Love of the Land: Protesting Anti-Semitism is "Hardline"?

Protesting Anti-Semitism is "Hardline"?

Scotland's Sunday Herald gives a platform to the fringe voice of an anti-Zionist Holocaust survivor while labeling Jewish opposition as "hardline".

Honest Reporting UK
Media Critiques
25 January '10

Scotland's Sunday Herald publishes a provocative article headlined "Auschwitz survivor: 'Israel acts like Nazis'". According to the article:

One of the last remaining Auschwitz survivors has launched a blistering attack on Israel over its occupation of Palestine as he began a lecture tour of Scotland. ...

His comments sparked a furious reaction from hardline Jewish lobby groups, with Dr Meyer branded an "anti-Semite" and accused of abusing his position as a Holocaust survivor. [Emphasis added]

The reason that this story is so sensationalist and able to garner publicity is simply because a figure such as Dr Hajo Meyer is very much on the radical fringes of the debate and is certainly not representative in any way of the mainstream Jewish community or Holocaust survivors.

Yet, those who protest Meyer's extreme views are themselves termed "hardline Jewish lobby groups" by the Sunday Herald.

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Love of the Land: Protesting Anti-Semitism is "Hardline"?

Love of the Land: Analysis: Hedy Epstein's European media sex appeal: Anti-Zionism and survivor of the Holocaust

Analysis: Hedy Epstein's European media sex appeal: Anti-Zionism and survivor of the Holocaust

Benjamin Weinthal
Berlin/JPost
03 January '10

There is a tried-and-true Jewish method in Europe to garner instant media coverage and awards of recognition: Scream the trendy anti-Israeli slogans equating the Jewish state with Nazi Germany and the former apartheid regime in South Africa, while highlighting one's background as a Holocaust survivor.

According to seasoned media observers in Germany, the formula of Shoah survivor coupled with anti-Israeli activism helps to explain the public relations coup of Hedy Epstein, an anti-Zionist 85-year-old German Jew who fled the Nazis in 1939, and is now promoting her hunger strike in Egypt to advance the so-called "Free Gaza Movement."

Epstein declared her hunger strike on Monday, as part of a campaign involving 1,400 activists from 42 countries in Egypt hoping to enter Gaza, in a bid to compel Israel to end its restrictions on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. She has attracted widespread press coverage in Europe.

Prompting the activists, many of whom are from organizations affiliated with Hamas, to march into Gaza, is the one-year anniversary of the start of Operation Cast Lead to stop Hamas rocket attacks on Israel's southern periphery.

The European laws of supply and demand (similar ones apply on many American college campuses) show an endless demand for Jewish senior citizens willing to invoke anti-Israeli language that meets the definitions of contemporary anti-Semitism. According to a Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs report, Epstein had "compared Israel to a Nazi state and Israeli soldiers to Nazis" during a lecture at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Writing this past week from Beirut, the liberal Huffington Post site reported that Epstein said, "The issue for Israeli Jews and the American Jewish community is the Holocaust, and everything is due to the Holocaust. But Israel is not being persecuted now. Israel is the persecutor."

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Love of the Land: Analysis: Hedy Epstein's European media sex appeal: Anti-Zionism and survivor of the Holocaust