RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-demise-of-hong-kong-11558134193

When a Hong Kong Legislative Council meeting ended in a brawl last Saturday with one lawmaker hospitalized, the Hong Kong government denounced the ”unprecedented” fight. But what did it expect? The weekend scuffle concerned a proposed extradition law that would allow the transfer of local residents from Hong Kong to Mainland China and eviscerate Hong Kong’s legal independence.

In the 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule, Beijing promised Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy under “one country, two systems” until 2047. But China has gradually increased its control over Hong Kong law and politics. It has pressed the city to remove pro-democracy lawmakers from office, outlaw the pro-independence Hong Kong National Party, refuse a visa to a foreign journalist who had moderated an event featuring the HKNP founder, and last month imprison leaders of the 2014 pro-democracy protests.

An extradition law could be the knockout blow. It would compromise Hong Kong’s independent legal system by allowing case-by-case extradition to Mainland China and elsewhere. Beijing could accuse anyone living in Hong Kong of one of 37 eligible crimes and demand he be sent to a Mainland court for trial, where the legal system is under control of the Communist Party. In 2018 China’s Jiangsu province acquitted 43 people while convicting 96,271.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/growing-international-movement-to-boycott-israel-is-condemned-by-germany-11558108099

BERLIN—The German parliament condemned as anti-Semitic a growing international movement that targets Israel and called on the government to withdraw funding for events or institutions affiliated with the initiative.

The Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement, which originated in Palestinian circles, calls for academic, cultural, economic and academic boycotts of Israel. Support for BDS is broad-based across the European center-left, but it also has backing among segments of the far-right and the far-left as well as in some Islamist groupings. It has also gained traction in the U.S.

On Friday, a broad majority of German legislators supported a resolution titled “Decisively Oppose the BDS Movement and Fight Anti-Semitism” that strongly condemned the initiative and compared its methods to Nazi-era campaigns targeting Jewish businesses in Germany.

The resolution will immediately stop funding and other forms of support for BDS-related events from the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, but it isn’t binding on the government. A spokesman for the German government didn’t immediately comment on whether it would follow parliament’s lead.

https://www.cjnews.com/

“Ali described “Islamist-driven anti-Semitism as the reigning anti-Semitism of the day,” and said that it’s distinct from the “classic” European variety, or today’s white supremacy movement.“Little attention is paid (to it) and that is a pity because it is the most zealous, most potent Jew hatred,” she said. “It both condemns Jews wholesale and seeks to destroy the State of Israel.”

Islamic anti-Semitism is of a “scale and scope” that most people in the West do not understand and is therefore all the more insidious, the controversial critic of the Muslim religion, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, told a capacity audience at the Jewish Public Library (JPL) in Montreal on May 13.

The Somali-born Ali, 49, grew up being told that Jews were evil and reflexively hated them, even though she had never met one. In her teens, she joined the Muslim Brotherhood, in which she was indoctrinated to believe that Jews were a sub-human enemy and that their state occupies Muslim lands and must be destroyed.

After fleeing to avoid a forced marriage, Ali found refuge in the Netherlands, where her views were transformed. She became an activist for Muslim women’s rights and was elected to the Dutch parliament.

She wrote the short, but incendiary, 2004 film Submission, a critique of Islam’s subjugation of women, whose director, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23863

In the six countries we conducted the survey , approximately 45% of Muslims agreed with this claim. Among non-Muslims it was eight percent.

Manfred Gerstenfeld interviews Ruud Koopmans

“Antisemitism in the Netherlands has grown in the past 10-20 years like in other countries in Europe. It is difficult to prove the spread of verbal antisemitism which can hardly be quantified. The rise of social media has increased this type of abuse. It aims at many targets, including Jews, Zionists and Israel. I do not give much weight to it.

“A stronger and more severe form of antisemitism is threats and violence. We know that this violence has also grown in Europe. Sometimes it is even lethal.”

Dr. Ruud Koopmans was born in the Netherlands in 1961. In 1992 he received his Ph.D in sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He is professor of Sociology and Migration Research at the Humboldt University of Berlin and director of the research unit “Migration, Integration and Transnationalization” at the WZB Berlin Social Center.

Koopmans says: “I have done some research on antisemitism. In 2015, I studied religious fundamentalism in six European countries including the Netherlands. One question asked interviewees their opinion about the statement that Jews cannot be trusted. In the six countries concerned approximately 45% of Muslims agreed with this claim. Among non-Muslims it was eight percent.

‘Both in the Netherlands and in Germany there is good data about punishable antisemitic acts. Statistics are however rather vague about the perpetrators’ origins. The situation in Germany is even worse than in the Netherlands. It is impossible to obtain data about the share of migrants in various crimes.