Wiesenthal’s top ten list of antisemites includes Pittsburgh shooter
Swedish hospital, UK singer Roger Waters and German bank make the list.
By BENJAMIN WEINTHALUpdated: DECEMBER 26, 2018 01:08ARE WE doing enough to confront antisemitism?(photo credit: REUTERS)
The prominent US human rights organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center announced on Tuesday its top ten list of the worst outbreaks of antisemitism in 2018, including a year that saw the most lethal incident of Jew-hatred in America’s history.The right-wing extremist Robert Bowers, who allegedly massacred 11 worshipers at the Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Congregation and wounded six more people, made the list’s number one spot. The Wiesenthal Center wrote “Bowers was an avowed neo-Nazi,” adding that “only FBI intervention thwarted another deadly attack on a Toledo-area synagogue in early December. This attack was planned by Damon Joseph, a fanatical convert to Islam and ISIS adherent.”The radical African-American Islamist Louis Farrakhan was listed as number two because of his October speech in Detroit. The Nation of Islam leader said about Jews: “I’m not mad at you because you’re stupid… So when they talk about Farrakhan, and call me a hater, you do what they do: call me an anti-Semite… Stop it, I’m an anti-termite.”The Wiesenthal Center noted that “Throughout the 1930s, before the Holocaust, Nazi propaganda serially demonized Jews as vermin and rats, seeking to dehumanize German Jews in the eyes of their neighbors.”US campuses earned the third dishonorable spot because of “Alarming ant-Semitic attacks on American campuses” after the Pittsburgh shooting. Swastikas, antisemitic graffiti and posters were found at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Duke University, Cornell University, Penn State, University of California campuses in Berkeley and Davis, and Vassar and Marist colleges.The British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn scored the fourth spot because he endangers the existence of Jewish life in Great Britain.Jewish MP Dame Margaret Hodge told Corbyn in July: “You have proved that you don’t want people like me in the party… It is not what you say but what you do, and by your actions you have shown you are an anti-Semitic racist.”In the same month as Hodge’s comment, the UK’s three leading Jewish newspapers published a joint editorial warning of “the existential threat to Jewish life in this country that would be posed by a Corbyn government.”Wiesenthal classified the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as number five on its list because UNRWA activities are “Enablers of Hamas’ massive child abuse with a ‘peace’ curriculum that erases Israel.”The Islamic terrorist entity Hamas “effectively controls the UNRWA teachers’ union and teachers resort to social media to promote terrorism against Israelis and to ‘stab Zionist dogs,”’ wrote the center.
“To its credit, the US stopped further payments to UNRWA, but Germany, Japan and other nations rushed in with increased donations.”The US travel lodge company Airbnb made the sixth spot because it announced in October that it would exclude 200 places in Israeli communities in the West Bank from its travel listings. Airbnb matches travelers with local home and apartment owners for short-term rentals.Wiesenthal wrote “There is no indication that Airbnb, who claim to oppose BDS, is extending its interventionist diplomacy to Cyprus or the scores of other disputed territories around the world.” The Wiesenthal center urged its 400,000 members to book their travel elsewhere.BDS is an abbreviation for the Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment campaign targeting the Jewish state.The German Bank for Social Economy was placed at number seven on the list because it “stands with anti-Semitic BDSers,” wrote the Wiesenthal Center.The center said, “When it comes to issues related to anti-Semitism and threats to the Jewish state, Germany receives a great deal of attention. In recent years, to their credit, German cities, companies and financial institutions have recognized the anti-Semitic underpinnings of BDS and shunned interaction with a global campaign seeking the Jewish state’s demise.”Wiesenthal added, “In 2018, however, one important financial institution, the Bank for Social Economy, insists on doing business with the radical ‘Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East,’ which strongly endorses boycotting the Jewish state.”The group’s sister organization, the US-based ‘Jewish Voice for Peace,’ hosted convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh at one of its conferences in 2017. Odeh was responsible for the 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing which killed two Hebrew University students.Wiesenthal noted that “Jewish Voice for Peace”declared it was honored to have her. No wonder Henryk Broder, a highly respected German commentator, labeled the group [Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East] “ anti- Semites.”Wiesenthal wrote that the “German LGBT organization, Magnus Hirschfeld, named after a victim of the Holocaust, canceled its account with the bank to protest the bank’s pro-BDS business policy. Protests from the leadership of German Jewry have fallen on deaf ears, while two-pro-Israel organizations in Germany – Keren haYesod and the Jewish National Fund have canceled and closed accounts linked to the bank.Bishop Gayle Harris secured the eight number for her fabrications about Israeli defense and security policies. She claimed that she “witnessed an Israeli soldier arrest a three-year-old Arab child on the Jerusalem Temple Mount and gun down a 15-year-old Palestinian teen in the back,” wrote the Wiesenthal Center.“After the Wiesenthal Center exposed the claims as fabrications, Harris, the number 2 Episcopal clergy in the state [of Massachusetts] backtracked saying that she only heard the stories from a third party [a Palestinian].”Sweden’s Karolinska University Hospital, where the Nobel Prize for medicine is announced each year, was designated number nine on the list for systematic discrimination against three Jewish doctors. The head of the medical center’s neurosurgery blocked Jewish doctors from helping their patients and hindered their research. The neurosurgery department head posted “blatant anti-Semitism” on his Facebook page, said Wiesenthal.“We are shocked by the lethargic response of the Karolinska to the cancer of anti-Semitism,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Wiesenthal center.Number ten went to the former Pink Floyd band musician Roger Waters because he is a "leading BDS cheerleader and antisemite who wants to tell Jews what antisemitism is."
