The Israeli-Palestinian conflict

[Gromovnik]

Now we're going to hear all about how the translation is completely wrong, because she in fact said "small snakes" instead of "little snakes" or some such absurdity.

[sumskilz]

Now we're going to hear all about how the translation is completely wrong, because she in fact said "small snakes" instead of "little snakes" or some such absurdity.

Ayelet Shaked didn't say any of it. She posted an essay written by a journalist named Uri Elitzur (who never himself published it). The translations are fine, except that they're cobbled together out of separate bits and pieces without giving any indication that this was done, which is itself an unethical journalistic practice. In this case, it obscures nuance and context rather than changes meaning of the individual sentences.

This is my translation of the full text of what she posted:

The Palestinian people have declared war on us, and we must respond with war. Not an operation, not a slow-moving one, not low-intensity, not controlled escalation, no destruction of terror infrastructure, no targeted killings. Enough of the vague references. This is a war. Words have meanings. This is a war. It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started it.

I don’t know why it’s so difficult for us to define reality with the simple words that language has made available to us. Why should we invent a new name for the war every other week, just to avoid calling it by its name. What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people are the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, are the enemy. A declaration of war is not a war crime. Responding to war certainly is not. Nor is the use of the word “war”, nor a clear definition who the enemy is. On the contrary: the morality of war (yes, there is such a thing) is founded on the assumption that there are wars in this world, that war is not an ordinary situation, and that in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.

And the morality of war knows that it is impossible to refrain from hurting enemy civilians. It does not condemn the British air force, which bombed and totally destroyed the German city of Dresden, or the US planes that destroyed the cities of Poland and wrecked half of Budapest, places whose wretched residents had never done evil to America, but which had to be destroyed in order to win the war against evil. The morals of war do not call for the prosecution of Russia, though it bombs and destroys towns and neighborhoods in Chechnya. It does not denounce the UN Peacekeeping Forces for killing hundreds of civilians in Angola, nor the NATO forces who bombed Milosevic’s Belgrade, a city with a million civilians, elderly, babies, women, and children. The morals of war accept as correct in principle, not only politically, what America has done in Afghanistan, including the massive bombing of populated settlements, including the creation of a refugee stream of hundreds of thousands of people who escaped the horrors of war, and thousands left with no home to return to.

And in our war this is twice as true, because the enemy soldiers hide among the population, and it is only through its support that they can fight. Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor them and give their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

This week there are mourning and honor celebrations at two homes of two despicable killers. I suppose they opened mourning tents there, and all the dignitaries of the city have come to pay homage to the mother and father who raised the devil. These two houses need to be bombed from the air, with the intent to destroy and to kill. And it should be announced that this will be done from now on for every house of every martyr. Nothing would be more just, and probably nothing more effective. Every suicide [bomber] should know that he is taking his parents and his house and some of the neighbors with him. Every umm-Jihad heroine who sends her son to hell should know she is going with him. Along with the house and everything in it.

The prevention cannot be targeted. This is how it is in wars. What is targeted is not preventive and what is frustrating is not focused on. Neither have we started this nasty war nor can we end it. The keys to a ceasefire are in the hands of the Palestinian people. We can only burn their fingers until they want to use them.

There is a play on words in the last paragraph that can't be translated in that "prevention" and "frustration" are the same word (סיכול) from a verb meaning "to foil" or "to thwart". The same is true of "targeted" and "focused on" (ממוקד). The fact that the Israelis can't target the incitement, the support network, is the frustration. It isn't actually clear whether or not Uri Elitzur meant for the essay to be understood as a call for an expansion of who is seen as a legitimate target, or for total war, or maybe just for greater deterrence. He expresses the desire to see it done, says it should be done, yet he describes it as impossible. This is the frustration of the more powerful side who has no capability to end the conflict.

He's not wrong about the Palestinian people being the enemy, at least if it's qualified as most of them in the territories. They would not describe themselves any other way, and nearly every relevant public expression in their culture is centered around that fact. The reason it's wrong to target civilians isn't because they aren't enemies, it's because they aren't a direct threat.

There is no doubt that Shaked posted the essay because she found something meaningful in it or agreed with it in some way. This was her response to the criticism:

Sadly, the militant, leftist propaganda machine has not changed its tune, looking for every opportunity to make Israel the culprit in a war she did not desire and which she entered reluctantly, after days of increasing provocation. I refer specifically to "Daily Beast" writer Gideon Resnick, who so misrepresented the facts in one of my recent Facebook posts, one has to wonder if his hatred for my country hasn't rendered him outright useless to his website and his readers.

In a story headlined "Israeli Politician Declares War on the Palestinian People," Resnick actually suggested I compared Palestinian children to “little snakes,” and accused me of fomenting Palestinian genocide. This vilification was later picked up by several bloggers and reporters, all of whom were convinced of this frightening notion, without even a scrap of fact or truth.

Let's start with my July 1 Facebook post. It was written some 12 years ago, but never published, by a dear man, the recently departed journalist Uri Elitzur. The gist of his article was that once one side in a war attacks the other side's civilians, they can no longer morally claim a special status for their own civilians.

Go ahead, ask a Hebrew speaking friend to translate it for you, they'll confirm this is what my Facebook post was about. But you'll find not a trace of that in Resnick's account. Perhaps it's his own ignorance of the Hebrew language. After all, he got the text from Electronic Intifada, a website dedicated to daily and hourly vilification of my country.

All Resnick had to do to make Elitzur's sober, legally minded discussion sound like a speech made by Hitler himself, was to cherry pick words out of context. A call for the indiscriminate killing of children is a terrible thing. But what if the statement was that any time you kill our children, you're exposing your own children to the same fate? Still unsettling, but rational when you consider that they purposely use their kids as human shields. It's not a call for indiscriminate murder.

Now you can believe that's her honest interpretation/intention or not (if you're a misogynist #BelieveAllWomen), but even Haaretz recognized that:

In a status update on her Facebook page a few days later, she wrote that whoever killed the Palestinian teen deserved the same punishment as any other “cold-blooded” murderer of innocents: life in prison with no pardon.

So Ayelet Shaked is the new interior minister. She used to be the justice minister.

Smells like democracy to me:

[Gromovnik]

Yeah, most of what she said is quite horrible and substantially not that different than the words atributed (allegedly) to her.

[PointOfViewGun]

Even sumskilz can't spin it enough without making it too obvious to avoid showing that she advocated for killing families of fighters. From his translation:

Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

And this is Electronic Intifada's translation:

Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

Looks like sumskilz copied from them.

Thats the crux of matter; justifying deliberate targeting of civilians. She tries to spin it as if it was merely a moralistic argument which clearly wasn't in the text she posted earlier. This is what we see with a lot of "Western" racists. They make a vile statement and then try to piggy back with a pathetic excuse. The "Eastern" racists should learn from them.

[sumskilz]

Even sumskilz can't spin it enough without making it too obvious to avoid showing that she advocated for killing families of fighters.

Uri Elitzur was a man. A man who advocated for annexing the entire West Bank and granting citizenship and equal rights to all the Palestinians living there. What's with the misgendering?

This is the second time in the thread that a portion of one of my translations being identical or close to identical to some partisan anti-Israel publication's translation was presented as evidence of my dishonesty, another real gotcha moment.

[PointOfViewGun]

Uri Elitzur was a man. A man who advocated for annexing the entire West Bank and granting citizenship and equal rights to all the Palestinians living there. What's with the misgendering?
This is the second time in the thread that a portion of one of my translations being identical or close to identical to some partisan anti-Israel publication's translation was presented as evidence of my dishonesty, another real gotcha moment.

I wasn't referring to Elitzur but to Shaked as it was her post. She chose to post that portion. Just because it was originally Shaked's words it doesn't alleviate her responsibility. No misgendering there. I didn't point at your dishonesty as well. It was more of a jab at how Shaked tried to belittle people's knowledge on Jewish language. If you really need a cop out and try to make it personal the way you tried to now, maybe its more suiting that Shaked was having a gotcha moment with you. Why you'd try to defend such a person is beyond me.

[sumskilz]

I wasn't referring to Elitzur but to Shaked as it was her post. She chose to post that portion.

She posted the whole essay, see here. You can Google translate it to see that it is the whole thing.

[PointOfViewGun]

She posted the whole essay, see here. You can Google translate it to see that it is the whole thing.

I didn't say she didn't post the whole, but she did chose to post that portion. Not that the rest of it is free of any other such instances. Its deplorable at every turn.

[Ludicus]

What is at stake... and what isn’t. What isn’t: Israel's survival and security.
Let us briefly consider what is at stake: how far can Israel go in trying to erase Palestinians?
Those pesky Palestinians need to read the Old Testament.They need to understand that the coming of the Messiah will be associated with the rebuilding of Temple, a Messianic age of peace, and the ingathering of Jews to their homeland. In the words of Danny Danon, Israel ambassador to the UN (2019), God gave the land (including the west Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem) to the people of Israel in Genesis, when he made a covenant with Abraham. Biden the blasphemer said he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state that includes West Bank land as demarcated by pre-1967 borders.
Israeli settlers believe God is on their side. "In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates."
---
---
Quotation from the beginning of the Israeli illegal occupation of West Bank, “It was decided to carry out the enumeration from house to house under curfew…The enumerator marked the doors of the houses enumerated with chalk to ensure an orderly and complete coverage.
—(Israeli) Central Bureau of Statistics, West Bank of the Jordan, Gaza Strip, and Northern Sinai, Golan Height Removing Borders, Erasing Palestinians: Israeli Population
By Jess Bier, assistant professor of urban sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she studies the social and political landscapes of science and technology. Read the full paper.
Excerpt,

How Israeli population cartography incorporated Palestinians through the very act of erasing them.
Bachi’s work wasn’t a case of “bad science” but rather a case of how science itself is political, how a violent politics and the scientific goal of rationalization were made to align. If the push to conduct a census after the 1967 war demonstrates a tacit acknowledgment of Palestinians’ existence, the census also aimed to limit the number of Palestinians who were allowed to remain. As Anat Leibler, a researcher who specializes in the study of quantification, has shown, one of the primary motivations for conducting the census so quickly was to prevent those who had fled during the conflict from returning.
...But the tension between maintaining supposed empirical rigor, on the one hand, and adapting his methodology to the people and landscapes so that they might further the simultaneous oppression and erasure of Palestinians by the Israeli government, on the other hand, is one that continued through the adoption of GIS in the region. Rather than furthering goals of equality and justice, GIS was mobilized to rationalize Israeli state violence against Palestinians that sadly continues to this day.

[Cope]

What is at stake... and what isn’t. What isn’t: Israel's survival and security.
Let us briefly consider what is at stake: how far can Israel go in trying to erase Palestinians?
Those pesky Palestinians need to read the Old Testament.They need to understand that the coming of the Messiah will be associated with the rebuilding of Temple, a Messianic age of peace, and the ingathering of Jews to their homeland. In the words of Danny Danon, Israel ambassador to the UN (2019), God gave the land (including the west Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem) to the people of Israel in Genesis, when he made a covenant with Abraham. Biden the blasphemer said he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state that includes West Bank land as demarcated by pre-1967 borders.
Israeli settlers believe God is on their side. "In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates."
---
---
Quotation from the beginning of the Israeli illegal occupation of West Bank, “It was decided to carry out the enumeration from house to house under curfew…The enumerator marked the doors of the houses enumerated with chalk to ensure an orderly and complete coverage.
—(Israeli) Central Bureau of Statistics, West Bank of the Jordan, Gaza Strip, and Northern Sinai, Golan Height Removing Borders, Erasing Palestinians: Israeli Population
By Jess Bier, assistant professor of urban sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she studies the social and political landscapes of science and technology. Read the full paper.
Excerpt,

Interesting that this new "criticism" focuses on Israeli cartography when there’s still been no acknowledgement of the misleading maps posted here which the NYT were forced to concede were inaccurate.

[Infidel144]

Those pesky Palestinians need to read the Old Testament.They need to understand that the coming of the Messiah will be associated with the rebuilding of Temple, a Messianic age of peace, and the ingathering of Jews to their homeland.

And these...:

"Enter then, my people, the Holy Land that God has ordained for you, and do not turn back, or you will suffer."
or
"And We said unto the Children of Israel after him: Dwell in the land; but when the promise of the Hereafter cometh to pass We shall bring you as a crowd gathered out of various nations."

...probably more relevant than:

In the words of Danny Danon, Israel ambassador to the UN (2019), God gave the land (including the west Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem) to the people of Israel in Genesis, when he made a covenant with Abraham. Biden the blasphemer said he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state that includes West Bank land as demarcated by pre-1967 borders.
Israeli settlers believe God is on their side. "In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates."

[Ludicus]

Interesting that this new "criticism" focuses on Israeli cartography...

The criticism is valid, and not new.Palestinian forms of empirical knowledge, including maps, continue to be discounted.It's the science of exclusion: PDF) The Uncounted: Citizenship and Exclusion in the Israeli -full text.
By Ana Leiblar,Bar Ilan University, Israel- and Daniel Breslau, Virginia Tech..."and the statistical outlook by which the nation is composed of interchangeable equivalent individuals for whom ethnic or national identity is but an individual variable, has no doubt contributed for legitimating the denial of basic rights to the nearly three million Palestinians living under occupation, who are excluded from the citizenship"

-----

Shaked posted,
Sadly, the militant, leftist propaganda machine has not changed its tune,

The reactionary nationalistic Israeli right is poorly placed to give lessons on human rights or to give lessons in democracy to the left or to anyone. Here, the left initiated the nationality law of return in 2015. For this reason, many new Sephardi citizens in October of 2019 voted for the Socialist Party.
New citizenship in hand, Israelis vote from abroad in Portuguese elections -The Times of Israel

... Daphna Gafni, who got her citizenship about a year ago, voted by absentee ballot in Sunday’s election and said she had been surprised to open her mailbox last month to find a Portuguese ballot inside. Gafni said that while she hadn’t expected to receive the right to vote from abroad, she very much appreciated it. “It makes you feel like it’s your country,” she said. Israeli-Portuguese citizens can also vote in the Portuguese embassy in Israel.
Two days before the election, Paulo Tomaz, a 32-year-old lawyer and activist with the Socialist party, was canvassing for last-minute votes on the promenade in Espinho, a suburb of the northern city of Porto with an expansive wooden boardwalk along the Atlantic Ocean. He said he was glad to hear that some new Israeli-Portuguese citizens are exercising their right to vote in Portugal for the first time. “We can’t remake history, but we can remake the future.”

This is what democracy looks like.

[swabian]

This is what democracy looks like.

No, this is how the abuse of naive people looks like. Do you think the Australians or New Zealanders would suffer that nonsense?

[nhytgbvfeco2]

The reactionary nationalistic Israeli right is poorly placed to give lessons on human rights or to give lessons in democracy to the left or to anyone. Here, the left initiated the nationality law of return in 2015. For this reason, many new Sephardi citizens in October of 2019 voted for the Socialist Party.
New citizenship in hand, Israelis vote from abroad in Portuguese elections -The Times of Israel


This is what democracy looks like.

How many Israelis voted in the Portuguese election, I wonder? And how many of them voted for the socialists?
And yes, your country gives out free EU citizenship to people who have no intention of coming to live there. We know, you mention this in every thread on Israel.

[Ludicus]

how many of them voted for the socialists?

Irrelevant.The majority, I think, according to a Jewish source.

your country gives out free EU citizenship to people who have no intention of coming to live there

According to Michael Rothwell, a board member of the Jewish Community in Porto "The spirit of the law was never that of forced migration"
Now that you mention it,last year, Portugal's ruling party looks to limit Jewish law of return policy
The Socialist Party submitted a draft amendment to a 2013 law,to limit naturalization to those who have stayed legally in Portugal for at least two years.
So, what happened? the supreme irony: the Portuguese right announced its vote against the changes to the law,the Portuguese Jews leaders and organizations weren't happy, so, the Socialist Party decided not to change the law but to adapt new regulations that would specify an "objective connection" with Portugal.All's well that ends well,
Michael Rothwell, a board member of the Jewish Community in Porto,

The Socialist Party and the government are to be congratulated on finally coming to their senses on this issue, which must lead to a strengthening, and not the destruction, of the law

---
Slowly, the Jewish community is thriving,
Exodus? The Jewish community in this European city is thriving...

While most European countries are contending with declines in their Jewish populations, one Portuguese community is experiencing a remarkable renewal some 500 years after the Inquisition

More? The first Holocaust Museum in Iberia- Museum of the Holocaust opened on 5th April (Porto) and offers free

And learn this: in the early middle ages, 20% of my home country was Jewish.Just out of curiosity, two Portuguese Jews led the examination of Columbus and rejected him as a charlatan.
A Jewish document,Report of the Public Advisory Committee for Examining Israel’s Approach Regarding Worldwide Communities with Affinity to the Jewish People.

...For more than a generation, forced converts were not interrogated or tested as to the extent of their adherence to Christianity... and preserve their Jewish identity...This framework of existence enabled and even promoted the emergence of extraordinary phenomena relating to clandestine observance of Judaism among Portugal’s Jews over a lengthy period of time as far as quality and scope, and remains unparalleled in Jewish history, and perhaps in overall human history, as described below...It is not the Jews who were left in Spain but rather, the Jews of Portugal...The descendants of Portuguese conversos were so outstanding in the 16th and 17th centuries in international commerce that they were called “The Portuguese nation” by others, so much so that the term “Portuguese” became a synonym for Jews in the commercial centers worldwide.... It also enabled a community definition that did not emphasize the degree of religious devotion, but rather the common national origin”.

----
But its also true that true that the Arab rulers of southern Iberia set out achieve mass literacy. Filomena Barros, a professor of Medieval History at the University of Evora, explains that, contrary to dominant versions of history and long-standing myths, Muslims were not outsiders."It’s dangerous to appropriate this for nationalist propaganda", especially in light of the rise of the far-right across Europe.
Joseph Abraham Levi -The George Washington University. Muslim Science as the Source of the Portuguese Age of Discoveries
In his article Joseph Abraham Levi analyses the Jewish, mostly Sephardic, and Islamic contributions to science and their legacy in Iberia, particularly present-day Portugal.

---
A pertinent question:Does Europe's far right hate Muslims the same way they hate Jews? Haaretz
it’s always the same old story, Why America's antisemites can hate Jews but still claim to admire Israel.

Yair Lapid insisted: “There are no two sides. When neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville with antisemitic slogans against Jews and for white supremacy, the denouncement is unequivocal.” But Netanyahu took three days to come up with a condemnation of neo-nazism, slipped out in an English-language tweet. Should it really have been so difficult for an Israeli PM to condemn nazism?

Italy: Police dismantle antisemitic neo-Nazi group planning NATO facility attack

Germany says antisemitic crimes up 15% in 2020, far-right attacks on the rise- Times of Israel...

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said far-right crime rose 5.65% in 2020. “This shows again that right-wing extremism is the biggest threat for our country”.

INSS Israel Antisemitism Rising Among American Right-Wing Extremists- Tel Aviv University



Excerpts,

...A new, particularly violent movement called “accelerationism” has arisen in the last five years... accelerationists see “modern society as irredeemable and believe it should be pushed to collapse so a fascist society built on ethnonationalism can take its place” (Miller, 2020)... By 2020, nearly every American federal law enforcement agency including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the National Counterterrorism Center has gone on record saying that white supremacy is the greatest terrorism threat Americans face, even greater now than ISIS or Al Qaeda (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 2020). American Jews also seem well aware of rising antisemitism and the threat it poses to the community.
Although the US government security agencies realize the seriousness of the threat, little was done to counter it under the Trump administration. In fact, Trump was a major purveyor of noxious ideas, pushing xenophobia, anti-Muslim hatred, and even posts from neo-Nazi social media accounts from his Twitter feed and refusing to address the issue of the growing white supremacy movement

[nhytgbvfeco2]

Irrelevant.The majority, I think, according to a Jewish source.

Are you really going to talk about relevancy when the entire rest of your post is irrelevant to anything I said or the topic of the thread?
I was just asking out of interest.

According to Michael Rothwell, a board member of the Jewish Community in Porto "The spirit of the law was never that of forced migration"
Now that you mention it,last year, Portugal's ruling party looks to limit Jewish law of return policy
The Socialist Party submitted a draft amendment to a 2013 law,to limit naturalization to those who have stayed legally in Portugal for at least two years.
So, what happened? the supreme irony: the Portuguese right announced its vote against the changes to the law,the Portuguese Jews leaders and organizations weren't happy, so, the Socialist Party decided not to change the law but to adapt new regulations that would specify an "objective connection" with Portugal.All's well that ends well,

To be fair, the law does little to actually benefit Portugal. It's not like a lot of Israelis will jump on the opportunity to migrate to a state with a significantly lower HDI and half the GDP per capita.

And learn this: in the early middle ages, 20% of my home country was Jewish.Just out of curiosity, two Portuguese Jews led the examination of Columbus and rejected him as a charlatan.

20% sounds absurdly high, you sure? Maybe 20% of Lisbon/Porto?

Germany says antisemitic crimes up 15% in 2020, far-right attacks on the rise- Times of Israel...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Germany labels attacks by Islamists as far-right when it comes to these statistics.

[sumskilz]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Germany labels attacks by Islamists as far-right when it comes to these statistics.

You're not wrong:

Curiously, however, some of the incidents documented at the Quds Day march in Berlin have been classified by authorities as forms of far-right anti-Semitism, independent watchdog groups have discovered.

Critics say the march example and other mislabeled incidents are facilitating attempts to politicize anti-Semitism and complicating the apparently losing battle to solve it.

“It means we can’t really use the official statistics on anti-Semitism in Germany,” Daniel Poensgen, a researcher at the Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism, or RIAS, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Germany’s Interior Ministry did not respond to JTA’s request for comment.

Doubts about the ministry’s methodology have become more pronounced as its data have increasingly diverged with information from across Western Europe — and from the perceptions of German Jews themselves.

Last month, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said that supporters of far-right groups were responsible for about 90 percent of the 1,800 recorded anti-Semitic incidents recorded in Germany in 2018, a 20 percent increase over the previous year.

In France, by contrast, more than half of anti-Semitism incidents, and virtually all the violent ones, are perpetrated by immigrants from Muslim countries or their descendants, according to the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism.

In Britain, the Community Security Trust suggests that far-right perpetrators are responsible for 50-60 percent of the incidents where victims offered a physical description of their attackers. This happened in about 30 percent of 1,652 cases in 2018, a 19 percent hike from the previous year.

In the Netherlands, the previous director of CIDI, the country’s foremost watchdog on anti-Semitism, said that Muslims and Arabs are responsible for about 70 percent of all cases recorded in any given year.

In a 2016 survey of hundreds of German Jews who had experienced anti-Semitic incidents, 41 percent said the perpetrator was “someone with a Muslim extremist view” and another 16 percent said it was someone from the far left. Only 20 percent identified their aggressors as belonging to the far-right.

“There is clearly a mismatch here, and it speaks to the inaccuracy of the German official statistics,” the RIAS researcher Poensgen said.

Poensgen said his watchdog organization has talked to officials about the statistics problem.

“There was interest in our criticism, it was listened to and studied, but till now [there’s] severe reluctance on the federal level to change their category system,” Poensgen said.

Confidence in German authorities was undermined in 2014 when a German court ruled that anti-Semitism was not behind the attempt by three Palestinians to set fire to a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal. (A higher court affirmed the ruling in 2017.)

To some critics, there is a political dimension to the apparent reluctance of German authorities to blame anti-Semitism on Muslim immigrants. Surveys suggest that group is considerably more anti-Semitic than non-immigrants, or at least more open about it.

But “the new Muslim anti-Semitism is taboo, as addressing it would only strengthen opponents of immigration,” Krisztina Koenen, a journalist for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and der Welt, wrote in an analysis she published in March in the Hungarian-Jewish magazine Neokohn.

The government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced considerable criticism, including that she is importing anti-Semitism, over her decision to let in more than 2 million immigrants from Syria and the Middle East since 2015.

Last year, a German federal entity went to some pains to refute the claim about importing anti-Semitism. The study by the Berlin-based EVZ foundation claims that there is no connection between anti-Semitism and immigration, despite claims by some Jews to the contrary.

The conclusion prompted scathing criticism by Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international affairs for the American Jewish Committee and the point man on anti-Semitism of the OSCE intergovernmental organization. He said the report’s authors “ignore the data, dismiss the problem, and blame the victims.”

Poensgen doubted that official German statistics are being deliberately mislabeled for political purposes.

“Most likely it’s the result of an out-of-date classification system, that for historical reasons is designed to monitor far-right anti-Semitism,” he said.

He cited one case in 2014 in which about 20 men shouted the Nazi slogan “Sieg heil” at an al-Quds Day march, an annual pro-Palestinian event where the mostly Muslim participants typically chant anti-Israel and anti-American slogans. The episode appears as a far-right incident in the Interior Ministry’s records.

Such mislabeling does, however, help the German far-right’s attempt to discredit the government, Poensgen said.

RIAS uses a more nuanced classification system than the government’s, he said. Last year, it indicated that the far-right was responsible for about 18 percent of anti-Semitic hate crimes where perpetrators could be affiliated with a population group or ideology. Islamists and anti-Israel activists accounted for about 11 percent of 1,083 cases last year in Berlin (RIAS limited its 2018 monitor report to that city). Other perpetrator categories included conspiracy theorists, the far left and centrists.

The political affiliation of about half of the cases were classified as unknown.

German authorities have made attempts to address Muslim anti-Semitism specifically. The top intelligence agency in Germany recently published a 40-page analysis of rising anti-Semitism by Islamist extremists that was welcomed by Jewish leaders.

But the government’s system for classifying anti-Semitic incidents is flawed, said Laszlo Bernat Veszpremy, who has researched anti-Semitism among recent immigrants to Europe in a paper published by the Budapest Migration Research Institute.

It has five categories: right-wing, left-wing, foreign ideology, religious ideology and unknown, which is rarely used.

“The problem is that Islam is not mentioned anywhere, so Islamist or ‘pro-Palestine’ attacks, which could motivate Muslim or Arab perpetrators, can go in at least three categories: right-wing (nationalist), foreign (secular) or religious,” Veszpremy told JTA.

“The de facto situation is that pretty much any anti-Semitic incident in Germany is automatically attributed to the far right because of how the classification system works.”

Germany Is Accused Of Downplaying Anti-Semitic Attacks By Muslims

[Ludicus]

To be fair, the law does little to actually benefit Portugal.

The law wasn't made to "benefit" the country.When we have the power to repair an injustice, we should do that.. The right of return is for Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin around the world.For example, 17,000 Sephardic Jews currently live in Turkey. 2.000 applied for Portuguese nationality.

20% sounds absurdly high, you sure? Maybe 20% of Lisbon/Porto?

No, in the early 14th century, more than 200,000 Jews lived in Portugal, which was about 20 percent of the total population, according to Jewish sources.

half the GDP per capita.

True. It's also true that cumulative U.S. aid to Israel for FY1951 through FY2020 helped a lot.

----------

The de facto situation is that pretty much any anti-Semitic incident in Germany is automatically attributed to the far right because of how the classification system works.

Automatically attributed to the far right? doesn't make sense.

Far-right group sought to trigger 'civil war' situation, German ...

Trial of 12 ‘openly Nazi’ men accused of planning a series of terror attacks opens in Stuttgart.Some have tattoos bearing Nazi symbols, including a swastika, an image of Hitler in uniform, the word “Aryan” and the Imperial war flag of the German empire.

I guess they are Muslims in disguise. More Muslims in disguise, Far-Right Groups Are Behind Most U.S. Terrorist Attacks ...

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I never understood the fascination of the American/ Israeli right with right-wing nazistoid dictatorships, and the hostility toward democratic socialists.
Dictators have reemerged as the greatest threat to the liberal- Whashington Post
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The Salazar dictatorship did not forge diplomatic ties with Israel. We were forced to wait until the revolution of 1974 in order to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries, Mário Soares began this process. At that time, the Arab League threatened to cut diplomatic relations with us, and threatened an oil boycott.
The death of Yitzhak Rabin took place on 4 November 1995. Read the address of Mário Soares,leader of the Socialist Party and President of Portugal, to the Knesset, three days before the assassination. He was a friend of Rabin, Wiesel and Shimon Peres. In fact, both Rabin and Soares were longtime friends and had lunch together on the day of Rabin's assassination. It was Rabin's last lunch.
Address of the President of Portugal, Mário Soares to the Knesset

Read the full text. Some excerpts.

(...) My family is a family with a republican and liberal tradition, and since I was a teenager I participated in the struggle against oppression and in favor of the noble values of liberty, respect for the other and the different, tolerance and solidarity. These struggles made me very familiar with prisons, torture and deportations. It is obvious, therefore, why I understand the persecutions so well. This past of mine explains why I felt obligated, as president of the Republic of Portugal, to ask in Portugal's name forgiveness from the Jews for the persecutions they fell victim to during the Inquisition and in its aftermath, although those were more concealed persecutions. s. In this request for forgiveness, it is inconceivable to me that it is possible to apologize for the unforgivable or to fix the unfixable. My only desire is to stir the conscience of my compatriots and cause them to accept responsibility and reconciliation with an act of justice; a lone but symbolic act. With this act toward the Jewish community and an ancient nation that was rehabilitated, I wanted to prove that following the democratic revolution of April 25, 1974 Portugal is now a free, open and tolerant country which has returned to its ancient tradition of humanism.

The Holocaust of the Jewish people in this century shows what horrors fanaticism and racism can lead to in the name of totalitarian ideologies. I honor here the memory of the millions of Jews who fell victim to the Nazi persecutions and other persecutions. My intention in mentioning these atrocities is to contribute to preventing them from ever happening again. As my esteemed friend Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel said - by virtue of the status his past has granted him – "To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice."

It is not an exaggeration to quote him, particularly when racism, the hatred of foreigners and religious fundamentalism are resurfacing from different sides and are succeeding in establishing themselves and posing a threat within a wave of intolerance which proves how short some people's memory is, and how much this memory continues to be short.

For ideological reasons, the Salazar dictatorship did not forge diplomatic ties with Israel....By virtue of my role as foreign minister I began this process, which I had the honor of completing while serving as prime minister.

As deputy president of the Socialist International I was appointed by Willy Brandt to monitor the problems in the Middle East because I visited the region - and particularly Israel, your country - on several occasions. These [visits] allowed me to establish ties with political parties and distinguished figures such as Golda Meir, Abba Eban, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, as well as with my friends Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.
Therefore, I followed from up close the development of the peace process in the Middle East. As fate would have it, two of these figures, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, played - with a lot of courage and with a very realistic approach – a decisive role in the launching of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

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Rabin didn't think Israelis should settle the West Bank. Read what happened in that day- later on the day, 4 November, in Gaza. Use google translate.According to Soares, Rabin's death was not the turning point in the breakdown of the peace process. That happened later, with the election of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Assassínio de Yitzahk Rabin deixou-me no centro do furacão ...

In 2002, Soares resigns from European pro-Israel lobby - Haaretz Com
And denounced Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the construction of colonial settlements.The Israeli’s right to a homeland- to exist-is undeniable, but so is the right of the Palestinian people to survival as an independent nation.

[Ludicus]

...

Blatantly off-topic, sorry.Now that the world is dangerously on the brink of a world war, let's leave aside for a moment people and politics. I hope you like it.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Half Israeli and half Portuguese Al'Fado - Encounters of Ladino & Fado - Al'Fado
Al’Fado is a fresh Israeli-Portuguese ensemble based in the rich music scene of Lisbon. It focuses on music originating from the Iberian Peninsula, through the cultures of the medieval-times Hebrew communities and the chant in an ancient dialect of Spanish mixed with Portuguese and Hebrew called Ladino. 13 songs here, Nasimiento | Al'Fado

[nhytgbvfeco2]

And here I thought the thread was revived for the super cool star-wars-esque laser defense system Israel succesfully carried out a test for and how it's going to be integrated into the Iron dome system in a year or two and how drastically it would impact future conflicts with Gaza, but music is cool too