TEACHERS’ TRAINING MANUAL IN BARCELONA COMPARES HOLOCAUST TO ISRAEL’S SECURITY BARRIER

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach the latest example of Holocaust revisionism from mainstream Europe.

The authorities in the Spanish city of Barcelona last week published a high school teachers’ training manual comparing “the wall of shame Israel is building in Palestine” to Nazi concentration camps.

The manual is designed to serve as a guide for teachers so that they can explain the Holocaust to Spanish pupils. It says Hitler’s “concentration camps can be compared to two other historical events: The wall of shame Israel is building in Palestine and the [American] detention camp in Guantanamo.”

Israeli ambassador to Spain Victor Harel wrote a strongly-worded letter to Barcelona’s mayor, Joan Clos, over the weekend, demanding that the “training manual” be withdrawn.

ARE SOME IN SPAIN MISSING THE INQUISITION?

I have previously detailed on this list several comparisons by mainstream Spanish newspapers (of left, right and center), and by Spanish politicians, of Israel and Nazi Germany, and of Ariel Sharon and Adolf Hitler.

For example, last November, the municipal information board in the northern Spanish town of Oleiros put up a huge slogan on a bright-red illuminated sign at the entrance to the town, next to the town’s weather forecast and traffic report, which read:

“Let’s stop the animal, Sharon the assassin, stop the neo-Nazis.”

In addition to the sign, the Oleiros municipality started selling T-shirts with anti-Sharon slogans on its town website.

RALLY IN LONDON: “NO MORE ISRAEL”

In London on Saturday, a combination of leftists and Islamists – including George Galloway, the British MP who addressed the US Senate last week – called for the destruction of Israel. There was no more pretence that the issue is the “occupation’ of the West Bank and Gaza,” or the security barrier.

Among the speakers, Andrew Birgin a leader of the “Stop the War (in Iraq) Coalition” called for “no more Israel.”

Galloway declared: “It’s about time that the British government made some reparations for the [1917] Balfour declaration.”

Tony Benn, a senior politician in Tony Blair’s ruling Labour Party, called George Bush and Ariel Sharon the “two most dangerous men in the world.”

Sue Blackwell, the Birmingham university lecturer who has led the academic boycott campaign against Israel, and has publicly said Israel should not exist, told the crowd: “Palestinian refugee camps are like open air prisons.”

I attach an article below from Ynet, the web edition of Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s best-selling newspaper.

-- Tom Gross