The Jewish celebration of Hanukkah in the Dutch city of Enschede took a strange turn, after the mayor refused to be seen near the Israeli ambassador. The Enschede synagogue had invited mayor Roelof Bleker to the Hanukkah celebration and reserved a seat for Bleker next to the Israeli ambassador, Modi Ephraim. But a few hours earlier, the synagogue received a phone call from Bleker with some preconditions. “The mayor did not want to sit next to the ambassador and did not want to shake his hand.”
Enschede’s small Jewish community – 45 Jews in total – was already frustrated with Bleker, who rejected their requests for greater security and surveillance after October 7, despite a wave of anti-Semitic attacks across the country.
But what is better than Hanukkah without Israelis in Europe from which Jews are disappearing to celebrate multiculturalism? When there are no longer even 45 Jews in Enschede, will they call Hamas to light the Hanukkah candles?
Perhaps Europe can invite the Arab residents of Gaza to resettle there?
Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, was also celebrated in Neukölln, the Berlin neighborhood where 40 to 50 percent of school-age children are Muslim and also known as “the Ottoman principality”. Everything seemed normal, if it weren’t for the massive police protection. It is Rabbi Jeremy Borovitz and his kippah who make the evening abnormal. Borovitz lives in Neukölln. There are easier places for a rabbi. Yet he had never wanted to move since he arrived from New York five years ago. He always proudly wore the kippah on the streets of the neighborhood even at the cost of being insulted and spat on. Whatever had happened the day before, Borovitz would walk out the front door the next morning with his kippah on his head.
Until October 7th. A Jewish friend who runs a security company told him about the Hamas terrorist attack, the dead and kidnapped people. Meanwhile, a Palestinian Arab network celebrating the killings was handing out sweets on Sonnenallee just a hundred meters from their apartment. “No more kippahs in the streets, not a word of Hebrew in the subway,” his friend pleaded. And Borovitz and his wife also hid their Jewishness. “I felt how fear gripped the Jews in Berlin.” Jews from all over the world wrote to him urging him to leave the country.
In Sweden, Holocaust remembrance day was organized without inviting the victims of the time: the Jews. Carrine Sjöberg, head of the Jewish community, was shocked when she learned that the Jews had not been called. Jan Hägglund of the socialist party Arbetarpartiet said he could not guarantee their “safety”. According to Sjöberg, however, it was a political decision: “The real reason was that they wanted the event to focus on Muslim refugees. In my eyes, this is a scandalous historical distortion. The memory of the Shoah is ignored.”
The confirmation comes from Hägglund himself, who told the Swedish media: “In previous years, we have had Palestinian flags and banners where the Israeli flag has been identified with a swastika. The Jewish community was not invited because we thought they might be uncomfortable.”
Remember when a UK cinema chain has canceled all screenings of a film about Muhammad’s daughter after branches were besieged by Muslim activists? A cinema manager even went outside where Muslims were protesting to apologise. The video shows him humiliating himself while shouting “Allahu Akbar”.
This week in London after protests and threats, an advertising company removed billboards showing Israeli hostages taken by Hamas terrorists on October 7. The advertising company in question, London Lites, had signed a deal for the billboards to be displayed across London. Posted on December 5, the signs were removed after six days due to “an unusual volume of complaints from the public” as well as personal threats directed at company staff.
No one has ever tried or succeeded in removing the billboards in London that say “For the love of Allah”. They are on houses, on buses, on the subway.
The hell of Eurabia is paved with inclusive intentions. Multiculturalism is the tomb of our guilty illusions.
