Legal Insurrection describes a disturbing rise in anti-Semitic attacks and threats in Berlin:
A new report by Germany’s Research and Information Center for Anti-Semitism (RIAS) shows that violent anti-Semitism has risen in Germany’s capital of Berlin. The Berlin-based organisation recorded 1,083 anti-Semitic incidents in 2018, compared to 951 the previous year.
While the overall number of anti-Semitic incidents rose “only” by 14 percent in Berlin, violent anti-Semitism grew even more. “The number of anti-Semitic attacks rose by 155 percent compared to 2017, the number of anti-Semitic threats grew by 77 percent” during the same period, the report said, …”We have an Antisemitism problem,” the left-wing Green party politician and Berlin’s Senator for Judicial Affairs, Dirk Behrendt, said. “It has grown and has consolidated itself in our society.”
The left-wing politician, however, did not talk about the role played by the disastrous policies implemented by the successive socialist-leaning governments in Berlin. Since 2001, various socialist alliances comprising of the left-wing Social Democratic Party, the environmentalist Green Party, and Die Linke, the Successor of the East German communist party, has controlled Berlin.
In Germany as a whole, there was a “ten percent surge in anti-Semitic hate crimes” in 2018. Germany is not the only country where the danger of anti-Semitism is rising.
Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of England’s Labour Party, has a good chance of being England’s next Prime Minister, even though he is an anti-Semite and defender of foreign dictatorships. He defended the dictatorial communist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela — especially the regime in Venezuela, which has presided over the economic collapse of that country, despite oil prices being higher than they were in 1999 when the left took power in that country.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has presided over widespread malnutrition, torture, and disappearances, that have driven over two million Venezuelans to flee the country. As “Venezuela collapses, children are dying of hunger,” noted the New York Times. As El Pais reports, “The majority” of Venezuelans “have lost weight and are going to bed hungry. Around 64.3% of people surveyed said they had lost 11 kilograms [24 pounds] in 2017. ”
Yet, noted The Spectator, “In 2014, Jeremy Corbyn rang President Maduro live on a Venezuelan television channel to congratulate him.” Corbyn praised the brutal Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro for his supposed “heroism.” He did so even though Castro’s regime killed tens of thousands of people and reduced to poverty what was once one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America. (Contrary to the claims of Castro’s defenders, pre-Castro Cuba had good healthcare and educational systems, by world standards, long before Castro appeared on the scene, as a Washington Post fact-check illustrates. Today, notes the Washington Post’s Charles Lane, Cuba is economically and socially backward in important measures, contrary to the Cuban propaganda peddled by some gullible reporters).
Corbyn is also an anti-Semite. As The Atlantic, a left-leaning publication, noted, Britain’s Labour Party continued supporting him, despite “revelations that Corbyn had likened Israel to the Nazis, and that he had attended a controversial wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of a terrorist behind the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich.” As The Atlantic’s Yasmeen Serhan notes, Corbyn is guilty of “openly singling out Britain’s Jews … for in his view not being British enough.” These controversies had little effect on Corbyn’s popularity: If an election had been last year, Corbyn would have become Prime Minister, because he led in public-opinion polls back then, when his anti-Semitism and extremism were already well-known.
Anti-Semitism has also risen in France. Jewish religious schools and synagogues are forced to have armed guards, due to deadly attacks by Islamic extremists in cities like Toulouse. Anti-Semitic bullying is widespread in French public schools. It was once rare. Now, Jewish students face “harassment, insults, and assaults.
Anti-Semitism persists in America, too. The anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was given a place of honor — a front-row seat — a few seats away from former President Bill Clinton, at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, reported the London Daily Mail. Clinton shook hands and chatted with Farrakhan, who has called Judaism a “gutter religion” and said Jews belong to the “synagogue of Satan.” Last year, Farrakhan said that “powerful Jews are my enemy” and “white folks are going down.”
In 2005, Farrakhan appeared with then-Senator Barack Obama, as shown in a photo that the media did not publish until after Obama left office. Obama reportedly had Nation of Islam members working in his office at the time.
The leftism of Corbyn’s Labour Party is echoed across the Atlantic in parts of America’s Democratic Party. According to a Gallup survey, 57% of Democrats have a positive view of socialism, while most don’t have view capitalism positively. The vast majority of Democrats used to prefer capitalism. A recent Harvard-Harris poll shows that 49% of Democrats want a “mostly socialist” economy. That is a much higher percentage than felt this way a decade ago.
Democratic Congressional leaders recently supported raising federal spending above prior caps by a massive $350 billion, even though the budget deficit already is expected to exceed $1 trillion this year. Leading Democrats support the Green New Deal. It would cost an estimated $90 trillion. That’s four times the size of the entire U.S. economy, and four times the size of America’s national debt. Paying that would result in America either going bankrupt, or experiencing a combination of extortionate taxation and hyperinflation. Many leading progressives have proposed taxpayer-financed racial reparations. As the New York Times notes, “experts say” reparations “could cost several trillion dollars.” Reparations policies harmed the economies of countries that pursued them, such as Zimbabwe.
