Tag Archives: Holocaust memorial

There was a time when America – indeed the world – took serious notice of what a US President said; Expert analysis from Andrew Neil gives insight why that may no longer be

Biden-Holocaust-Memorial

Important Takeaways:

  • Final proof Biden’s America is utterly adrift, ignored – and barreling toward disaster: ANDREW NEIL’s expert analysis of an infirm, incoherent President… now losing all control
  • The words were forceful enough on Tuesday when President Joe Biden rightly condemned the current ‘ferocious surge of anti-Semitism in America and around the world.’
  • He was speaking, appropriately enough, at a Holocaust memorial ceremony in the US Capitol on May 7 – seven months to the day of Hamas’s unprovoked and barbarous attack on Israel.
  • Biden was even explicit about Hamas’s crimes and its responsibility for the war that inevitably followed October 7.
  • ‘I have not forgotten,’ averred the President.
  • But the most remarkable feature of his speech was how little his words seemed to matter. They disappeared in the wind almost as soon as they were uttered.
  • There was a time when America — indeed the world — took serious notice of what a US president said. Biden, it appears, can be safely ignored.
  • Certainly, few seem to heed his warnings these days.
  • He told Iran ‘don’t’ when it threatened to retaliate for Israel’s fatal attack on its Revolutionary Guard HQ in Damascus, Syria. Tehran proceeded to launch over 300 missiles and drones at Israel, nearly all of them thankfully taken out before reaching their targets.
  • He informed Israel that rooting out what’s left of Hamas in the southern Gaza city of Rafah was a ‘red line’ the Jewish State must not cross because of the potential for more civilian casualties. This week Israel started rooting out Hamas in Rafah.
  • He informed Israel that rooting out what’s left of Hamas in the southern Gaza city of Rafah was a ‘red line’ the Jewish State must not cross because of the potential for more civilian casualties. This week Israel started rooting out Hamas in Rafah.
  • On Tuesday, he addressed the poisonous anti-Semitism now rampant on university campuses.
  • He highlighted ‘vicious propaganda on social media … Jews forced to hide kippahs under baseball caps, tuck Jewish stars into their shirts … Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class .. anti-Semitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel … too many people denying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th … it’s absolutely despicable — and it must stop.’
  • He is, of course, absolutely right to call this out. The pity is that it’s taken him so long to do so.
  • The so-called National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), instigators of many of the encampments, has called October 7th ‘a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.’
  • New York’s Columbia University SJP has declared ‘full solidarity with Palestinian resistance,’ praising the ‘historic’ attack ‘despite the odds.’
  • These are not protestors pleading for peace to be given a chance. They want to see Israel destroyed and Hamas victorious.
  • Biden’s own campaign supporters are funding this pro-war rabble.
  • Money from Democratic megadonor George Soros has gone to a group called Jewish Voice for Peace which immediately after October 7 blamed, ‘Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity,’ for the slaughter.
  • Yet as President, Biden couldn’t even bring himself to condemn the notorious anti-Semitic ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ chant so beloved of the protestors.
  • As Biden claimed his support for Israel is ‘ironclad even when we disagree’ we learned that his administration was holding up shipments of precision bombs to Israel to signal to the Israeli government that Washington really doesn’t want it to pursue the all-out defeat of Hamas.
  • To be fair, Biden’s intervention, well-meant and heartfelt – as it no doubt was despite all its inadequacies – was over-shadowed by Stormy Daniels testimony in the Donald Trump hush-money trial in New York.
  • The media was more obsessed with that than Biden’s important words about anti-Semitism, which is not the President’s fault.
  • But you can’t help feeling that a President with more authority and respect would also have commanded more attention.

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World leaders at Jerusalem conference condemn rising anti-Semitism

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – World leaders voiced alarm at resurgent anti-Semitism on Thursday as they gathered at Israel’s national Holocaust Memorial to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence also castigated Iran in their speeches to the World Holocaust Forum, accusing it of rabid anti-Semitism and of seeking Israel’s destruction.

Leaders of Russia and France looked closer to home in lamenting the killing of six million Jews in Europe during World War Two by the Nazis and vowing to combat rising anti-Semitism.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the conference at the Yad Vashem memorial center that he bowed his head in “deepest sorrow (for) the worst crime in the history of humanity” committed by his countrymen.

“I wish I could say that we Germans have learned from history once and for all. But I cannot say that when hatred is spreading,” he said.

Steinmeier spoke in English rather than in German, a choice made, his office said, to avoid causing any distress to Holocaust survivors in the audience.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said it was vital to oppose xenophobia and anti-Semitism everywhere.

“You just said that it’s not known where anti-Semitism ends,” Putin told Israeli President Reuven Rivlin at a meeting before the conference convened.

“Unfortunately we do know this – Auschwitz is its end-result.”

A global survey https://global100.adl.org/about/2019 by the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League in November found that global anti-Semitic attitudes had increased, and significantly so in Eastern and Central Europe. It found that large percentages of people in many European countries think Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.

More than one million people, most of them Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Israel hailed the memorial conference, attended by more than 40 world leaders, as the biggest international gathering in its history.

IRAN DENOUNCED

In his speech to the forum, Netanyahu denounced Iran as “the most anti-Semitic regime on the planet” and vowed that Israel would always defend itself against those out to destroy it.

Netanyahu has long accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, an allegation it denies.

Pence, in his comments, described Iran as the one country “that denies the Holocaust as a matter of state policy and threatens to wipe Israel off the map”.

Other guests at the commemoration included French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Prince Charles.

Warning of the “dark shadow of anti-Semitism”, Macron met French survivors of the Holocaust at a memorial near Jerusalem to some 76,000 Jews arrested in wartime France and transported to death camps such as Auschwitz, where most died.

One notable absentee from Thursday’s commemoration was President Andrzej Duda of Poland, who turned down his invitation because Poland he was not allowed to speak at the conference, unlike the wartime victors the United States, Russia, Britain and France, and also Germany.

Polish leaders have also been angered by comments made by Putin last month suggesting Poland shared responsibility for the war. Poland, which was invaded first by Nazi Germany and then by Soviet forces in September, 1939, sees itself as a major victim of the war, in which it lost a fifth of its population.

Poland will host its own ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum on Jan. 27, as it does every year.

(Additional reporting by Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw, Darya Korsunskaya in Jerusalem and Sabine Siebold in Berlin; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Macron, in Israel for Holocaust memorial, warns of ‘dark shadow’ of anti-Semitism

By John Irish

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday France was determined to combat the hatred and intolerance that have fueled a sharp rise in anti-Semitism in his country as he met Holocaust survivors during a visit to Israel.

Macron is one of dozens of world leaders attending events at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem to mark the 75-year anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

“The dark shadow of anti-Semitism is being reborn,” Macron told members of the roughly 100,000 French-Israeli citizens.

“Anti-Semitism is back. It is here and its cortege of intolerance and hate is here. France won’t accept.”

“I responded to the call to come to Yad Vashem to say this shall never happen again. It’s a battle that is never won,” Macron said. “My determination to act on this is total.”

Earlier on Thursday, Macron met French survivors of the Holocaust at a memorial near Jerusalem to some 76,000 Jews who were arrested in France during World War Two and transported in terrible conditions in railway boxcars to death camps such as Auschwitz, where most died.

In 1995 France’s then-president, Jacques Chirac, officially acknowledged for the first time French complicity in the wartime deportations. But it was only in 2009 that France’s highest court recognized the state’s responsibility.

A survey published on Tuesday by French think-tank Fondapol and the American Jewish Committee found that 70 percent of Jews living in France today had been victims of anti-Semitism.

France has Europe’s biggest Jewish community – around 550,000 – and anti-Semitic acts have risen by 70 percent in each of the last two years. More than 500 were reported in 2018 alone.

Last month, scores of Jewish graves were found desecrated in a cemetery in eastern France, hours before lawmakers adopted a resolution equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

“UNCERTAIN FUTURE”

Commentators have blamed the surge in anti-Semitic attacks on incitement by Islamist preachers, others on the rise of anti-Zionism – opposition to the existence of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people.

Macron and the French survivors of the Holocaust were joined by young college students at a solemn ceremony at the Roglit memorial, west of Jerusalem, to remember the French Jews deported between 1942-1944.

Serge Klarsfeld, an 84-year-old Nazi hunter, welcomed the participation of Macron and the young people in the ceremony.

“Your presence today with the education minister and the children from the banlieues (suburbs) who are bravely engaged in studying the Shoah and drawing the consequences touches us deeply and allows us to look with hope toward an uncertain future,” said Klarsfeld.

(Reporting by John Irish; Editing by Gareth Jones)