* A diverse range of people -- from the leader of Britain’s Scottish Conservatives to a West Wing actor to the founder of WhatsApp -- praise the dignity of Israel’s judo gold medal winner as he sings the national anthem alone when the tournament hosts refused to play it. Video below. (Will other athletes now follow American tennis player Andy Roddick’s lead?)
Lazio soccer players wore images of Anne Frank and the words ‘No to anti-Semitism’ on their shirts on Wednesday – by chance they were playing at Bologna in front of a stand dedicated to the memory of Arpad Weisz, the great Jewish Hungarian player and coach who had outstanding success in Italian football (and until today remains the youngest manager ever to win Serie A), before being murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
CONTENTS
1. They refused to play the anthem when he won gold, so he quietly sang it himself
2. Andy Roddick makes a stand
3. Will the IJF take action?
4. “Italian football needs more than a public reading to bring meaningful change” (By Paolo Bandini, The Guardian, Oct. 26, 2017)
5. “Italian Soccer club owner’s response to anti-Semitism leaves Rome’s Jewish community ‘unimpressed’” (By Davide Lerner, Haaretz, Oct. 26, 2017)
THEY REFUSED TO PLAY THE ANTHEM WHEN HE WON GOLD, SO HE QUIETLY SANG IT HIMSELF
[Note by Tom Gross]
A sizeable number of people wrote to me about the recent dispatches on sport.
Below are two follow-up items to the dispatch last week:
‘Diary of Anne Frank’ to be read at all Italian soccer matches (& anti-Semitic professors in US)
***
First, for those who haven’t been following this story, Israeli Tal Flicker won the Gold medal at the Judo Grand Slam competition in Abu Dhabi on Thursday. Contrary to all sporting norms, the tournament hosts refused to raise the Israeli flag or play the Israeli national anthem. So in a moment of dignified defiance against anti-Semitic racism, he quietly sang it himself.
Here is a one-minute video from British TV
Tal Flicker’s stand against sporting bigotry has been praised on social media by persons that don’t usually involve themselves in Israeli affairs, including WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, Scottish Conservative party leader Ruth Davidson, and Scandal and West Wing actor Joshua Malina.
Tal Flicker told Israel’s Channel 2 television: “The anthem that they played from the world federation was just background noise. I was singing Hatikva from my heart.”
Israeli athletes won five medals at the judo tournament, despite being harassed at every turn. Their journeys to Abu Dhabi were delayed after being refused visas and they were initially refused permission to change planes in Istanbul airport. Alone among the athletes of the world, they were not allowed to have their national flag attached to their clothing.
And yet they beat athletes from Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Hungary and elsewhere, and out of the 12 male and female Israelis participating in the two-day judo tournament on Thursday and Friday, five Israelis won medals, a remarkable achievement.
As in other areas of life, perhaps the discrimination Jews felt spurred them to try especially hard and do particularly well.
ANDY RODDICK MAKES A STAND
What is disappointing is that almost no other athletes have made any kind of protest on behalf of the Israelis.
A rare exception is the American tennis star Andy Roddick.
When in 2009, the UAE refused to allow Israel’s then number one women’s tennis player Shahar Peer to play at the Dubai open, Roddick was alone among major stars in pulling out of the tournament in solidarity, saying he would not participate in a tournament where Jews were not allowed to play.
The Wall Street Journal also terminated their tournament sponsorship as a result of the discrimination against Israel and the Dubai organizers were subsequently fined a record $300,000 by the World Tennis Association (WTA).
At the time Peer was ranked 19th in the world.
The following year, after the protest by Roddick, the Wall Street Journal and the WTA, Shahar Peer was allowed to play in Dubai, although she needed five bodyguards and was kept separate from the other women players.
(Stacey Allaster, the chief executive of the Sony Ericsson WTA tour, told the Dubai organizers that if they didn’t let Shahar Peer play in 2010, they would cancel the entire tournament. It is rare in the sporting world for sporting bodies to take such a stand.)
Peer went all the way to the semi-finals in Dubai, losing to Venus Williams.
“I can’t imagine playing as well as Shahar in these circumstances,” Williams said of the discrimination Peer faced while in Dubai. “I have to give Shahar congratulations. She’s courageous. I don’t think anyone else on tour could do what she’s doing.”
As a result of her courage, two months later, Peer (who at one stage was ranked 15 in the world) accompanied by her grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, was chosen to lead 10,000 people at the “March of the Living” in Poland.
“My grandmother was 14 when she sent to Auschwitz,” said Peer. “Most of her family died in the Holocaust, and only she and her sister survived. It was a tough trip for her. It was her first trip back to Auschwitz.”
WILL THE IJF TAKE ACTION?
It remains to be seen whether the International Judo Federation will be as firm against Dubai as the World Tennis Association was against United Arab Emirates.
In a letter last week from the International Judo Federation to the president of the UAE Judo Federation, leaked to The Associated Press, it told them before the tournament that “all delegations, including the Israeli delegation, must be treated absolutely equally in all aspects, without any exception.”
The letter added the IJF statutes “clearly provide that the IJF shall not discriminate on the ground of race, religion, gender or political opinion.”
Discrimination against Israelis at sporting events is nothing new, just as Jews were discriminated against at sporting events in many countries on a number of occasions before modern Israel existed.
For example, as I reported in a dispatch on this list last year, at the Rio Olympics in 2016, Lebanese athletes prevented Israel’s team from boarding the bus that was taking athletes to the stadium.
When Israel’s Or Sasson won a bronze medal for judo at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Egyptian judoka Islam El Shehaby refused to shake hands with Sasson.
Or Sasson won another bronze medal in Dubai on Friday. He told Israeli media yesterday: “Whereas competitors from all other countries had their national flag I had a bare patch on my chest. But my heart is still there and my heart is with the state of Israel.”
***
Two UAE judo officials (but not others) apologized today for a UAE athlete’s refusal to shake hands with Israeli judokas at the Abu Dhabi Judo Grand Slam tournament.
After Israel’s Tohar Butbul defeated the UAE’s Rashad Almashjari, he held out his hand for a handshake. Almashjari turned his back and walked away.
***
I attach two articles below.
ARTICLES
“DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF ARPAD WEISZ, THE ITALIAN STAR SENT TO AUSCHWITZ TO BE KILLED”
Italian football needs more than a public reading to bring meaningful change
After a week of ultras-related outrage and public relations damage in Italy, the only surprise, regrettably, is that anyone should still be surprised
By Paolo Bandini
The Guardian
October 26, 2017
Of all the stadiums Lazio could visit on Wednesday, it had to be the Renato Dall’Ara. Their week had begun amidst outrage after ultras affixed anti-semitic stickers, including mocked-up images of Anne Frank in a Roma shirt, to plexiglass barriers inside their own Stadio Olimpico. Now supporters travelling to their away game against Bologna would occupy a stand dedicated to the memory of Arpad Weisz.
A Jewish Hungarian, Weisz came to Italy late in his playing career and stayed on afterwards to move into coaching. He remains the youngest manager ever to win Serie A, having led Inter – then known as Ambrosiana, following pressure from the fascist government to adopt a more ‘Italian’ branding – to the Scudetto at 34. Weisz would claim two further titles with Bologna, before fleeing the country following the introduction of racial laws. He was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.
His final game in Italian football was as manager of Bologna, against Lazio. There remains a plaque dedicated to him on an exterior wall of the Dall’Ara. Such cues were insufficient, apparently, to dissuade a small group of away fans from performing fascist salutes and singing “Me ne frego” (“I don’t give a damn”) – a slogan of Mussolini’s blackshirt militias – as they waited to enter the ground.
The only surprise, regrettably, is that anyone should still be surprised. A culture of anti-semitic and racist humour has long persisted among ultras from a great many Italian football teams, always excused by its propagators in the same terms: as irreverence, banter, deliberate bad-taste satire. Likewise, the response to any outrage is met always with claims of double standards. “Why is the media outraged about our joke,” they ask, “but not the one that those other guys made?”
To some extent, that retort might be valid. This was not even a new ‘gag’ among Lazio’s ultras, who affixed the exact same image to road signs as long ago as 2013. Likewise, there is graffiti in the Testaccio neighbourhood, an area of strong Roma support, proclaiming that “Anne Frank supports Lazio”.
So when figures as prominent as the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, step forward to portray this latest act of anti-semitic vandalism as “a dishuman and alarming gesture” it only serves to nourish the perpetrators’ victim mentality. A post on the Facebook page of Lazio’s Curva Nord observed that: “We are amazed that these things, which are considered as insults or offences or who knows whatever else, when they are used against us, don’t seem to scandalise anyone.”
Nor is it difficult for them to portray their critics as hypocrites. The Italian Football Federation arranged for a segment of Anne Frank’s diary to be read out before each game in the midweek round – from Serie A right down to Serie C. Its president, Carlo Tavecchio, spoke out against “unqualifiable behaviour which offends a community and our whole country”. But this is the same man who won his job despite infamously lamenting the “banana eaters” flooding Italy’s domestic leagues.
Lazio ran their own initiatives, with players wearing shirts with Anne Frank’s face on before kick-off against Bologna. One day earlier, a group had travelled with the team president, Claudio Lotito, to lay flowers outside the Great Synagogue of Rome. But that gesture was undermined when a member of the public recorded Lotito describing the event as a “sceneggiata” – a show – during a phone call as he waited to board a plane.
Despite attempts to contextualise – Lotito’s colleagues insisting he was just frustrated at his inability to make constructive contact with leading members of the Jewish community at the time – the public relations damage had already been done. A wreath laid outside the synagogue was subsequently found to have been tossed into the River Tiber.
What will come of it all? Not a lot, most likely. An inquiry will be launched and Lazio may play a game or two behind closed doors. The irony here is that the Curva Nord had been shut already for Sunday’s match against Cagliari, as a punishment for racist chanting. The Anne Frank stickers were placed in the Curva Sud, perhaps an act of opportunism by ultras who had switched to what is traditionally the ‘Roma’ end of the stadium.
Many boycotted the Bologna match on Wednesday, but those who did make the trip were treated to a 2-1 win. The margin of victory ought to have been greater. Lazio were scintillating in the first half, scoring twice and hitting the woodwork twice more, but a Senad Lulic own goal made things a little hairy in the second.
“Even Arpad Weisz would have applauded this Lazio team,” wrote Andrea Schianchi in Gazzetta dello Sport. What he would have made of everything else that surrounds Italian football nowadays is another question entirely.
Whereas the majority of fans up and down the country stood quietly to listen to the passage from Anne Frank’s diary, there were pockets of ultras in several places who rebelled in their own way. Back at the Stadio Olimpico, some of those Roma supporters reoccupying the Curva Sud sang team chants over the reading. In Turin, a group of Juventus ultras launched into the Italian national anthem.
“I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions,” ran the excerpt in question. “And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquillity will return once more.”
Those words are as powerful as ever. It will take more than a public reading, though, to bring about meaningful change.
ITALIAN SOCCER CLUB OWNER’S RESPONSE TO ANTI-SEMITISM LEAVES ROME’S JEWISH COMMUNITY ‘UNIMPRESSED’
Italian Soccer Club Owner’s Response to anti-Semitism Leaves Rome’s Jewish Community ‘Unimpressed’
By Davide Lerner
Haaretz
October 26, 2017
‘He thought he could get away from the scandal by turning up at the synagogue with a bunch of flowers,’ says one community member. ‘We expected concrete steps, not trivial gestures’
***
On the face of it, the owner and president of the Roman soccer club Lazio seemed to be taking a very firm stance against the latest episode of anti-Semitism by his club’s hooligan supporters. Earlier this week the hard-core fans, known in Italy as ultras, plastered stickers of Anne Frank wearing the jersey of Lazio’s rival club, Roma, in their shared stadium. Lazio’s president, Claudio Lotito, condemned the episode, headed to the Great Synagogue of Rome with a blue and white flower wreath – his club’s colors – and promised to bring 200 supporters every year to the Auschwitz concentration camp for an educational trip. Twenty-four hours later, however, Italian police found the flowers floating in the waters of the Tiber, the river that runs through the city. The local Jewish community did not take the solidarity gesture well.
“I can confirm that the flowers were thrown away by members of the Jewish community,” said Daniele Regard, a 31-year-old Italian Jew who works as a press officer for Nicola Zingaretti, the president of Italy’s Lazio region. “To most people in the community, those flowers were too little, too late,” he added. At the beginning of the month, the Italian Football Federation decided to close down the northern curva, or stadium stands, where Lazio’s hard-core supporters normally sit. The decision was taken after they booed black players from the Sassuolo club, something Lazio fans have a long history of doing. Instead of letting them stay at home for Lazio’s match against Cagliari, Lotito decided to open up the southern stands of the stadium, the place where Roma’s hard-core fans usually sit. He sold tickets for 1 euro – virtually a gift to the banned fans – giving them the opportunity to paste the controversial stickers all over the enemy’s terrace. The Italian Football Federation has now decided to take measures against the move.
“Lotito made concessions to the hard-core fans after they engaged in racist behavior, and then he thought he could get away from the Anne Frank scandal by turning up at the synagogue with a bunch of flowers,” says Enrico Camp, another young Jew from the Rome community. “We expected concrete steps, not trivial gestures,” he concludes.
“The visit came across as a rushed way to clean Lazio’s conscience,” agrees Daniele Di Nepi, a soccer fan from Rome who lives in Israel and works at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. To make matters even worse, a recording where Lotito dismissed his visit to the synagogue as a “charade” – that is, a necessary PR operation because of the widespread outrage over the stickers, rather than a sincere way to show solidarity – emerged on Wednesday. In another misstep that gave the impression he didn’t take the case seriously enough, Lotitio said on a radio program that the media outrage surrounding the Anne Frank stickers could be a conspiracy against Lazio, “because we are doing so well this season.”
In the aftermath of the scandal, the Italian Football Federation deemed that passages from Anne Frank’s famous diary would be read ahead of this week’s matches in the Italian Serie A league. On Wednesday evening, referees gave copies of the book, along with Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and the Saved,” to the captains of the teams, who in turn gave it to the children who traditionally walk them to the pitch. But these measures are not effective, members of Rome’s Jewish community told Haaretz. “It is extremely stupid and wrong to treat the current incidents as an episode, and to try to address them with an emergency response,” said Camp. “Racism is a structural, long-standing problem for Italian soccer, which includes not only anti-Semitism but also discrimination against black players and territorial discrimination against the poorer regions of Italy’s south.”
In yet another expression of racism, a few days ago, fans of the Benevento club from the southern province with the same name put up a banner calling their former coach a “Gypsy” after a series of bad losses for their team. Southern supporters are often mocked as “terroni,” a derogatory term which literally means “people of the land” or “farmers,” by their rivals.
Lazio’s hooligans were genuinely surprised at the public’s outrage to their Anne Frank stickers, since their recent behavior isn’t any different than what they have consistently been doing for decades. Di Nepi thinks it will not go away: “Sometimes a scandal on racism in Italian soccer erupts, people kick up a big fuss about it and then everything goes back to where it was before,” he says. “Racism among hooligans is a problem for most Italian teams.” His friend Daniele Regard agrees. “It takes more than a few readings of Anne Frank or some flowers to solve such a deep-rooted, profound cultural problem,” he says. Many hard-core supporters across Italy did not react well to the exchange of books about the Holocaust in the pitch, chanting disrespectful slogans or ignoring the event altogether. Supporters of the Ascoli club went as far as purposely remaining outside of the stadium when the ceremony took place ahead of their team’s match.
“If anything, the current round of measures against anti-Semitism will make the phenomenon go bigger. The Jews will come across as annoying, as always behaving like they are victims,” says Clemente Mimun, a prominent Italian journalist who happens to be both a Jew and a Lazio fan. As someone who knows Lazio well, he swears that Lotito actually had long years of conflict with the hooligans and that he is not complicit when it comes to racism and anti-Semitism. “Israeli ambassador Ehud Gol used to sit next to him at Lazio matches,” he recalls, even though he admits giving out tickets to banned ultra fans two weeks ago was a mistake on Lotito’s part.
Politically, the Jewish community in Rome has been closer aligned to the right to the left in the last few years. But when the most conservative segment of the right bring up references to their fascist past and proudly uphold them, the entire community feels a deep sense of unease. Mimun, who is 64, says that he suffers a great deal from the racism of the fans of the very team he supports: “Soccer was the last game connecting me to my childhood, and they broke it, I don’t know if I will be able to go to the stadium anymore, I’m so pained and angry.”
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri met Syria’s President Bashar Assad in Damascus several days ago to discuss increased military coordination, including assistance for Hamas and Hizbullah. (Photo by SANA, the Syrian government news agency)
CONTENTS
1. Hugging the Iranian regime, asking for more weapons to try and kill Israelis
2. Meeting with Assad, coordinating further attacks near Aleppo
3. “Sinwar: National mass mobilization needed to achieve the reconciliation” (Hamas website, Oct. 25, 2017)
4. “Hamas Never to Recognize Israel: Official” (Tasnim news (Iran) Oct. 24, 2017)
5. “Official: Differences between Iran, Hamas Buried in History” (Fars news agency (Iran) Oct. 24, 2017)
6. “Abu Marzouk: Disarming Resistance not discussed in Cairo talks” (Hamas website, Oct. 21, 2017)
7. “Senior Official: Hamas Never Accepts Cut of Ties with Iran” (Fars news agency (Iran) Oct. 21, 2017)
8. “Hamas delegation arrives in Tehran” (Hamas website, Oct. 20, 2017)
9. “US Consul General Launches campaign to attract Palestinian students to United States” (WAFA news agency (PLO) Oct. 24, 2017)
10. “Iran, Azerbaijan form first joint defense commission” (Mehr News (Iran) Oct. 25, 2017)
HUGGING THE IRANIAN REGIME, ASKING FOR MORE WEAPONS TO TRY AND KILL ISRAELIS
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach several pieces below from the Iranian and Palestinian media in recent days, including some from Hamas’s website.
Earlier this month, on October 12, the two leading Palestinian hardline factions Fatah and Hamas signed an internal reconciliation agreement.
Some western media commentators and academics hailed this as a bold move towards peace by Hamas.
So far we see nothing of the sort. Hamas was forced to cede some civil power in Gaza to Fatah, after the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority cut off electricity to the Palestinian population of Gaza earlier this year and pressured Hamas in other ways.
However, Hamas has made it clear both before and after signing the agreement – and particularly during a high profile visit to Tehran this week – that it has no intention of giving up its enormous weapons arsenal (or of even discussing the issue), or of recognizing Israel, or of stopping its terrorist attacks (which it calls “resistance”).
After some coolness between (Shia Persia) Iran and (Sunni Arab) Hamas these past years – while Iran and Iranian-directed militias were carrying out the bulk of massacres and war crimes against (Sunni Arab) civilians in Syria – a senior Hamas delegation travelled to Iran this week to demonstrate a warm display of unity and ask for even more weapons.
(In recent years – and in particular since the Obama administration handed hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran as part of the nuclear deal – Iran has greatly increased its supply of weapons, technology, and financial assistance of Hamas and to another Palestinian terrorist group, Islamic Jihad. The Iranian regime has also used its new riches to fund terror militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere.)
MEETING WITH ASSAD, COORDINATING FURTHER ATTACKS NEAR ALEPPO
Several of the pieces below concern the high-ranking visit this week by a senior Hamas delegation to Tehran where they met Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani, and Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Supreme Leader Ali Akbar Velayati, among others.
Separately, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps General Staff Chief Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri met several days ago with Syria’s President Bashar Assad in Damascus to discuss military coordination between Tehran and Damascus. Gen. Bagheri also visited Iranian-controlled Shia militia in the Aleppo region of Syria who are continuing “mopping up” operations (i.e. murdering) Sunni civilians as well as Sunni militants in the area.
More here from Sepah News, the website of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (in Persian).
And from Defa Press (in Persian).
And in English from Reuters: From Damascus, Iran vows to confront Israel
Among previous dispatches on Aleppo, please see: East Aleppo’s last clown, RIP (& Arabs donate wood to rebuild burned synagogue)
I attach eight articles below.
Regarding the last two articles, one is a report about the U.S. state department trying to encourage even more Palestinian students to study in the U.S. (Several senior Hamas figures previously studied in the U.S.)
The last article concerns increased military cooperation between Iran and its regional rival Azerbaijan. As I have reported in previous dispatches, Azerbaijan has long enjoyed close ties with both the Israeli and American intelligence services, so they may be concerned by Iran’s outreach to Azerbaijan.
-- Tom Gross
ARTICLES
HAMAS: HAMAS AND THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE WILL NEVER ABANDON THE RESISTANCE PATH
Sinwar: National mass mobilization needed to achieve the reconciliation
Hamas website
October 25, 2017
http://hamas.ps/en/post/1023/sinwar-national-mass-mobilization-needed-to-achieve-the-reconciliation
The leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahia El-Sinwar said in a meeting with the trade unions that achieving the reconciliation is a strategic decision to Hamas, noting that Hamas will never retreat back and will continue to make efforts until reconciliation is fully achieved.
He noted as well that the current situation calls for a mass mobilization to put pressure on all sides in order to accomplish the internal reconciliation.
National Dialogue:
El-Sinwar said that the national and popular dialogue has been launched, and all Palestinian streams and factions are welcomed to participate so that a strong response and participation are assured.
He stressed that the reconciliation issue is a pressing Palestinian need, adding that all burdens and aspirations of the Palestinians are going to be discussed in the coming Cairo talks.
El-Sinwar reiterated Hamas’s stance regarding achieving the Palestinian reconciliation, noting that Hamas is very serious to end the internal split.
National Project:
Hamas leader said that Hamas adopted many decisions and measures to initiate the national dialogue including: ending the crisis inside Al-Aqsa university, improving relations with other national Palestinian movements, and maintaining relations with Arab and Islamic countries.
In this context, El-Sinwar noted that Hamas exerted efforts to strengthen the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli Occupation and this strategic asset aimed to back the Palestinian national program and can never be overlooked.
The PLO:
Hamas leader said that Hamas does not look for an alternative to the PLO, but works to include all the Palestinian national and Islamic powers within it.
Pertaining to the Israeli conditions, El-Sinwar said that the Israeli Occupation’s conditions are completely unacceptable, noting that Hamas will never surrender nor succumb to the Israeli Occupation pressure.
He concluded by saying that Hamas and the Palestinian people will never abandon the resistance path, and it will be used to back the Palestinian national program.
HAMAS NEVER TO RECOGNIZE ISRAEL: OFFICIAL
Hamas Never to Recognize Israel: Official
Tasnim news (Iran)
October 24, 2017
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2017/10/24/1554570/hamas-never-to-recognize-israel-official
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Hamas’s Deputy Political Chief Saleh el-Arouri insisted that the movement will never accept demands for recognizing Israel or cutting ties with Iran.
Speaking in a meeting with Head of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations Kamal Kharrazi on Monday evening, Arouri said Hamad will never agree to lay down arms, recognize the Zionist regime of Israel or sever its ties with the Islamic Republic.
“Our trip to Tehran is a sign of our strong will” for maintaining the relations with Iran, the senior Hamas official, who is leading a delegation said.
He also referred to the recent reconciliation agreement between the Gaza based Hamas and the Fatah movement in the West Bank, and stressed the need for unity among different Palestinian groups and continued resistance against the Zionist occupiers.
Kharrazi, for his part, highlighted the Zionists’ conspiracy to foment discord among regional countries by pitting Sunni Muslims against Shiite Muslims and said the presence of Hamas officials in Iran is testimony to the failure of the conspiracy.
“The basis of Iran’s support for the oppressed is their resistance against Zionism, not their being Shiite or Sunni” he said in a reference to the fact that Tehran supports both Shiite Hezbollah movement in Lebanon and Sunni Hamas movement in Gaza.
Heading a delegation, Arouri arrived in Iran on Friday to sit down with senior Iranian officials and discuss the latest developments on the Palestinian arena, especially the reconciliation file, as well as bilateral relations.
OFFICIAL: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN IRAN, HAMAS BURIED IN HISTORY
Official: Differences between Iran, Hamas Buried in History
Fars news agency (Iran)
October 24, 2017
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13960802000560
TEHRAN (FNA)- Deputy Head of Hamas political bureau Saleh al-Arouri underlined that the Palestinian resistance group and Iran have agreed to set aside their differences, adding that ties with Tehran do not harm any other country.
“We have come (to Iran) to show that differences are now history. We have made a major agreement not to allow the differences leave negative impact on our bilateral ties in a bid to enable ourselves leave obstacles behind,” al-Arouri said in an interview with the Iranian media on Tuesday.
Noting that Hamas ties with different countries will not harm others, he said, “Our relations with Iran don’t harm any other governments, including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others.”
“We will welcome any of these nations or governments which supports our cause and our nation,” al-Arouri said.
A high-ranking Hamas delegation began a visit to Iran on Friday to inform Tehran about reconciliation efforts with rival Palestinian faction Fatah.
The group led by al-Arouri will meet senior Iranian officials over the next several days.
The two Palestinians factions have agreed a landmark deal to end a decade-long split and are seeking to form a unity government along with other parties.
In relevant remarks on Saturday, Iranian Supreme Leader’s top adviser for international affairs Ali Akbar Velayati praised Hamas for insisting on continued armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.
“We congratulate you for declaring that you will not set your weapons aside and for describing it as your redline,” Velayati said in Tehran.
Velayati underlined that he welcomes meeting with the resistance groups’ officials, specially Hamas, on any occasion.
ABU MARZOUK: DISARMING RESISTANCE NOT DISCUSSED IN CAIRO TALKS
Abu Marzouk: Disarming Resistance not discussed in Cairo talks
Hamas website
October 21, 2017
http://hamas.ps/en/post/1020/abu-marzouk-disarming-resistance-not-discussed-in-cairo-talks
The leader in Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzouk said in an interview with CNN Arabic that the resistance arms has not been discussed with Fatah movement during the recent talks in Cairo, noting that resisting the Israeli Occupation is an unalienable right for the Palestinian people.
He also added that Hamas has chosen to end the internal split, and the Palestinian Authority is required to achieve the interests of the Palestinian people.
Abu Marzouk said that Hamas totally rejects the Israeli impositions which attempt to foil the Palestinian reconciliation, underlying the importance of the Egyptian role to neutralize these Israeli attempts.
Regarding elections, he said that Hamas will present itself to the Palestinian people through elections, and at the same time will protect its resistance in order to defend Palestinians rights.
Abu Marzouk noted that so far only one core issue has been discussed with Fatah movement, which is reestablishing the unity government in the Gaza Strip, while other important issues including: the PLO, the national council, the legislative council, and forming a unity government have all been postponed for deliberation with all Palestinian factions.
Abu Marzouk concluded by saying that Hamas looks forward to receiving positive signs from Fatah like lifting all the punitive measures imposed on the Palestinians in Gaza, and taking swift and sincere steps towards achieving the Palestinian reconciliation.
SENIOR OFFICIAL: HAMAS NEVER ACCEPTS CUT OF TIES WITH IRAN
Senior Official: Hamas Never Accepts Cut of Ties with Iran
Fars news agency (Iran)
October 21, 2017
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13960729001457
TEHRAN (FNA)- Deputy Head of Hamas political bureau Saleh al-Arouri underlined that the resistance group would never agree to sever ties with Iran and give up armed struggle as prerequisites for talks with Israel.
Al-Arouri made the remarks in a meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader’s top adviser for international affairs Ali Akbar Velayati in Tehran on Saturday.
Referring to the peace negotiations in Cairo, he said that Israel had set three preconditions for talks, including disarmament of Hamas, recognition of the Zionist regime and cutting ties with Iran.
“In response to the first prerequisite that was disarmament of Hamas, we have declared that we don’t accept it at all,” he said, adding that the second precondition was also rejected as Hamas is now fighting to annihilate the Zionist regime.
“Our presence in Iran is the practical denial of the third precondition that was cutting ties with Iran,” al-Arouri said.
A high-ranking Hamas delegation began a visit to Iran on Friday to inform Tehran about reconciliation efforts with rival Palestinian faction Fatah, a Hamas official said.
The group led by al-Arouri will meet senior Iranian officials over the next several days, the representative said on condition of anonymity.
The two Palestinians factions have agreed a landmark deal to end a decade-long split and are seeking to form a unity government along with other parties.
HAMAS DELEGATION ARRIVES IN TEHRAN
Hamas delegation arrives in Tehran
Hamas website
October 20, 2017
http://hamas.ps/en/post/1018/hamas-delegation-arrives-in-tehran
A high profile delegation from Hamas headed by the deputy head of the political bureau, Saleh Al-Arori arrived on Friday in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
The delegation includes several Hamas leaders including: Izzat El-Risheq, Mohammed Nasser, Osama Hamdan, Sami Abu Zohri, and Khaled El-Kadomi.
The delegation will hold several meetings with high profile Iranian officials to discuss some important issues including: the latest updates on the Palestinian cause, the joint relations, and the conflict with the Israeli Occupation.
US CONSUL GENERAL LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN TO ATTRACT PALESTINIAN STUDENTS TO UNITED STATES
US Consul General Launches campaign to attract Palestinian students to United States
WAFA news agency (PLO)
October 24, 2017
http://english.wafa.ps/page.aspx?id=698PqXa92241045501a698PqX
JERUSALEM – US Consul General Donald Blome Tuesday launched the #PalStudyUSA2018 campaign in Ramallah to encourage more Palestinian students to study in the United States, said a press release issued by the U.S. Consulate General’s Press Office in Jerusalem.
The campaign will include social media outreach to identify Palestinian participants for an elite “boot camp” examining all aspects of study in the U.S., a series of week-long information sessions with Amideast at American Spaces in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Salfeet, Nablus, and Gaza; and a series of television, print, and social media stories by Palestinian journalists on Palestinian students studying in the United States which will air later this year.
The sessions, for potential students and their parents, will focus on admissions, testing, and financial aid, highlighting the ongoing educational advising services provided by the Consulate’s partner Amideast.
Consul General Blome announced a number of new higher education cooperation initiatives at the event, including a $1 million project funded by the Middle East Partnership Initiative to support cooperation between Notre Dame and Palestinian university partners to build a shared research hub; a $400,000 project between Palestine Polytechnic University and University of Michigan to promote critical thinking and entrepreneurship; and a $100,000 Tech Camp with the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs and Partners for Sustainable Development to build teams of university students that will tackle problems provided by Palestinian businesses.
The Consul General noted, “education provides hope; education grows the economy; and education builds Palestinian civil society and business as a vehicle for peace and prosperity.”
Speaking on the #PalStudyUSA2018 campaign, he noted the virtues of the U.S. model, saying: “the U.S. higher education system is one of the best in the world, with a focus on intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and innovation.”
IRAN, AZERBAIJAN FORM FIRST JOINT DEFENSE COMMISSION
Iran, Azerbaijan form first joint defense commission
Mehr News (Iran)
October 25, 2017
http://en.mehrnews.com/news/128924/Iran-Azerbaijan-form-first-joint-defense-commission
TEHRAN, Oct. 24 (MNA) – The first joint commission of Iran and Azerbaijan’s defense cooperation was held in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense.
The joint commission aims to establish and enhance mutual cooperation and to increase military and defense interactions between Iran and Azerbaijan.
A high ranking delegation of Iran’s Armed Forces headed by deputy defense minister has traveled to Baku to attend the meetings of the commission. In addition to participating in the first joint commission, they met with Azerbaijan’s defense minister.
The Iranian delegation maintained that providing an outline of cooperation in military and defense areas could improve interactions between the two countries and stressed “Iran attaches great importance to developing further relations with neighboring countries as part of its foreign policy and defense diplomacy.”
The two sides also discussed strengthening friendly relations, respecting territorial integrity and utilizing all potentials and capacities to preserve safety and stability in the region.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
Graffiti in London, England. The design plans for a new national Holocaust memorial were announced yesterday. (See item below.)
Fliers found on Monday posted on the campus of the U.S. Ivy League university, Cornell. (See item below.)
Above, one of many anti-Semitic Facebook posts and slurs made by Rutgers University microbiology professor Michael Chikindas, who has also blamed the Armenian genocide on Jews, and promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories. Last year, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers (which is New Jersey’s largest publicly-funded research university) claimed Jewish doctors were “mining [Palestinians] for organs for scientific research”.
CONTENTS
1. ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ to be read on loudspeakers at all Italian soccer matches
2. La Repubblica: “We are all Anne Frank”
3. UNESCO and Anne Frank
4. Rutgers professor blames Jews for Armenian Genocide, makes slew of anti-Semitic remarks
5. Anti-Semitic fliers at Cornell
6. “The Oskar Schindler of document rescue”
7. London Holocaust memorial design winners announced
8. “Anne Frank diary to be read at games after Lazio fans’ anti-Semitism” (Guardian, Oct. 25, 2017)
9. La Repubblica editorial: Siamo tutti Anna Frank
10. “A Trove of Yiddish Artifacts Rescued From the Nazis, and Oblivion” (By Joseph Berger, New York Times, Oct. 19, 2017)
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
(This is one in an occasional series of dispatches on the Holocaust and its aftermath.)
‘DIARY OF ANNE FRANK’ TO BE READ ON LOUDSPEAKERS AT ALL ITALIAN SOCCER MATCHES
The Italian Football (Soccer) Federation has said that a passage from “The Diary of Anne Frank” will be read on loudspeakers before the start of all soccer matches in Italy this evening after fans of Lazio (one of Rome’s two biggest teams) plastered Rome’s Olympic Stadium on Sunday with stickers mimicking Anne Frank and graffiti denying the Holocaust. It is the latest in a long line of anti-Semitic incidents involving Lazio and other European soccer clubs.
The decision to hold a moment of silence and read from the diary at all professional, amateur and youth matches throughout Italy was announced yesterday by Italy’s sports minister, the enterprising Luca Lott.
Lazio President Claudio Lotito said yesterday that in response to the incident, his club will also play with Anne Frank’s image on their shirts this evening for their game at Bologna, and will take 200 fans every year to visit Auschwitz. Players will also visit schools to speak to students about respecting rules and stamping out racism.
Prior to the decisions being announced, Lotito laid a wreath in front of Rome’s main synagogue yesterday in memory of Holocaust victims.
In the past, Lazio fans have unfurled banners at matches aimed at Roma fans, stating: “Team of Blacks, Crowd of Jews” and “Jews to Auschwitz”.
In 2005, one of Lazio’s most famous players, Paolo Di Canio, was fined and suspended after giving a straight-arm salute to Lazio fans. He defended his actions by saying, “I’m a fascist, not a racist.”
Thousands of Italian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Only a few of those deported survived, including Primo Levi, arguably the greatest writer on the Holocaust.
This is the passage from Anne Frank’s diary which will be read before the matches, according to the Italian soccer federation:
“I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”
Anne Frank was murdered at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 15.
LA REPUBBLICA: “WE ARE ALL ANNE FRANK”
One of Italy’s leading newspapers, La Repubblica, also had an editorial on the subject, which I attach below after the news pieces from The Guardian.
I don’t have the resources to have it properly translated but I attach a Google translate version in English following the Italian, which appears to be good enough.
***
UPDATE to this dispatch here: They refused to play the anthem when he won gold, so he quietly sang it himself
Among other dispatches and articles about the slander of Anne Frank:
* Sharon and Hitler share space at Anne Frank house in Amsterdam (Jan. 29, 2004)
* Repulsive cartoon published in Belgium and Holland of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler
* Does Oxford think it ok to honor a man who calls Anne Frank a “Holo-porn” star? (Jan. 21, 2008)
Among other recent dispatches on soccer:
* Syria are now just three games away from extraordinary World Cup qualification
* Palestinian girls’ soccer defies the odds in a conservative society
* “Stars of David: The story of Israel’s first national soccer team”
UNESCO AND ANNE FRANK
The U.S. and Israel recently announced their intention to withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) after a slew of anti-Israel and arguably anti-Semitic resolutions by the world cultural body.
Although there are many bigots and anti-Semites working within UNESCO, there are also honest people working there too.
One of them is my friend Karel Fracapane (a former French diplomat and longtime subscriber to this email list – who, for the record, is not Jewish). He has helped organize an exhibition “Let Me Be Myself – The Life Story of Anne Frank” at UNESCO Headquarters during the Upcoming 39th session of the UNESCO General Conference next week.
The exhibition highlights the life of Anne Frank from her childhood, life in hiding during the Holocaust, until her death at Bergen-Belsen. The exhibition connects her life story to modern experiences of discrimination and exclusion, based on interviews with youths with diverse backgrounds and identities.
More information here:
https://en.unesco.org/events/anne-frank-house-exhibition-let-me-be-myself-life-story-anne-frank
See also:
* UNESCO makes Beirut “World Book Capital” as it bans The Diary of Anne Frank (May 4, 2009)
* UNESCO is a “diplomatic version of Isis” (Oct. 24, 2016)
Anne Frank in 1940, aged 11, before she went into hiding
ANTI-SEMITIC FLIERS AT CORNELL
The Cornell Daily Sun reports that anti-Semitic fliers with swastika-like symbols were discovered on the campus of Cornell University in upstate New York on Monday.
The posters (one of which can be seen in the photo at the top of this dispatch), which read “Just say no to Jewish lies!” and urged students to “join the white gang,” were taken down the same day.
The Ivy League school’s president, Martha Pollack, said in a statement:
“Whoever is responsible for these fliers is hiding under the cover of anonymity, having posted them overnight. Whoever they are, they need to ask themselves why they chose our campus, because Cornell reviles their message of hatred; we revile it as an institution, and I know from many personal conversations that thousands of Cornellians deplore it individually.”
Police said they were increasing patrols around Jewish buildings on campus.
RUTGERS PROFESSOR BLAMES JEWS FOR ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, MAKES SLEW OF ANTI-SEMITIC REMARKS
Rutgers University microbiology professor Michael Chikindas has published a series of Facebook posts blaming the Armenian genocide on Jews, referring to “international fat Jewish pockets,” and making other slurs.
In one post to students, he lied: “We must not forget that the Armenian Genocide was orchestrated by the Turkish Jews who pretended to be the Turks.”
In another post, Chikindas appeared to suggest Israel should be wiped out because (he claimed) it “has one of the highest percentage of gays in the world.”
On Facebook, he also shared an interview with conspiracy theorist Christopher Bollyn, who has claimed American Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks.
He also praised Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, who has been accused of anti-Semitism.
In another post, he called First Lady Melania Trump, and President Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka “jewish motherf*****s” and “b**ches”.
In an interview with the Jewish website The Algemeiner yesterday, Chikindas claimed (wrongly, of course) that he couldn’t be an anti-Semite, because he was previously married to and had a child with a Jewish woman, and was “25 percent Jewish” himself.
In a statement, Rutgers said it would be difficult to discipline him because he has tenure, and “needed to respects the free speech rights of its faculty members,” but were looking into the matter.
Last year, Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers (which is New Jersey’s largest publicly-funded research university) also promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
She told students at a faculty-sponsored event at Vassar College, that Jewish doctors were “mining [Palestinians] for organs for scientific research”.
Next month, Puar is due to publish a new book through Duke University Press, which critics who have seen an advanced manuscript say is full of anti-Semitic lies about Israel.
“THE OSKAR SCHINDLER OF DOCUMENT RESCUE”
A trove of 170,000 Jewish documents thought to have been destroyed by the Nazis during World War II has been found hidden under a church in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
Among the findings:
• Five notebooks of poetry by Chaim Grade, considered along with Isaac Bashevis Singer as one of the leading Yiddish novelists of the mid-20th century.
• Two letters by Sholem Aleichem, the storyteller whose tales of Tevye the Milkman formed the basis of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
• A postcard written by Marc Chagall, the famous Jewish painter.
• An early poem by Abraham Goldfaden, the father of the flourishing Yiddish theater in Europe and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
• Ten poems handwritten in the Vilna ghetto by Abraham Sutzkever, among the greatest Yiddish poets.
• Other unpublished manuscripts by famous Yiddish writers.
As the Jews were deported to their deaths or killed in mass shootings by Lithuanian Fascists, the documents were hidden in a basement under a church by a Lithuanian librarian, Antanas Ulpis. He helped hide them not just from Hitler but then later from Stalin, who also tried to wipe out Yiddish culture. He is now being dubbed the “Oskar Schindler of document rescue.”
Some of the findings will now be displayed in New York.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said yesterday: “Displaying this collection will teach our children what happened to the Jews of the Holocaust so that we are never witnesses to such darkness in the world again.”
Dani Dayan, Israel’s consul general in New York, called the documents “priceless.”
It is worth reading the article further down this dispatch by Joseph Berger in the New York Times. (Berger is a subscriber to this email list.).
LONDON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DESIGN WINNERS ANNOUNCED
The designers of Britain’s new national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre were announced yesterday.
Located next to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, the new memorial will honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust along with the other victims of Nazi persecution, including Roma, homosexual and disabled people.
The winning entry was the unanimous choice of a panel of judges which included British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan (who is a Muslim) and Holocaust survivor Ben Helfgott.
The chosen design features 23 tall bronze fins with spaces in between representing the 22 countries in which Jewish communities were destroyed during the Holocaust.
Chief Rabbi Mirvis said of the winning design: “The question of how we will memorialize the Holocaust in the years to come, in a society which will no longer be able to rely on first-hand testimony of survivors, is one that should occupy the mind of every one of us. Today, the British nation has taken an important and historic step in offering our answer to that question.”
Among other recent works of David Adjaye, who will lead the London design team, is the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, which I found very impressive when I visited it earlier this years, as I noted at the end of this dispatch.
There will be an underground learning centre below the London memorial.
You can see images of it here.
Tom Gross adds: Most European capitals now have national Holocaust memorials. One prominent city that unfortunately doesn’t is Prague, as I pointed out in a quote in the last two paragraphs of this article in The Guardian last year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/11/former-schindlers-list-factory-plans-czech-museum-nazi-industralist
***
I attach three articles below.
ARTICLES
ANNE FRANK DIARY TO BE READ AT SERIE A GAMES AFTER LAZIO FANS’ ANTISEMITISM
Anne Frank diary to be read at Serie A games after Lazio fans’ antisemitism
By Ed Aarons
The Guardian
October 25, 2017
The Italian football federation (FICG) has announced plans to read out a passage from Anne Frank’s diary before matches this week in response to acts of antisemitism by Lazio fans.
During Sunday’s league game against Cagliari, supporters of the club defaced their Stadio Olimpico home in Rome with antisemitic graffiti and stickers showing images of Frank, the teenager who was killed at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, wearing a jersey of their rivals Roma. Their actions have been widely condemned, with Lazio’s president, Claudio Lotito paying a visit to Rome’s main synagogue on Tuesday to lay a wreath to remember victims of the Holocaust.
He also promised a new education campaign culminating in an annual trip to Auschwitz with 200 young fans at a club which has a history of antisemitic behaviour, including a Lazio banner in the city derby nearly 20 years ago aimed at Roma supporters that read: “Auschwitz Is Your Homeland; The Ovens Are Your Homes.”
An image of Frank will be put on Lazio’s shirts for Wednesday’s game at Bologna, the club said, to demonstrate their fight against “all forms of racism and antisemitism”. The FIGC also said a minute of silence will be observed before Serie A, B and C matches this week, plus amateur and youth games over the weekend, with a passage from Frank’s diary entry on 15 July, 1944 being read out over loudspeakers.
It reads: “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquillity will return once more.”
A statement from Anne Frank House, one of Amsterdam’s most visited tourist sites, condemned the Lazio supporters’ attitudes but welcomed the response since Sunday’s match.
“We are shocked by these anti-Jewish expressions, which are extremely painful to those who have experienced the consequences of the Jewish persecution,” they said in a statement. Fighting football-related antisemitism is part of our educational activities. We are pleased to see that others, including Italian football clubs, have expressed their indignation about this action.”
The head of the European Parliament has also denounced Lazio fans’ behaviour. Antonio Tajani, who is also Italian, told the European Parliament in Strasbourg that “using the image of Anne Frank as an insult against others is a very grave matter”.
The Italian prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, said the stickers were “unbelievable, unacceptable and to not be minimised”.
A statement on Lazio’s website outlined the plans to place Frank’s image on the club’s shirts.
“The president of SS Lazio, Claudio Lotito, has decided that tomorrow the team will be coming to the stadium at Renato Dall’Ara Stadium in Bologna with an image of Anne Frank on the Biancoceleste shirt, demonstrating the club’s commitment to fighting all forms of racism and anti-Semitism,” it said.
Lotito announced the Auschwitz trip initiative in comments reported by Gazzetta dello Sport: “Today, I can officially announce that Lazio will partake in a new initiative, organising an annual trip to Auschwitz for 200 Lazio fans to educate and make sure we don’t forget certain episodes, so that these lads can know what it is we’re talking about.
“You can’t play around with these facts, we condemn all forms of racism. Lazio will launch this initiative.”
LA REPUBBLICA EDITORIAL: SIAMO TUTTI ANNA FRANK
(English follows the Italian.)
Siamo tutti Anna Frank
Ribaltiamo i piani, restituiamole il suo valore, trasformiamola in un omaggio, non lasciamola sola e in mano all’ignoranza
di Mario Calabresi
Siamo tutti Anna Frank
L’idea che l’immagine di Anna Frank possa essere utilizzata per insultare qualcuno è talmente arretrata e grottesca da squalificare per sempre chi l’ha pensata. Quel volto è nei cuori di ogni studente che abbia letto il suo Diario e l’abbia avuta come ideale compagna di banco: quella ragazzina ci ha raccontato non la sua morte ma la vita, i sogni, le speranze, il futuro sebbene si trovasse nel cuore della notte dell’umanità. Grazie a lei generazioni hanno compreso cosa è stato il nazismo, cosa abbia significato vivere nascosti, essere deportati e morire in un campo di sterminio.
Quando ieri sera al giornale abbiamo visto la sua foto con la maglia della Roma, usata da un gruppo di ultrà della Lazio per infamare gli avversari, ci siamo indignati come tutte le volte che ci troviamo di fronte alla banalità del male. Ma questa volta abbiamo pensato che è necessario fare un passo in più.
Come è diventato possibile che Anna Frank sia considerata un modo per offendere? Ribaltiamo i piani, restituiamole il suo valore, trasformiamola in un omaggio, non lasciamola sola e in mano all’ignoranza. E allora Anna Frank siamo tutti noi, può e deve avere la maglia di ogni squadra, essere parte della nostra vita. Ogni club dovrebbe farne una bandiera, per rispondere senza esitazione alla deriva degli estremisti delle curve.
Soprattutto oggi che non solo una parte delle curve degli stadi ma una parte della società sta diventando ricettacolo di razzismo, antisemitismo e xenofobia. Perché Anna è la
ragazzina che non ce la fa a sopravvivere fino alla Liberazione. Il suo Diario è la trama di una vita spezzata, che diventa parte della vita di tutti noi. Riprendiamocela, non lasciamola nelle mani di chi vuole calpestarla ma continuiamo a leggerla e a dedicarle strade, scuole e biblioteche.
Google translate version:
We are all Anne Frank
The idea that Anne Frank's image can be used to insult someone is so retarded and grotesque to disqualify forever who has thought of it. That face is in the hearts of every student who has read her Diary and has had it as an ideal companion for a student: that girl told us not her death but life, dreams, hopes, the future though she was in the heart of the night of humanity. Thanks to her, generations they understood what Nazism was, what it meant to be hidden, to be deported and to die in an extermination camp.
When last night in the newspaper we saw his photo with the shirt of Rome, used by a group of Lazio ultras to infamate our opponents, we are as angry as we all face the banality of evil. But this time we have thought that it is necessary to take a step further.
How has it become possible that Anne Frank is considered a way of offending? We rebut the plans, return it to its value, transform it into a tribute, let alone it and in the hands of ignorance. And then Anne Frank is all of us, she can and must have the team's shirt, to be part of our lives. Each club should make it a flag to respond without hesitation to the drift of the extremists of the curves.
Especially today that not only a part of the stadium curves but part of society is becoming a recipe for racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Because Anne is the little girl who can not survive it until Liberation. Her Diary is the plot of a broken life, which becomes part of the life of all of us. Let's resume it, let's not leave it in the hands of those who want to trample it but we keep reading it and dedicating it to roads, schools and libraries.
A TROVE OF YIDDISH ARTIFACTS RESCUED FROM THE NAZIS, AND OBLIVION
A Trove of Yiddish Artifacts Rescued From the Nazis, and Oblivion
By Joseph Berger
New York Times
October 19, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/arts/a-trove-of-yiddish-artifacts-rescued-from-the-nazis-and-oblivion.html
In one of their odder and more chilling moves, the Nazis occupying Lithuania once collected Yiddish and Hebrew books and documents, hoping to create a reference collection about a people they intended to annihilate.
Even stranger, they appointed Jewish intellectuals and poets to select the choicest pearls for study.
These workers, assigned to sift through a major Jewish library in Vilna, Vilnius in Lithuanian, ended up hiding thousands of books and papers from the Nazis, smuggling them out under their clothing, and squirreling them away in attics and underground bunkers.
In 1991, a large part of the collection was found in the basement of a Vilnius church, and were hailed as important artifacts of Jewish history.
But months ago curators at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan, the successor to the Vilnius library, were told that another trove, totaling 170,000 pages, had been found, somehow overlooked in the same church basement.
These documents, experts say, are even more valuable and compelling. Among the finds:
• Five dog-eared notebooks of poetry by Chaim Grade, considered along with Isaac Bashevis Singer as one of the leading Yiddish novelists of the mid-20th century.
• Two letters by Sholem Aleichem, the storyteller whose tales of Tevye the Milkman formed the core of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
• A postcard written by Marc Chagall, the Jewish modernist painter.
“These are gold,” said David E. Fishman, a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who traveled to Vilnius in July at YIVO’s behest to assess the trove’s importance. He came back with the sort of enthusiasm one might find in an explorer who has just discovered unknown lands.
A selection of 10 items from the newly found literary manuscripts, letters, diaries, synagogue record books, theater posters and ephemera will go on display on Oct. 24 at YIVO headquarters on West 16th Street.
In interviews, Mr. Fishman and Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s executive director, discussed other findings, including, an early poem by Abraham Goldfaden, the father of the flourishing Yiddish theater in Europe and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and 10 poems handwritten in the Vilna ghetto by Abraham Sutzkever, among the greatest Yiddish poets. In one poem, Sutzkever expresses his fear that “Death is rushing, riding on a bullet-head/To tear apart in me my brightest dream.”
Mr. Brent and his staff said they were just as excited by more quotidian items like scripts of “Sherlock Holmes” and other popular entertainments that delighted prewar Jews and an astronomical guide with a set of dials to calculate when religious holidays should fall, given variations in the lengths of Jewish lunar months. A 1933 “autobiography” by a malnourished fifth grader, Bebe Epshtein, describes how her parents forced her to eat by telling her beguiling stories. When “I would open my mouth,” she wrote, “they would pour in food.”
Many of the items, the experts said, offer glimpses into the hardscrabble everyday lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe when the region, not Israel or the Lower East Side, was the center of the Jewish world.
Almost as intriguing as the cache is the serpentine story of the documents’ rescue and rediscovery, much of which had been known before but which has been updated with the new find.
When the Nazis occupied Lithuania from 1941 to 1944, they were determined to incinerate or grind up the country’s Jewish collections, particularly those at YIVO, which from 1925 to 1940 in Vilna was the world’s foremost library of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. With characteristic incongruity, though, they decided to save a third of the YIVO collection for a research center near Frankfurt that would study “the Jewish question” even if they planned to make sure the Jews would be extinct. (In Lithuania alone, 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population of 160,000 was murdered.)
They needed Yiddish speakers to analyze and select the materials, and deployed 40 ghetto residents like Sutzkever and another raffish poet, Shmerke Kaczerginski, as slave laborers. Risking death by a firing squad, this “paper brigade” rescued thousands of books and documents.
When the Germans were pushed out of Lithuania by the Soviets, survivors like Sutzkever spirited some hidden treasures to New York. (The Soviets frowned on anything evocative of ethnic or religious loyalties.) Meanwhile, a gentile librarian, Antanas Ulpis, who was assembling the remnants of the national library in a former church, St. George’s, stashed stacks of Jewish materials in basement rooms to hide them from Stalin’s enforcers. He is, as a result, regarded by YIVO as a kind of Oskar Schindler of document rescue.
The bulk of the basement collection – documents totaling 250,000 pages – was recovered after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Last year, the entire basement collection was transferred to the Martynas Mazvydas National Library of Lithuania, which had reopened in a grand colonnaded building, and in May officials there informed Mr. Brent, of the new trove of 170,000 documents. They had been stored in a separate church basement room and had never been evaluated because none of the assigned archivists could read Yiddish or Hebrew.
Lithuania has chosen to hold onto all the Jewish documents in the library’s Judaica center as part of its national heritage. But it has allowed YIVO to digitize them for the use of the general public – and to have select items to display in Manhattan later this month.
“It’s going to take decades for scholars to analyze all of this,” said Mr. Fishman, who this month published “The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures From the Nazis.”
Among the more mundane curiosities that were salvaged is a weathered agreement from 1857 between a yeshiva in Vilna and a union of water carriers.
What is a water carrier, a Talmud student might ask?
In Vilna at that time, water carriers were needed to deliver buckets of water to homes from available wells. The ragtag Jewish water carriers formed a guild, which promised to donate a Torah scroll and a set of Talmuds to the yeshiva if members were given a room of their own, rent-free, for worship.
The crew that rescued these records largely did not survive the war. Some 34 of the 40 people viewed by experts as having been members of the “paper brigade” died, according to Mr. Fishman, some in death camps like Treblinka or in labor camps or in more random fashion. Mr. Kaczerginski was killed in 1954 in a plane crash in the Andes. Sutzkever had an illustrious career as a poet in Israel and died at age 96 in 2010. Mr. Ulpis, who helped save the documents later found in the church basement, died in 1981.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
Sephardi Israeli singer Noam Vazana (above performing at the Tanjazz Festival in Tangier, Morocco) was threatened on stage by anti-Israeli activists. Vazana has been active in aiding Syrian refugees and organizing musical projects between Israeli and Palestinian musicians.
WANTED FOR GENOCIDE
[Notes by Tom Gross]
I attach five unrelated pieces below.
In the first, the New York Post reports that police were forced to release a Sudanese Arab UN diplomat, Hassan Salih, for groping a woman’s breasts at 2:25 am in a New York bar because he enjoys diplomatic immunity.
(Alcohol was outlawed in Sudan under Muslim Sharia law in 1983, and the penalty for drinking alcohol there is 40 lashes.)
In May Hassan Salih was elected (by fellow Arab nations and third world countries) as vice-chair of the UN committee that oversees the work of 4,500 human rights NGOs, including groups that defend the rights of women.
I have previously drawn attention to the election of Sudan as Vice-Chair of this UN committee overseeing human rights groups, on the grounds that the Sudanese regime is one of the worst persecutors of human rights activists in the world, and Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is wanted for genocide at the International Criminal Court.
This is the second time this year a Sudanese diplomat at the UN has claimed diplomatic immunity. Mohammad Abdalla Ali was arrested in January for grinding his crotch on a 38-year-old woman aboard an uptown 4 subway train in the middle of the afternoon.
ENORMOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO MANKIND
In the second article below, Haaretz reports that the 2017 Nobel Economics Laureate Richard Thaler (who is an American Jew) has strong collaborative research connections with Israelis in his field.
Tom Gross adds:
Over 40 percent of the Nobel Economics prizes have reportedly been awarded to Jews. (Oliver Hart, the British-born American Jewish professor at Harvard who won last year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, is a subscriber to this email list.)
Historically, the Nobel science prizes have also been dominated by Jews, and that is once again the case this year. Rainer Weiss who won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics was born in 1932 in Berlin and he and his parents escaped Nazi Germany to Czechoslovak and then were among the last Jews to escape to America before the Holocaust.
Both parents of Michael Morris Rosbash, the American geneticist and chronobiologist who won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Medicine, were also German Jews who fled Hitler.
Barry Barish who shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Weiss is a leading expert on gravitational waves. Hs parents’ families fled pogroms against Jews in Poland and Belarus.
Given the enormous contribution of Jews to mankind, the continuing hatred and disdain felt by so many people around the world towards Jews is one of the most bizarre phenomena of human history.
A number of recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature have also been Jewish. These include in recent years: Nadine Gordimer of South Africa, Imre Kertész of Hungary, Elfriede Jelinek of Austria, Harold Pinter of Britain, Patrick Modiano of France, and Bob Dylan of the United States.
INCITEMENT ON AL JAZEERA
In the third article below, the Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli singer Noam Vazana was threatened on stage by anti-Israeli activists at a Moroccan jazz festival. Vazana’s shows at the festival were a premiere for her project Maktub, which features songs in Hebrew and Arabic and collaboration with Dutch-Moroccan singer Teema.
She is currently on a 90-concert tour in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
She accused the Qatar regime-controlled Arab-language Al Jazeera TV network of fabricating information about her ahead of her show, including an accusation that she was anti-Palestinian.
BROUGHT TOGETHER
In the fourth piece below, published in today’s Wall Street Journal, Egyptian-American writers Haisam Hassanein and Wesam Hassanein say that “President Obama nudged Arab Leaders toward Israel: Obama aligned their interests with Netanyahu’s through his clumsy handling of Iran and the Arab Spring.”
SPYING ON ALL
In the fifth article below, the UAE paper The National reports that travelers departing from Dubai will no longer need to pass through any sort of security clearance counter or e-gate. “They will simply walk through a virtual aquarium tunnel that will scan their face or iris using hidden cameras while they’re in motion.”
The first of these “virtual borders” will be installed by the end of the summer of 2018 at Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport. In phases up until 2020, the tunnels will be introduced at other Dubai terminals.
Currently, according to the airport authorities, 600 to 700 tons of gold and up to US$25 billion pass through Dubai airport each year. (While in nearby Yemen, millions of children are dying of starvation and malaria…)
-- Tom Gross
CONTENTS
1. “UN worker pulls diplomatic immunity card over groping allegations” (New York Post, Oct. 9, 2017)
2. “Nobel Economics Laureate Thaler has strong Israel connection” (Haaretz, Oct 9, 2017)
3. “BDS Morocco Attacks World-Renowned Israeli Singer In Tangier” (Jerusalem Post, Oct. 10, 2017)
4. “How Obama Nudged Arab Leaders Toward Israel” (By Haisam Hassanein and Wesam Hassanein, Wall St Journal, Oct. 11, 2017)
5. “Dubai airport’s new tunnel scans your face as you walk through it” (By Haneen Dajani, The National (UAE) , Oct 9, 2017)
ARTICLES
UN WORKER PULLS DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY CARD OVER GROPING ALLEGATIONS
UN worker pulls diplomatic immunity card over groping allegations
By Tina Moore and Max Jaeger
New York Post
October 9, 2017
http://nypost.com/2017/10/09/un-worker-pulls-diplomatic-immunity-card-over-groping-allegations/
A Sudanese man dodged arrest for groping a woman and fleeing from cops Sunday – all because he’s a diplomat, according to police sources.
Hassan Salih, 36, grabbed the 23-year-old victim’s butt and breast while they were on the dance floor at Third Avenue’s Bar None at around 2:25 a.m., the sources said.
The woman complained to bouncer Tracy Juniors about the pervy patron, and Juniors detained Salih until police could arrive, the sources said.
While cops were interviewing Salih and his accuser, Salih allegedly tried to run, so police cuffed him and put him in a cruiser.
But Salih pulled the diplomatic immunity card, and was allowed to go free after investigators confirmed he works for the Sudanese mission to the United Nations, the sources said.
The mission’s Web site lists Salih as a “second officer” – a mid-level position requiring five to 10 years of experience.
In May, Salih was selected to represent Sudan on a UN committee that oversees nongovernmental human-rights organizations, according to UN Watch.
It was not clear whether he was drinking alcohol at the bar. Booze was outlawed in his home country under Muslim Sharia law in 1983.
The penalty for possessing alcohol there is 40 lashes and a fine, according to a BBC report.
Neither Salih nor the Sudanese mission responded to repeated requests for comment.
Sunday’s incident was the second time this year an emissary from the north African state has been accused of forcible touching. Sudanese diplomat Mohammad Abdalla Ali was arrested in January for allegedly grinding his crotch on a 38-year-old woman aboard an uptown 4 train in the middle of the afternoon.
Charges against him were dropped when he provided papers proving his diplomatic immunity.
Diplomatic immunity protects envoys from arrest in host countries, often leaving local law enforcement in a lurch.
“It happens all the time,” a high-ranking law-enforcement source said. “They assault women and then they claim diplomatic immunity and they let them go.
“Cops generally get upset that these guys just thumb their noses at them. ‘Ha, ha. You can’t do anything to me.’ “
Only the government sponsoring the diplomat can waive his or her immunity, but countries often call their functionaries home if they get into trouble here.
In July, Afghan diplomat Mohammad Yama Aini was arrested – and subsequently released – after his wife complained to hospital workers in Queens that he had beated her. He was recalled to Afghanistan for an investigation.
Last year, German diplomat Joachim Haubrichs was accused of beating his wife so badly that the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs petitioned the US State Department to request Germany waive Haubrichs’ immunity so he could be prosecuted.
Rather than allow him to face the music, Germany summoned him back to the fatherland.
NOBEL ECONOMICS LAUREATE THALER HAS STRONG ISRAEL CONNECTION
Nobel Economics Laureate Thaler Has Strong Israel Connection
By Tali Heruti-Sover
Haaretz
October 9, 2017
Richard Thaler, who was awarded the Nobel memorial prize in Economics on Monday, was born, brought up, educated and spent nearly his entire career in the United States, but he and his field of behavioral economics have a strong Israeli connection.
Among his closest associates are the Israelis Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and fellow Nobel laureate in economics, as well as Shlomo Benartzi, a behavioral economist who teaches at UCLA. Israeli economist Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, also worked with Thaler in developing the emerging field starting in the 1970s.
Thaler also has a connection with a fourth Israeli, Dan Ariely who teaches at Duke University and the person most popularly associated with behavioral economics, but in this case as a rival, say people in the field.
“He is a unique person,” said Kahneman, speaking from his home in the U.S. “He is special because he is brilliant in every respect. He has a wonderful sense of humor, which has played an important role in his career. In the late ‘70s, he, Amos [Twersky] and I defined our direction. Despite the age difference, he became friends with us.”
Behavioral economics, along with the related field of behavioral finance, deals with the effects of psychological, social, cognitive and emotional factors on the economic decisions made by people and institutions and how they affect prices, returns on investment and the allocation of resources.
Kahneman recalled that a critical link in the development of the field came in 1983-84 when they were together at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and wrote what he said was several important articles together. “We complemented each other,” Kahneman said.
He characterizes a series of articles that Thaler was invited to write, called “Anomalies,” for the Journal of Economic Perspectives as a breakthrough for the field. “[They] described with immense humor the anomalies if the field of economics. These articles were perfectly clear so that anyone could understand them,” Kahneman said.
Benartzi conducted research with Thaler in the area of pensions and has known Thaler since 1989. “He sees things that become very clear to everyone only after he has seen them. ... What is special about him is the ability to see the world differently, in such a sophisticated and ingenious way, and make things simple to understand,” Benartzi said.
Kahneman and Benartzi both said unreservedly that they were glad Thaler had won the economics prize. Maya Bar-Hillel, professor emeritus of psychology at Hebrew University, who knew him when she was a student of Kahneman, said she had worried that Thaler, 72, might be skipped over for a Nobel.
Ariely, on the other hand, declined to talk about Thaler and made do with a brief statement: “I think the awarding of a prize like this is very good for the field and so I am very happy.”
Ariely has become the public face of behavioral economics thanks to popular books like “Predictably Irrational,” a role that people in the small community of behavioral economists say Thaler sees as his. Thaler says that because Ariely is a psychologist by training, he shouldn’t be presenting himself as a behavioral economist. (Kahneman is also a psychologist but that apparently didn’t bother Thaler.)
Behaviorial economics is more than an academic science and its insights have been employed in the real world, including in Israel where the finance minister formed a team headed by Ariely to apply behavioral economics in policy. Among other things it was used by the Environmental Protection Ministry in designing the rules for discouraging Israelis from using disposable bags by requiring they pay a small fee for them.
BDS MOROCCO ATTACKS WORLD-RENOWNED ISRAELI SINGER IN TANGIER
BDS Morocco Attacks World-Renowned Israeli Singer In Tangier
By Benjamin Weinthal
Jerusalem Post
October 10, 2017
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement activists protested the concert of international singer Noam Vazana in Tangier, Morocco, last month, and an anti-Israel protester rushed toward the stage during her performance.
“The incident was scary,” Vazana told The Jerusalem Post on Monday, in a wide-ranging interview. “I didn’t know what he would pull out of his clothes. I went into survival mode and just continued to perform and smiled at him,” said Vazana, who is currently on tour in Germany.
An alert security guard at the Tanjazz Festival in Tangier stopped the man before he could reach Vazana. The man had his hand in his clothing, suggesting he was about to use a weapon.
The object he hid under his clothes was later revealed to be a flag.
“When he was led away from the hall, people started cheering,” Vazana said.
“The audience was very supportive.”
As a result of attempted attack, an adviser to Moroccan King Muhammad VI intervened to provide extra security measures for Vazana, in addition to the already tight security at the festival.
Vazana’s shows at the jazz festival were a premiere for her project Maktub, which features songs in Hebrew and Arabic and collaboration with Dutch-Moroccan singer Teema.
She estimated that 1,500 attended her two performances.
Vazana has performed twice at the Tanjazz Festival over the years without any problems.
This year, however, a Jewish Moroccan BDS activist, Sion Assidon, launched a campaign ahead of Vazana’s show that whipped up anti-Israeli hysteria, and led to the circulation of false allegations against Vazana among a segment of Moroccan society.
“That demonizing was not working on everyone,” she said, adding that a petition was started in support of her show by her fans which more than 1,000 people signed.
Vazana said 300 to 400 people demonstrated against her on each of the five nights of the Tangier festival in which she performed twice. The demonstrators shouted “Out with Noam!” and burned an Israeli flag.
“The festival helped me rediscover my roots but the happening around it also denied my roots. It was highly emotional,” she said.
Anti-Israeli media such as the Qatar regime-controlled Arab-language Al Jazeera spread fabricated information ahead of Vazana’s show, including an accusation on a program about “murdering Palestinian kids.”
Vazana wrote in a statement that she merely served as a trombone player and singer in the army’s orchestra and never participated in any violent operation.
“Another claim of the BDS movement is that Noam is funded by a Zionist organization, when in fact the AICF is a cultural charity foundation that holds competitions for young musicians,” She added.
Vazana won the American- Israel Cultural Foundation competition three times. The prize was a scholarship for her studies at music academies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Four years ago the Tangier festival invited Vazana – whose parents were born in Morocco – to perform. In the Moroccan city of Fez, Vazana said she heard a melody that her grandmother used to sing to her.
“I knew the song from when I was four years old,” she said.
Vazana recorded an album of Ladino songs a month ago titled Nani. Vazana’s grandmother nicknamed her “Nani” [little girl] when she was a young child, a name that means the “sound you make when you want a child to go to sleep.”
Vazana was the winner of the Sephardic Music Award 2017. Her third solo album was debuted on September 23 in the Korzo Theater in The Hague.
Her second album, Love Migration, was listed as an iTunes Top-20 bestseller and won her the ACUM album prize 2014.
Vazana is active in humanitarian causes, including aid to Syrian refugees and organizing musical projects between Israeli and Palestinian musicians.
“Music should connect people,” she said.
Vazana is currently on tour with 90 concerts scheduled worldwide in 2017 in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
HOW OBAMA NUDGED ARAB LEADERS TOWARD ISRAEL
How Obama Nudged Arab Leaders Toward Israel
He aligned their interests with Netanyahu’s through his clumsy handling of Iran and the Arab Spring.
By Haisam Hassanein and Wesam Hassanein
Wall Street Journal
October 11, 2017
Israeli-Arab relations have been warming of late. Last month Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa reportedly urged fellow Arabs to end their boycott and normalize relations with Israel. In August, the Egyptian government released a letter from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman affirming Riyadh’s commitment to the existing arrangements between Egypt and Israel relating to the Straits of Tiran–the first public Saudi acknowledgment of Israel’s maritime rights in the straits.
Several Arab officials have reportedly met in private with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense officials. Israel reportedly enjoys close security and intelligence cooperation with Egypt, Jordan and several Gulf monarchies. Last month at the United Nations, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir adopted a soft tone toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and did not criticize Israel. Mr. Sisi departed from his written speech and called on the Palestinian people to accept Israel and live in peace alongside its citizens.
For the Arab change of heart, credit the Obama administration–specifically, its rift with Mr. Netanyahu.
From the perspective of Arab leaders, that administration supported the wave of political Islamism that engulfed the region in the Arab Spring’s aftermath. It also threatened their regimes in unprecedented ways by abandoning Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and slowing military exports to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain under the pretext of democratization. Worse, the administration signed a nuclear deal with Iran that reintegrated the ayatollahs’ regime into the international community while unleashing a wave of destabilization throughout the region.
Mr. Netanyahu’s views aligned perfectly with those of Arab leaders on all these issues. All rejected the administration’s belief that Iran deserves a share of the Gulf’s spoils and that Arabs must accommodate Tehran. Arab leaders admired Mr. Netanyahu’s staunch public criticism of Mr. Obama during the nuclear deal negotiations. The editor in chief of the Saudi-backed website Al-Arabiya published an article in March 2015 with the title “President Obama, Listen to Netanyahu on Iran.” Arab leaders share Mr. Netanyahu’s view that Mr. Obama’s policies, which prioritized democratic reforms over the stability of their regimes, left social, political and security vacuums, which radical Islamists soon filled.
Arab leaders realized they could learn something from Mr. Netanyahu’s ability to withstand Mr. Obama’s pressure. He allied with the U.S. Congress to repulse Mr. Obama’s efforts to interject himself into internal Israeli politics. Arab leaders decided to ally with Israel in the hope of successfully navigating the American political system. This summer leaked emails from Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Washington, revealed a concerted effort to reach out to American Jewish figures in Washington to help his government establish contacts with Israel. Mr. Sisi has frequently met with American Jewish organizations in Cairo, Washington and New York where he assured them of his commitment to peace with Israel.
Arab leaders have realized the urgency of engaging Israel directly instead of relying on the U.S. as a meditator. Their sense of urgency stems from a deep feeling of betrayal by Mr. Obama. Even with President Trump in office, the dangers of Iran and terrorism to the Arab states continue, so that the Arab states see better relations with Israel as necessary for long-term stability. The Arab openness to Israel is irreversible. It is hard to put the genie back into the bottle.
DUBAI AIRPORT’S NEW TUNNEL SCANS EVERYONE’S FACE AS YOU WALK THROUGH IT
Dubai airport’s new virtual aquarium tunnel scans your face as you walk through it
Passengers will no longer have to wait in line at security counters or pass through e-gates, instead walking through a tunnel that scans people’s faces
By Haneen Dajani
The National (UAE)
October 9, 2017
https://www.thenational.ae/uae/transport/dubai-airport-s-new-virtual-aquarium-tunnel-scans-your-face-as-you-walk-through-it-1.665406#5
Travellers departing from Dubai will no longer need to pass through any sort of security clearance counter or e-gate, they will simply walk through a virtual aquarium tunnel that will scan their face or iris using hidden cameras while they’re in motion.
The tunnel, which will display high-quality images of an aquarium, will be equipped with about 80 cameras set up in every corner and the idea came about after 18 months of brainstorming.
The move is one of several new security measures taken by Dubai aviation officials, such as replacing the explosive detection scanners with new, Chinese-made ones that can detect a wider range of explosive materials.
“The fish is a sort of entertainment and something new for the traveller but, at the end of the day, it attracts the vision of the travellers to different corners in the tunnel for the cameras to capture his/her face print,” said Major Gen Obaid Al Hameeri, deputy director general of Dubai residency and foreign affairs.
“The virtual images are of very high quality and gives a simulation of a real-life aquarium.”
The tunnel display can also be altered to offer other natural settings, such as the desert, or even to display adverts.
At the end of the tunnel, if the traveller is already registered, they will either receive a green message that says “have a nice trip” or, if the person is wanted for some reason, a red sign will alert the operations room to interfere.
“And throughout the tunnel, the passenger does not feel anything, they pass through normally,” Maj Gen Al Hameeri said.
The first of these “virtual borders” will be installed by the end of the summer of 2018 at Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport, the home of Emirates. In phases up until 2020, the tunnels will be rolled out at other Dubai terminals.
While the tunnels will serve all passengers, not only those travelling with Emirates, Maj Gen Al Hameeri said the first phase will be piloted at Emirates’ terminal as it already has the required infrastructure and it is also the official airline and partner.
The idea came about when officials were considering how best to accommodate the continually increasing number of passengers travelling through Dubai airports.
General Civil Aviation figures show that more than 124 million passengers are expected to pass through all Dubai airports by 2020 so “we had to come up with more ways to co-op with the increase. Right now, we have 80 million,” the Maj Gen said.
Travellers will be able to register their face scans at kiosks all around the airport, and they will also be available during a promotional stage at a number of malls and hotels.
The tunnels will replace the security clearance currently conducted at airport counters.
Even though airport officials have managed to cut down the time spent at the security clearance desk to five seconds, it is still not fast enough when passenger numbers hit 120 million, said Maj Gen Al Hameeri, who added that the tunnels are part of an ongoing process to introduce innovative measures.
“The tunnel has not come out of nowhere, without any foundation,” he said.
“We have been working for about four years to transform the procedure from the traditional counter and in the future we will not need the counter at all.
“There will be auditing, of course, but not through the counter.”
He added that security, as much as speeding up procedures and enhancing the travel process for passengers, is a priority.
“This will also benefit stakeholders; now the traveller can spend more time shopping at duty free, or avoid missing their flight due to long queues,” he said.
Initially, the first tunnel will conduct face scans, with a plan to introduce iris in motion scanning as well.
Meanwhile, Rabie Atieh, vice president of Emirates Group Security, said that, in addition to the tunnel introduction, other stringent security measures are being implemented.
“There are measures to increase inspections, there are new Chinese devices that detect things that were not detected by earlier devices, like explosives… and there are many new measures with regards to combatting terrorism,” he said.
“Every year there are new challenges. We try to anticipate and face the threat before it happens.”
Dubai Airports’ chief executive Paul Griffiths said that security teams at the airports are always “vigilant”.
“We are always vigilant, always working with police and national security… so vigilance and collective responsibility is what has kept us safe,” he said.
“We are trying to minimise disruption to the customer journey and develop new measures that will develop security standards, because obviously the threat is increasing.”
Currently, said Mr Atieh, there are 600 to 700 tonnes of gold and up to US$25 billion that pass through Dubai airport each year.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
The Israeli team that won the 1964 Asia Cup
“YOU ARE GOING TO SHOW THE AMERICANS WHO THE ISRAELIS ARE”
[Note by Tom Gross]
* Maccabi Tel Aviv goalkeeper Avraham Bendori was the lucky one. Ten players from Maccabi Tel Aviv alone had been killed by Arab armies in the 1948 war. It was while recuperating in hospital in 1948 that Bendori got the call. An Israel national team was to be put together. The team was summoned to Ben Gurion’s house. “He told us, ‘You are going to America, and you are going to show the Americans who the Israelis are.’”
* The Israeli national team’s first coach was Egon Pollak, who had been a star player before the war with the Jewish Austrian team Hakoah Vienna. Like a Jewish Harlem Globetrotters, Hakoah Vienna embarked on tours to play for the Diaspora, in England – where they beat West Ham 5-0, in France and finally, after winning the Austrian league in 1925, to the USA. They attracted huge crowds and, with players like Béla Guttmann (who would later win the European Cup twice as a coach with Benfica) they would often win, too. Wherever they played, huge crowds followed, the biggest being at New York’s Polo Grounds where 45,000 people crammed in to see Hakoah play. Their aim: to encourage Jewish teams to fight racial stereotypes by showing strength and discipline in sport.
(Incidentally there is a good new book out on the pre-war Jewish Hungarian soccer star Béla Guttman, who escaped deportation to Auschwitz, survived a Nazi slave labor camp and went on to become Europe’s greatest soccer manager of the 1950s and early 1960s with AC Milan and Benfica: “The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide To Football Glory, The Story of Béla Guttmann” by David Bolchover, who is a subscriber to this list.)
Following the dispatches about the Syrian team, and about the Palestinian women’s team, this is the third in the series about football (soccer) and national identity.
Incidentally, Syrian exiles who I know, and who subscribe to this list, thanked me for drawing attention in the Syrian football dispatch to the ongoing killing of civilians, which is now at its highest since the siege of Aleppo earlier this year – and yet is being all but ignored by most mainstream newspapers.
The Reuters news agency reports that Syrian and Russian warplanes killed at least 185 civilians, including at least 45 children, in five days of aerial strikes last week. These included at least 60 civilians who were bombed as they fled across the Euphrates in makeshift rubber dinghies and small boats in the Deir al-Zor province on Wednesday. And another 15 civilians were killed in air strikes on the town of al-Quriya. Tens of thousands of civilians are presently fleeing a major Syrian army advance in the east of the country.
Regime propagandists are trying to use news reports of the Syrian football team’s world cup success to try and pretend there is now tranquility in Syria.
The previous two dispatches can be read here:
* Syria are now just three games away from extraordinary World Cup qualification
* Palestinian girls’ soccer defies the odds in a conservative society
Among my past articles on football:
* Football killing fields: International soccer singles out Israel (Published in America, Canada and Israel)
* Move the 2022 World Cup from Qatar to Gaza? (Published in The Guardian)
STARS OF DAVID: THE ASTONISHING STORY OF ISRAEL’S FIRST NATIONAL TEAM
Stars of David: The astonishing story of Israel’s first national team
By James Montague
The Blizzard
June 1, 2011
https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/stars-david
Hear, O my brothers in the land of exile
The voice of one of our visionaries
Who declares that only with the very last Jew
Only there is the end of hope
“Tikvateinu” (“Our Hope”),
Naftali Herz Imber
Avraham Bendori skips up the stairs of his apartment, past the thousands of pennants and badges and medals that tell the story of his remarkable life, as if he were three decades younger than his 83 years.
“Memories,” he says, pausing halfway up, in front of a bank of triangular, fading pieces of cloth embossed with the names and dates of bygone matches whose scores have long been forgotten: USSR, Ipswich, Internazionale, Watford. Dressed in a cap, bright shirt and slacks, he spins around and opens his arms wide, like a cross between Lionel Blair and Uncle June from The Sopranos. “Just memories! When I look, there are so many memories. I have to re-read every word, every single day, so I don’t forget.”
Life and memories. They’re words that Bendori will use again and again over the next two hours. The former Israel international hadn’t played in all the matches, of course. But for 20 years, long after his playing career as a goalkeeper for Maccabi Tel Aviv had ended, he had been the national team manager. There is a portrait of Bendori with the first team before his final match in 1999, looking little different from the man standing in front of the frame today.
Over those 20 years Bendori wandered with the Israel national side from continental association to continental association looking for a home, after an Arab boycott in the 1970s meant that Israel were banished from the Asian Football Confederation. By 1994 they had joined Uefa, and settled into a reassuringly mundane reality of failure as European Championships and World Cup finals passed them by. Fittingly, the picture also celebrated Israel’s high watermark: a play-off against Denmark for a place at Euro 2000. They lost 8-0 on aggregate.
“When I was the team manager it was between the times when we knew who was a friend and who wasn’t a friend,” he explained. “We ourselves didn’t know when we went to a country how the situation was with us. We were a new country and not every country wants a new country.”
But there’s one memory not on his wall, a memory Avraham has kept to himself. There’s no pennant, no letter of thanks, no badge, not even a picture to commemorate his role in arguably the most important match he ever played, probably the most important match in his country’s history. Fifa doesn’t even recognise it as an official international. But when Israel played the USA in New York in September 1948, just four months after the state was born, it was the first time an Israeli team, any sports team, had flown the Star of David abroad.
When Israel proclaimed statehood in May 1948, conflict was inevitable. The Arab countries that encircled it declared war, while the cities and towns that had seen Arab and Jew living in relative peace during the years of the British Mandate tore themselves to partition. But as war raged, the Israelis decided that their plight needed to be heard through unconventional means. From Israel’s armed forces, a team of footballers was convened, under the watchful eye of the country’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion. Many of the players had been injured in the War of Independence. Some had only recently recovered from appalling injuries. Others had fought with the British Army’s Jewish Brigade against the Nazis. And others had fought in underground groups against the British when they still represented an occupying force. The 18 soldiers chosen from the best Jewish football clubs in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Petah Tikva had new orders from the very top. They would go and play in the USA, and would fly the new flag of Israel to show the world – and the Jews it hoped to attract to move to the fledgling state – its strength and independence.
Bendori has lived in Tel Aviv all his life, the son of Polish and Russian immigrants who came to British Palestine in 1926, a few months after his birth. “My father was friends with Ben Gurion before he was Prime Minister, so bought the land here to be close by. Because, for him, Ben Gurion was king,” recalled Bendori, now standing on the roof terrace of the apartment his father built near the Mediterranean coast, the white city shimmering behind him. Used tank shells, holding water for his collection of tropical plants, stood by the door. He points down to Ben Gurion Street, to where the former Prime Minister used to live.
His early memories of Tel Aviv are of peace and relative coexistence, of Jews and Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, living in the same apartment blocks. But as the prospect of independence started to become a reality, attacks and counter attacks took place against both communities. Bendori was too young to join the army, so he joined a local militia. “I was 17, maybe 18, and I started also to work around the area to keep the Jewish people here safe. And we had a small war.”
As soon as he was old enough he joined the Israeli Army, while continuing to keep goal for Maccabi Tel Aviv. He nearly died during the War of Independence when he was ambushed near an Arab village. “They threw a grenade into the back of my Jeep,” he said. The blast killed two of his friends, sheering the Jeep in half. But the engine kept running, and he managed to escape with the front half of the Jeep scraping against the ground. “If the engine had been in the back,” he said, “I’d be dead.”
He was the lucky one. Ten players from Maccabi Tel Aviv alone perished in the conflict. It was while recuperating in hospital that Bendori got the call. An Israel national team was to be put together in response to an invitation from the United Jewish Appeal and Zionist Organisation of America. An army training camp was set up to find the best players Israel had to offer, but Bendori was drafted into the squad straight from hospital. The team was summoned to Ben Gurion’s house. “He told us, ‘You are going to America, and you are going to show the Americans who the Israelis are.’”
But Bendori had a problem. Bendori hadn’t always been Bendori. He was born Avraham Bendersky, a product of his father’s Polish roots. It was too European for Ben Gurion, who ordered Bendersky, and the rest of squad, to change their names. “He said, ‘You are not going to the United States with a Polish name! You are going with a Hebrew name.’ So he changed it himself!” The name meant ‘the son of a generation’, but Ben Gurion’s actions were too much for Bendori’s family, even if his father revered him. “It was terrible for me. My parents didn’t want to talk to me!”
***
The Associated Press, 19 September 1948
Israel Team Flying Here to Start on Soccer Tournament
Haifa: A selected group of Israeli soccer stars left by plane this morning bound for the United States. The Israel team will play in the United States with the first scheduled match on Sunday, Sept. 26, in New York. The visitors will oppose the United States Olympic team in the Polo Grounds that day.
The eighteen players, chosen from Israel soccer clubs, are all Israeli Army soldiers. They underwent intensive training in a special camp last month. Heading the party is coach J Pollak [sic], the former star player on the famous European team Hakoah of Vienna.
***
It was the first time that Avraham Bendori had left his homeland. But the other players in the squad were battle-hardened, each with their own unique story of survival. There was Beitar Tel Aviv’s Hungarian-born centre-back Israel Weiss, who survived the Second World War after volunteering to fight the Nazis in the British Army’s so-called Jewish Division, set up by Winston Churchill in 1944; Yosef Mirmovich, the Maccabi Tel Aviv winger who was born in Cyprus but volunteered for the Australian army. And then there was the team’s captain, a beast of a man called Shmulik Ben-Dror. He too joined the British Army, rising to officer. “He was a very, very hard man,” recalled Asher Goldberg, a former journalist who now works at the Israeli Football Association archives. “He was seriously injured [during the Second World War] and spent a long time in hospital in Italy. His body was full of shrapnel. They were taking pieces of shrapnel out of him for the rest of his life.”
The biggest star of the tour to the US wasn’t on the pitch, though. The coach Egon Pollak was the only member of the delegation who had visited the United States before, when he was a star player of the famous Austrian team Hakoah Vienna. Hakoah was a club formed by Austrian Zionists at the turn of the 20th century and had a resolutely Jewish identity, attracting Jewish fans from across the world. Like a Jewish Harlem Globetrotters, they embarked on tours to play for the Diaspora, in England – where they beat West Ham 5-0, France and finally, after winning the Austrian league in 1925, to the USA. They attracted huge crowds and, with players like Béla Guttman (who would later win the European Cup twice as a coach with Benfica) they would often win, too. Wherever they played, huge crowds followed, the biggest being at New York’s Polo Grounds where 45,000 people crammed in to see Hakoah play. As a publicity exercise, the tour was a resounding success, reaching out to Jewish communities across the world with the team’s “Muscular Judaism” – a phrase coined by Max Nordau, the co-founder of the World Zionist Organisation with Theodore Herzel – to encourage Jewish teams to fight racial stereotypes by showing strength and discipline in sport.
It also effectively destroyed the team. “Do you know what they called this tour? El Dorado. The City of Gold!” said Goldberg. Such was the outpouring of affection in the US, and such was the absence of anti-Semitism, that most of the players decided to stay. “Seven players signed for Brooklyn alone. Only three players ever returned to Vienna.”
By the 1930s Hakoah were a shadow of their former selves, languishing in the third division. Then the Nazis came for them. “They were a little Hakoah then, but the Nazis took the club, and killed four of the players,” said Goldberg.
Pollak had stayed in the US too, for just one season at the New York Giants. But as coach of Israel’s very first national team, there was no chance of anyone being left behind. “When we left the country [for the US], Ben Gurion asked the players, ‘Do me a favour. Play the game. But don’t forget you are Israeli. Every one of you. When you are on the pitch, everyone should know you are Israeli,’“ recalled Bendori. “‘And I want to see every one of you when you get back!’ We didn’t dare go against him.”
Much has been written in Israel about the use of sport by politicians and political groups both before and after 1948. Sport, and especially football, had become increasingly important in the Yishuv – the name given to the Jewish settlement in pre-1948 Palestine – in building a national consciousness while also appealing to the Diaspora either to provide financial support or commit to making aliyah, the Jew’s return to the land of Israel.
“By the second half of the 1920s, sport became a means of national representation for the Jewish society,” wrote Yair Galili and Haggai Harif in “Sports and Politics in Palestine 1918-1948” in the journal Soccer and Society. “The aspiration of breaking out of the framework of the Palestinian Mandate, while at the same time continually striving to advertise the achievement of the Jewish nation and home... and to stress its ties to Diaspora Jewry, aroused the enthusiasm of local sportsmen to compete with their colleagues in the Middle East and Europe.”
There is, of course, the other side of the story. As the Palestinian writer Issam Khalidi pointed out in an article for the Electronic Intifada, the history of Jewish sport and its use in promoting Zionism during the British Mandate has all but wiped Palestine’s Arab identity from sports history. “Efforts to dominate athletics, marginalise the Arabs and cultivate cooperation with the British at any price were the main traits that characterised Zionist involvement in sports,” he wrote. The principle exammple was the status of the Palestine national team, recognised by Fifa until 1948, but which had a resolutely Jewish and British identity. In the handful of official games it played, qualifiers for the 1934 and 1938 World Cups, not one Arab player was represented, even though it was meant to be a team that represented all of Palestine – British, Arab and Jew. “Although the Zionist movement attempted to claim that sports were separate from politics, it proved to be yet another arena for Zionist colonisation,” said Khalidi. “Then and now, sports in Palestine cannot be isolated from politics.” It would take more than 60 years for an ‘Arab’ Palestinian team to play an officially recognised international football match: a 1-1 draw with Thailand in an Olympic qualifier in April 2011.
Both sides would agree on the political power that sport wields in moulding the identity of new states. Tours by Jewish teams in Europe and beyond – like Hakoah’s trip to the US – energised the local Jewish populations, a fact that intrigued politicians looking to secure Israel’s place on the world stage in early 1948. In his recent book Zionism of Muscles, a look at how sport was used in Israeli foreign policy, Haggai Harif wrote of how Israel’s tour of the USA in 1948 – the first by any Israeli sports team – was seen as hugely important propaganda tool.
“The visit of the Israel football team,” he wrote, “realised the use of sports as a tool influencing the huge populations in other states... It was emphasised that politically and diplomatically this game will symbolise the unity, ability and existence of the young state in every field. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Moshe Sharett, blessed the team before they left. This mission is to strengthen... the feeling of the Jews in America and their identification with the main goal of defending the state of Israel. You, the people of this team, must emphasise the Jewish strength, the Jewish unity and the brave bond between us in Israel and the Jews in the Diaspora.”
Sharett, who would later become Israel’s second Prime Minister, was unswerving in his belief that the tour would be a success beyond sport, providing his nascent country with a valuable publicity coup. “Our best men, who we have sent abroad, will tell [the USA] unequivocally the story of the War of Independence,” he said.
***
New York Times, 23 September 1948
Mayor Welcomes Team from Israel
Forty cars with streamers bearing the legend, “Welcome Heroes of Israel,” and carrying the squad of visiting soccer players from the new State of Israel... bore down upon City Hall yesterday after a tour of Manhattan. Representatives of leading Jewish organizations accompanied them. Then, in the presence of a huge noon-day gathering, they dispersed. Ten of the cars returned at 2 o’clock for a brief reception by Mayor O’Dwyer on City Hall steps.
Photographers and newsreel men promptly took over and kept the mayor busy shaking hands with Capt. Samuel Ben-Dror of the Israel Army, who was severely wounded in the battle for Latrun.
“It is always a pleasure for me to meet great men of your calibre who have done their full duty on behalf of their country and I am sure that the people of New York City will extend to you all the warm welcome which you deserve,” said the Mayor. “You will be made to feel at home and our best wishes are with you.”
***
Just a few blocks away from Bendori’s apartment, Eliezer Spiegel sits in his lounge with his wife and grandson. Despite being considered a legend in Israeli football there are few clues of Spiegel’s long career in the game, either as a star striker for Beitar Tel Aviv and Maccabi Petah Tikva or later as a coach. Instead pictures of his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren adorn his shelves.
Spiegel was 24 when he travelled to the USA with Israel’s first national football team, and had fought a very different war to the war Avraham Bendori was involved in. “My wife’s brothers were all members. They recruited me,” Spiegel says. “I was an expert with pistols. Small pistols.”
While many of his future teammates chose to join the British Army to fight a common enemy in Nazism, Spiegel joined the Irgun, a militant Zionist underground armed movement that assassinated British officials and bombed British targets. In 1946 they were responsible for bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the nerve centre of British rule, killing 91 people. Irgun members, who saw the British as occupiers, were deemed so dangerous that in 1945 the British began rounding up members. Spiegel was arrested, but rather than being sent to a local prison, he was sent to a camp in Eritrea. It was hoped that they were so far away they wouldn’t be able to escape and return.
“We used to play football in the camp, against a team of the British,” Spiegel recalls. “I used to play very well. One of the soldiers, a captain, said he could arrange for me to go to England and play there.”
It was a way out of exile, but for Spiegel it was replacing one exile with another. “I told him I wouldn’t go,” he said. “They wanted us to be far away. I had to return [to Israel] first.”
Instead Spiegel was imprisoned in Eritrea for three years, only being allowed home after Israeli independence had been declared. His first act of service was to go to the USA.
It had rained non-stop all weekend, but 26 September 1948 was still a beautiful day. The teams lined up in front of either 25,000 (according to the New York Times) or 35,000 (according to the Israeli FA) overwhelmingly Jewish fans at the Polo Grounds. “My English wasn’t too good then,” remembers Bendori. “But I remember everyone was with Israel, shouting ‘Is-ra-el, Is-ra-el!’ Everyone wanted us to stay because of the war.”
The Israel team wore blue bomber jackets, a gift from their American hosts when they landed. The team lined up to watch their new flag hoisted for the first time and hear their national anthem, the Hatikvah – an adapted version of “Tikvateinu” by Naftali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from what is now Ukraine. It invoked pride, as well as painful memories.
“I asked all the players what they felt,” says Bendori. “I saw their eyes, and they were crying. They didn’t know how this Israel music would make them feel. It was difficult.”
Spiegel, too, still remembers the powerful emotions that Israel’s first sporting national anthem on foreign soil provoked. “This is the only thing we were satisfied with the match,” he said. “When we were hearing it, we took it very hard. It felt like we had a country, and to be in America to sing it.... There were many people crying. I am a strong man but I was crying too.”
***
New York Times, 27 September 1948
US Olympic Squad Turns Back Israeli Soccer Team on Opening of Tour Here
American Eleven Gains 3-1 Triumph
It was a more nimble-footed United States Olympic team that spoiled the debut in this country of the soccer team of Israel, first international athletic group to represent the new state.
While the Israelis pressed the Americans to the utmost in the second half and missed more than a few opportunities, the Olympic eleven made its shots count. The US booters broke through twice in the first half and once in the second to carry away a 3-1 decision before 25,000.
Perhaps it was the fact that the Israelis had only one opportunity to engage in a real workout since reaching this country. They were not outplayed too greatly. And certainly their passing was a shade better than that of the Americans.
Impressive ceremonies preceded the start of the game. Headed by the New York Police Department Band, the Police Department Glee Club and a Jewish War Veteran’s color guard, the members of the Israel team and then the United States Olympic eleven paraded around the flags of both nations and the singing of the national anthems.
***
Egon Pollak’s dark mood soon destroyed the dressing room bonhomie fostered by seeing the Israeli flag for the first time. “We didn’t play too good,” Spiegel explained. “It was cold, raining, we don’t have this climate. It was hot for us [in Israel]. It was very cold in America and for us it was very difficult. He [Pollak] told us that we played like girls. We are afraid all the time. Why didn’t we fight? He was very angry. Very angry because we lost. Because for him coming to America was something special because he was from Vienna and had played here before.”
The one bright spot was Israel’s captain scoring his country’s first goal. Spiegel provided the assist. The tour didn’t get much better. Israel lost all its games in New York and Philadelphia, and matches against an All-Star American league team. But the results, for once, didn’t matter.
“As far as sport is concerned it was a failure,” said Haggai Harif. “But as a means of propaganda it was successful. In the Israeli newspapers they wrote it was such a great experience for the Jews of New York and Philadelphia to see Israel, this young and unknown state. The gathering of the Jews... in the streets waving for the players of the Israeli team was such an extraordinary propaganda tool for the Zionist groups in America. It strengthened the Zionist passion for the state of Israel and led them to contribute and even make aliyah.”
As Ben Gurion had hoped, every player returned to Israel. There was a new country to build. The players returned to Haifa to a hero’s welcome, but their rest was short-lived. All of them returned to their Army units. There were still three months of war to fight, but they didn’t know that then. Slowly the years would pass. Children would be born, parents would die, wives passed and second wives would take their place. One by one, the team of 1948 would get smaller and smaller. Now only three remain: the winger Yosef Mirmovich, Bendori and Spiegel, who had to find a new Army unit to join after years of exile in Eritrea. “They didn’t give me anything dangerous to do,” he admitted. “They just wanted me to play [football].”
After the war, Spiegel would realise the dream that been offered to him by a British army captain in Eritrea. In 1954 Maccabi Tel Aviv travelled to England for a friendly against Wolverhampton Wanderers. They lost 10-0. “I touched the ball 10 times,” Spiegel said. “The 10 times we kicked off.”
It was while in England he had a chance encounter with a ghost from the past. “The newspaper had printed which hotel we were staying in,” he said. “I was waiting outside and I saw this man in full military uniform coming towards me. I thought, ‘That’s it, the British have found me. I’m to be arrested!’ It was the colonel from Eritrea. Retired now. He had read in the paper I was here!”
What did he say? “He was sorry for Africa, and happy I got to England eventually. He was bored now. He said he drank cups of coffee all day.”
Spiegel would go on to have a long and happy relationship with England, visiting Lilleshall when he decided to become a coach and was hired as the assistant manager to the national team. He counted Walter Winterbottom as a friend, and met the Charlton brothers. A letter stands on his bookshelf, from the then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to mark Israel’s 60th anniversary in 2008, extolling his “extraordinary life” and recognising his role in creation of Israel, both on and off the pitch. He also thanked him for not leaving the camp to play in England when he had the chance. His son, Giora Spiegel, would go on to enjoy the playing career his father never did, being part of the great Israel team that, along with Mordechai Spiegler, qualified for Israel’s one and only World Cup appearance at Mexico ‘70.
Progress to that World Cup began on 26 September 1948, with a squad of soldiers fresh from war and exile. “The match was significant. It was the first because everything was new in the country,” says Bendori, now in his kitchen. His son, who was briefly a Maccabi Tel Aviv youth player 20 years ago, has arrived to ensure he takes his medication, as he has done every day since Avraham’s wife died suddenly two years ago. He hands him a glass of thick green gunk to drink.
Life in the end catches up with everybody, even sportsmen, even those sportsmen whose actions reverberate far beyond sport. “The football team would bring Jewish people to Israel,” says Bendori senior. “It was propaganda, yes – there was no other kind of business.”
Above: The Palestinian Women’s National Soccer Team: “Since 1998, the Palestinian men’s soccer team has been part of FIFA; in 2006 the women followed suit. All this was undeterred by the fact that soccer is considered among some Palestinians to be a Western import brought to the region by the British Mandate and early Jewish immigrants and should be avoided.”
For girls wishing to play, the hurdles are even higher. “Most families do not appreciate seeing their girls in short clothing on a soccer field and traveling around without supervision,” says Yousef Zaghloul, one of the women’s team coaches. “For most of the girls, the game is over at around age 16.”
[Note by Tom Gross]
I am sending/posting three dispatches about football (soccer) and national identity. (They are split into three emails for space reasons). This one concerns Palestinian women’s football. The other two concern Syrian football (they are on the verge of qualifying for the World Cup for the first time despite the war there), and Israeli football upon the state’s foundation.
Among my past articles on football:
Football killing fields: International soccer singles out Israel (Published in America, Canada and Israel)
Move the 2022 World Cup from Qatar to Gaza? (Published in The Guardian)
ARTICLES
PALESTINIAN GIRLS PLAY SOCCER TO WIN IN THE WEST BANK
Palestinian Girls Play Soccer To Win In The West Bank
By Franziska Knupper
Jerusalem Post
August 5, 2017
The Palestinian Women’s National Soccer Team trains under harsh conditions in a sport that seems to give hope and incentive for change.
Already at nine in the morning, E-Ram’s streets are burning with heat. It crawls through the lively markets and into the crowded buses, lingering above the artificial grass of the town stadium, home to the Palestinian Women’s National Soccer Team. Instead of advertisements for American beer or energy drinks, the banner ads on the sideline feature portraits of Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Arafat.
Three times a week, Dima Youssef, 22, comes here to play soccer. Even last month, during Ramadan, she notes that “games take place at night after people have had dinner, or right before sunset so you can go eat and drink afterward.”
She shrugs her shoulders. Actually, none of this applies to her, she says, since she is a Christian. But it does influence her teammates, she adds, and therefore the energy of the whole team.
According to Youssef, the conditions to pursue a sport professionally are less than ideal in the West Bank for the Palestinian Women’s National Soccer Team.
Founded in 2006, the team has participated four times for the West Asian Cup, but has not been able to partake in bigger tournaments so far. “We are a young team,” stresses Youssef, “and none of the girls can afford to give 100 percent for soccer.”
Practice almost makes her late for class at the university, where Youssef studies journalism. Soccer as a career? “I never even thought of it,” she says. “This is not really an option. In contrast to Europe, there really is no money in the clubs around here.”
She turns her head and looks at the girl next to her, awaiting affirmation. Gina Khnouf claps her hands together and sighs. A gesture of resignation? For over a year Khnouf has been coaching girls under 19: a task between hope and frustration.
“So many talents here are wasted,” she says. “Most Palestinians don’t even know that there is a women’s soccer team. It is a man’s sport, even more than in Europe. But I am trying to spread the word.”
This is an undertaking which is twice as hard: even most male Palestinian athletes have trouble expanding their talents outside the territories, not to mention Gazans or underage girls for whom travel to games and training camps abroad often remain virtually impossible.
The opposing team usually has to come to the West Bank, and that only happens very rarely. “In 2011 we played against Japan; that was a highlight,” Khnouf declares proudly, despite having lost 19 to 0.
Soccer has become an integral part of Palestinian culture since the first soccer union [at a time when Palestinians largely referred to Jewish residents of Palestine] was founded in 1928. Since 1998, the men’s soccer team has been part of FIFA; in 2006 the women followed suit. All this was undeterred by the fact that soccer is considered among some Palestinians to be a Western import brought to the region by the British Mandate and early Jewish immigrants and should be avoided.
For girls wishing to play, the hurdles are even higher. “Most families do not appreciate seeing their girls in short clothing on a soccer field and traveling around without supervision. Also, they consider the game as being too rough for a woman,” explains Yousef Zaghloul, one of the women’s team coaches. “For most of the girls, the game is over at around age 16.”
He sounds truly distressed. Zaghloul is an engineer, but soccer has been his passion from a very young age. “One day I saw a group of kids playing in front of my house. One girl was among them and I was very impressed by her skills, but at the same time it hit me that she probably would never be able to benefit from her potential.”
That moment forever changed his life, as well as the destiny of his hometown, Dura, near Hebron. There Zaghloul founded one of the first female soccer clubs in the West Bank after having trained two boys’ teams. People know him and trust him. This is essential, he stresses, explaining how only a familiar face can change anything around here.
“But I understood that, by supporting women’s sports, I can really make a difference in my society. It might sound like a cliché, I know, but in places like this, sport still retains its vital power.”
The place where the first training field was established – a pitch of pure rubble – bears the name “Joseph Blatter Street” after the former FIFA president, who has been suspended from his position due to corruption allegations. “He was here for the inauguration of our first stadium and has traveled around to observe the Palestinian soccer scene,” Zaghloul recalls.
He has been pushing for the acceptance of women’s soccer in the region and the sport seems to have gained popularity. There are now nearly 30 women’s clubs.
Team sport offers young girls an opportunity to leave the house for communal activities other than school, emphasizes Zaghloul. “I noticed that the girls – in contrast to the boys – are always on time for their training sessions. Often they even come half an hour before and don’t mind staying longer for some extra practice. It is their moment in the week to spend time with their girlfriends.” Most of them have never missed a single class, he adds: “Even when they are sick, they come and watch the game from the sideline.”
Many times Zaghloul has had to convince the girls’ parents. Many cups of coffee and tea were served while many cakes and cookies were eaten in the company of worried mothers and fathers, all in the name of soccer. “I have a good rate of success convincing them of the safety of the sport and the environment it takes place in,” he says.
With joy he remembers the two girls who were allowed to accompany him to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, representing the Palestinian Authority abroad. “Apart from short trips to Jordan, they’ve never been outside the territories,” he notes.
There have also been many cases in which even Zaghloul was not able to keep the girls on the team. “Sometimes I couldn’t really figure out the core reason. The clothing? That could be adaptable. The travels? But there is always supervision! In the end, some figure it’s just not for girls, period.”
Fortunately Dima Youssef never had to suffer through such an experience. As a Christian her upbringing was a bit more liberal compared to her Muslim friends. It is the politics and economics of the region that keep her from considering soccer as more than a passion, she discloses.
“I love the game, I do. But there is so little support – no scholarships, no sponsors, no investors. How are we supposed to get our jerseys? The equipment? The coaches? We pay in order to play.”
Zaghloul himself works on a volunteer basis even today – just like Khnouf. “Several evenings a week,” he stresses. “You really have to believe in what you are doing. I am doing it for the next generation, no more and no less,” he says.
Youssef is doing it for fun, no more and no less, she confides. Her favorite club is Germany’s Borussia Dortmund. “I would love to see them play once,” she jokes, “Maybe they’ll come to E-Ram one day, what do you think?”
PALESTINIAN ALL-GIRL SOCCER TEAM BREAKS CULTURAL BARRIERS
Palestinian all-girl soccer team breaks cultural barriers
Hundreds of young women are enjoying an opportunity denied their mothers’ generation in the socially conservative West Bank
By Hossam Ezzedine
AFP
September 16, 2017
DEIR JARIR, West Bank – Dozens of young Palestinian girls are practicing their soccer skills on a makeshift village pitch, enjoying an opportunity denied their mothers’ generation in the socially conservative West Bank.
Gender barriers and religious taboos mean that the sight of women – even girls – wearing a soccer uniform is still shocking to some Palestinians who regard it as a men’s game.
Yet women’s soccer has developed significantly since the first Palestinian team was formed in 2009.
There are now six adult teams playing in an outdoor league and a dozen more in an indoor league.
Around 400 girls over the age of 14 are registered as players, and more and more younger girls are taking up the sport.
The 40 or so girls between 10 and 14 training in the village of Deir Jarir, outside Ramallah, have to make do with just six balls between them and their shirts have the name of the boys’ team on the back.
But under the watchful eye of coach Rajaa Hamdan, they are learning how to trap and pass a ball, dribble between cones and jump for headers.
Hamdan said she had been desperate to play as a child but was prevented by social attitudes in the village.
Now aged 32, she decided to set up a team for girls.
“When I was young, the circumstances did not allow me to practice, but the idea stayed in my mind,” she said.
“So I said to myself as I didn’t play when I was small, why doesn’t my village have a team for girls like for the boys?”
Using Facebook, she urged girls to sign up and was surprised to have 30 volunteers almost immediately.
“I was afraid of problems with the villagers, but so far there have been no serious ones,” she said.
Salma Fares, 12, said she was proud to be part of the team.
“I am very happy to practice soccer with girls like me. It is my right,” she said.
“I am happy they formed a team in the village for girls, like for the boys.”
Amal Alaa, 13, echoed her enthusiasm.
“I love soccer a lot and when I saw the announcement of the team, I asked my parents to allow me to join.
“My dream is to become captain.”
Hamdan said she was happy with the success of her project but worried the girls would give up on soccer as they grew older.
“I am happy because I realized my dream of getting the girls out of the repression they face,” she said.
“In our culture and traditions, when girls get older they either wear a hijab or get married, so they will not play the game.”
The president of the village soccer club, Youssef Mousa, said he had been pleasantly surprised by villagers’ reaction so far.
“When the idea of setting up the team started, we were afraid of the subject because it was not easy to set up a girls’ soccer team in a conservative village.
“But so far there has been no problem.”
One of the Syrian national team’s goalkeepers was deemed an enemy of the Assad regime and survived several assassination attempts. Another was jailed. Now Assad is using the team’s unlikely success for propaganda purposes to try and show an atmosphere of normality in the country at a time when his regime is still killing dozens of Syrian civilians every day.
SYRIA ARE NOW JUST THREE GAMES AWAY FROM EXTRAORDINARY WORLD CUP QUALIFICATION
[Note by Tom Gross]
I am posting three dispatches about football (soccer) and national identity. (They are split into three emails for space reasons). This one concerns Syrian football. The other two concern Palestinian women’s football and Israeli football upon the state’s foundation.
Syria, who have a few minutes ago drawn 1-1 this evening against Australia in the first of two legs, are on the brink of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup.
If they succeed, it will mark the first time the country has qualified for the world’s most watched event.
It would seem an unlikely year for Syria to qualify given the fact that at least 400,000 Syrians have been killed (mostly by their own government) in the past six years and about half the population driven into external or internal exile.
When BBC journalists Richard Conway and David Lockwood investigated the Syrian side’s sudden success for their documentary ‘Syria: Football on the Frontline’, Assad’s officials discouraged them from covering two car-bomb attacks, a short distance from where the players were training. The pair did so anyway. A total of 40 people, many of them Shia pilgrims visiting from Iraq, were killed.
The first article below, from the (London) Mail, asks if they qualify “will the Syrian team just be a propaganda tool for the murderous Assad regime?”
The second article below, from the Australian Associated Press, is titled: World Cup: “This is not Assad’s team, it’s Syria’s team”.
Because of the war, the so-called “Qasioun Eagles” have been forced to play their recent home qualifiers 4,500 miles away in Malaysia. After Macau refused to continue hosting Syria’s home matches, the world football body FIFA looked set to throw them out of World Cup qualifying, before Malaysia stepped in to help.
Having never before featured at the World Cup, Syria’s hopes were kept alive thanks to Omar Al Somah’s 92nd minute equalizer against Iran in the final game of the group stages, which secured third place and a play-off against Australia.
The winner of the tie, played over two legs, will play one final qualifier against a team from the CONCACAF region for a place at Russia 2018.
Not everyone in Syria sees the national team’s rise as an uplifting. Many argue the Assad regime are using the success to portray a false positive image of the country at a time when every day Syrian civilians are still being killed by the Assad regime and its allies Hizbullah, Iran and Russia.
Eight of the 32 places up for grabs at the 2018 World Cup have been claimed:
Russia (hosts)
Brazil
Iran
Japan
Mexico
Belgium
South Korea
Saudi Arabia
Among my past articles on football:
Football killing fields: International soccer singles out Israel (Published in America, Canada and Israel)
Move the 2022 World Cup from Qatar to Gaza? (Published in The Guardian)
ARTICLES
ON THE BRINK OF QUALIFYING FOR THE 2018 WORLD CUP
Syria are on the brink of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup... but will their team just be a propaganda tool for the murderous Assad regime?
By Ian Herbert
The Mail On Sunday (UK)
October 1, 2017
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-4936834/Syria-brink-World-Cup-just-propaganda.html
The country’s civil war has claimed more than 400,000 lives and forced four million into the exile of refugee camps in Turkey, Iraq and Jordan.
One of the national team’s goalkeepers was deemed an enemy of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and survived several assassination attempts. Another was jailed.
A talented member of the nation’s Under 16 squad was killed by a bomb a few years ago.
Syria are potentially four games away from the most extraordinary World Cup qualification
Such is the backdrop to the most extraordinary of all the World Cup play-off ties: Syria’s journey to the brink of qualification. Beat Australia over two legs, and Syria will have one final qualifier – possibly against the USA, of all countries – to earn a place in Russia.
Incongruous though it seems amid the current disintegration of the country, the roots of this success lie in Syria’s enlightened push to develop young talent, more than 10 years ago.
The Syrian FA ended the domestic monopoly of the army team Al-Jaish, who dominated because compulsory conscription meant they recruited the best players. The nation began investing in scouting and training.
Their youth teams flourished. Al-Karamah, in the now rebel-held city of Homs, reached the last four and last eight of the Asian Champions League for three successive years, from 2006.
The war meant there was not even a Syrian domestic league for several years and key players refused to play for a national side representing a regime which has been accused of waging repeated chemical attacks on civilians and the mass bombing of Homs, where the Arab Spring revolt took hold in 2011.
However the side have progressed under the management of Ayman Hakeem, an emotional 57-year-old Syrian who wept at his press conference after the decisive 2-2 draw in Tehran against Carlos Queiroz’s Iran. The imperious Iranians booked their ticket to Russia three months ago.
As the side progressed deep into the qualification stages, the charismatic Hakeem has persuaded several of a golden generation developed in the past decade to put their abhorrence of Assad to one side and return to the international fold.
They include veteran striker Firas al-Khatib, whose young cousin was killed in an attack on Homs, and Omar al-Somah, Syria’s most celebrated footballer due to his goal-scoring exploits with Saudi club Al Ahli - but this is by no means the fairy tale it seems.
Assad’s regime is providing the team’s finances and seeking a propaganda coup. In the early stages of qualification, some of the team’s players wore shirts featuring an image of Assad at a pre-match press conference.
Making it to Russia would create the impression of normality and order in his country. It would also give a headache to FIFA, who vehemently oppose political interference in football.
When the BBC journalists Richard Conway and David Lockwood investigated the side’s success for their the documentary ‘Syria: Football on the Frontline’, Assad’s officials discouraged them from covering two car-bomb attacks, a short distance from where Hakeem’s players were training. The pair did so anyway. A total of 40 people, many of them Shia pilgrims visiting from Iraq, were killed.
The film captured the huge image of Assad, pitch-side at one training session. His government funds the team via the Syrian Football Association, an arm of government.
Though the players’ wages are minimal - £55 a month - the side could not afford travel or hotels without the country’s FA. General Mowaffak Joumaa, the most powerful sports official in Syria, has attended qualification matches. He was denied a visa for the London 2012 Olympic Games, because of his links to Assad.
For many of the best Syrian talents, the war has brought obscurity, rather than a place on this international stage. Helal al-Baarini was a key member of the Under 19 side and played for Al-Karamah as a 17-year-old, but his family were forced to flee the bombing in Homs and, after four years as refugees in Jordan, ultimately found refuge in Birmingham.
A player seen as one of many great talents lost to the war is now plying his trade for Bilston Town in the Premier Division of the West Midlands League. He initially joined Third Division club Continental Star FC.
‘There was a lot of excitement when we were coming through the system together,’ Al Baarini told The Mail on Sunday.
‘A lot of the players unfortunately lost their lives during the war and a lot of players gave up playing football because of the war. At least 15 of my closest friends left football. If the war had not happened it could’ve been a great opportunity for me to be part of the team and get myself on the map.’
His team-mates included Abdelbasset Sarout - a target for Assad’s regime who survived several assassination attempts after joining the uprising.
Working with the Ballers Sports Management agency, Al Baarini said he had been invited to a trial with Birmingham City a few months ago, assisted by a caseworker at Birmingham City Council, which has helped the family and others to settle. That has come to nothing.
Some of those in exile feel that Hakeem’s players should not attach themselves to a symbol of the regime.
One refugee, Nihad Saadeddine, has established a ‘Free Syria’ team drawn from those in exile in Turkey and Germany. Saadeddine has been uncompromising about players who have returned to the fold.
He said recently that Al Khatib should be ‘condemned to the garbage bin of history’ with those who support the Assad regime.
But amid the build-up to Thursday’s ‘home’ leg – to be played 5,000 miles away in Malaysia because Damascus is not deemed safe – there are few in the country who don’t want to see Syria win.
Al Baarini will look out for the players he served his football apprenticeship with in this national side and sees his besieged compatriots back at home as the beneficiaries of another win.
Striker Al Khatib seems to feel the same. ‘The people could do with some kind of enjoyment and happiness,’ he said.
‘The reason why I have come back into the team is very complicated but I can’t talk more about these things. Better for me, better for my country, better for my family, better for everybody if I not talk about that, but if we can win and go the finals it will lift the people. The people deserve that.’
WORLD CUP: “THIS IS NOT ASSAD’S TEAM, IT’S SYRIA’S TEAM”
World Cup: ‘This is not Assad’s team, it’s Syria’s team’
Syria’s players have much more than football on their mind in tonight’s World Cup playoff against Australia
Australian Associated Press
Thursday 5 October 2017
Syrian midfielder Zaher Midani and his colleagues will have more than football on their mind in tonight’s first leg World Cup playoff against Australia.
“We have a huge motivation: to make the Syrian people happy,” Midani said. “The players and management hope we’ll be able to unify our people.
“Australia may have many big-name players known for their individual talents. But we have the enormous potential that comes from performing as a group.”
Syria have never been so close to a maiden World Cup berth.
To describe the team’s unprecedented qualifying run as improbable is an understatement.
On a shoestring budget and shackled by security concerns that deny them from hosting home fixtures on home soil, the world No75 nation has toppled several rivals that boast significantly greater pedigree and pay cheques.
It has all the trappings of a fairytale, a Cinderella story, of a country ripped to shreds by civil war finding hope in the all-uniting power of sport.
Last month, when Omar Al Somah scored a sensational stoppage-time equaliser against Iran to snatch Syria’s historic first World Cup play-off spot, thousands of jubilant fans danced on the streets of Damascus in a rare celebration.
However, that the giant public screen on which they watched was erected by president Bashar al-Assad’s dictator government underlines the very reason Syrians are so painfully divided over what their national team represents.
Detractors say the team normalises and legitimises the regime’s myriad atrocities while sweeping under the carpet the killings, disappearances and detainments of professional football players.
The government stands accused of using the team as a propaganda tool, another weapon against its own people.
The allegation was epitomised in 2015 when then Syria coach Fajr Ibrahim attended a press conference wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Assad’s image.
They’re all factors that informed captain Firas Al Khatib’s decision in 2012 – along with teammate Somah – to boycott the national team until the country stopped bombing its civilians.
Five years later the 34-year-old – widely considered Syria’s greatest player – accepted a call to return for the Russia 2018 push, but betrayed signs of a man trapped between a grim divide.
“I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” Khatib told ESPN in May. “What happened is very complicated, I can’t talk more about these things.
“Better for me, better for my country, better for my family, better for everybody if I not talk about that. Whatever happen, 12 million Syrians will love me. Other 12 million will want to kill me.”
Indeed, when half a nation’s population is displaced, the chasm cannot expect to be fixed by a sporting team mired in such deep moral conflict.
Regardless, the unlikely success has provided welcome respite to both regime backers and opponents.
Some, like Wafi al-Bahsh, who runs a football club in the rebel-run Eastern Ghoutan near Damascus, attempt to reconcile their feelings by separating sport and politics.
“My dream is to see Syria qualify for the World Cup,” he said. “This team is not Assad’s team, it’s Syria’s team.”
In this brief dispatch, I attach three photos with captions I have written.
-- Tom Gross
HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
Above: This is what the Spanish security forces have been doing this afternoon to Catalan grandmothers, who dared to try and take part in a free and fair democratic vote for independence.
(There are many more photos and videos here in the international media or in the Spanish media.)
Some of the very same Spanish officials who have been at the forefront of criticizing Israel for supposedly not allowing Palestinian independence (even though successive Israeli prime ministers have offered Palestinians an independent state), have been egging on the Spanish police to use brute force today to stop the Catalan independence vote taking place.
The nation of Catalonia has more than 7.5 million citizens. Over 800 Catalan civilians trying to vote were injured today by what some might term the Spanish “occupation forces”, many by rubber bullets as they lined up to vote.
In spite of the police violence, and 300 polling stations being shut by the police, over two million Catalans managed to vote today in towns and villages across Catalonia. The police then seized many of the ballot boxes.
A number of European and Israeli MPs were invited by the Catalan authorities to observe today’s vote and many have expressed shock at the level of violence they witnessed.
Catalan leaders say that if the vote is overwhelmingly “yes”, they may declare independence in the next week or two. That would likely result in a strong reaction against this move by Spain, and possibly by the EU too.
(In sharp contrast, Spain unilaterally recognized a Palestinian state in 2014 and encouraged others to do so.)
239 AND COUNTING
Above: Passengers waiting outside Marseille’s main train station today, in France’s second-biggest city, after French soldiers shot dead an Islamist after he slit two women’s throats (the second woman was stabbed in the throat and then the back) and tried to kill more, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is Greatest).
Today’s victims brought to at least 239 the official total number of people killed in France by jihadists since 2015. (This figure doesn’t include a large number of other attacks where the police claimed the perpetrators were psychologically disturbed and therefore could not be sure the attacks were Islamicly motivated even though the perpetrators on many occasions shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they carried them out.)
A state of emergency continues in France. Over 7,000 troops are still guarding transport hubs, tourist sites and prominent churches and synagogues.
As was the case with the Islamist terror attack in Finland’s second largest city a few weeks ago, the Marseille attacker today reportedly targeted only women (for not dressing “correctly”) slashing their throats. Today’s attack follows last night’s vehicle and stabbing attacks by Islamists in Edmonton, Canada. An ISIS flag was found in the perpetrator’s vehicle.
NEO-NAZI MARCH ON SYNAGOGUE DURING YOM KIPPUR
Above: More than 50 people were arrested in Gothenburg, Sweden on Saturday as over 600 black-clad members of the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement, tried to attack the city’s main synagogue, as the city’s tiny Jewish community prayed during Yom Kippur. Several people were injured in running battles as police tried to protect the synagogue. The Nordic Resistance Movement had a permit from police to hold the march, which the authorities then tried to re-route away from the synagogue.
Allan Stutzinsky, hear of the Gothenburg Jewish community, said anti-Semitic threats from the Nordic Resistance Movement had already resulted in the closing down in April of the small Jewish community center in Umea, a city in northeastern Sweden.
In Sweden, Jews have been under attack in recent years from Islamists, from the extreme right and from the extreme left.
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