Europe: "Je Suis Charlie"? Maybe. "Je Suis Juif"? Not Really.

[Valin]

Gatestone Institute:

Abigail R. Esman

January 18, 2015

 

The four people gunned down in Paris on January 9 had not even been buried yet -- four men murdered by a Muslim terrorist just for being Jews -- when Amsterdam's pro-Palestinian student group demanded an academic boycott against Israel.

 

Not that they are anti-Semitic -- not a bit, insists Studenten for Rechtvaardig Palestina [sRP], which models itself on the American Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that accuses Israel of genocide. A leader of the group, Sarah (who would not give her last name to reporters, she said, for fear of reprisals), declared, rather, "I find anti-Semitism terrible. We are against it, and we said so from our first informational meeting. I find Israel as bad as IS," she continued, "and I am Muslim myself."

 

Comparing Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East and a country regularly subjected to terrorist attacks, to the Islamic State would be surreal under any circumstances; but even more so when four European Jews have just been killed by Muslims, and when IS has not only applauded their murders but called on Muslims everywhere to commit more.

 

But it is not, it turns out, inexplicable.

 

(Snip)The SRP's outburst was set off by the decision last week by Amsterdam's Vrij Universiteit [VU] (Free University), to cancel a previously planned "debate," called for by SRP, on encouraging the school to join the international academic boycott against Israel. This debate, to which not a single pro-Israel speaker had been invited, was to have taken place the following day at VU. The debate was to be led by former Dutch Socialist Party member Anja Meulenbelt, wife of convicted former Fatah terrorist Khaled Abu Zaid. Abu Zaid, by his own description, once trained fellow Palestinians in the use of explosives against Israeli targets.