‘We are masters of our destiny. Today we place a blue-white flag on the lapel, not a yellow patch’, the head of Yad Vashem tweeted.

By Etgar Lefkovits, JNS

The head of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on Tuesday criticized Israel’s U.N. ambassador for donning a yellow Star of David during an address to the U.N. Security Council, saying the stunt “dishonors both the victims of the Holocaust and the State of Israel.”

The very public dispute between the two Israeli officials comes despite calls for unity as the army is fighting Hamas on the ground in Gaza, and as pro-Palestinian students at campuses across the United States are vilifying Israel and overtly or covertly backing the Islamist terror group.

“The yellow patch symbolizes the helplessness of the Jewish people and being at the mercy of others. Today we have an independent country and a strong army,” tweeted Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan. “We are masters of our destiny. Today we place a blue-white flag on the lapel, not a yellow patch.”

Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan told the Security Council Monday that he and his staff would wear the yellow stars, inscribed with the words “Never Again,” until members of the body condemned Hamas’s atrocities.

Dayan’s criticism came a day after the Yad Vashem chief urged caution in a statement to JNS with regard to comparing Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre with the systematic mass murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Such comparisons, he said, risked belittling or marginalize both the past and present events.

The Oct. 7 massacre was the deadliest one-day attack against the Jewish people since the Shoah, and leaders and journalists in Israel and abroad have drawn unprecedented direct comparisons between the Islamic terrorist group and Nazi Germany.

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A lawyer representing some of the individuals listed on “Judas Watch” told the court that by marking Jews with a “Judenstern,” the site had engaged in “incitement to murder.”

By The Algemeiner

A court in Vienna has jailed two Austrian neo-Nazi brothers over a vehemently antisemitic website that was described by one prosecuting lawyer as “incitement to murder.”

One brother, named in the local press as “Benjamin H.”, was sentenced to a four-year jail term last Tuesday by the Vienna Regional Criminal Court under Austrian laws prohibiting the revival of national socialism.

His website, titled “Judas Watch,” listed the names of 1,787 individuals and organizations, with Jewish individuals marked with a “Judenstern” — the “Jews’ Star” which the Nazi regime forced Jews to wear upon their outer clothing.

The court heard that Benjamin H.’s identity could not be detected because his website was hosted on a server in the U.S. However, investigators unmasked him through his brother Philip, a white supremacist rapper who uses the moniker “Mr. Bond” and is popular in neo-Nazi circles.

One of Mr. Bond’s tracks was played on the live stream of the Oct. 9, 2019 attack on the synagogue in the German city of Halle during Yom Kippur services by Stephan Balliet, a neo-Nazi gunman who was sentenced to a life term in jail in Dec. 2020. Another track plagiarized the Akon and Snoop Dogg hit “I wanna love you” by changing the lyrics to “I wanna gas you.”

Prosecutors said that Philip H., who was on trial alongside his brother, wrote lyrics that “teem with Nazi glorification and fantasies of violence against blacks, homosexuals and Jews.”

He also translated into German the manifesto of the neo-Nazi gunman who murdered 49 Muslim worshipers and wounded dozens more in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. As a result of these offenses, the court sentenced Philip H. to 10 years in prison.

Austrian police investigators discovered messages between the two brothers during a Jan. 21 search of Philip’s house that proved Benjamin was the editor of “Judas Watch,” a site that remained online for nearly four years between 2016 and 2020.

Johannes Kerbl — a lawyer representing some of the individuals listed on “Judas Watch” — told the court that by marking Jews with a “Judenstern,” the site had engaged in “incitement to murder.”

The court also heard that many of those tagged on “Judas Watch” had been unhappy with the police investigation. One writer listed, Julya Rabinowich, told the German news outlet Zeit that the police had not warned her that her name had been included, despite the threat of violence. “One idiot put the list together, another idiot could take it seriously,” she said.

Another individual who was listed — Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and former head of the German Jewish community — said she had been relieved by the sentencing of the two brothers. Congratulating the police for their investigation, Knobloch added pointedly that “such successes are all too rare.”

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The mayor of Anchorage, Alaska apologized for his comments supporting some residents’ use of Holocaust imagery to liken a proposed mask mandate to the oppression of Jews in Nazi Germany.

By Associated Press

Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson has said he staunchly opposes the proposal and initially defended the use of yellow Stars of David worn by other critics this week at heated public hearings. Such imagery has been used by opponents of mask and vaccine mandates across the U.S., drawing condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations.

The proposal before the Anchorage Assembly would require people to wear masks in indoor public spaces and outdoors at large events. If approved as written, businesses and building owners would be required to deny entry to people not wearing masks, though there are exceptions for small children and some others.

It comes as Alaska experiences a spike in coronavirus cases. The state has seen a 42% increase in newly confirmed COVID-19 cases over last week, officials said, and its largest hospital has declared crisis standards that allow the overwhelmed facility to modify its normal levels of care.

The mask proposal has provoked a strong response.

Four people were arrested during a Wednesday assembly hearing on the measure, two for disorderly conduct and two for trespassing. One also faces a weapons misconduct charge for allegedly carrying a concealed gun, Anchorage Police Sgt. Ken Bushue told the Anchorage Daily News.

Anchorage instituted mask mandates under two different mayoral administrations. But Bronson was elected in May after pledging not to enact mask mandates.

During a Tuesday assembly meeting, he said the proposed mask mandate is “reckless and ill conceived.”

“I oppose this ordinance because it is based on inconclusive science, because it is bad policy, and because it is an unconstitutional infringement on the freedom guaranteed to every Anchorage citizen by our federal and state constitutions,” Bronson said. “But most of all, I oppose this ordinance because it pits neighbor against neighbor, shop owner against customer and friend against friend.”

At a hearing the next day, he defended the use of the yellow stars, with the words “Do not comply,” worn by some attendees opposing the mask mandate.

Christine Hill, who twice ran unsuccessfully for the assembly, printed out the stars at home and handed them out for others to wear to draw a comparison to the oppression and genocide of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.

“We’re going down that same road, what’s happening now, taking more and more of our freedom away. And that’s what’s happening. That’s what’s frightening,” Hill said.

Assembly member Forrest Dunbar, who is Jewish and lost to Bronson in the mayoral race, decried the use of the Star of David, reading a letter he received from his rabbi, Abram Goodstein.

“It was heart-wrenching for me when I noticed individuals were wearing yellow Stars of David, mimicking my Jewish ancestors who perished during the Holocaust,” Dunbar read, quoting Goodstein.

“For myself and most Jews, seeing the yellow Star of David on someone’s chest elicits the same feeling as seeing a swastika on a flag or the SS insignia on a uniform,” the letter said. “I believe it is a constitutional right to protest for your values. But I request that you do not use symbols that diminish the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust.”

During his comments on the subject Wednesday, Bronson said: “There was a formal message that came out within Jewish culture about that, and the message was, ‘Never again.’ That’s an ethos. And that’s what that star really means is, ‘We will not forget, this will never happen again.’ And I think us borrowing that from them is actually a credit to them.”

On Thursday, the mayor issued a statement apologizing for his remarks.

“I understand that we should not trivialize or compare what happened during the Holocaust to a mask mandate, and I want to apologize for any perception that my statements support or compare what happened to the Jewish people in Nazi Germany,” Bronson said.

Many in the crowd testified against the mask mandate.

Others called into the meeting expressing support for the proposal, citing rising case numbers and overburdened hospitals. They included Dr. Tom Hennessy, who specializes in public health and preventative medicine at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“There’s clear and convincing evidence that the use of facial masks and mask mandates in public settings reduces transmission and deaths from COVID-19. We know this from laboratory studies and real world evaluation of mask policies,” Hennessy said.

The hearing was scheduled to continue Thursday. Bronson could issue a veto on the proposal, but the assembly has the authority to override it.

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