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Friday, Jan. 27 '17, כ"ט בטבת תשע"ז
HEADLINES:
1. 'GERMANY DISHONORING THE MEMORY OF THE MURDERED SIX MILLION'
2. TWO KILLED IN BUS ACCIDENT IN THE BINYAMIN REGION
3. SECOND VICTIM FROM DEADLY BUS ACCIDENT IN SAMARIA IDENTIFIED
4. GERMAN JOURNALIST: ASSASSINATION OF TRUMP WOULD END 'TRAGEDY'
5. WATCH: TRUCK SMASHES DOZENS OF CARS IN TEL AVIV - THEN FLEES
6. HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY: DISTORTION IN HOLOCAUST MEMORIALIZING
7. TRUMP: I'VE FIXED OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL
8. 'HE WAS AN EXEMPLARY FAMILY MAN'
1. 'GERMANY DISHONORING THE MEMORY OF THE MURDERED SIX MILLION'
by David Rosenberg
The government of Germany is providing financial backing to a radical anti-Israel non-governmental organization working to promote the view that the establishment of the Jewish state was a "disaster".
Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, activists from the Im Tirtzu organization released a new report documenting foreign aid for "Zochrot", a far-left NGO working to "decolonize" Israel.
A tireless promoter of anti-Zionism, Zochrot advocates for a "right of return" for descendants of Arabs who left Israel during the 1948 War of Independence.
Nor does the group limit its support to a symbolic "right of return", but calls for all so-called "Palestinian refugees" to be absorbed into Israel – a policy which would mark the end of the Jewish state.
Zochrot aims to perpetuate the anti-Zionist "Nakba" narrative, which portrays the establishment and existence of the Jewish state as a "disaster".
According to the group's website, Zochrot mission is to "promote acknowledgement and accountability for the ongoing injustices of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 and the reconceptualization of the Return as the imperative redress of the Nakba."
The group's mission statement makes no mention of the expulsion of 900,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa and their loss of property.
In 2014, Zochrot chief Eitan Bronstein and other group officials participated in the production of a video which dubbed the Holocaust "the best thing that ever happened" to the Jewish people.
But despite the group's radical anti-Israel positions, the Im Tirtzu report reveals the German government is one of Zochrot's biggest financial backers.
Based on data gathered by the Israeli Corporations Authority's non-profit registrar, from 2012-2016 the government of Germany gave over 1,100,000 shekels ($290,000) to Zochrot.
The funds were transferred via two German foundations, Misereor and Rosa Luxemberg Stiftung, both of which are funded primarily by the German government.
This despite the fact that an organization established by the German government - the Memory, Responsibility and Future Fund (EVZ) – cut off funding to Zochrot nearly five years ago because of the group's political agenda.
Zochrot engages in a wide variety of activities to delegitimize the Jewish state and promote the anti-Zionist "Nakba" narrative. The group worked with anti-Israel groups on campuses around the world to offer what was dubbed the "Film Festival on Nakba and the Right of Return" during "Israeli Apartheid Week".
The group also released the "iNakba" smartphone application, which was promoted by the Qatari state-funded Al Jazeera media outlet.
While Im Tirtzu has contacted the German Ambassador to Israel over the funding, the German government has yet to issue a response.
"The idea that Germany in 2017 is funding an organization that brazenly seeks to destroy the Jewish character of the State of Israel is a disgrace," Im Tirtzu chief Matan Peleg said.
"This funding not only dishonors the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, but is anti-democratic at its core. This is another painful example of foreign governments working to impose their unwanted policies on the State of Israel from within via anti-Israel NGOs."
2. TWO KILLED IN BUS ACCIDENT IN THE BINYAMIN REGION
by Arutz Sheva Staff
[youtube:2023743]
An Egged bus overturned and fell into a pit 300 meters deep overnight Thursday, killing two people and injuring seven.
The accident took place on Highway 60, on the road to Maaleh Levona, located southwest of the city of Ariel in the Binyamin region.
Magen David Adom paramedics who were called to the scene treated seven victims, among them three with serious injuries, two with moderate injuries and two more who were lightly injured.
The victims were evacuated to the Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, the Sheba Hospital at Tel Hashomer and the Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem.
Fire crews who were called to the scene are searching for passengers who may have been trapped under the bus.
A large number of volunteer paramedics from United Hatzalah rushed to the scene as well.
Menachem Leff, Head of the Binyamin region of United Hatzalah, said, "United Hatzalah first responders who arrived at the scene have requested that lighting be brought, as well as search and rescue crews, fire rescue crews and helicopters be dispatched in order to help reach those on the bus. Due to the extreme nature of the incident, volunteers have also been dispatched from the Jerusalem and Samaria chapters of United Hatzalah."
Michael Chai Cohen, a volunteer from United Hatzalah who arrived at the scene of the accident, said that reaching the overturned bus proved to be very difficult.
"I came from the community of Adam and when I arrived at the scene on foot, together with other volunteers, we had to walk for 10 minutes in the rain and mud until we got to the bus. Unfortunately, upon arrival we found several victims who were unconscious and without a pulse," he said.
The Central Bureau of Statistics said this week that 378 people were killed on the roads in Israel in 2016, an increase of 6% from 2015.
In the last week alone, 11 people were killed in road accidents across the country.
3. SECOND VICTIM FROM DEADLY BUS ACCIDENT IN SAMARIA IDENTIFIED
by David Rosenberg
The identity of the second victim of Thursday's deadly bus accident in Samaria was released to the public Friday afternoon, hours after Avishai Kroani was named as a victim.
Ofir Rahmanov, a 23-year old resident of the Ramot neighborhood in Jerusalem, was killed late Thursday night, when the Egged 462 line bus he was travelling on from Jerusalem to Ariel overturned and fell off a cliff.
The other fatality was the 37-year old bus driver, Kroani, a resident of Ariel. He is survived by his wife, Idit, and their five children.
Seven passengers were injured in the accident.
Victims of the accident were evacuated to the Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, the Sheba Hospital at Tel Hashomer and the Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem.
Of the seven, three are listed in serious condition, another three in moderate condition, and one in light-to-moderate condition.
The accident occurred off of Route 60, on the Maaleh Levona access road. After overturning, the bus slide off the edge of the road and down a cliff, falling some 1,000 feet (305 meters).
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4. GERMAN JOURNALIST: ASSASSINATION OF TRUMP WOULD END 'TRAGEDY'
by Arutz Sheva Staff
Josef Joffe, the publisher and editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit, known for its left-wing views, criticized the new administration of US President Donald Trump and implied that the President should be assassinated.
During the television program Media Club on the ARD network, the studio asked guests if it was possible for the citizens of the US to vote Trump out of power to "end the tragedy of Trump," as he termed the now week-old administration.
The first guest on the program, former Die Zeit editor Constanze Stelzenmüller, said that under the US Constitution, "there must be a majority of two thirds in the Senate to impeach the President from office. These legal and political hurdles are very high. A lot needs to occur for this to happen. We are very far off from it."
During her answer, Joffe interrupted with a quicker solution. "Murder in the White House, for example."
US media rushed to report the to the Secret Service that the editor of a German newspaper had called for the murder of the President. The Secret Service informed the American news website Breitbart that they are aware of the comment and that it is under investigation. It is still unclear whether the German police intend to open an investigation against the editor for incitement to murder against the president.
5. WATCH: TRUCK SMASHES DOZENS OF CARS IN TEL AVIV - THEN FLEES
by Arutz Sheva Staff
[youtube:2023717]
A truck driver smashed dozens of parked cars in Tel Aviv Thursday afternoon, causing extensive damage before fleeing the scene.
Part of the incident was filmed by onlookers and forwarded to authorities.
Police units have been deployed to the area and are attempting to locate the driver.
No injuries were reported in any of the accidents stemming from the incident. Police say the incident does not appear to be nationalistically motivated.
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6. HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY: DISTORTION IN HOLOCAUST MEMORIALIZING
by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
Dr. Gerstenfeld, considered the foremost expert on anti-Semitism in the world today, is former chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and recipient of the LIfetime Achievement Award (2012) of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism. He founded and directed the Center's Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism program. His latest book is The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Delegitimization of Israel.
Friday, the 27th of January, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The memorialization of the Holocaust over the decades has led to many controversies. A small, fairly random selection of issues from seven countries will illustrate some facets of this subject.
Currently, a major debate is going on in the German extreme-rightwing AfD Party as well as in German society at large. Bjorn Hoecke, the AfD leader in the federal state of Thuringia, has said that Germans are the "only people in the world who planted a memorial of disgrace in the heart of their capital." He is referring to the stone slabs memorial in Berlin. It opened in 2005 and commemorates the six million Jews of Europe murdered by Germany. The AfD in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg wants to stop the state's subsidy for the French memorial site of the Gurs internment camp, where the Jews of Baden-Württemberg were initially deported.
The first Holocaust monuments in the formerly Nazi-occupied countries were often placed within Jewish environments – synagogues, Jewish institutions, and cemeteries. There was often no interest by authorities, and sometimes even opposition, to having them located in the public domain.
In the Netherlands, the situation has been rather awkward. The first Holocaust-related monument in Amsterdam reflected the distorted attitude of Dutch society in those years. This was a monument of recognition for the gentiles who helped Jews during the war, and was established in 1950. The surviving Jews had apparently been told by the authorities that it would be desirable to put up such a monument.
I passed this monument every day on my way to the Jewish high school. I was, however, too young to understand what was wrong with its establishment at that point in time. In recent years more publicity has been given to this scandalous attitude of the authorities.
Even worse: the Amsterdam authorities opposed the establishment of a monument for the murdered Jews in the main square of the destroyed Jewish quarter. This monument would have been dedicated to the Jewish population of Holland, a majority of whom had been murdered - with Dutch assistance, upfront, in arresting, transporting, and guarding therm.
To add insult to injury, a monument called the "Dockworker" was erected in 1952 in that square, in memory of the two-day solidarity strike with the persecuted Jews by the Amsterdam population in February 1941. The truth is that after those two days, almost all strikers left the Jews to their fate. When the "Dockworker" was put up, M.H. Gans, then editor of the NIW, the Dutch Jewish weekly, wrote: "It is like a monument to anti-aircraft defense on the grave of those who were killed by the bombardment."
Only now, more than seventy years after the war, is there a plan to erect a monument in Amsterdam with the names of the 102,000 Dutch Jews and additional citizens murdered in the Holocaust. In many Dutch towns whose Jews were killed, Holocaust monuments have finally gone up in recent years, and some more are being planned.
When Communist governments ruled in Eastern Europe, they did not allow special monuments for Jews in the public domain. They considered that there should be no differentiation between those killed, even though only Jews were specifically targeted for extermination. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, mentions that in Lithuania, local officials opposed the inclusion of the phrase "and their local accomplices" on a memorial monument at Ponar (Paneriai), the site of the mass murder of the Jews of Vilnius. Therefore, it attributed the killings only to the Nazis and ignored their willing Lithuanian helpers.
Though less permanent and tangible, memorial days and ceremonies have also been a point of contention, and often used as occasions to make political statements. Under Muslim influence, the local council of the British town of Bolton did not hold Holocaust Memorial Day in 2007, and replaced it with a Genocide Memorial Day. The following year they marked both.
One might call memorializing Kristallnacht "pre-Holocaust memorialization." These ceremonies have frequently been occasions for distortions. In 2010, Frankfurt's then Christian Democrat mayor, Petra Roth, invited Holocaust survivor Alfred Grosser to deliver a dubious Kristallnacht speech in the Paul's Church. This German-born French Jewish intellectual is a notorious anti-Israel hate-monger and has maintained that Israel's politics are the reason for anti-Semitism.
In Helsingborg, Sweden, the Jewish community refused to participate in the 2012 Kristallnacht memorial ceremony. The local paper Helsingborgs Dagblad noted that the community's leader, Jussi Tyger, said that the memorial was organized by left-wing parties and Muslims, who are known to be the most racist against Jews.
The Croatian Jewish community has announced that it will boycott this week's national Holocaust memorial as a protest against the country's downplaying of its extreme Holocaust crimes.
A former Yugoslavian Jewish leader, Ivan Ceresjnes, now living in Israel, has pointed out that the breakup of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the past decades provides a case study of many aspects of the process of destruction of memory. The successor-states to Yugoslavia are rewriting their histories, during which their collective memories change. The memory of the Holocaust is thus also fragmented according to the current national context.
A single article can only mentions a few of the many ways Holocaust memory can and has been publicly distorted. Unfortunately, it is likely that additional ones will occur in the future.
7. TRUMP: I'VE FIXED OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL
by David Rosenberg
[youtube:2023745]
(Pertinent segment begins at 26:30)
The damage caused by eight years of tensions between the White House and Israel has already been repaired, President Donald Trump claimed in a sit-down interview with Fox News Thursday evening.
Speaking with Sean Hannity, President Trump said that Israel had been mistreated in the past, but that the US-Israel relationship had already been repaired.
While Trump did not directly reference his predecessor, President Obama, whose rocky relationship with the Israeli government often manifested itself in public spats between the White House and Israel, he suggested that the departure of Obama on inauguration day last Friday marked an end to the frayed ties between Washington and Jerusalem.
"It's repaired [already]. It got repaired as soon as I took the oath. It's repaired. We have a good relationship. Israel has been treated very badly. We have a good relationship with them," Trump said.
Trump refused to comment on the potential relocation of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the Israeli capital of Jerusalem, a move past presidents have pledged to make but none has fulfilled.
"I don't want to talk about it, it's too early," Trump said in response to questioning by Hannity on the subject.
The president slammed the Iran nuclear deal, signed by the Obama administration in 2015, calling it "one of the worst deals I've ever seen."
"Why Kerry didn't get out of the chair and leave is hard to believe," Trump said.
Trump also referenced Israel while discussing America's neighbor to the south, citing Israel's use of border fences and other barriers to block terrorists and reduce illegal immigration from the Sinai desert.
"The Wall is necessary," Trump said. "That's not just politics, and yet it is good for the heart of the nation because people want protection and a wall protects. All you've got to do is ask Israel."
8. 'HE WAS AN EXEMPLARY FAMILY MAN'
by Arutz Sheva Staff
Authorities have identified one of the two victims killed in Thursday night's deadly bus accident in Samaria as 37-year old Avishai Kroani, the driver of the bus.
Kroani and a second victim were killed when an Egged bus overturned, then fell off of a 1,000-foot (305-meter) cliff off of Highway 60, near the town of Maaleh Levona in Samaria. Seven others were injured in the accident.
A resident of the city of Ariel in central Samaria, Kroani leaves behind his wife and the couple's five children.
The bus in question was part of Egged's 462 line, and was making its way from Jerusalem towards Ariel.
Ariel Mayor Eliyahu Shviro issued a statement Friday morning in response to the tragedy.
"The entire city of Ariel is with the Kroani family, who lost their father, Avishai, the driver of the bus which fell off the cliff into the chasm. Avishai, who was 37 years old, married to Idit, and a devoted father of five, was an exemplary family man."
Menachem Leff, Head of the Binyamin region of United Hatzalah, said, "United Hatzalah first responders who arrived at the scene requested that lighting be brought, and that search and rescue crews, fire rescue crews and helicopters be dispatched in order to help reach those on the bus. Due to the severe nature of the incident, volunteers have also been dispatched from the Jerusalem and Samaria chapters of United Hatzalah."
Michael Chai Cohen, a volunteer from United Hatzalah who arrived at the scene of the accident, said that reaching the overturned bus proved to be very difficult.
"I came from the community of Adam (near Jerusalem, ed.) and when I arrived at the scene on foot, together with other volunteers, we had to walk for 10 minutes in the rain and mud until we got to the bus. Unfortunately, upon arrival we found several victims who were unconscious and without a pulse," he said.
Victims of the accident were evacuated to the Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, the Sheba Hospital at Tel Hashomer and the Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem.
[youtube:2023743]
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