News Releases 2022
Paris, 2 June 2022
Madam Ursula von der Leyen,
President of the European Commission,
On behalf of our 400,000 members, we are aghast at the statements of your Representative, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff.
As a German national, he has apparently forgotten his history and responsibility to the Jewish people, by such statement as, “terrorist attacks against Israelis should not be surprising given the depth of Palestinian suffering from the 74 years of conflict with Israel!”
Read more: Wiesenthal Centre Open letter: “We are Aghast at...
Paris, 31 May 2022
International Quds Day began with the return to Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini, from his exile in France. Each year, since the 1979 revolution, Tehran has promoted Quds Day to ingratiate itself with Muslim organizations and demonstrators mobilized “against Zionism and in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.”
The idea was to reverse the narrative of Jerusalem Day: the celebration of Jerusalem becoming the “grievance of Al-Quds” – just as terrorist murderers were to be rehabilitated as “holy martyrs”.
Quds Day sees pro-Palestinian groups parading with flags in Paris, London and elsewhere in Europe, and has become also a bridge between Sunna and Shi’a for a common cause.
Paris, 30 May 2022
“The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall led to a snowball effect of archives opening across Europe,” stated Dr Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal Centre’s Director for International Relations.
“Each archive added new revelations on the crimes of World War Two. In 1997, our Geneva Conference, entitled ‘Restitution: A Moral Debt to History’, led to the creation, in France, of the CIVS (Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation), in 1999.”
76,000 Jews were deported from France between 1942 and 1944. In 1999, the CIVS held 29,934 files.
Read more: We Will be Present to Ensure a Just Compensation...
Paris, 25 May 2022
Madam Ursula von der Leyen,
President of the European Commission,
Though we are aware that your Commission does not control the European Parliament, we urge you, as head of the EU system, to deplore the presence in the Parliament of a spokesman in favour of Hamas, the PFLP and Hezbollah – movements that are on the EU’s list of terrorist organizations.
The Wiesenthal Centre is grateful to the Spanish NGO “Action and Communication on the Middle East” (ACOM), for its 27-page dossier revealing MEP Manuel Pineda. His case is unacceptable for any Member of the European Parliament. Yet, Roberta Metsola, President of the Parliament, is clearly reluctant to take the necessary measures.
Article by Dr Shimon Samuels published in The Jerusalem Post
23 May 2022
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-707482
Dieudonné has mutated into a political polemicist and is bent on defaming, denying and deriding the Holocaust and Jews – for which he has been tried in court many times.
We recall how Dieudonné M’bala M’bala began his career as a comedian, together with his Jewish friend, Elie Semoun. After they split, Dieudonné turned antisemitic, expressing friendship towards the late Robert Faurisson, infamous Holocaust denier, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the extreme-right party National Front and who had commented “the gas chambers to kill Jews are a mere detail of history.” Jean-Marie is the father of Marine, runner-up in the latest French Presidential elections.
Antisemitism has always permeated Dieudonné’s artistic career. One of the most bizarre of his feature films, The Antisemite, sees his wife begging him to go to a psychologist to treat his Judeophobia, only to discover the psychologist is a Jew, as is his wife.