Bnai Brith Europe

Press Review n202. By Gilberte Jacaret

Talks between Israel and the Palestinians...

On Thursday morning, 2 September 2010, Israeli PM Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Abbas will relaunch
direct negotiations in Washington…….

Steps to support peacemaking

Israel remains deeply committed to peace and aspires to achieve a stable, sustainable agreement that will ensure peace,
security and prosperity for both peoples. The present government is sincere in its intentions to achieve a peace
agreement with the Palestinians and has demonstrated its commitment to peace by taking significant steps towards the
Palestinians, such as:

• Accepting the principle of two states for two peoples;

• Removing hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints throughout the West Bank (Judea and Samaria);
• Providing incentives to the Palestinian economy, which is growing in the West Bank at the amazing rate of 9% a
year;
• Affording assistance to the Palestinian security forces;
• Instituting the unprecedented 10-month moratorium on new construction in Judea and Samaria.
Although Israel realizes that obtaining peace between Israel and the Palestinians will be a difficult task, it remains an
achievable goal.

IRAN

Japan approves fresh economic sanctions against Iran... Haaretz, September 3, 2010

Measures include asset freeze on 88 entities, 15 banks and 24 individuals; Japan had previously frozen assets on 75
entities and 41 individuals.

ANTI-SEMITISM

Shame in Sweden... Ronald S. Lauder. World Jewish Congress, published in partnership with Project Syndicate, August
17, 2010
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"Last month, firecrackers were thrown at the only synagogue in the Swedish city of Malm, breaking three windows. The
day before, a bomb threat had been left at the building, warning of what was about to happen. Two weeks previously,
another attack was launched against the same synagogue.

For months, local Jews have testified to an increasingly hostile atmosphere, with many saying they are frightened to go
out on the streets wearing anything that might identify them as Jews. Earlier this year, Daniel Schwammenthal, writing in
The Wall Street Journal, explained why in the starkest possible terms:

'Screaming Sieg'Heil and Hitler, Hitler, a mostly Muslim mob threw bottles and stones at a small group of Jews peacefully
demonstrating for Israel at this town's central square last year. Worshippers on their way to synagogue and Jewish kids
in schools are routinely accosted as Dirty Jews.'

Malm police say that of the 115 hate crimes recorded in the city in 2009, 52 were aimed at Jews or Jewish institutions.
Anti-Semitism is back, and what is taking place in Malm is merely an extreme manifestation of what is happening across
the whole of Sweden.

Let us recall that it was Sweden's top-selling newspaper, Aftonbladet, that last year published an anti-Semitic blood libel
by alleging that Israeli soldiers routinely murdered Palestinian children and harvested their bodily organs for sale on the
international black market.

The Swedish government responded with indifference, and worse: when the country's ambassador to Israel put up a
note on the embassy's website distancing Sweden from such appalling calumnies, her enraged superiors in Stockholm
ordered her to take it down.

It is not just the media and the government that is fanning the flames of this hatred. In January 2009, church officials in
the town of Lule cancelled a planned torch-light procession for Holocaust Memorial Day, with a spokesman saying that
they were 'preoccupied' and 'grief-stricken' by Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

Cancelling Holocaust Memorial Day? Spreading blood libels and acquiescing in them? Allowing a state of affairs in which
Jews are frightened to leave their homes? This does not sound like the tolerant, fair, and just society for which Sweden
would like to be known."

Death threats received at French shul... Jerusalem Post, August 25, 2010

Swastika reportedly drawn on letter found in Paris suburb synagogue.

A synagogue in a northern suburb of Paris received an envelope containing bullets and death threats on Tuesday.

According to reports, a swastika was also drawn on the letter inside the envelope, which was received a number of days
after it was sent.
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The letter was sent on August 14 but was only discovered Tuesday when community heads returned from their summer
vacation.

The head of a national body monitoring anti semitism in France, Sammy Ghozlan, urged other synagogues to put extra
security in place ahead of the upcoming September holidays.

Ghozlan said that the letter was similar to one that was received at a synagogue in another northern suburb of Paris,
Stains

The synagogue is located Drancy where an infamous transit camp for Jews was set up during World War ll. About
65,000 Jews were deported from there to extermination camps.

The attack in France comes a day after reports that a pig's head was found on Saturday outside a synagogue in
Lithuania's second city Kaunas.

Death threats against French synagogue in a letter containing bullets....

BOBIGNY (AFP)—Aug. 25-A letter containing bullets and death threats to Jews was sent to a synagogue in a
northern Paris suburb, where an infamous transit camp for Jews was set up during World War II.

The letter to the synagogue in Drancy also bore a swastika, said Sammy Ghozlan, head of a national body monitoring
anti-Semitism.

He said the letter had been sent on August 14 and discovered on Tuesday after the summer break.
He urged authorities to "beef up security in all places of worship" ahead of the Jewish High Holidays, Rosh Hashana and
Yom Kippur next month.

Ghozlan said a similar letter had been sent to a synagogue in Stains, another northern suburb.

Drancy was home to an internment camp set up by the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II. About 65,000
Jews were deported from there to extermination camps.
In 1976, a memorial was set up in Drancy. Since then, the site has been desecrated at least twice with swastikas and
anti-Jewish graffiti.

French teacher suspended for spending too much time on Holocaust... European Jewish Press, Sepember 1, 2010

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PARIS (AFP)---A Jewish French history teacher has been suspended from her school for spending too much time
teaching her pupils about the Holocaust and for organising trips to former Nazi death camps.

A lawyer acting for Catherine Pederzoli, a 58-year-old secondary teacher in the eastern town of Nancy, said her client
had been accused by administrators of teaching the World War II massacres with insufficient "neutrality".

"If this teacher had been a Christian, no-one would have accused her of brain-washing," alleged lawyer Christine Tadic.
"Isn't it the case that this teacher's fault is to have been Jewish?"
Nancy local education authorities were not immediately available to respond to the charge, but a report compiled by
school inspectors revealed that they did have concerns over Pederzoli's teaching of the Holocaust.

The report, compiled last month, alleged the teacher took up too much time preparing pupils for annual school trips to
Poland and the Czech Republic to visit sites like the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

A copy of the report, seen by AFP, accuses Pederzoli of "lacking distance, neutrality and secularism" in teaching the
Holocaust and of manipulating her charges through a process of "brain-washing".
In December some of the teacher's pupils staged a protest during a visit to the Henri-Loritz High School by Education
Minister Luc Chatel, complaining that the number of places on the Holocaust field trips had been reduced.

Authorities suspect Pederzoli of inciting the protest.

Tadic said that her client had organised the trips without facing any complaints for 15 years before she found herself
unfairly targeted by a new school management team that arrived in 2007.

The lawyer lodged a complaint on Tuesday seeking a court injunction to annul the suspension. Judges have two weeks
to make a ruling.

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