[Notes below by Tom Gross]
Yesterday the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq released the poster pictured above. (It was sent to me by a member of that government who subscribes to this list.) It is rare for the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Israelis’ to appear on official posters or statements from government entities in Iraq.
The Kurds, however, have long been supportive of Israel, as the other more liberal nation in an otherwise illiberal Middle East. See the photo here for example, at a pro-independence rally in 2017, when the Iraqi Kurds voted by an overwhelming majority for independence in a free, fair and peaceful referendum. Yet the only government in the world to recognize Kurdish independence after that vote was Israel. (The tens of millions of Kurds in Iran and Turkey are too repressed to be able to hold such rallies.)
Among other related dispatches, see also: he Kurds deserve a state of their own
AMAZON REMOVES FROM SALE CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS WITH IMAGES OF AUSCHWITZ
Following a request from the director of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, the online retailer Amazon has withdrawn sales of Christmas ornaments and bottle openers featuring the site of the former Auschwitz Nazi death camp. (The above image is from Amazon.com.) Over 1.1 million people, the vast majority Jewish, were murdered at Auschwitz, including more than 300,000 children.
In several countries, where in the past there were bloody clerical-organized attacks against Jews each year during Christian festivals, antisemitic hate continues to increase annually at the time of Christmas and Easter.
***
Earlier this year I reported on an online sale of miniskirts, pillow cases, bags and other items printed with photos of the railway tracks and gas chambers at Auschwitz. See photos here.
629 PAKISTANI GIRLS SOLD AS BRIDES TO CHINA
The Associated Press reported in an exclusive yesterday:
LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Page after page, the names stack up: 629 girls and women from across Pakistan who were sold as brides to Chinese men and taken to China. The list, obtained by The Associated Press, was compiled by Pakistani investigators determined to break up trafficking networks exploiting the country’s poor and vulnerable....
Christians are targeted because they are one of the poorest communities in Muslim-majority Pakistan. The trafficking rings are made up of Chinese and Pakistani middlemen and include Christian ministers, mostly from small evangelical churches, who get bribes to urge their flock to sell their daughters. Investigators have also turned up at least one Muslim cleric running a marriage bureau from his madrassa, or religious school.
Full article here.
ANTISEMITIC BELGIUM CARNIVAL GIVES UP UNESCO STATUS
This is a follow-up to a previous dispatch item on this list, about the Belgium (Flemish) town of Aalst that sparked outrage for again featuring a viciously antisemitic float in its annual UNESCO-sponsored carnival.
The 2019 Aalst carnival featured life-size effigies of grinning Jews holding money, with rats on their shoulders.
The carnival often contains antisemitic floats. In the 2013 carnival, revelers dressed like Nazis and held canisters labeled “Zyklon B” while they walked alongside caged revelers in the guise of Nazi concentration camp prisoners. Zyklon B was the poison used by the Nazis to kill millions of Jews in gas chambers in Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Birkenau, Majdanek, and other extermination camps.
UNESCO had warned Aalst not to promote antisemitism at next year’s carnival, but the town’s mayor has refused telling UNESCO it would rather renounce its UN cultural heritage status than give up mocking Jews, the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported this week.
The mayor of Aalst, Christoph D’Haese, said it is “unavoidable” that Jews will be mocked again in the 2020 carnival as it was part of the town’s “heritage”.
The Mayor of Aalst had been summoned to UNESCO headquarters in Paris in September 2019, where he tried to argue that their previous carnival procession was not antisemitic after it depicted caricatures of orthodox Jews with hooked noses standing on chests of money surrounded by rats.
The carnival attracts tens of thousands of people each year. The centuries-old carnival was added to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010.
‘GAME OF THRONES’ STAR CANCELS BELGIUM TV APPEARANCE OVER ANTISEMITIC CARNIVAL
Carice van Houten, the (non-Jewish) Dutch actress who starred on the hit series “Game of Thrones,” yesterday canceled a television appearance in Belgium over the continued use of antisemitc caricatures at the Aalst carnival. (See the item above.)
Van Houten, who portrayed Melisandre, pulled out of the panel on the TV talk show “The Appointment” after learning the panel would also include Christoph D’Haese, the mayor of Aalst.
Photo above: van Houten attending the premiere of Season 8 of “Game of Thrones” in New York, in April 2019.
13 COUNTRIES (INCLUDING 11 EU MEMBERS) VOTE WITH ISRAEL AT UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY FOR THE FIRST TIME
On Tuesday, the UN General Assembly in New York (as usual) passed five resolutions against Israel.
But following some astute diplomacy by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for the first time, 13 countries switched their positions and voted on Israel’s side.
The 13 are Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Brazil and Colombia.
11 of them are members of the 28-member European Union.
There was disappointment in Israel and the US that other EU countries, including the UK, France and Spain, did not join them, but instead abstained, as they do each year.
The U.S., Canada, Australia, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and Kiribati voted with Israel, as they have done before.
A host of dictatorships voted against Israel.
Netanyahu and Pompeo held meetings yesterday in Lisbon, Portugal where they discussed, among other things, the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Iran.
Amnesty international is now reporting that the Iranian government is charging families for the bullets used to kill protesters before agreeing to hand over the bodies for burial.
CORBYN ASSISTING CONVICTED TERRORISTS
The (London) Daily Mail reported on Tuesday:
“Jeremy Corbyn, the bomb-maker’s friend: IRA terrorist gloried in the Hyde Park bombing [in London, England] - yet after he left jail, admirer Corbyn helped create a council job for him and he jumped a 12,000-strong queue for genteel Islington council [government] flat [in one of London’s more prosperous neighborhoods].”
Full article here:
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