The Danske bank of Denmark announced they plan to boycott Bank HoPoalim for its involvement in settlement construction.

They recently pulled their investments from Israeli real estate giants Africa-Israel and Danya Cebus.

It turns out that the Danish Embassy has an active bank account at Bank HaPoalim, and they have no intention of closing it down.

The Danish embassy said that the decision of Danske bank is a private one, and the government of Denmark has no say over their decisions.

It’s seems worthwhile to point out that Danske bank not only were not doing business with Bank HaPoalim prior to their announced “boycott”, but they don’t have any investments with any other Israeli bank either.

One might begin to suspect that settlements have nothing to do with their decision to not work with any Israeli banks.

Full Update from JTA:

A Jewish man from Kiev sustained serious injuries in a knife attack by three men, the second assault on a Jew in the city in one week.

The victim of the stabbing on Saturday night was identified by Ukrainian media as Dov Ber Glickman, a 28-year-old student of a local kolel, a school of Talmudic studies for married men.

He was attacked by three men after exiting the Podolski synagogue.

After the stabbing, Glickman returned to the synagogue and was rushed from there to the hospital, where he is currently recovering, according to Rabbi Moshe Asman, a chief rabbi of Ukraine. Asman told the Israeli daily Maariv that the Glickman suffered a massive loss of blood.

Police are searching for the attackers, who ran away after the stabbing.

Last week, four unidentified men were involved in an assault on an Israel-born Hebrew teacher from Kiev, whom they followed from his synagogue to his home. Three of them attacked the teacher in the vestibule until neighbors responded to his cries. One of the men is in custody.

Mark Levin, executive director of NCSJ: Advocates on Behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia, strongly condemned the violent attacks in Kiev targeting Jewish individuals.

“It’s disturbing that the incidents have happened on back-to-back Friday nights,” Levin told JTA Sunday. There is “growing concern” throughout the Jewish community in Kiev, he said, adding: ”The atmosphere has certainly been changing over the last couple of months.”

Levin said the government and police must convinced to provide greater security around the synagogues and other Jewish sites in the city. He said he has spoken to the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, who is in touch with the Ukrainian government on the issue.

Levin said that following the most recent attack the Yeshiva students organized their own security patrol.

On Friday night, 3 youths attacked a yeshiva student, Dov Ber Glickman in the neighborhood of Padul in Kiev, Ukraine. The student was on his way home after a meal at the local synagogue.

The three jumped the student, beat him, stabbed him three times in the legs and then ran.

The student managed to get back to the synagogue where he passed out. The synagogue guard called an ambulance.

The Jewish community is demanding to know who is behind the attack.

h/t Rotternik

The Israeli government is expected to approve soon a plan to bring tens of thousands of French Jews to Israel within the next three years, according to a report in Makor Rishon on Friday.

An Aliyah plan of this scale hasn’t been attempted since Operation Moses and Operation Solomon rescued Ethiopian Jewry and and brought them to Israel.

Currently, tens of thousands of French Jews are essentially fleeing France, in great part due to the serious rise in antisemitism in that country. The problem is that they are leaving France to go to London, Canada, and the US. A mere 3,000 of the the Jews who left France in 2013 made it to Israel.

The Israeli government has determined that in order to entice French Jewry to come to Israel, three primary areas must be addressed: employment, housing and quality education.

In order to address the employment issue, the government is set to recognize existing French professional licenses in the fields of medicine and tax advise; it will consider placement in the army in jobs that actually fit the Oleh’s professional skill set, and will assist existing business owners wishing to bring their companies over to Israel.

The programs Taglit (birthright) and Masa, intended to strengthen Jewish identity and solidarity with Israel through a 10-day trip to Israel for young Jews will be expanded to French Jewish youth.

And French Jews will be practically guaranteed slots in the top schools.

The goals of the program are to double the number of French Jews brought to Israel each year. In 2014, the goal will be 6,000 Jews, 12,000 in 2015, and 24,000 in 2016.

The cost of the program is still unknown. The effort will be coordinated by the Prime Minister’s office.

The strategy is to create a 3 year window of opportunity for French Jewry, telling them: Come to Israel now while the going is good, because we can’t guarantee these conditions in the future.”

We at The Jewish Press are calling it “Operation Moïse.”

We reported on the American Studies Association debates on boycotting Israel. They are now recommending an academic boycott.

From the ASA:

(1) Whereas the American Studies Association is committed to the pursuit of social justice, to the struggle against all forms of racism, including antisemitism, discrimination, and xenophobia, and to solidarity with aggrieved peoples in the United States and in the world;

(2) Whereas the United States plays a significant role in enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the expansion of illegal settlements and the Wall in violation of international law, as well as in supporting the systematic discrimination against Palestinians, which has had documented devastating impact on the overall well-being, the exercise of political and human rights, the freedom of movement, and the educational opportunities of Palestinians;

(3) Whereas there is no effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian students and scholars under conditions of Israeli occupation, and Israeli institutions of higher learning are a party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights and negatively impact the working conditions of Palestinian scholars and students;

(4) Whereas the American Studies Association is cognizant of Israeli scholars and students who are critical of Israeli state policies and who support the international boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement under conditions of isolation and threat of sanction;

(5) Whereas the American Studies Association is dedicated to the right of students and scholars to pursue education and research without undue state interference, repression, and military violence, and in keeping with the spirit of its previous statements supports the right of students and scholars to intellectual freedom and to political dissent as citizens and scholars;

(6) It is resolved that (a) the American Studies Association (ASA) endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. It is also resolved that (b) the ASA supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

You truly need to be an academic to be so stupid as to endorse this.

1) The ASA clearly doesn’t believe in “social justice” for Israeli Jews.

2) Besides the obvious falsehoods that are taken as a given, if they say that the US is complicit in all these supposed crimes, chouldn’t US academic institutions be boycotted as well?

3) Really? No “effective or substantive academic freedom” under the PA? So all the graduates of Palestinian Arab universities are being taught Israeli propaganda? Or are they simply no graduates because of that onerous “occupation?”

4) Really??? Criticism of professors who want to see Israel disappear is against academic freedom???

5) Exactly how free are students in Palestinian universities to espouse pro-Israel positions? How many pro-Israel professors are there? Where are the published papers and articles that support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state? How much intellectual freedom really exists in the very universities the ASA pretends so much to care about?

a) Is there any logical or causal relationship – at all – between the earlier clauses and the resolution?

But the second part is simply classic. It seems to be an override clause – if any Israeli academic supports BDS, then they are allowed to act with no restrictions.

In other words, the ASA doesn’t just endorse BDS. They are against academic freedom for any Israelis who oppose BDS!  Their position is the only valid position in academia – and this is in the name of academic freedom!

The mind boggles.

In case your eyes glazed over trying to find the tiniest amount of logic in this nonsensical resolution, I have taken the liberty to synopsize it for you:

Visit Elder of Ziyon.

On Shabbat morning, a Jewish man in Antwerp, Belgium, on his way to synagogue was beaten by a Moslem.

The Moslem began to beat the man as he was walking down the street. The man ran into the synagogue, where the Moslem followed him. The man managed to lock the Moslem in the women’s section, and held him there until the police arrived.

The man was taken to the hospital.

Last November we posted about a political cartoon at the Guardian by Steve Bell depicting British foreign minister William Hague and Tony Blair as puppets being controlled by Binyamin Netanyahu, in the context of expressions of support by these leaders during the war in Gaza.  Bell’s image evoked the canard of powerful Jews controlling western politicians for their own nefarious purposes and was hauntingly similar to more explicitly antisemitic cartoons routinely found in Arab and Islamist world.

The Guardian’s readers’ editor, Chris Elliott, addressed the row a couple of weeks later, and actually rebuked Bell for ‘unintentionally’ using the visual language of antisemitic stereotypes.

While such cartoons often have more of an immediate impact in reinforcing negative stereotypes about Jews than lengthy essays, the damage done by such toxic ideas regarding ‘Jewish control’, in any form, should be taken seriously.  The Guardian narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in news reports and commentaries, often includes passages with the unmistakable  suggestion that Israel (and the pro-Israeli lobby) wields enormous power over ineffectual Western leaders – a theme present in a report by Harriet Sherwood and Julian Borger titled ‘Iran nuclear programme deal in danger of unravelling’, Nov. 11.  The story centered on nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany) which ultimately unraveled largely due to concerns that the agreement would have eased sanctions on Iran without requiring that it cease enriching uranium.

The report by Sherwood and Borger included the following:

In a bid to contain the danger, the lead US negotiator, Wendy Sherman, flew straight from the talks in Geneva to Israel to reassure Binyamin Netanyahu’s government that the intended deal would not harm his country’s national interests.

The hastily arranged trip represented an acknowledgement of Netanyahu’s power to block a deal through his influence in the US Congress and in Europe. Egged on by the Israelis, the US Senate is poised to pass new sanctions that threaten to derail the talks before they get to their planned next round in 10 days’ time.

…

More immediately, Netanyahu demonstrated over the weekend that he could sway the Geneva talks from the inside through his relationship with Paris.

These passages of course strongly suggest that US congressional leaders take their marching orders from Jerusalem and that the French government’s position was not motivated by what it saw as its own national interests but, rather, as a result of the influence of the Israeli prime minister.

However, the deal was fatally flawed, according to many experts, due in part because it would have fallen short of the requirements in six resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council over the years which called on Iran to suspend ALL uranium enrichment – resolutions passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, rendering them binding under international law.

As Adam Chandler observed in an essay published at Tablet about the superficial analysis by Sherwood and Borger:

[Their argument] smacks of that paranoid, evergreen charge that all wars and international campaigns are waged on behalf of Israel, a claim that devolves from Israel into “the Jews” as it goes through portal after conspiratorial portal.

You don’t even need to believe that antisemitism is at play to nonetheless be contemptuous of the extraordinary myopia displayed in the Guardian report.  As Walter Russell Mead observed recently about the broader intellectual dynamic which unites antisemitism with anti-Zionism:

Weak minds…are easily seduced by attractive but empty generalizations. The comment attributed to August Bebel that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools can be extended to many other kinds of cheap and superficial errors that people make. The baffled, frustrated and the bewildered seek a grand, simplifying hypothesis that can bring some kind of ordered explanation to a confusing world.

Guardian “journalists” may fancy themselves sophisticated, erudite and worldly, but their frequent ‘Zionist root cause’ explanations betray both their ideological bias and the extraordinarily facile nature of their reasoning.

Visit CIFWatch.

A new survey shows that many European Jews hide their faith due to fear of antisemitism.

The online poll by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights reveals that 27 percent of all respondents blamed rising antisemitism across the European continent on Muslims. About the same percentage of respondents blamed antisemitism on individuals with left-wing political convictions, and 19 percent blamed those with right-wing beliefs.

“Preliminary findings already show that three-quarters of respondents feel that anti-Semitism has [gotten] worse in the past five years, particularly as [it] concerns anti-Semitic comments and hate speech online,” the report said.

About half of the 800 respondents from Sweden said they hide their faith in public, according to Swedish news website The Local .

In response to the latest European ban on Brit Mila (circumcision), MK Nissan Slomiansky (Bayit Yehudi) has put forward the proposal to utilize the diplomatic immunity and extraterritorial status of Israel’s embassies, and allow Jewish families in Europe to perform their Brit Mila ceremonies within the Israeli embassy’s walls.

Jewish Home Knesset Member Nissan Slomiansky

Slomiansky wrote to Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin stating, “We are witnessing the winds of Antisemitism again blowing through Europe, this time under the guise of humanism and health. It started with the ban on Shechitah (kosher slaughter of animals) that began in a few countries such as Sweden and Poland and it is now expanding throughout Europe. Throughout Jewish history, since the time of Abraham, Jews have given everything to fulfill Brit Mila, and we will continue, with Israel, to do so.”

Slomiansky said that Israel must let European Jews know that in every European country where Brit Mila is banned, Israel will open the embassies to them, where, on Israeli soil, they can perform Brit Mila without breaking the (local) laws.

One wonders if the Israeli embassies will soon be building Shechitah facilities too.

Maybe its just time for European Jewry to return home to Israel.