‘BDS wants to destroy Jewish state’

YEHUDA BAUER, PROFESSOR of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University, was in conversation this week with Tulip Siddiq, MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, at the JW3 Jewish community centre, where he spoke out against BDS.

Professor Bauer said the boycott movement wanted “not a better Israel, they want no Israel.”

He added: “Anti-Zionism is a slogan, there’s nothing real behind it. It’s antiJewish, it’s antisemitic. They want to destroy the Jewish state; they want to destroy it because it’s a Jewish state.”

The 90-year-old academic also criti- cisedEuropeanandIsraelimediaoutlets for not doing enough to promote the message of moderate Muslims fighting against their extremist counterparts.

“In January of this year, in Marrakesh, there was a meeting of several hundred Muslim clerics, in order to distance themselves from radical Islam. Did you read about it in any European paper, in any Israeli paper? Not a word.

“This is a complete blindness in Western society towards the only way you can fight radical Islamic antisemitism. That is by allying yourself with antiradical Islam; there is no other way.”

In a week where Ken Livingstone provoked anger by repeating his remark that Hitler had supported Zionism, Professor Bauer pointed out that “the Nazi policy from 1933…was to get rid of the Jews of Germany.

“The British government, in 19381939, agreed to the absorption in Britain of close to 10,000 Jewish children — the Kindertransport — from Germany, Austria and later from the occupied Czech lands until the outbreak of war.

“This was done with the agreement of the German government; they wanted to get rid of Jews, and the British wanted, at that point, to rescue children.

“Does that mean that the British and Nazi governments were in collusion?”