Right-populist party’s strong showing in Berlin voting seen as ‘Nazi renaissance’

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

If you scream “Nazi!” long enough, people stop taking you seriously and when real Nazis come along, they won’t react.

BERLIN (JTA) — In what one German Jewish leader is calling a “Nazi renaissance,” Germany’s newest right-populist party — Alternative for Germany — has broken the Berlin barrier, gaining seats for the first time in that state’s parliament.

The anti-immigrant, Euro-sceptic party, which has been plagued by controversies over anti-Semitism in its ranks, finished fifth in Sunday’s vote with 14.1 percent. AfD, as the party is known, now has seats on legislatures in 10 states following several elections this year. The party was founded in 2013.

Winning the Berlin election was the Social Democratic Party, which retained power over the party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic Union, with 21.6 percent of the vote to 17.5 percent.

AfD leaders were jubilant at the prospect of occupying 25 seats out of 160 in the state parliament of Germany’s capital.

The elections are seen as a litmus test for Merkel’s controversial refugee policy, with more than 1 million asylum seekers having entered the country from war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa.

The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, told the German news media Sunday that the results were worrying.

A former council president, Charlotte Knobloch, who heads the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, issued a statement Sunday urging Germany’s “Democratic parties to make good use of the time between now and the next elections in 2017 to stop the Nazi renaissance.”

Three additional states will hold elections in the first half of 2017, followed by national parliamentary elections in September.

Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust in hiding as a child in Bavaria, called AfD “a party that incites against minorities in a disgusting manner, that wants to make National Socialist terminology and approaches acceptable again, that is unable to distance itself credibly from neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.” She said its gains in state parliaments are a “true nightmare.”

If the established parties don’t manage to gain support by the national elections next year, Knobloch warned, “I fear for the good and peaceful future of our country.”

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Meet Joel Sollender, the Jewish Prisoner of the Nazis Taking it to Donald Trump in Hillary’s Latest Ad

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

With few exceptions, Jewish-American prisoners of war were not treated any differently by the Nazis than gentile-American prisoners.

Yair Rosenberg writes: On Friday, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign released an arresting new ad. In it, Joel Sollender, an American Jewish soldier who was taken prisoner by the Nazis, responds to Donald Trump’s infamous claim that he doesn’t consider John McCain a war hero because “I like people that weren’t captured.” Here’s what Sollender said:

Sollender, who will soon turn 92, lives in California and has been speaking out against Trump and his candidacy for over a year, which is how the Clinton campaign found him. “I was very pleased that they contacted me and that I had a chance to voice my opinion,” he told me. Sollender worked for two hours with the film crew to produce the spot. The online ad runs for 90 seconds, while a 30 second version is now airing on TV. It has already gone viral and been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Something that didn’t make it into the short clip, Sollender said, was his fear at the time that the Germans would discover that he was Jewish. “As a prisoner of war, and being Jewish, I had some concerns about my dog tags, which were obviously marked ‘H’ for Hebrew,” he recounted. “But they never looked at them. I had blond hair and blue eyes and spoke a little German, so it helped me along.”

“I was a pretty lucky guy to do what I did and get away with it,” he continued, “and come home safely and have a more or less charmed life ever since.”

Sollender has been so vociferous this election because he has been deeply disturbed by the dark resonances he has perceived accompanying Trump’s ascent. For reference, he pointed to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which chronicles the rise of a fascist demagogue to the presidency of the United States. “There are indications that it could happen here,” he said, “and I’ll do whatever I can to stop it.”

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Donald Trump Praises Israel’s Use of Profiling for Security

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

(JTA) — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lauded Israel for its success in using racial profiling to prevent terror attacks.

In a phone interview Monday with “Fox & Friends,” the network’s morning show, Trump said that U.S. police are afraid to consider religion or ethnicity when identifying suspects as potential terrorists.

“Our police are amazing. Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said in the interview. “They’re afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling and they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.

“You know, in Israel they profile. They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do. They see somebody that’s suspicious, they will profile. They will take that person and they’ll check out.”

The interview came after the FBI announced that it was searching for a naturalized Afghan citizen, Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, of New Jersey, in connection with an explosion in a New York City neighborhood and at a New Jersey train station.

Trump continued to press the profiling issue.

“Look what’s going on. Do we really have a choice?” he asked. “They’re trying to be so politically correct in our country and this is only going to get worse. This isn’t going to get better.”

Trump has previously cited Israel’s success in using profiling to prevent terror attacks.

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World must recommit to refugees: Jewish leader

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

What better time to lobby for America to take in more refugees than after a weekend that saw bombs go off in New York and New Jersey and a mass stabbing in Minnesota.

If you found your bedroom was filled with poisonous snakes, who would you hate? The snakes or the people who put them there? HIAS wants to fill your country with poisonous snakes.

Mark Hetfield writes for the USA Today:

In 1951, after witnessing a second world war, a genocide and an iron curtain descending across Europe, nations of the world finally united to establish a Refugee Convention and share responsibility for those who no longer had a home or a homeland. Among the displaced at that time were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and asylum seekers.

For the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the Refugee Convention came too late. In the aftermath, the world promised that never again would refugees be pushed back into the hands of their persecutors, as the United States, Canada and Cuba did in 1939 when they turned back the St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees who had tried to flee Nazi Germany.

Yet today there are more refugees and displaced persons — 65 million — than there have been since the World War II. Refugees are again being wrongly perceived not as a people who are threatened themselves, but as a people who threaten our own security. This rationale was used to limit Jewish immigration in the 1930s and 1940s. Western countries, some more openly than others, today are using similar prejudices to limit resettlement of refugees from predominantly Muslim countries.

The 135-year-old organization I currently lead, HIAS, demonstrates Jewish communal support welcoming and protecting refugees. For many years, HIAS helped refugees because they were Jewish. Now we help refugees because we are Jewish.

Welcoming the stranger is central to our tradition and to our shared experience, and we know there is too much at stake to become paralyzed by xenophobia and intolerance. Recognizing this communal obligation to act, nearly 200 synagogues across America have already signaled their willingness to help welcome refugees in their communities. Last year, over 1,200 American rabbis signed onto a statement in support of refugee resettlement…

Mark Hetfield is president and CEO of HIAS, the global Jewish organization that protects refugees.

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‘Hamilton’ creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stars in new video — for Yeshiva University

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jewish Journal:

“Yeshiva University is a radiating force that is shaping our world,” Miranda says over footage of famous Jews, like Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz, who have connections to the school.
But Miranda, who is Puerto Rican and not Jewish, has connections to the school, too. He grew up in Washington Heights — where the main Y.U. campus is located, and which served as the setting for his first hit, “In the Heights” — and his mother is an assistant professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (which was, until earlier this year, part of Y.U.). Miranda has given guest lectures there and was given an honorary doctorate from the school in 2009, when he was 29 — making him the youngest ever to receive that honor from the university.
Of course, growing up in Washington Heights left him with plenty of Jewish connections outside of Y.U. He has previously said that all of his elementary school friends were Jewish and that he paid his rent before making it big by performing at bar mitzvahs. Then there’s his love for “Fiddler on the Roof,” which he has said heavily influenced “In the Heights.” He even surprised his wife at their wedding by singing “To Life (L’Chaim),” an upbeat tune from “Fiddler.”

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