Sunday night and Monday are Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. While I have some beefs with the manner in which the date was picked, there is no doubt that remembering the Holocaust today is as even more important than was the case fifty years ago. Lisa Graas has a feature from the United States Holocaust Museum about remembering the Holocaust here.
Unfortunately, one place where Holocaust remembrance is an absolute necessity is in Germany. The lovely graphic at the top of this post came from the web site of a German political party known as the Left party in the town of Duisburg in North Rhine, Westphalia. The name Duisburg may ring a bell for some of my longtime readers - that's the town where, in 2009, German police broke into a private home to remove an Israeli flag from a window, while an anti-Semitic mob jeered outside. Video of that incident is here.
The Left party in Duisburg had the lovely graphic at the top of this post on its web site until an internet web site called Ruhrbarone noticed it on Wednesday. The graphic is a swastika morphing into a Star of David and calls for - you guessed it - a boycott of Israeli products.
The Left Party in Duisburg is a hotbed of anti-Semitism,” Ruhrbarone wrote.
The flyer states, “Confront the moral blackmail of the so-called Holocaust,” and terms Israel a “rogue state” and “warmonger.” After Ruhrbarone reported about the flyer, the party branch removed it from its website.
A Ruhrbarone writer filed a complaint with Duisburg police asserting that the flyer violated Germany’s anti-hate laws. It may have been on the website for many years.
“The content and style of the flyer that is posted is clearly anti-Semitic, disgusting,” Petra Pau, a Left Party MP and vice president of the party in Bundestag, wrote on Thursday in response to an email query from The Jerusalem Post.
Pau traveled to Israel in 2008 to speak at an international conference of the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism.
When asked if Left Party legislators agreed with the flyer, she told the Post that “because I am at this time not in Berlin, I cannot speak for the Left Party in the Bundestag.
Personally, I am angry and convinced that the party leadership will clarify the matter.”
Ruhrbarone criticized the Green Party and the Social Democrats for forming a coalition with the Left Party on the Duisburg City Council.
Read the whole thing.
How soon they forget.
Labels: BDS, Duisburg, German Left Party, Holocaust denial, Holocaust Remembrance Day, swastikas
posted by Carl in Jerusalem
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