German Chancellor Angela Merkel led a rally in Berlin on Sunday against anti-Semitism, after Operation Protective Edge sparked an upsurge of anti-Jewish attacks in Germany and throughout Europe.

German President Joachim Gauck, other political and religious leaders and thousands of people attended the rally under the banner “Stand Up: Jew Hatred – Never Again!” at the Brandenburg Gate.

Speaking to the gathering, Chancellor Merkel condemned any form of anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe: “That people in Germany are threatened and abused because of their Jewish appearance or their support for Israel is an outrageous scandal that we won’t accept,” the Jerusalem Post reports. “It’s our national and civic duty to fight anti-Semitism. Anyone who hits someone wearing a skullcap is hitting us all. Anyone who damages a Jewish gravestone is disgracing our culture. Anyone who attacks a synagogue is attacking the foundations of our free society.”

Dr. Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, stressed that anti-Israel activity was actually anti-Semitism in disguise: “This latest ant-Semitic outbreak began with the Gaza war,” he said. “But what does one have to do with the other? When we hear, in German streets, shouts of ‘Jews should be gassed,’ or ‘burned,’ or ‘slaughtered,’ this has nothing to do with criticism of Israeli policies. This is pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism, and nothing else,” the Jerusalem Post quotes.

‘Despite Our Dark 20th Century History’

Merkel, in her latest weekly podcast, vowed to “personally do everything I can, as will my entire government, to ensure that anti-Semitism doesn’t have a chance in our country.”

“We can see that there is not a single Jewish institution here that doesn’t require police protection…That’s something that very much concerns me,” AFP reports.

“Unfortunately, recent weeks have shown that anti-Semitism and racism rear its ugly head again and again in this country despite our dark 20th century history,” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told The Ruhr Nachrichten. “We must resolutely confront this.”

A poster depicting PM Netanyahu and Palestinian flags in front of the Israeli embassy in Berlin. (Photo: Anti Defamation League).

Plague of Anti-Semitism

During the height of Operation Protective Edge, Germany and Europe were plagued with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations, during which calls for “gassing the Jews” and the Nazi “Zig-Heil” were chanted.

A Molotov-cocktail was hurled at a synagogue in the western city of Wuppertal. Three people, described as “Palestinian” nationals, were arrested in connection with the attack, the German Die Welt reported.

Germany’s Jewish community condemned the “explosion of evil and violent hatred of Jews.” Levi Salomon, spokesman of the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism, told AFP that after “outrageously anti-Semitic” chants drew widespread political and media condemnation, rally organizers merely shifted their language from attacking “Jews” to “Zionists.” Although the street protests were dominated by young Muslim men, Salomon pointed out in an essay, they also drew support from an alliance of “neo-Nazis, Israel-boycott activists, left anti-imperialist and Islamist groups under the banner of hatred.”

“The trigger for the flare-up of anti-Semitism was the escalation in the Middle East, but the cause was the anti-Semitism that remains rooted in large parts of German society,” he wrote.

Sharp Increase in Attacks Against Jews

Germany was not the only country to witness a violent wave of anti-Semitism, which has spiked and reached new heights across the world, especially in Europe, in recent months.

A report released by the Anti-Defamation League last week states that Jewish people and institutions in the Diaspora were targeted for violence, threats and vicious lies this summer, all under the pretext of outrage over Operation Protective Edge.

The Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), citing figures compiled by the French Interior Ministry, reported that a total of 529 anti-Semitic acts were registered throughout July, as opposed to 276 during the same period last year. The acts included violence against individuals, arson and vandalism, and “exacerbate the growing unease that oppresses Jews in France each day and overshadows their future”, CRIF said in a statement.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Community Security Trust (CST) anti-Semitism watchdog organization reported 302 anti-Semitic incidents in July, a staggering 400-percent increase over the same month last year.

A World Zionist Organization study in August found that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the world jumped by 383 percent in July as compared to the same month the previous year, with Europe showing a 436-percent increase.

Author: Aryeh Savir
Staff Writer, United with Israel

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 A pregnant woman has been stoned to death by her own family outside a courthouse in the Pakistani city of Lahore for marrying a man her family disapproved of.

Farzana Parveen, a 25-year-old, was killed while on her way to court to contest an abduction case her family had filed against her husband.

Her father was promptly arrested on murder charges, police investigator Rana Mujahid said, adding that police were working to apprehend all those who participated in this “heinous crime”.

Arranged marriages are common among conservative Pakistanis, and hundreds of women are murdered every year in so-called honour killings carried out by husbands or relatives as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behaviour.

Stonings in public settings, however, are extremely rare. Tuesday’s attack took place in front of a crowd of onlookers in broad daylight. The courthouse is located on a main downtown thoroughfare.

A police officer, Naseem Butt, said Parveen had married Mohammad Iqbal, 45, against her family’s wishes after being engaged to him for years.

Three months pregnant

Her father, Mohammad Azeem, had filed an abduction case against Iqbal, which the couple was contesting, said her lawyer, Mustafa Kharal. He said she was three months pregnant.

Nearly 20 members of Parveen’s extended family, including her father and brothers, had waited outside the building that houses the high court of Lahore. As the couple walked up to the main gate, the relatives fired shots in the air and tried to snatch her from Iqbal, her lawyer said.

When she resisted, her father, brothers and other relatives started beating her, eventually pelting her with bricks from a nearby construction site, according to Mujahid and Iqbal, the slain woman’s husband.

Iqbal said he started seeing Parveen after the death of his first wife, with whom he had five children.

“We were in love,” he told the Associated Press. He alleged that the woman’s family wanted to fleece money from him before marrying her off.

Dying Germany has only one item on its bucket list, and that is redemption. The Germans cannot seek redemption from the crimes of their grandparents because they do not understand what motivated them to do such terrible things.

• For Merkel and most of Germany’s elite, the appearance on Germany’s threshold of millions of Muslim refugees is a final chance at redemption, an opportunity for Germany to redeem itself from the crimes of its past through a transcendent act of selflessness.

• ---

Denke ich an Deutschland in der Nacht
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht

If I think of Germany in the night
It kills my sleep.

– Heinrich Heine.

Once there was an old man who in his youth committed a terrible crime, the murder of many innocents. He no longer could remember what drove him to do this; he tried not to think about it, and his memories came to mind unwillingly and infrequently. Rage and guilt had faded long ago into a vague residue of disgust. He worked hard and found some distraction in the monotony of daily tasks. He sought diversion in tasteless entertainment; he followed football, looked at pornography, watched the dubbed version of American comedies, and took vacations at the beach.

He had a child but no grandchildren; his child knew that he once did unforgivable things, but did not want to know what they were, and the old man did not want to tell him. The old crime hung like a black curtain between them.

The old man could feel that he did not have long to live. Ahead of him he saw only days clouded with boredom, illuminated only by the occasional flash of regret. He let the days come and go one at a time until their count might come to an end, for he did not know any other way to live. Because he had no ties to life, he had no way to prepare for death.

One day the old man met a street urchin and on an impulse invited him back to his apartment. He fed the strange boy and gave him a place to sleep. The next morning the old man bought the urchin new clothes, and gave him things — a smartphone, a video-game system, a football jersey. The street kid made himself at home and said little.

Before long, the old man noticed that things had gone missing. A watch that belonged to his father disappeared from a drawer. A silver souvenir goblet no longer stood in the cupboard. Even worse, he came home to find things broken with apparent intent. The remains of a glass pitcher lay in shards on the kitchen floor. The bathroom mirror was cracked. A sofa cushion was slashed.

At length, the old man confronted the boy: “I have only done you good. Why do you do this to me?” The boy laughed at the old man, then punched him. The old man lay on the floor, bleeding from his nose and lips. Perhaps he should call the police? He thought: “No, I will not call the police. What does it matter? I will die soon anyway. Perhaps some good will come of it.” The prospect of death robs us of rationality, especially if we perceive that our life has gone wrong.

* * *

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2015, was the model of rationality, finding resources to backstop Germany’s near-bankrupt southern neighbors during the great European debt crisis of 2012, defusing the Ukraine crisis after the Maidan coup and the Russian takeover of Crimea, balancing Atlantic commitments and European integration, while presiding over Europe’s only successful major economy. Merkel was rational, that is, until she wasn’t.

Admitting 1.2 million Muslim refugees in 2015 and perhaps another million in 2016, and sticking to her guns after the organized mass sexual abuse perpetrated by migrants in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve, was an act of existential despair, not a rational act. What explains this seemingly sudden transformation?

Chancellor Merkel, it seems clear, acted on an impulse that was as sudden as it was irresistible. As the global refugee count passed the 60 million mark last year, Germany did nothing. Between January 1, 2014 and June 30, 2014, fewer than 1000 newspaper stories appeared in the German-language media with the word Flüchtlinge (refugees) — mostly about boat disasters in the Mediterranean.

A January 2, 2014 story in the Berliner Morgenpost noted that the German government planned for 6,000 refugees in the course of the year. During the second half of the year, more than a quarter of a million stories appeared. Only when the refugee crisis threatened to create a humanitarian disaster on Germany’s borders did the Merkel government act.

This kind of impulsiveness begs explanation. Since the Second World War, Germans have preferred not to think about their past, because it is too horrible to contemplate. The German school system dutifully teaches about the Holocaust and German cities dutifully memorialize the murdered Jews; the walls of Frankfurt’s old Jewish cemetery are covered with small bronze plaques for every Jew deported from the city. “They will never forgive us for Auschwitz,” quipped the Austrian-Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rix, and Germans often attempt to relativize the crimes of National Socialism by attributing similar things to the Jews. 54% of Germans under the age of 29 have a negative opinion of Israel, according to a January 2015 poll by the Bertelsmann Institute.

Germans work hard and immerse themselves in private life: in hobbies, vacations, and sports. But they do not have children, to a great extent because they do not like themselves. Germany is dying. It can not only foresee, but calculate with a reasonable degree of accuracy, the point at which so few Germans will inhabit the lands between the Rhine and the Oder that it will be as meaningless to speak of Germans as it is to speak of Etruscans or the people of Thrace. At 1.3 children per woman, Germany’s population of young people (0 to 19 years) and working-age adults (20 to 64 years) will halve by the end of the present century.

Dying Germany has only one item on its bucket list, and that is redemption. The Germans cannot seek redemption from the crimes of their grandparents because they do not understand what motivated them to do such terrible things. Their great-grandparents during World War I believed in the superiority of German culture, and their grandparents during World War II believed in the superiority of the Aryan race. Today’s Germans can only believe that no culture and no race has any claim to precedence, and that all the world’s cultures have equal value.

Israel’s unabashed nationalism horrifies them, because National Socialism’s claim to the status of “master race” was a Satanic parody of the Election of Israel. Jewish strength and success, in German eyes, are an uncomfortable reminder of the Nazis’ perversion of the biblical idea of Chosenness.

For Merkel and most of Germany’s elite, the appearance on Germany’s threshold of millions of Muslim refugees is a final chance at redemption, an opportunity for Germany to redeem itself from the crimes of its past through a transcendent act of selflessness. The Germans turned away from self-sacrifice for the Fatherland to the extreme of self-absorption. Germany became materialistic, irreligious, and Philistine. But self-absorption was a poor distraction from the sense of horror that lingered after the Second World War. The Nazis used terror and horror — Schrecken und Entzsetzen (lit. “dislodgement”) to bind the German people to their leadership. The prospect of new horrors arising not from a clash of civilization, but from internal clashes within Muslim civilization, is too much for the Germans to bear, because it recalls the horrors of the past war.

That is why Germans tumbled headlong into their decision to admit millions of Muslim refugees only when the horrors of war presented themselves on Germany’s own doorstep. Until the flood of refugees reached Central Europe last summer, Germany showed little interest in their problems. As noted, Germany had prepared to admit only 6,000 refugees in 2015. Not until September, after a news photo of a drowned Kurdish boy went viral, and a dozen decomposing bodies were found in an abandoned truck in Austria, did Merkel declare, “Wir schaffen es.” [“We can do it.”] It is also why Germany will not reverse this policy no matter what sort of crimes the refugees commit.

Mrs. Merkel’s rationality crumbles before the horrific prospect of human suffering. Germany’s elites hope that one last, great national valedictory act will open the prospect of redemption.

Ordinary Germans, to be sure, do not like to be assaulted sexually by organized mobs, or subjected to other social pathologies that the refugees bring with them. Despite some objections, including some very vocal ones, Germans nonetheless will do what the Obrigkeit [Authority] tells them, just as they always have done.

Sadly, Germany is looking for redemption in all the wrong places. Its obsession with helping the refugees is not a mistake or a misjudgment, but an existential impulse so powerful that all the evidence in the world of the baleful effects of this policy will not outweigh it. There is no dissuading the Germans from hastening their own destruction. They can only stand as a terrifying example for the rest of us.

David Goldman is an American economist, author and a principle of Asia Times HK,LTD

A Palestinian terrorist threw a firebomb at a passing car in Jerusalem. As a result, three civilians were wounded – two men lightly and a young woman moderately.

An Israeli woman, 27, was moderately wounded Monday night when a Palestinian terrorist threw a Molotov cocktail at her car on the Ben Zion Netanyahu interchange on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Her husband, who was with her, escaped unharmed.

Another man was lightly wounded after the driver of the burning car lost control and hit him. A third man was lightly injured after attempting to extinguish the flames. He sustained burns and inhaled smoke.

The car was completely consumed by the fire.

The wounded woman was rushed to Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center in Jerusalem. A hospital spokesperson said she was being treated for second- and third-degree burns on 25 percent of her body, mostly on the lower limbs. “We will determine in the coming days the course of treatment,” depending on the severity of the burns,” she added.

Terror Attacks Against Israelis Occur Regularly

There are similar terrorist incidents at the site of the attack on a regular basis.

“Every rock and every fire bomb thrown is a severe terror attack, which we will not accept,” stated Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. “We will not succumb to terror nor alter our daily routine.”

All summer events in the capital will continue as scheduled.

Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben Dahan said he expects “all those who condemned the terror events over the weekend to condemn the attack that took place this evening, which injured two people and miraculously did not lead to deaths.”

“There is no Jewish terror or Arab terror, there is just terror — and it kills,” Dahan asserted. He was referring to the widespread condemnation voiced by Israel’s leadership and protests across the country in the wake of the death of a Palestinian baby when his house caught fire. Security forces suspect that Jewish terrorists ignited the flames.

Member of Knesset (MK) Tzipi Livni called for harsh action against the terrorists. “Facing terrorism, rock throwings and Molotov cocktails, it is now up to security forces to wield a heavy fist to find and punish these criminals and thwart any future attacks,” she said on Tuesday.

In a separate incident, Palestinian terrorists threw several firebombs at an Israeli bus in the Hebron area on Monday. They missed their target.

There were also numerous incidents of rock-throwing and firebombing of Israeli citizens at various locations throughout the country. They go unreported because they end without incident and are regarded by the security forces as routine.

By: Max Gelber, United with Israel

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