‘The Death of Klinghoffer’— an apology for terrorism
On Saturday night, a controversial work premiered at the English National Opera in London. One hundred and ninety seven members of the press packed the seats — the entire playhouse was sold out. This...
View ArticleA letter to Catherine Ashton
Lady Ashton, On behalf of the over 400,000 members of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, we express indignation at your utterly insensitive statement to a Palestinian youth group on Monday, immediately...
View ArticleThe people of Saturday and the French elections
Eighty years ago, a series of elections in the inter-war democratic Weimar Republic empowered extremist factions of right and left. Economic disaster, shattered national identity and racial...
View ArticleFrench Jews, between the right and the hard left
In May 1981, Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s long reign as president of France ended with the election of François Mitterand. Giscard later claimed that he had lost his presidency eight months earlier, with...
View ArticleAt the Olympics, silence is golden
On the 40th anniversary of the Munich atrocity, we were outraged at the callous refusal by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), to mark a moment of silence — in memory of the 11 murdered Israeli...
View ArticleHolocaust memory as a fig leaf for modern hate
The fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 aroused a euphoric debate about the city’s post-Communist future. In a Die Zeit op-ed entitled “Berlin as Federal Capital of Germany, Yes or No,” I argued...
View ArticleLetter to Kofi Annan the Elder
Mr Kofi Annan, Chairman The Elders Foundation, London, UK Mr Annan, We have noted your election last week in Dublin as Chairman of The Elders, a group billed as “independent global leaders working...
View ArticleChancellor Merkel: End abuse of Kristallnacht
Madam Federal Chancellor, We are about to mark the 75th anniversary of the KristallnachtReichspogrom (the Night of Broken Glass State Pogrom) which is considered the prelude to the Nazi Holocaust. The...
View ArticleEU disowns the ‘EU working definition of anti-Semitism’
The European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in 2005, with input from many Jewish experts and organizations, released its “Working Definition of Antisemitism”. This had been...
View ArticleToday a boil has burst in Paris: ‘Jew, France is not yours!’
On 10 May 1990, the Carpentras Jewish cemetery was desecrated. A two week old grave was dug up and the body impaled on an umbrella. In a wave of public revulsion, Socialist President Francois...
View ArticleFrom the Copernic Synagoge Bombing to the Brussels Jewish Museum Slaughter:...
From the Paris Copernic Synagogue in October 1980 until the Rue deRosiers Jewish Quarter massacre of August 1982, there were 73 attacksagainst Jewish targets in Western EuropeThis antisemtism –...
View ArticleIntifada and Jewish Defence in France
Last month,I attended a Gaza solidarity march of 15,000 marchers through central Paris. Young French-born Muslims burned the Israeli flag, waving posters of the President of the Jewish community as a...
View ArticleDoes Britain Seek a Mandate over Palestine? An Open Letter to David Cameron
Mr. Prime Minister, Born and bred a British-Jew, I have often been confused in dealing with that hyphenated identity in the context of UK policy. Last month you led a “light brigade” to Edinburgh to...
View Article11 January Paris Demonstrates
Participating in the Paris march reminded me of another. In 1990, a recently buried cadaver in the Carpentras Jewish cemetery was exhumed by hate-infested vandals and propped on an umbrella. The then...
View ArticleMunich to Munich: A Symbol of Betrayal or Warning
The hash tag “Munich” evokes a key signpost to World War II. For the Jewish collective memory it symbolizes betrayal: – September 1938, Neville Chamberlain’s kowtow to Hitler, brandishing his umbrella,...
View ArticleBoris Nemtsov and Alberto Nisman: a Homage to the Victims
Though his mother is Jewish, the late Boris Nemtsov had been baptized by his Russian Orthodox grandfather. As a practicing Christian respectful of his Jewish heritage, he was a friend of Israel. I...
View ArticleIceland’s New Antisemitic Threshold – A Psychiatric Illness?
Iceland is more than its tourist posters of geysers, volcanoes, the singer Bjork and the Northern Lights. It has now stretched antisemitism to new outer limits, rendering it almost a psychiatric...
View ArticleNuremberg betrayed: ISIS and the International Criminal Court
Coming in the context of this 70th Yom HaShoah, the statement by Fatou Bensouda, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC): “…I have come to the conclusion that the jurisdictional basis...
View ArticleArgentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman is no Theodor Herzl
Argentine Foreign Minister,Hector Timerman, has demonstrably and “irrevocably” excommunicated himself from the AMIA – Argentina’s premiere Jewish welfare, education and burial society – demolished by...
View Article“Mr. Palestinian Terrorist” – You Have no Place in Football
On 6 December 2001, at an International Commission of Jurists session on the boycott of Israel held at the United Nations in Geneva, Jibril Rajoub physically threatened me. With his fist at my chin,...
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