Scotland’s Sunday Herald publishes a provocative article headlined “Auschwitz survivor: ‘Israel acts like Nazis’“. According to the article:
One of the last remaining Auschwitz survivors has launched a blistering attack on Israel over its occupation of Palestine as he began a lecture tour of Scotland. …
His comments sparked a furious reaction from hardline Jewish lobby groups, with Dr Meyer branded an “anti-Semite” and accused of abusing his position as a Holocaust survivor. [Emphasis added]
The reason that this story is so sensationalist and able to garner publicity is simply because a figure such as Dr Hajo Meyer is very much on the radical fringes of the debate and is certainly not representative in any way of the mainstream Jewish community or Holocaust survivors.
Yet, those who protest Meyer’s extreme views are themselves termed “hardline Jewish lobby groups” by the Sunday Herald.
Who are the real hardliners?
To accuse anyone of anti-Semitism, let alone a Jew or a Holocaust survivor, is a serious charge. But Dr Meyer’s comparisons of Israelis to the Nazis are certainly anti-Semitic and fall within the European Union’s own Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, which states:
Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:
Meyer is one of a tiny number of anti-Zionist Jews, including Holocaust survivors who garner media attention out of all proportion to their numbers. For example, Hedy Epstein, an anti-Zionist 85-year-old German Jew who fled the Nazis in 1939, and promoted her hunger strike in Egypt to advance the so-called “Free Gaza Movement.”
As the JPost writes: “The Shoah as a cynical form of moral shock therapy for Diaspora Jewry and Israelis remains a ubiquitous bully club to pit a clique of anti-Israeli Jews against the mainstream European Jewish community.”
To circumvent the unsavoury Nazi-equals-Israel comparison, pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli groups in Europe frequently outsource the new anti-Semitism to a minuscule group of anti-Zionist Jews who seek to strip Israel’s legitimacy as a nation.
The Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign is one such group and a sponsor of Dr Hajo Meyer’s speaking tour. The SPSC’s chairman Mick Napier, quoted in the Sunday Herald is quite familiar with the Israel = Nazis equation. In January 2009, the SPSC hosted a Holocaust Memorial Day “commemoration” featuring Azzam Tamimi, a Hamas supporter who calls for the destruction of Israel.Napier also spoke at the event on the subject “Zionism before the Holocaust”.
Writing in 2008, Napier appeared to justify the March 2008 Mercaz Harav terrorist attack in Jerusalem when he described the yeshiva as “a training center for illegal occupation, murder and ‘Arabs to the Gas Chambers.'”
“Ala Abu Dheim killed eight students who were being trained to oppress and dispossess him, his family, his entire people,” Napier wrote.
In December 2008, Napier’s SPSC fabricated a story that it had been responsible for a boycott by Scottish companies of Israeli water company Eden Springs Ltd.
The group also refers to One Voice, a grassroots peace group of Israelis and Palestinians, as “the voice of apartheid and racist State of Israel.”
Despite this, the mainstream Zionist Federation and the Scottish Israel Information Centre are labeled as “hardline Jewish lobby groups” by the Sunday Herald for expressing opposition to Meyer and Napier’s extremist agendas.
The Sunday Herald has demonstrated a clear prejudice giving a voice to radical and extreme voices while denigrating the views of mainstream Jewish groups. Please send your considered comments to [email protected].
