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Editorials

Blog by Dr. Shimon Samuels published in The Times of Israel
16 May 2021
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-corona-lockdown-and-ambulances-to-sirens-rockets-and-shelters/

The euphoric hyphen from vaccinations and dropping masks – a hint of normality – mutated into the shriek of sirens and war. The equation is the bipolar jump into the 48 hours from Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day) to Yom Ha’azmaut (Independence Day), in reverse. My Army Reserve unit was the Senior Education Corps in the IDF Education Office. In peacetime, we would entertain troops with non-military lectures. In wartime – as in the 1978 Operation Litani incursion into Southern Lebanon, sparked by the PLO coastal road busses massacre – we would move from one battery to another during a break in the shelling. There, our role was to get the soldiers to vent as in the role of a psychologist or a rabbi, to raise morale.

Blog by Dr. Shimon Samuels published in The Times of Israel
29 April 2021
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/is-spain-a-champion-of-the-zionism-apartheid-campaign-of-durban-iv/

As the only Jew elected to the International Steering Committee (ISC) of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, I attended several preparatory committee meetings for the Durban conference, backed at the NGO level by COSATU, the South African Trade Union Congress which obsessively referred to ‘Apartheid Israel’.

At these meetings, I was often prevented from speaking and, on arrival in Durban, I was expelled from the ISC.

Blog by Dr. Shimon Samuels published in The Times of Israel
13 April 2021

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/extreme-left-far-right-and-european-jews/

In May 2004, I was invited to Warsaw by then Polish President, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, as one of 8 speakers on the theme “The Dangers of Joining the European Union.” My subject was “Antisemitism,” an Imam from the World Muslim Congress was to talk on “Islamophobia.”

I felt an exceptional enthusiasm in the thought of EU enlargement as a supranational identity, reflecting in part chapters of Jewish history.

Article by Marvin Hier And Abraham Cooper published in The Hill
7 April 2021
https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/546564-hitlers-1936-olympics-antics-are-a-lesson-for-helping-chinas-uyghurs

“Freedom is not a gift from Heaven. It must be fought for every day,” said Austrian Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. He knew from personal experience. By the end of World War II, the Nazis had murdered 89 members of his family. On May 5, 1945, Wiesenthal was too weak to greet U.S. soldiers who entered Mauthausen Concentration Camp, so he crawled from the barracks and collapsed into the arms of a GI. “I could not take my eyes off the American flag,” he recounted. “Each star was, for me, a symbol of freedom, of everything good that had been taken from us.”

An open letter by Dr. Shimon Samuels published in The Jerusalem Post
3 April 2021
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/rejecting-ihra-antisemitism-definition-is-a-return-to-dark-past-opinion-664010

An open letter to the mayor of Strasbourg, France, which is the only city to reject IHRA antisemitism definition on “anti-Zionist” grounds.

3 April 2021
Flowers are placed near memorials where the gas chamber once stood, at the Natzweiler-Struthof
concentration camp in Natzweiler, France, in 2015. Photo Patrick Seeger/Reuters

Madame Mayor Jeanne Barseghian, in representing the Green Party (EELV), you must be sensitive to the environment. You would thus be aware of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp nearby, where in 1943, a gas chamber was built for 80 Jewish prisoners at the request of Strasbourg’s University Institute of Anatomy. Their skeletons were to be used to prove “Jewish racial inferiority.” This example of antisemitism should be sufficient evidence of historic environmental poisoning.