News Releases 2022
Paris, 27 June 2022
In a letter to Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, argued that Borrell’s speech from Tehran evoked Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 statement following his discussion with Adolf Hitler: “...I return from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time... Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”
Samuels called on Borrell, “as a bi-national Spanish and Argentine citizen, to recall the role of Tehran in the Buenos Aires 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy (29 dead and 242 injured) and the 1994 massacre of the AMIA Jewish Centre (85 dead and over 300 wounded).”
Read more: “Peace For Our Time” – A Wiesenthal Centre Open...
Paris, 20 June 2022
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, commented on this week-end’s French Parliamentary elections, “which focused mainly on internal issues of purchasing power and popular discontent, resulted in the ‘Ensemble’ cluster aligned with President Macron suffering a great loss, obtaining only a relative majority of 245 seats of the total 577 in the Assemblée Nationale (the lower Chamber).”
In order to pass laws, the governing majority will need to either form a rickety coalition with another party to rise up to the minimum of 289 seats, or else gather fragments of consent on specific issues, giving way to painstaking negotiations in Parliamentary Commissions and corridors – a situation France is not used to, unlike other democracies where proportional representation is the norm, such as Israel, Belgium or Spain.
Article by Shimon Samuels and Ariel Gelblung published in The Jerusalem Post
19 June 2022
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-709855
Approaching the 28th anniversary of the Buenos Aires AMIA Jewish Center bombing
Shimon Samuels (right) and the late Alberto Nisman stand alongside the prosecutor’s 2015 diagram
of Iran’s terrorist network in South America (photo Simon Wiesenthal Center).
In June 2019, 73 tons of gold from Venezuela were sent to the Middle East. According to reports investigated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, they may have included ingots of “Zahngold,” Jewish teeth fillings, torn from Holocaust corpses’ mouths while their bodies were moved from the gas chambers to the crematoria.
Geneva, 15 June 2022
“In the midst of the attacks on Israel at the Human Rights Council: charges of colonialism, apartheid, disproportionate violence are nonstop!... ” stated Dr Shimon Samuels, Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations and Permanent Observer at the UN in Geneva (UNOG).
Within this maelstrom, came a questionable appointment.
North Korea – under its ballistic missiles tests and threats to use a nuclear bomb – was appointed President of the 65 member-States of the Conference on Disarmament.
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (DPRK) Ambassador Han Tae Song stated, “the DPRK remains committed to global peace and disarmament and attaches importance to the work of the Conference...” It was noted that “not one Western state walked out of the meeting,” added Samuels.
The North Korea appointment follows that of the Islamic Republic of Iran which, in March 2022, began a four year seat at the UN Commission on Women’s Rights.
Article by Dr Shimon Samuels published in The Jerusalem Post
8 June 2022
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-708920
Peace cannot be bought. But incitement through hostile media keeps the Goebbels fire burning and sadly, the lies persist.
Then-US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell attends a rally protesting anti-Israel bias
outside the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, in 2019 (photo Denis Balibouse/Reuters).
The United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva holds the infamous Item 7 pertaining to Israel and the OPT – the so-called Occupied Palestinian Territories – at each session.
The following Item 8 applies to the rest of the world.