who documented Polish participation in the murder of Jews in wartime Poland. He is in the crosshairs of Polish authorities who are considering charges that could put him behind bars for three years for ‘harming the country’s reputation.’”