German anti-Semitism ‘deep-rooted’ in society

Notorious serial hater David Duke has been arrested in Germany and is facing deportation.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that tracks hate groups and fights discrimination cases, describes Duke as the “most recognizable figure of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Klan leader and now international spokesman for Holocaust denial.”
Anti-Semitism has gone mainstream, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, named for the famous Nazi Hunter.
Today, the center releases its Top Ten list of such offensive speech by politicians, Hollywood figures, journalists, historians, and everyday people on social media such as Facebook pages.
A Paris court is hearing the appeal of 18 people convicted in the 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of a young French Jew.
One who’s not appealing is Gang leader Youssouf Fofana, who chose not to appeal his conviction and life sentence.
‘People’ is a big word for a gang of criminals who refer to themselves — appropriately — as Barbarians.
The swastika now shows up so often as a generic symbol of hatred that the Anti-Defamation League, in its annual tally of hate crimes against Jews, will no longer automatically count its appearance as an act of anti-Semitism.
“The swastika has morphed into a universal symbol of hate,” said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organization. “Today it’s used as an epithet against African-Americans, Hispanics and gays, as well as Jews, because it is a symbol which frightens.”
Observing the trend, he said that his group had decided it would examine reports of scrawled swastikas for contextual clues. If it appears Jews were not the target, the incident will not be included in the league’s annual audit of anti-Semitic hate crimes.
A Jewish dance group was attacked with stones by a group of children and teenagers during a performance at a street festival in the Germany city of Hannover, police said Thursday.
The teenagers also used a megaphone to shout anti-Semitic slurs during the Saturday afternoon attack, Hannover police spokesman Thorsten Schiewe said.
Schiewe said there were several Muslim immigrant youths among the attackers.
The acting mayor of Amsterdam, Lodewijk Asscher, wants to look into the possibility of using so-called ‘decoy Jews’ to combat anti-Semitic violence.
The approach is in line with Asscher’s intention to look for unorthodox measures in the city’s fight against intolerance and violence toward gays and Jews, his spokesman said Monday.
A bomb blast rocked a synagogue in Russia on Monday, drawing condemnation from the country’s Jewish community, who linked the attack with the upcoming anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia.
The Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, whose apologists usually claim that he protected Jews, ordered his officials to draw up a list of some 6,000 Jews living in Spain and include them in a secret Jewish archive. At the end of the World War in 1945, Franco’s regime ordered the destruction of all documents relating to the census of Jews in Spain carried out in 1941 at the request of Hitler’s Germany.