Israel’s ambassador in Spain, Rafi Shotz, received dozens of postcards -- hand-written, with messages such as “Jews kill for money,” “Evacuate the country for Palestinians,” and “Go to someplace where someone will be willing to accept you.”
Israel’s foreign ministry officials told the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, that the handwriting appears typical of children six to nine years old.
"Apparently there are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel individuals who get permission to operate within schools," the official said. "Each time, the embassy has received several dozen postcards from a different school. And it seems as though whoever is doing this is moving from school to school."
Israeli government lodged a formal complaint with Spain on February 28, charging that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are being instilled in elementary students across parts of the country.
According to sources in the Foreign Ministry, this is an organized campaign by officials outside the education system in Spain who have been given permission to work with the students. The Israeli Foreign Ministry originally planned to summon the Spanish envoy in Israel, Alvaro Iranzo, to rebuke him. However, in an effort to prevent a diplomatic crisis, the ministry decided to discuss the matter with him via telephone instead. Naor Gilon, the Foreign Ministry's Deputy Director for Western Europe, spoke with Iranzo and said, “Israel feels strong discontent over the postcards sent by school students and views the matter with utmost gravity.”
The Spanish envoy explained that the postcards were a private initiative, not one that is part of Spain's education ministry. Gilon said Israel understands this is not a government policy, but stressed that these types of initiatives have no place in schools and that Israel requests action be taken to have the campaign stopped.
Who are behind this? I have no idea about the perpetrators are, but would like to share something which is continuing in my own country - Bangladesh.
The Iranian government has for decades maintained a huge Cultural Center in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka. Millions of dollars are spent in continuing activities of this ‘Cultural Center’. The main objective of this Iranian Mullah outlet is to spread anti-Semitic notions in the country, as well encourage people to wage Jihad against Israel, United States and the West.
This ‘Cultural Center’ of Iran in Dhaka also publishes a monthly ‘newsletter’ for children, targeting students. According to information received from several sources, at least 75,000 copies of such hate speech material are printed by Iran and distributed free of charge among various educational institutions. Most of the contents of this publication are concocted stories against Israel, the United States and the West, seemingly made with the motive of poisoning the minds of the children.
I do not want to categorically say that Iran is behind such activities also in Spain, but such possibility cannot be simply turned down.
In recent years, the so-called embassy of Palestine in Dhaka has also been engaged in openly recruiting Jihadists and sending them to fight against Israel. The former Palestinian ambassador in Bangladesh, Shahta Zarab [now the Palestinian envoy to North Korea] was operating a huge network of drug trafficking in Bangladesh. Zarab is known to Bangladeshi media as a notorious playboy who used his diplomatic status to continue various forms of illegal activities. It was also reported in Bangladeshi media that the millions of dollars earned by Shah Zarab were shared with his leader, Yasser Arafat.
When Shahta Zarab was Palestinian ambassador to Bangladesh, his team spent considerable amounts of money spreading anti-Semitic ideas in the society, as well were encouraging people to wage Jihad against Israel, USA and the West. When the wrongdoings of this man reached an intolerable scale, Bangladesh formally requested Palestine to withdraw him; Dhaka was almost set to declare him ‘persona non grata’.
While anti-Semitic activities are unfortunately spreading their wings in various parts of the world, there are alarming sings of such activities even inside United States. In January 2009, at a symposium at UCLA [choreographed by the Center for Near East Studies], four longtime Israel-bashers were invited to analyze the human rights conditions in Gaza; they used the occasion to attack the legitimacy of Zionism and its vision of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.
They criminalized Israel's existence, distorted its motives and maligned its character, its birth, and even its conception. At one point, the excited audience reportedly chanted "Zionism is Nazism" and other slogans.
Jewish leaders condemned this hate-fest as a dangerous invitation to anti-Semitic hysteria, and pointed to the chilling effect it had on UCLA students and the faculty on a campus known for its open and civil atmosphere. The organizers took refuge in “academic freedom,” and the argument that anti-Zionism is not really anti-Semitism.
Anti-Zionism, however, rejects the notion that Jews are a nation - a collective group bonded by a common history - and accordingly denies Jews the right to self-determination in its historical birthplace. While anti-Semitism rejects Jews as equal members of the human race, anti-Zionism rejects Israel as an equal member in the family of the nations. So any anti-Zionist activities should been clearly seen as anti-Semitic as well. I fail to understand why UCLA organized such symposium. Who was behind this?
Colombia University, as well, invited the terror patron, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, to speak, giving him a platform for spreading venom against Israel, Jews and all other anti-Jihadist forces in the world.
While anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are being spread under patronage of various quarters, known and unknown, it is unfortunate that peace-loving people in the world, who are very much in majority in numbers, are either silent or very much reluctant to extend their support towards anti-Jihadist as well Zionist activities.
We need to be cautious, nevertheless, about opportunists in the West who pretend to be anti-Jihadist, but are actually running a corporate type of business by soliciting funding from the people to buy luxury items for themselves, instead of either motivating people, especially the Muslim nations against Jihad, or combating the rise of Islamist militancy. While sitting in a Muslim country, we can take the risk of running an anti-Jihadist, pro-Zionist newspaper like Weekly Blitz for years under extreme adversity. But websites maintained by those so-called anti-Jihadist asylum-seekers are often nothing but a promotional tool to popularize their own faces to bring more donations to their business ventures.
The Weekly Blitz fights militant Islam, opposing Sharia Law from inside a Muslim nation, thereby spreading our message to people as well policymakers. We have been successful in identifying several notorious Islamist militancy groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, Hizb ut-Towhid and others, and recently even succeeded in getting one of them banned in Bangladesh. Our team is continuing a virtual war against militant Islam, terrorism and Sharia Law; we are seeing an increasing number of readers from a number of Muslim nations show interests, including pro-democracy forces in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
