News Releases 2022
Paris, 5 May 2022
In a letter to Ernesto Ottone Ramirez, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture, the Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, thanked the Director-General “for the response to our request that this summer’s 45th session of the World Heritage Committee be cancelled due to its location, in Kazan, Russia.... The decision to postpone the session sine die is an important step.”
The letter continued, “We feel, however, that other steps need to be taken by the World Heritage Committee during “armed conflict”, especially with reference to the news that Russian troops are perpetrating theft in Ukrainian museums.”
Paris, 29 April 2022
In a letter to Agence France Presse (AFP) Chairman and CEO, Fabrice Fries, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, expressed horror at an article that whitewashes the Al-Quds Brigade, the armed wing of the terrorist Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)....“Your correspondent enjoys the invitation to visit the ‘tunnel city’ of electric-lighted passages, ventilation and telephone system, leading from Gaza, under the barriers, to Israel.”
Samuels asserted “the horror of the Centre’s membership, especially our French constituents, that AFP – an important global news agency – could sink so low as to heroize a worldwide listed terrorist group, as if they were a branch of the Eurostar under the English Channel.”
The PIJ tour guide described both defensive and offensive tunnels – the second equipped with weapons used to attack Israelis. “Your journalist ‘humorously’ calls it ‘a smuggling route for Kentucky Fried Chicken’!”
The Centre continued, “we hope that this was the act, only, of an antisemitic lone-wolf, a budding militant or uneducated in the subject.”
“Our Centre demands an AFP investigation, condemnation and immediate dismissal of an employee unworthy of the title ‘journalist’,” concluded Samuels.
“Religious Jew-hatred has returned to the scene across Europe.”
Paris, 27 April 2022
Despite the Netherlands government declaration of 2019 that “antisemitism is on the list of national priorities,” Judeophobia is not only the violence from radical Islamism or antisemitic terrorism.
Religious Jew-hatred has returned to the scene across Europe. An extreme-right/neanderthal Christianity crawls out of dark caves, especially at Easter.
Paris, 24 April 2022
Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, in the name of the Centre’s 400,000 membership and senior officials, Founder and CEO Rabbi Marvin Hier and Director for Global Social Action Rabbi Abraham Cooper, congratulated President Emmanuel Macron on his re-election and wish him success over the next five years.
Samuels lists below some of the lesser known dangers had there been a Le Pen victory, which could possibly have become a ‘kowtow’ to Moscow and its African designs.
Russia is growing in influence, from South Africa to Libya, from Angola to Mali. Foreign Minister Lavrov has called for a “New World Order” – language reminiscent of German Nazism and Italian Fascism of the 1930s. Lavrov now recreates an ‘Axis’, by inviting China to join in “the beginning of a new era in international relations.”
Blog by Dr Shimon Samuels published in The Times of Israel
18 April 2022
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-a-le-pen-administration-would-ruin-france-and-beyond/
Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, ran the long-time French harbour of neo-Nazis, the National Front (Front National – FN). Apart from racism, he had manifold lawsuits for Holocaust denial, calling the Nazi gas chambers “just a detail in World War Two!”
His daughter expelled him from the party, then renaming it “National Rally” (Rassemblement National – RN). Yet many members of the party maintain their national-socialist views, likely to receive government sinecures or even membership in the Cabinet, if elected.