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ISRAEL

Islamic group invited anti-Semitic speaker

The Islamic Association in Sweden (Islamiska Förbundet) engaged lecturers with anti-Semitic opinions at a conference in Stockholm in December, with one known for spreading myths about Jewish conspiracies and ritual killings, reported the Dagens Nyheter (DN) daily.

The newspaper names, among others, Salah Sultan, an Egyptian professor who has expressed anti-Semitism in several film clips on Youtube.

In one particular film, he quoted a myth which circulated in the Middle Ages of Jewish ritual murder, DN reported.

Sultan has also gone on the record with claims that Jews are part of an international conspiracy trying to control the world.

After being shown the YouTube clips of the Egyptian speaking, Abdirizak Waberi, a member of parliament and former chairperson of the Islamic Association, expressed surprise.

“We have invited him in good faith,” he said.

Waberi stressed that had the association known of the film clips, the lecturer would probably not have been invited. He furthermore underlined that Sultan said nothing that could be construed as anti-Semitic during the course of the conference.

Integration Minister Eric Ullenhag has seen with the two clips featuring Sultan and stated that he considered the content to be “clearly anti-Semitic, ” DN reported.

“We do not know what Salah Sultan said when he was in Stockholm, but to invite him was inappropriate,” the minister told the newspaper.

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ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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