Sabeel Attacks Israel From All Angles In Its "Cornerstone" Publication

The Spring 2012 edition of Cornerstone, a publication of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, is a full scale assault on Israel’s legitimacy from all angles. The Sabeel Center is a driving force behind the campaign by mainline Protestant churches to divest from Israel, including a number of proposed resolutions being considered at next week’s Presbyterian General Assembly.

The publication depicts Israel as systematically racist, employs offensive Holocaust imagery and uses theological arguments to demonize the Jewish State.

An article titled The Role of the Prophet, written by Sabeel Center co-founder and executive committee member Jonathan Kuttab, notes that “Judaism brought [together] the two correctives of the Law and the Prophets.” It then describes Israel as an unjust and racist country that approves “laws that violate the interests and freedoms of the individual or the minorities living among them.”

Kuttab blames most Jews in Israel for what he perceives as unfair treatment of the Arab population, saying, “the majority of Israeli Jews, acting through their duly elected representatives are the architects of these laws.”

An article submitted by Mossawa, the advocacy center for Arab citizens of Israel, is titled Anti-Democratic, Anti-Arab Legislation in Israel. The synopsis states “there are at least 35 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Arab citizens of Israel.” The article lists “four key legislative measures” as evidence, citing as one example the Citizenship law, which Mossawa claims “disproportionately affects Arab citizens,” although it applies to all Israelis.

An Open Letter to Foreign Missions by Taiseer Khatib, an Arab citizen of Israel, tells a story of his wife and children having problems obtaining permanent residency inside of Israel. This problem, Khatib contends, is a result of the Citizenship Law, which he claims shows Israel’s racism since its goal is allegedly to “diminish the number of the Arab population.” He adds that this “should remind Jews in Israel of dark times in their own history, when they were themselves separated from their families, never to see them again.”

A poem titled Hear O Israel by Jewish Voice for Peace activist David Glick also makes claims that Israel is inherently racist and compares the country to Nazi Germany, saying, “But what O Israel/Have you become?/The Nazis made me fearful to be a Jew/but you [Israel] have made me ashamed.” He then writes “Time to confront the darkness we have become./With the Holocaust it is Never Forget/but with Deir Yassin it is Never Mind.”

Anti-Semite Dieudonne In the News in France

Update: Dieudonne ran unsuccessfully for French Parliament as the Anti-Zionist Party candidate from Dreux. He was eliminated in the second round of the election, receiving just 1.14% of votes cast. His film, L’Antisémite, has been banned from the Cannes film festival for violating the festival’s policy of not “threatening public order or insulting religious beliefs.”

Anti-Semitic performer Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala has garnered some media attention in France since he announced on May 18 that he will be running for Parliament as a member of the Anti-Zionist Party (Parti Anti-Sioniste or PAS) in upcoming elections. Dieudonne is known for his performances which routinely include Holocaust denial, praise for Adolf Hitler, Nazi salutes, slurs against the Talmud and other anti-Semitic language.

This is not Dieudonne’s first time running for political office. Most recently, he stood as a candidate for the European Parliament in 2009 with the Anti-Zionist Party, receiving 1.3% of the vote. According to its website, the Anti-Zionist Party’s primary goal is to remove the “Zionist intervention” from the public affairs of France.

Dieudonne, one of four PAS members running for Parliament, hopes to represent the city of Dreux, 50 miles west of Paris. The other PAS candidates are running in the 8th and 13th districts in the North as well as the 14th district in the Rhone region.

While Dieudonne has repeatedly been prosecuted for his racist and anti-Semitic performances and comments, none of his criminal convictions render his candidacy illegal. According to an article in the French edition of The Huffington Post, even if his campaign materials incite hatred or racial violence, the penalties would be significant (€45,000 fine and five years in prison) but would not make him ineligible for Parliament.

As a 501(c)(3) organization, ADL does not endorse or oppose candidates for office in the United States or abroad.

Anti-Semite Dieudonne’s Tour Cancelled in Montreal

Update: Dieudonne’s film, L’Antisémite, has been banned from the Cannes film festival for violating the festival’s policy of not “threatening public order or insulting religious beliefs.”

Four scheduled shows in Montreal by French comedian Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, whose act routinely includes Holocaust denial, praise for Adolf Hitler, Nazi salutes, slurs against the Talmud and other anti-Semitic language, were cancelled last week by Quebec’s largest concert promoter.

The cancelled shows were part of Dieudonne’s first attempt to seriously promote his first feature film L’Antisémite, released earlier this year, in North America. The film, reportedly funded in part by the Iranian government, makes no attempt to conceal its message. The film’s trailer shows Dieudonne declaring, “It’s clear the Jews control everything — media, finance, politics. We no longer have a choice,” before arriving to the apparent punch line, “we must exterminate them.” Another short clip from the film mocks the discovery of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, suggesting that they were a fabrication.



Dieudonne has been the subject of much controversy in Europe where he has been convicted of inciting hatred in France and is under investigation in Belgium for “inciting racial hatred and xenophobia” during a performance earlier this year. Additionally, Belgian authorities recently forced Dieudonne to cancel two shows in Brussels, and French police stopped Dieudonne mid-performance on May 9 for breaking local defamation laws.

In addition to his performances, Dieudonne makes his views known outside the context of his supposed comedy, including running for the European Parliament in 2009 with the Parti Anti Sioniste (the Anti-Zionist Party), which received 1.3% of the vote. According to the party’s website, its primary goals are to remove the “Zionist intervention” from the public affairs of France, denounce all politicians who advocate for Zionism, and to eradicate all forms of Zionism from France.

In April 2010, Dieudonne was interviewed on Iran’s English-language propaganda television station Press TV, where he claimed that Zionism has organized “all the wars and disorders on the planet.” He also argued that the stock market and the unemployment that resulted from its crash are part of the “Zionist project” and that Zionists manipulate the film industry using movies as Jewish propaganda.

Dieudonne, the son of a French mother and a Cameroonian father, is also notorious for a grotesque provocation in 2008 in which he had his assistant, dressed as a Jew in a concentration camp, present an award to Robert Faurisson, a serially convicted Holocaust denier, at a show at the Zenith Theater in Paris. Dieudonne was fined €10,000 for the incident, which was considered a “public insult of people of Jewish faith or origin.”

California Arabic Newspaper Says Israel Abuses Memory of Holocaust

The April 27 issue of Watan, an Anaheim, California-based Arabic-language newspaper, featured an article accusing Israel of intentionally using the memory and history of the Holocaust to mask Israeli crimes committed against the Palestinian people.

The article, “The ‘Holocaust’ Industry,” asks, “How could crimes against a group become a justification for that same group to commit crimes against another group?” Similarly, the article accuses “the Zionist entity” of committing the heinous crimes against the Palestinians all “in the shadows of celebrating the memory of the Holocaust through the last century.”

The Watan article also promotes the conspiratorial view that Israel’s purpose in preserving the memory of the Holocaust is to be able to use it as a tool “against politicians, intellectuals and others who dare to whisper opposition to Israeli policies,” a charge that has frequently been used by anti-Israel scholars, activists and organizations to stave off accusations of anti-Semitism.

Watan, which claims to have a circulation in California of 30,000, consistently prints anti-Semitic editorials and cartoons. The cartoons, originally published in the Arab press, have been internationally syndicated.

Another California-based community newspaper, Al Akhbar, published an article in March featuring anti-Semitic narratives and comparisons of Israeli policies to Nazi ideology.

Norman Finkelstein to Speak at KinderUSA Fundraiser in Long Beach

Norman G. Finkelstein, an anti-Israel academic whose career has been marked by a vitriolic hatred of Zionism and Israel, is scheduled to be the “Special Guest Speaker” at the 10th anniversary celebration of KinderUSA, an organization whose stated mission is to “alleviate the suffering of children and their families in Palestine and beyond.”

The May 5 event in Long Beach, billed as: “A Decade of Giving,” is endorsed by the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). In a press release for the event, MPAC’s Senior Advisor Dr. Maher Hathout said, “I think everyone who comes will walk out informed and inspired as well…you will listen to perspectives that you will not hear on CNN or the official media that is always giving us our narrative. It's about time to hear the narrative coming from ourselves to ourselves.”

Finkelstein, who is frequently invited to speak on campus about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has a long history of portraying Holocaust education and survivor compensation as a calculated attempt to "immunize Israel from criticism" for alleged human rights abuses.

He frequently evokes offensive comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. On his website in 2009, for example, he re-posted a collection of images of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany juxtaposed with images of Palestinian suffering. The title of the Web page is “The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany…”

Finkelstein has also expressed support for the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah. In an interview with a Lebanese television station in January 2008, Finkelstein said, “I was of course happy to meet the Hezbollah people, because it is a point of view that is rarely heard in the United States. I have no problem saying that I do want to express solidarity with them, and I am not going to be a coward or a hypocrite about it.”

At a speaking appearance at the University of Denver in September 2011, Finkelstein attempted to legitimize Hamas by comparing the group to Gandhi: “Gandhi's solution is the same as Hamas, word-for-word.”

LaRouche Supporters Employ Holocaust Comparison to Castigate President Obama

Screenshot from the LaRouchePAC website

Supporters of conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche have recently manned tables outside public areas in several U.S. cities that featured images of President Obama wearing a Hitler mustache and signs calling for Obama’s impeachment.

In New Jersey, LaRouche supporters set up tables on two occasions that displayed posters with the offensive comparison of Obama to Hitler. One of the individuals was quoted by local media, saying “Obama is just like Hitler…he’s sending drones into other countries, killing people, including Americans.”

In late March, members of LaRouche’s political action committee set up a table outside a post office in Litchfield, Connecticut, with the President Obama-Hitler signs and signs of the Republican presidential candidates wearing clown noses and wigs. A similar event took place in San Mateo, California, earlier in the month, where LaRouche supporters gathered signatures calling for the impeachment of Obama outside a local post office.

This is not the first time that LaRouche and his supporters have injected Holocaust rhetoric into the political arena. In 2009, his supporters attended numerous Congressional town hall meetings around the country waving signs with President Obama wearing a Hitler mustache to express their opposition to health care reform and President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

At the time a spokesperson said that LaRouche and his organization “have declared war against Obama's so-called health care reform because it is a direct copy of the policy Hitler declared in October 1939…our Obama mustache poster symbolizes the fact that the president is attempting to implement a Hitler health care policy.”

Turkish Ad Uses Footage of Hitler to Sell Shampoo

Adolf Hitler is the star of a Turkish commercial for men’s shampoo. The ad for Biomen, which is now appearing on Turkish television, features a video of Hitler angrily gesticulating, with a Turkish voiceover calling on men to purchase the shampoo. 

“If you’re not wearing women’s clothes, then you shouldn’t be wearing woman’s shampoo,” the voiceover says. “Here it is. A real man's shampoo, Biomen.”

The ad is yet another example of how Holocaust-era images are used in advertising around the world, which contribute to the trivialization of and desensitization to the unparalleled horrors of the Holocaust.

Earlier this year, photos of a Nazi concentration camp were used in a promotional campaign for a Dubai gym, including an image of the railroad leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau with the slogan, “Kiss your calories goodbye.” After receiving complaints, the founder of The Circuit Factory gym in Dubai, Phil Parkinson, apologized and removed the photo.

In a letter to the Turkish Ambassador to the United States, ADL called on the Turkish government to condemn the ad. The Turkish Jewish community has also released the following statement:

"We follow with sadness and regret the use of Hitler figure in the Biomen Men Shampoo advertisement, which was brought to the screen in recent days."

"Hitler, who massacred 6 Million Jews in gas chambers for the sole reason of being Jewish and also killed its mentally disabled citizens on the purpose of creating “a pure Arian race,” had created the darkest pages of the world history. Using him in an advertisement for whatever reason is an unacceptable situation and could not be accepted by us at all. This is beyond all ethics as well as a huge insult to human rights."

Los Angeles Community Newspaper Publishes Classic Anti-Semitism

Al Akhbar, a Los Angeles-based dual language community newspaper, published an article this month that employs anti-Semitic narratives in its opposition to Israel and Zionism, which it claims is inspired by Nazi principles.

Yousif Hadad's article in Al Akhbar

The article, titled “The Democracy of the State or its Jewishness,” is written by Yousif Hadad, a regular contributor to the paper. The State of Israel “is an identical concept to the Nazi Aryan concept,” Hadad writes. “It’s our right to question why nations hate Jews and no one else but them. Isn’t it because of their racism, stoniness and disloyalty to the countries which they live in?”  

“It’s the entrenched hatred in their souls that drives their delusions that others hate them,” Hadad adds.



Hadad, who claims in the article that “Zionists invented ‘Anti-Semitism’” as a tool to use against anyone who criticizes “Israel’s racist and oppressive policies,” also denies that “Western, Ashkenazi, Caucasian Jews who founded the Zionist Movement are Semites…in reality they have no connection to the Semitic race. Arabs are the Semites.

Al Akhbar has previously published other articles by Hadad, who received an award in 2009 from the Jordanian American Association for defending the Palestinian cause in his writing, according to the Association website.

Mock “Apartheid” Wall Kicks off Palestine Awareness Week at UCLA

Monday, February 27, marked the start of Palestine Awareness Week at the University of California - Los Angeles. The weeklong event, timed to coincide with the Israeli Apartheid Week is sponsored by the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the primary organizer of anti-Israel activity on campus.

A large outdoor “apartheid wall” containing extreme anti-Israel imagery and text has been erected at the university’s central public gathering space, Bruin Plaza. Texts on the panels include accusations that Israel is an apartheid state that persecutes and deprives Palestinians of their fundamental rights.

“Apartheid Wall” at UCLA

There are also Holocaust analogies comparing the Nazi ghettos of Europe with conditions facing Palestinians in Gaza. Comparisons to the Holocaust are displayed under the banner of “Never Again? History Repeats Itself.” The panels also feature statistics and “facts” portraying a skewed and inaccurate image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The “apartheid wall” has also been displayed at a public area across the Student Activities Center in Wilson Plaza in order to more broadly reach the student public.

In addition to the “apartheid wall,” SJP members gathered Tuesday evening to denounce Israel with delegitimizing slogans like “Israel is a terrorist state.” Other events scheduled for Palestine Awareness Week include a one-state solution lecture by UCLA professor Sari Madison and a panel on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).