Anti-Semitic incidents down 12% worldwide, but rising in US, UK

 JTA

Researchers at Tel Aviv University say that while the number of violent attacks in Europe is falling, Jew hatred on American campuses is on the rise

Illustrative photo of Jews in Paris, January 12, 2015. (AFP Photo/Joel Saget)

The number of anti-Semitic incidents worldwide decreased by 12 percent in 2016 despite a spike in cases in the United Kingdom and the United States, Tel Aviv University’s watchdog on anti-Jewish racism said. The data was published Sunday, ahead of Israel’s national Holocaust Remembrance Day, in the annual “Antisemitism Worldwide” report by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University.

The report is a global overview combining surveys from recognized watchdogs from dozens of countries, including nearly all European Union member states. The decrease in the overall number of incidents mirrored a decline in the number of violent assaults, from 410 in 2015 to 361 the previous year, the report said.

Bucking the overall decrease in incidents from 2015 was the recording in 2016 of 1,309 incidents in the United Kingdom alone, constituting a 36 percent increase over the 2015 tally.

The Community Security Trust, the British-Jewish charity that compiles the report in Britain, said in February it could not attribute the increase to any single trigger, citing instead a “combination of events and factors,” including an unprecedented public debate about anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, terrorist attacks in Western countries and the June referendum in which a majority of voters supported a British exit from the European Union.

In the United States, “there was an alarming rise of 45 percent in anti-Semitic incidents on university campuses, where Jewish students are facing increasing hate and intolerance,” Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, said in a statement about the report.

The swastika daubed on the Jewish Community Center in northern Virginia, April 11, 2017. (Screenshot from NBC Washington via JTA)

It was a reference to a study conducted by the anti-Semitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative, which reviewed acts of anti-Semitism at 113 public and private colleges and universities with the largest Jewish undergraduate populations. Last year, 433 anti-Semitic incidents were reported, compared to 309 in 2015. However, the report’s findings and methodology were challenged by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, among other critics.

In Austria, where approximately 8,000 Jews live, the number of anti-Semitic incidents rose slightly in 2016 to 477 from 465 the previous year — when the figure had jumped by roughly 200, the country’s Forum Against anti-Semitism said.

In France, authorities recorded a 58 percent drop last year in anti-Semitic incidents in a report that identified only far-right perpetrators and questioned the existence of a new anti-Semitism by Muslims over Israel’s actions. The report attributed the decrease to the deployment of troops around Jewish institutions. In 2001, the SPCJ security group of the Jewish community documented a 71 percent decrease to 219 cases. In 2004, SPCJ recorded 974 incidents.

In addition to the French government’s explanation for the decrease, there is “the fact that more Jews avoid appearing in public spaces with identifying attributes such as Yarmulke and a Star of David,” the Kantor Center said in a statement about its report.

In addition to incidents perpetrated by culprits associated with far-right causes, many cases feature radical left-wing characteristics, Kantor said.

“We are now witnessing that the targeting of Jews is no longer the sole domain of the far right. The far-left are now using the same messages, tactics and agenda,” he said.

The four-and-a-half-hour Nazi documentary you can’t afford to miss

JORDAN HOFFMAN

First released 40 years ago, ‘The Memory of Justice’ uses the Nuremberg Trials as a springboard for unanswerable questions. A newly restored version will be streaming on HBO from April 24

NEW YORK — Marcel Ophuls demands your time. Moreover, the 89-year-old documentary film director, born in Germany and holding French and American citizenship, deserves it.

The son of German-Jewish director Max Ophuls (a giant of world cinema whose films include “The Earrings of Madame de…” and “Lola Montès”), Marcel began his career as an actor and assistant director to his father in France, where his family fled during World War II. He made some successful films, including the Jean-Paul Belmondo – Jeanne Moreau romp “Banana Peel,” but in time he turned toward documentaries, making some of the most important works about the 20th century’s darkest moments.

His most lasting achievements can be seen as a trilogy. In 1969 he released “The Sorrow and the Pity,” a penetrating exposé into the culture of French collaboration during WWII. If you remember the “Annie Hall” joke about “a four-hour documentary on Nazis,” this is the one they are talking about. And that length is actually selling it a tad short.

In 1988 he won the Academy Award for “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbi,” a thorough examination into the life of the Nazi war criminal, his capture and trial. It’s four hours and 27 minutes, and absolutely staggering.

In between these two highly-regarded works was a middle child: “The Memory of Justice,” released in 1976. A bold and philosophical project, Ophuls himself recently referred to it as “flopp[ing] pretty badly when it came out [but] the best work I ever did in my life, or at any rate the most personal and the most sincere of my films.”

Thanks to Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and a handful of other organizations, this four hour and 38-minute movie — the longest of the bunch — was recently retrieved from the vault, cleaned up, given new subtitles and had all the original audio reinstated, ridding it of dubs.

So, what is “The Memory of Justice”?

Much of it focuses on the Nuremberg Trials, but it is far more than a beat-by-beat explanation of that process. It uses Nuremberg as a springboard to ask unanswerable questions. What is justice in the face of an atrocity like the Holocaust? Should the victors in a war be the ones to sit in judgement? And how can those same victors charge people with the death of innocents after blasting Dresden and Hiroshima to bits?

Director Marcel Ophuls in a still from his movie ‘The Memory of Justice.’ (Courtesy HBO)

read more: The four-and-a-half-hour Nazi documentary you can’t afford to miss

It Will Only Be Weeks Before The NSA Starts Using THESE!

    Technion

The Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, is a place not only for high level technology students to work hard. It’s a place of creativity and innovation. There is no other way to explain these incredible robots they designed, which mimic almost perfectly the movement of phenomenon which are found naturally in the world.
The number of possible applications of these robots is incalculable. The snake robots are already being used in surgery on organs which are hard to reach and to search for survivors of natural disasters in building ruins. It is clear how many of these robots could be used to fight terror organizations and criminals, and to gather intelligence information.

These ingenious robots, created by the Technion’s finest students and professors of the Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science departments, are a glimpse into the future, opening a multitude of possibilities to help make our world a better, safer, and more enjoyable place.

23,544 fallen Israeli soldiers

Arutz Sheva Staf

Defense Ministry publishes casualty statistics for all operations in defense of Israel and the pre-state Jewish community since 1860.

Mt. HerzlFlash 90

On the eve of Israel’s 57th Memorial Day, the Defense Ministry published the official figures of the number of fallen soldiers in Israel.

Twenty-three thousand, five hundred and forty four Jewish and Israeli soldiers, policemen, and guards have fallen in defense of the State of Israel and the pre-state Jewish community from 1860, when the Jewish community of Jerusalem expanded beyond the walls of the Old City and began to provide its own security, until today.

Sixty casualties have been added to the number of fallen soldiers since last Memorial Day (May 6, 2016), Additionally, 37 IDF veterans died over the past year as a result of injuries they received in combat.

The number of bereaved families in Israel in 2017 includes 9,157 bereaved parents, 4,881 widows of IDF soldiers and security forces, 1,843 orphans under to the age of 30, and thousands of bereaved and orphaned children over the age of 30.

A one-minute siren will be heard all over the country on Sunday, 4 Iyar, April 30th, at 8:00 p.m., marking the opening of Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers. Immediately after the siren, the memorial rallies will begin. On Monday, a two-minute siren will be sounded, followed by state memorial ceremonies and memorial ceremonies throughout the country.

The Family, Commemoration and Heritage Division of the Defense Ministry, which is responsible for the Memorial Day events, was held this year for the arrival of more than a million and a half people to the military cemeteries throughout the country. The division’s activities span 52 military cemeteries and hundreds of military burial plots, from Kiryat Shmona to Eilat, and thousands of graves in the various communities.

The scope of activities includes renovation, maintenance, cleaning and gardening of cemeteries, polishing and replacing damaged or old tombstones, expanding access to cemeteries and handicap for the handicapped and elderly population, while paying attention to each family member.

Barbra Streisand Sings Hatikvah

Barbra Streisand