U.S. Sends Anti-Israel Advisor to Anti-Semitic Sweden
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Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his Swedish counterpart Carl Bildt
Photo Credit: Yossi Zamir/Flash 90
Enter into the mix Hannah Rosenthal, who has been President Obama’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism since November 2009.
Rosenthal’s first official act in office was to rebuke Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren for describing the self-described “pro-Israel” activist group J Street as “dangerous” to Israeli security. J Street — which says it aims to “redefine” what it means to be pro-Israel, and has repeatedly worked to undermine Israel’s fight against terrorism — is funded by George Soros, an anti-Israel secular Jewish billionaire who blames Jews for anti-Semitism.
Rosenthal, a former director of J Street who has also served on the board of the left-wing activist group Americans for Peace Now (which is part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] movement against Israel aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish state), has also implied that Jews around the world who are vocal supporters of the Israeli government are fair game for anti-Semitic attacks.
Commenting on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, Rosenthal said: “It’s a scary time, with people losing the ability to differentiate between a Jew, any Jew, and what’s going on in Israel.” According to Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard: “Parse that quote and it’s pretty clear what Rosenthal is saying — the Israelis have it coming, but the rest of the world needs to distinguish between the good progressive Jews who are not living on Palestinian land and the Israeli Jews who are committing daily atrocities in the name of colonialism and occupation.”
Rosenthal has also criticized non-leftwing supporters of Israel as having “narrow, ultra-conservative views of what it means to be pro-Israel.”
Although her job description is to combat anti-Semitism, Rosenthal focuses much of her time and effort on fighting “Islamophobia.” Speaking to the London-based Community Security Trust, an organization that is dedicated to protecting the Jewish community in Britain, Rosenthal called for a crackdown on bigotry… against Muslims.
A few months later, at the so-called High-Level Conference on Tolerance and Non-Discrimination organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Rosenthal again attacked Islamophobia and also criticized the “severe constraints” to the “free practice of Islam” in Europe, as well as the “great difficulty” Muslims face in building mosques on the continent. She made no mention of the fact that many, if not most, of the attacks on Jews in Europe are perpetrated by Muslims.
During a visit to Vilnius in April 2010, Rosenthal refused to confront the Lithuanian government’s efforts to hide the country’s complicity in the Jewish Holocaust. Instead, she declared that Lithuania had “taken very proactive steps in dealing with anti-Semitism,” and also promised the Lithuanians a €64,000 ($85,000) grant “to develop Holocaust education.”
Rosenthal made no mention of the fact that Lithuania is spending millions of euros on a pernicious campaign to obtain official recognition by the European Union that the crimes of communism are equivalent to those of the Nazis.
On a return visit to Vilnius in November 2011 to participate in a conference called “Tolerance and Totalitarianism: Challenges to Freedom,” which was sponsored by the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rosenthal again refused to address the issue of anti-Semitism. Never mind that the Lithuanian government is currently sponsoring a series of events to honor as heroes Lithuanians who murdered their Jewish neighbors even before the Germans arrived in 1941.
Rosenthal now wants to travel to Sweden to find out what Reepalu is doing to combat intolerance in Malmö. Since both share similar perspectives on the root cause of anti-Jewish hate crime in Europe, namely Jewish support for Israel, Rosenthal and Reepalu can be expected to downplay the severity of anti-Semitism in Sweden and focus their attention on Islamophobia instead.
Originally published by Gatestone Institute http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org
tell a friendAbout the Author: The writer is the Senior Analyst for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group, one of the oldest and most influential foreign policy think tanks in Spain.
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